Chapter 72

The man takes me back to the academy, and I barely follow along, tripping and stumbling. He hardly waits for me to collect myself after each misstep, as he seems quite maddened.

I once again face the same academy employee manning the entrance. This time, I don't take long to decide my actions. I give him the necklace, and he lets me in.

The man quickly follows, urgent not to let me off alone once more. After that, he takes me to the main building to get the key to the new dorm the academy gives out each year. Standing in line there is ridiculously frustrating. It feels as if I am one step away from freedom, yet I can do nothing.

After he gets the key, he brings me back to the dorms and into my new place of holding for the year.

My back once more feels the rough embrace of wood. Well, at least it's much higher quality than what the commoners confined me to. My spine appreciates it.

After he ties me down to my chair, he leaves and slams the door. I sit there for a moment, the events of the day bouncing around inside my skull. However, before I get very depressed, I sigh to myself and close my eyes. There is no use thinking of what I could have done better—the moment has already passed. Now, I should think of what I will do.

Along with talking with Hector—gods rest his soul—I also meditated and practiced my soul sensing. Currently, I can sense about forty percent of my soul. So, I should probably get back to practicing.

After some time of meditating, I am snapped out of it when the man enters the dorm once more. He sits down on the bed and smiles, ready to meditate. But before he begins, a glint goes through his eyes as he remembers something.

He looks at me with an annoyed and tired glare. "Ustos, it seems you have forgotten your place," he states.

Before I can respond, he says, "I remember asking you not to lie and to tell me about your family. It seems you withheld some matters about your little sister." He approaches, holding a dagger, and I suddenly get painful flashbacks of when he started behaving this way.

I mentally prepare myself for what's to come, and my expectations are not disappointed. He forcefully rips off the bandages covering my neck and shoulders, revealing half-healed wounds inflicted a while back when he last decided my actions weren't to his liking.

He then puts his cold dagger onto a new spot devoid of any scars or wounds and starts cutting.

The torture is as bad as all the last times. I still can't get used to the pain. I yell and cry like the last time this happened. He cuts and cuts my flesh away. I yell so much that I almost swallow the ring in my mouth, and I cry so much that flasks could be filled.

Finally, when he is done, he wraps my wounds and cleans my surroundings of blood.

Afterward, he just leaves and goes to sleep. I, however, can't. The burning pain on my shoulders won't fade away, and I spend the whole night shaking and crying from it all.

The next morning, it fades a bit, at least enough for me to put myself back together. It still hurts a lot. It's a piercing throbbing that shatters the insides of my brain. But I've been through this before. I need to distract myself from the pain. Well, I just happen to have a way to do so.

I focus on my soul and start practicing. While the pain doesn't make it easy, I persist. I know what happens if my attention snaps back to the pain. I've been through this before, after all. Eventually, as the days pass, the wounds start to scab over, the pain decreases little by little, and I can focus better on my soul. When the pain dies down to a negligible degree, I can sense about forty-five percent of my soul.

Over the next two months, I continue practicing my soul sense. Finally, one day, as I scan through the astral body superimposed above my real one, I realize that I'm fully done. I can sense from my toes to my head.

As I watch the marvelous creation of the gods given to every living being, I ponder what is next. I think back to what the man made me write down. Though a little hazy, I remember I am supposed to open a permanent mana breach on the spinal cord.

Yet, as I channel my mana to create the breach, it quickly gets filled back up by the soul once more. I frown and try again, but the same thing happens. The soul heals faster than I can dig; it's like trying to carve a trench in the sand, only for it to be washed away by the tide.

On the fifth try, I give up and attempt to approach the problem from a different angle. Clearly, my control isn't good enough to create a mana breach before the soul patches it over. I need to find a way to delay the healing somehow.

I try a sixth time and observe how the soul tries to heal itself. The moment I remove a single mana particle out of place, I feel mana start to come out of the core and travel through mana veins. When it reaches its destination, the mana slots into place, leaving no hint of any damage behind.

I try once more, but this time I try to hold back the approaching mana. I focus on its movements and try to pull against it. It slows down, moving at a snail's pace. Yet, if I try to switch my attention back to carving away, the mana speeds up again.

It seems I need to focus on the healing mana to stop its movement.

I sigh to myself. This can't be it. It seems impossible to do on my lonesome. I would probably need some sort of outside assistance to focus my attention solely on the healing mana.

But I have no other choice. My hands are tied behind my back, and I am stuck in this accursed room. The only person I can ask for assistance is the very person keeping me here, which is, of course, not an option.

Well, I suppose there is nothing I can do. I should just close my eyes and start practicing my control.

Over the next month, I practice, trying to refine my mana control through repetitive exercises. It has helped. I think in about two to three months, I should be barely able to create that mana breach.

During this month, the man has been up to something. Last week, he brought a weird item and immediately started to disassemble it for parts. I think it's safe to say he is building something.

Along with whatever he's building, he has also been practicing making magic circles out of normal ink. Well, that's what I assumed at first, before one day he injected some mana into one of them and a ball of flaming fire appeared on top of the paper, the ink on its surface starting to faintly glow and shimmer.

Realizing I would need a few for my escape, I decided to grab some while he was away. I managed to snatch a couple of these papers with my chair techniques, and with some effort, I folded them and fit them into my pockets.

One day, while practicing my mana control, I sense something cut into my soul. My eyes snap open in confusion. I look in the direction the cut is coming from and see the man standing there with goggles and a weird pen-like item.

Before I can question the man's motives, the knife-pen thing starts moving and cutting through my soul. The feeling is quite strange; it's like a part of me is being cut off, but it doesn't hurt, like cutting hair.

As I feel it smoothly glide through my soul, I inwardly wish that I could have the pen-knife all to myself to easily make the mana breach.

An idea suddenly comes to my mind. If I could make the man accidentally cut through my spinal cord and make a mana breach, I could comfortably hold back the healing mana and the second stage would be complete. Yes, that could work.

I start jittering around while he is cutting away. He doesn't seem to care about my static movements and continues to cut through my soul unfazed.

I swing my head back a couple of times, yet it seems the man stops himself from cutting too deep. Damn rotten bastard, why did you suddenly start caring for my well-being?

After a while, the man seems to be done with his task and carries away a chunk of my soul. I idly think to myself: the man has taken my life away from me already, now he's taking parts of my soul. What's next? Will he follow me after I die and take my afterlife too?

I sigh. I couldn't get him to cut my spinal cord. He was just too careful.

As I dryly look at my captor, I suddenly feel a drowsy and drained sensation go through my body. I've actually felt this before. On one particular day, as I was practicing forming the breach, I got quite far—the most I've gotten before, in fact. As I unfortunately failed to deepen the potential breach like all the other times, I felt a smidge of a woozy feeling go through me. And I recognize what I'm feeling now as a much worse version of that sensation.

Eventually, whatever the feeling is overwhelms me, and I fall unconscious.

I wake up the next day with a dry mouth and an empty stomach. It's morning, which means I slept for about sixteen hours.

I look at the man, sound asleep on that comfortable bed. Damn it, when I escape, I will sleep for a full week nonstop to cure my horrid back. My eyes wander to the blueprints lying on the bench he's been constantly attached to for about a week now.

I also find a new addition: a neat white pair of gloves with a comfortable design.

My interest is piqued for a little, until I realize that the gloves probably wouldn't really hinder my escape plans.

Eventually, the man wakes up from his comfortable slumber. As he gets up, his groggy eyes scan me up and down, after which he looks at his oh-so-important work desk.

He wanders over to the desk, looks at the gloves, nods, and carefully puts them on. Then, he gets dressed in his stolen uniform and walks off.

I sit here, starving and thirsty. Apparently, removing parts from the soul has backlashes, and they are very uncomfortable. On the bright side, the missing chunk the man graciously took is already a fourth filled in. I suppose I can last four days with such a feeling.

Indeed, after four and a half days, the feeling dissipates. The man gives me more food during this period for some reason, which makes me conclude that the soul needs food to regrow itself. This strikes me as quite odd—how can a soul digest food?

Whatever. I put the useless question off to the side and continue practicing.

I continue for another month, and then unexpectedly, the man comes and tries to cut out another chunk of my soul. Instead of enraging me, this makes me happier because it means I have more chances to create a mana breach.