Power to Fight Against The Whole World

"So we're going to do this back at my home?" Lucas asked the red pendant hanging on his neck.

It would be quite eye-catching if anyone saw the red pendant dangling in front of his chest, but Lucas knew that beforehand and put the pendant on the inside of his clothes to hide it.

'Yes, the first time you start to cultivate will be quite an event, it would be bad to gather any unnecessary attention.'

Maya, in her pendant form, answered straight to Lucas' mind, avoiding speaking directly to not make the pendant glow.

Lucas questioned what she meant by quite an event, but he saved his curiosity for later as there was another thing that caught his attention.

Looking at the clock on his phone, Lucas nodded in understanding as he recalled Maya's previous explanation.

"It's really only been a few minutes since I disappeared…"

Lucas knew that he didn't spend that much time in Gula despite the events there making it seem like he had been through a full day's worth of experience.

From learning the existence of mana to the experience of having to kill another human being, time seemed to flow so fast yet felt so long due to the abundance of new things that he felt.

However, when he looked at the time on his phone and counted the difference between the time when he walked back from his part-time job to the current time, only about half an hour had passed.

That half hour included the time when Lucas spawned back on Earth and made the contract with Maya.

'As I've told you before, an hour in Gula is about a minute here, so you don't need to worry too much about missing for days when you spend a week there.'

Maya explained as the two of them made their way back to Lucas' home.

The park they were at was not too far from Lucas' home and it was the usual place that Lucas went to when he needed to clear his mind a little.

So after spending about a dozen minutes walking, they finally arrived at a rundown complex that was filled with houses of different kinds.

Some had wooden doors, some rusty iron doors, one had windows and the other didn't, but one thing that was the same about these houses was their sizes.

All of the houses were packed in the area and none of the houses were bigger than a few meters wide.

Currently, Lucas was standing in front of a house with a simple wooden door with a single-window beside the door.

Both the door and the window weren't anything fancy and it looked the same as the other houses beside it, but the two were exceptionally clean as if they were cleaned carefully every single day.

Lucas didn't bother knocking as he brought his own key and opened the door himself.

Looking inside, a familiar figure was standing in the corner of the only room, a part of the room that was made to be the kitchen.

An old woman standing only about as tall as Lucas' neck, worsened by her slightly hunched back, making her look even shorter.

The hair on her head was all white and her skin almost hugged her bones, making her wrinkles look even worse than normal.

Despite all that, her hands were still moving swiftly as she cut the vegetables in her hands, seemingly determined to prepare the best dish for her loved one.

Hearing the door opening, the old woman stopped moving her hands and put down her vegetables as she turned her head.

"Lucas!"

She quickly walked towards him and began scanning him up and down.

"Why did you come home late? Are you injured at work?"

She began patting his body, putting all her focus on her wrinkly eyes, trying to find the tiniest bit of scratch on her treasured grandson's body.

"I took a slight detour to the park, Grandma. I'm not hurt or anything." Lucas said as he opened his arms as if he was being body-checked at airport security.

Finding her grandson was really fine and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary, Grandma heaved a sigh of relief as she returned to the kitchen.

"Don't go there when it's already dark, you know it's empty when the sun's out. You don't want to meet any bad people lurking around there."

"Go wash up quickly, dinner will be ready soon." She said as she began putting the vegetables into the boiling pot of stock.

After his shower, Lucas began eating with her grandma.

As usual, tempeh, carrots, and potatoes were their dinner.

Lucas found nothing wrong with it and it tasted better than any other soup he could find in the streets.

However, seeing his skinny grandma, eating barely any nutrients that didn't help with her pale complexion and seemingly weak body, made his heart ache.

It made him feel like he was a failed grandson who could do nothing for his grandma who had wholeheartedly taken care of him since he was dumped by his parents after their divorce.

Lucas held onto the bronze atm card inside his pocket tightly,

'I will withdraw more money tomorrow and buy enough food to make her as fat as those corrupt lawyers and government officials.'

Thinking about the expensive surgery that was not too out of reach now, Lucas' determination strengthened even more.

'Maya, let's learn your cultivation technique after this.'

Feeling and hearing Lucas' thoughts, Maya didn't say a lot and just gave him a short reply, 'Ok.'

Later that night, with his grandma asleep and him hiding under his blanket, Lucas held the Perfect Mana Body Cultivation Technique book in his hands.

'Go ahead and do the same as before when you learned coercive figment.'

Hearing Maya's instruction, Lucas closed his eyes and began to try and find the guiding light that had been helping him all this time,

However, different from before, he couldn't find it.

No matter which way Lucas looked, he couldn't find the familiar guiding light that had made him practically a genius in learning the two techniques that had given him the power to scare away 10 adults with ease.

'It's strange… Where did it go…?'

After a few minutes had passed and still no guiding light could be found, Lucas began to change the way he approached the situation.

Instead of closing his eyes, doing nothing and only waiting for the guiding light to appear, he recalled what Maya said the first time she gave him the coercive figment technique book.

Now that he knew how to move his mana, unlike before, Lucas manually controlled his mana to go into the book and images finally appeared in his mind.

Just like before, with the high-level technique book, Lucas not only knew the name of the cultivation technique, he knew how to do it, what kind of technique it was, and what it was capable of.

After learning about the last part, the images finally stopped appearing in his head and Lucas gained a full understanding of the cultivation technique.

Instead of learning the cultivation technique right away, with his new knowledge, Lucas gulped as he now fully understood what Maya meant when she said she was the embodiment of illusion.

'Now you realize how awesome I really am, right?'

Her pride-filled voice echoed in his mind.

With the cultivation technique that Maya gave him, Lucas would be able to become the embodiment of a certain element.

Which means that his body, his whole being, would be that element itself.

He understood now why the immortals of Gula couldn't kill Maya despite them all working together.

'The only way to kill her was for them to erase the illusion element itself from the world as she had become one of the aspects of the world…' 

Lucas gulped as he realized that he could be just like her in the future.

'If that were to be the case, then…' 

Lucas' worries had lessened slightly as he thought,

'Fighting against the whole world might not seem that impossible now.'