The next few weeks flew by quickly for Eldrian. In that time, he and Vivian had learned a lot. Having found the strengths and weaknesses of what they had dubbed Greater Sense.
As it turned out, Vivian really could only hone in on one person's lifeforce at a time. Any more and their lifeforce wouldn't be visible to her, only the one she had focused on.
They were unsure why, especially considering the ghosts, aka, lost souls, she could see were all different people. They assumed it had to be something like her tuning into the frequency of their lifeforce.
Similar to how telepathy worked. With telepathy, having someone in your sight also helped create the connection. As if a visual confirmation allowed one to better tune into their thought patterns. It probably did.
Vivian's Greater Sense could also be interrupted or 'blinded' by stronger spells. Overloaded spells were especially good at this—spells that have more mana pushed into them than normal, but forcefully kept from collapsing.
Overloading spells wasn't something normal, though. So this one was more a weakness against Eldrian only.
As Vivian explained it, it was like he was holding a torch in front of her eyes while she was trying to gaze at the stars. The light of his overloaded spells simply outshone the thread of lifeforce guiding the mana of his spells.
Thus, Eldrian had learned that he could overload one spell and cast others to catch Vivian off guard. Still, this only put him back into a position where she couldn't predict his spells. It didn't really help him much. Especially since he had to spare a great deal of focus on overloading a spell, stopping it from collapsing, dissipating, or exploding.
Other than that, they had also confirmed things on lifeforce. Especially regarding Wrath and Tranquility, but also on some information on Chronos and the Divine Flames.
While Eldrian still struggled to tap into his bloodline, his experience in the dungeon finally allowed him to get a grasp on what it felt like. It had allowed him to learn what 'time' felt like, or at least what the energy his bloodline gave him access to (which could influence time) felt like.
With that knowledge and a success rate of less than ten percent, they had managed to gleam how time dilation worked.
Granted, their tests were small in scale. Eldrian was terrified of causing a collapse of the time field (or something) and killing everyone nearby.
Still, they had finally gotten some understanding of it. Though that didn't mean Eldrian actually understood it.
It certainly didn't follow the principles that Ziraili had been teaching Eldrian. It wasn't a matter of relativity, velocity, perspective, or mass. When he influenced time, it wasn't that he changed the property of the thing he was influencing. He was influencing time itself, or so Eldrian speculated.
He didn't really get it. But he had managed to confirm what worked and what didn't. The biggest breakthrough was learning that whenever he tapped into his bloodline, his perception of time slowed.
It didn't matter what he tried to do, time always seemed to freeze—or at least move extremely slowly.
Sadly, due to this, perhaps, Eldrian couldn't use his bloodline all that often. Nor could he maintain it for long. Even when he tried to only channel his bloodline through himself, he would lose control in just a few seconds (of his experience).
This meant Vivian could almost never witness whatever Chronos was doing. She could only recount to Eldrian what she described as "flashes".
But, through trial and error, they had learned what caused 'flashes' and what didn't. This might not sound like a big deal, but Eldrian felt confident the flashes were time falling into itself or something similarly deadly.
Luckily, he had been testing on an extremely conservative method. Literally motes of dust. Thus, even when Eldrian lost control, the explosions were too small to notice. Yet, Vivian had seen them.
And when she didn't, that meant what Eldrian had done hadn't caused an instability between natural time, and time he had altered.
"Basically, I can't actually slow the flow of time without causing an imbalance and thus an explosion." Eldrian was now reporting to Ziraili. She had finally finished all the preparations for the tournament. It would start in a few days. On Saturday, two days hence, to be precise.
"Yes, that is correct. Until you learn how to fix the imbalance." She smiled while taking a sip of tea. They were currently in Eldrian's soul, and she was very happy with the differences she had noticed upon arriving.
Eldrian's soul still wasn't where it had been when Two had been with them. But some true repair had been started. Eldrian had finally moved on, finally accepted the reality of things, and also found what he needed to do to make the space within his soul more 'real'.
That the tea he was serving had some taste, not a lot, but some, showed how far he had come.
"But I don't get what I'm actually doing when I don't cause an imbalance. My thoughts are to exclude the objects from the flow of time." What Eldrian calls objects here were only grains of dust.
"How does that cause less trouble than when I try to slow something's time flow?" He asked.
"Now, isn't that the most interesting question." Ziraili smiled, taking her sweet time to answer. Clearly, she was enjoying teasing Eldrian. "The fact is that exclusion is imply less energy intensive than modification."
"How? That doesn't make any sense."
"A lot of things don't make much sense to our 'normal' perception of reality. You already know that a person's experience of reality can't translate to the quantum."
"Is this some weird quantum reason?"
"No, nothing that complicated." She paused. It was actually more complicated, but she had a simpler explanation for Eldrian. One which he could actually understand. "What do you think of dimensional storage?"
"What do I—Wait!? Seriously?!"
"Exclusion, yes."
"But I don't... I guess... Is that really possible?"
"Dimensional storages, in general, exclude something physical from the rest of the world. Storing it in what we call pocket dimensions."
"But I thought pocket dimensions were folded space, or something to that line."
"Why can't it be both?"
"How can it? If it isn't part of space, then it can't be made of space."
"Who said that?"
"No one, I guess... It just doesn't—right, that's what you meant."
"Yes. It doesn't feel like it makes much sense. But that is simply how it works out. Dimensional manipulation is a complicated business, time manipulation is the same."
"To make a pocket dimension, you need to fold space in on itself. This requires an insane amount of energy. Hence why Mov Crystals are the lowest quality of mana crystalization which allows for this type of graft."
"Wait, if it is possible for... no, I guess time is already also influenced."
"Indeed, time and space are intertwined. When you fold the one, the other follows."
"But that isn't how it works with my bloodline?" While this was a fact, Eldrian didn't feel confident either. Hence, his questioning tone.
"Very astute. Bloodlines are like ciphers, keys to very special parts of the universe we all live in. And due to how we access these parts of the universe, the rules can be changed. In fact, it almost always does."
Eldrian didn't get what she meant by that, so he asked.
"Well, why do you think everyone's manifestation of a bloodline is different?" She replied.
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