Chapter 828: The Training ‘Grounds’ [Monthly Bonuse 3]
Barda’s words left Arthur silent, which the man took as a cue to continue.
"Even if you don’t want to, as long as you possess those Aspects, other Candidates will come after you, aiming to kill you and take your Aspects to make their own stronger.
The Candidate Selection is a Battle Royale. Unless you plan to give up your Aspects without a fight if it comes to that, and lose all the power they grant you?"
"..."
Arthur might not have wanted to gain them, but he definitely wanted the power they granted him.
Giving that up willingly?
No way. He couldn’t see himself doing that.
He didn’t need to say it aloud for Barda to understand, and sitting up, the man offered,
"Let’s make a little compromise. I won’t force you to become an Eternal, but I’ll train you a bit. Then again, even if I did, it’s not like it would happen immediately.
Before you reach the minimum level needed to hold a Conceptual Authority, you’ll gain a lot more life experience, so let’s see what your decision is then."
Arthur blinked, slightly surprised. He hadn’t expected free training from one of the Cosmos’ most powerful beings.
"You’re really going to teach me to control the Aspects’ power for free?"
"Well, not exactly for free," Barda replied, leaping off his hammock as he added, "That Rule Breaker 1 of yours can take other forms, right? In that case, I think I know what I’m going to get out of this."
The man reached out, pulled Arthur up, and slung an arm over his shoulder, his irises glowing with a dull light.
|Hey, bros and hoes, get over here for a bit.|
Seconds after he spoke, Barda leapt to the side, narrowly avoiding the black lightning bolt that struck the spot where he had just been standing, and laughed as he shouted,
|Haha! You misse—OW!|
A second bolt hit him square in the face, sending the dragon flying several dozen meters into the air before crashing into the lake surrounding the small island.
Arthur watched with raised brows, then turned to the black-haired dragon dusting her hands after hitting her younger brother with a faceful of lightning.
With a loud gasp, Barda resurfaced, screaming at Berlal, "What gives?!"
’I don’t know, man, you kinda brought that on yourself.’
Arthur was about to voice his thoughts when Gindry appeared above Barda, pulled him out and dried his clothes, before grabbing and twisting his ears.
"Who the hell do you think you’re calling a hoe, huh?!"
"o-ow, yeowch! I’m sorry!"
While Gindry was disciplining him, Gervod’s clone set down his water tank and approached, and then, with a pop, two palm-sized dolls shaped like Raikis and Wyndella appeared, their voices coming from within.
[What is it, Bardiot?]
[Dude, you gotta stop pushing the wrong buttons...]
Raikis somehow sounded disappointed as he spoke, but Barda quickly ignored it, breaking free from Gindry’s hold and teleporting to Arthur, grabbing him by the shoulder.
"Setting aside my plan to turn Arthur into the next Eternal of Time so Ranus stops bugging me, how about we take him in as our first student in a billion years?"
Gindry, sitting down in the chair Arthur had used earlier, rolled her eyes and asked,
"What are you scheming this time?"
"Nothing," Barda replied. "I was just thinking that since we’re all proficient with different main weapons, and his Rule Breaker can transform into various forms, why not use him for a little competition?
Each of us teaches him to control a different weapon and sets trials for it. The winner would be determined by which weapon he performs best with."
"That’s unfair to the rest of us," Berlal immediately interjected. "He’s been using a sword most of his life, and you use a sword too. You have a head start."
The others nodded in agreement, but Barda had expected this, so he simply nodded and continued.
"I know. So, how about you all train him to bring him up to the level of his sword skill, and I’ll only begin my training once his skill levels are equalised.
In the meantime, I’ll train him on controlling his Aspects, because the way he uses them right now is terrible."
"What more do you expect from him, Barda?" Gindry cut in. "Most people can barely activate one. He’s doing fine with the two he’s got."
"If I have to nit-pick something, it’s his manipulation of cosmic energy. For a full Cosmic Superior, it’s incredibly wasteful and inefficient..." Berlal muttered, her expression darkening slightly as she spoke.
"Need I remind you all that I’ve only had full Cosmic Superiority for barely two years?" Arthur questioned the black dragon, but she simply shook her head.
"It’s not just you. All the others I’ve observed are also inefficient, many far worse than you.
I pondered the state of the Cosmos after a billion years of slumber, but the usage of such wasteful energy circulation and manipulation methods implies degradation. It’s irksome to watch."
Berlal had casually concluded that the Cosmos had degraded simply based on the way cosmic energy was being manipulated, and Arthur honestly wanted to see what kind of scale she had in her head.
"Well, Berlal seems on board. What about the rest of you?" Barda asked.
Gervod, Gindry, and Wyndella silently nodded, while Raikis sent his miniature avatar into the river to catch a fish before resurfacing and voicing his agreement.
"Great! Everyone’s on board. I’ll start with him now. Since it’ll take some time for you all to bring his other weapon skills up, I’ll just create a pocket universe for you to use."
"Make it sturdy," Berlal remarked, and Barda nodded before turning to Arthur.
"So, what do you say?"
"Well...thanks?" Arthur said, unsure what else to respond with.
Barda chuckled at his reaction, and as the clones and miniature avatars of his siblings returned to where they were before, the man stepped forward and cracked his knuckles.
"Now then, let’s do this."
His eyes glowed as two blue-scaled horns sprouted from the sides of his head, curling upwards. Holding his hands aloft like an orchestra conductor, he began to enact the most beautiful sight Arthur had ever witnessed.
"...such fluidity..."
With every movement of Barda’s hands, cosmic energy flowed, slipping through dimensions and weaving layers of space and time as the laws danced at his fingertips.
’I think I get what Berlal meant now...’
Arthur found himself in agreement with the Eclipse Dragon as Barda continued to manipulate the laws of reality purely through space-time control.
Before Arthur’s eyes, he carved out a portion of reality and used space creation to form a pocket universe within the Draco Sirus Universe.
The rapidly expanding space enveloped everything around Arthur, plunging him into darkness, the only illumination coming from the glow of swirling cosmic energy.
Barda floated upwards, siphoning space dust from the main universe and compressing it with immense gravity, increasing its density until nuclear fusion ignited and a new star was born.
He infused the star with excess cosmic energy until it expanded into a supergiant and then went supernova, erupting in a brilliant blaze that scattered its material across space. The debris gathered at multiple points, clumping together until a new, smaller star formed, accompanied by several planets orbiting it.
’Did I just witness the entire life cycle of a star in seconds?’
[Yes, you most certainly just did.]
Lostvayne answered Arthur’s unspoken question as Barda paused his movements and turned to him.
"You’re 33 now, right?"
"Yeah?"
Arthur wondered why Barda asked his age, but the next words explained it before he could.
"Let’s speed things up by 3 then."
With that, Barda began expanding space and compressing time, making the flow of time within the pocket universe 3x faster than outside.
"That’ll give us a lot of time to teach you, but..."
He fell silent, rubbing his chin in thought before suddenly calling out.
|Hey, Wyndella!|
Five seconds later, a response came as space tore open and the real Wyndella peered into the pocket universe, which now contained just one newborn star and several baby planets.
"This is crude."
Her expression twisted in disgust at the sight, and Barda rolled his eyes.
"Yeah, yeah. Anything I create looks crude to you."
Shaking his head, he added,
"Come over for a bit, let’s make this a simulation project."
Hearing him, Wyndella pulled herself into the pocket universe, narrowing her eyes as she asked,
"Don’t tell me you want to recreate that Simuls 3 game here?"
"Yes, I do," Barda admitted, not hiding his true intentions, and Wyndella sighed at this.
"Gindry’s gonna be mad at you when she finds out."
"That’s why you’re my accomplice. Now start spawning those planets. Time to play Simuls with real planets!" Barda declared with enthusiasm.
At that, Arthur muttered,
"Hey, Author. They’re not seriously about to play The Sims with real planets, right?"
Author: "..."
"Fuck."
Arthur’s mutter went unheard as the dragons continued shaping the new pocket universe however they pleased.
Gervod soon arrived, and the barren planets Wyndella was forming with cosmic energy were transformed into worlds capable of sustaining life.
Raikis brought over people from civilisations destroyed in a distant intergalactic war and placed them on the new planets, while Berlal and even Gindry soon joined in on the ’fun’.
This was how Arthur’s training pocket universe came to be, with the six competitive dragons putting him through spartan-style weapon training that eventually expanded into all-around combat training.
While difficult, it also had the added benefit of preventing Mofil or any of his Seekers of Truth comrades from getting anywhere near Arthur, for fear of angering the dragons who seemed to be having fun with him.
The days turned into weeks, the weeks into months, and in the blink of an eye, Chazat had completed fifteen orbits around its host star.
