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"Mischievous! Long time no see!"
"I know, I know! I said I would visit more often, but I didn't. No need to sulk."
The playful smile changed into a pouting one coincidentally, and Ashen took it as his chance to interpret it as he liked.
"Oh, c'mon. It wasn't that long, how many days was it again…? Lemme count…"
His eyes ran alongside the countless dots on the shaft. They were ordered in various shapes representing weeks, months, and years, making it easy to count.
"Oh, seventy years had passed? No wonder you were pouting. Ten years' absence is kinda long, not gonna lie."
The spear's smile turned down, and Ashen's own mirrored it before it turned empathetic.
"Those sad smiles of yours are appearing more often nowadays… I guess even you are getting bored with being stuck in the same place."
Then, his eyebrows rose challengingly, "I, on the other hand, have become so disciplined that people might call me crazy! Haha."
"...Not like there's anyone to see, anyway."
A sigh left him, "Haah… I don't know what came over me, but every time I immerse myself in the spear, I lose sight of everything else. Must be all the new skills messing with my head."
"I'm still holding on, so you should too. You're not going to leave me alone in this, right?"
"..."
"That's what I thought."
"Alright, Mel, gotta go again."
Mel. That was the name he bestowed upon it, but he hardly called it that in favor of the nicknames he usually used.
Either way, the spear stayed silent, no matter what he called it.
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The spear, Mel, stayed motionless in this stagnant world where time ran differently.
The only continuous variable aside from the moving air was the dots added to its shaft by the mana as days passed.
And when the number of dots surpassed thirty thousand, another variable appeared once again.
He woke up again.
And with his awakening, it felt a flood of mana pour into it almost at once. That's right. It had felt it.
Somewhere along the way, as this strange human kept feeding it his mana and talking to it as if he talked to a friend, an awareness was born.
It started dim, not knowing what it was or what it was supposed to be. But it knew one thing. It was lonely.
That emotion was its most defining trait.
With time, and under the man's steady care, the one it had come to recognize as its companion, its awareness deepened, steadily unfolding, until it began to discern the meaning woven within the mana it was fed.
After ten years, it began to see images of its own life.
How it was and stayed as a blade for a long time.
How it was forged into a spear and handed over to its companion.
How it had pranked and played with him as he wielded it.
And finally… how both of them became stranded in this place.
"Yo, little Mel! Oh? Since when did your blade become black?"
Ashen eyed the obsidian color curiously, then turned his attention away when he felt it wasn't harmful.
"So, how are you doing these days?"
The spear tried to make the inscription show a smile, but only a sad one emerged.
"Not so good, huh?
Ever since its evolution, a feeling has been spreading over it constantly. By now, it knew that the concept of Mischief had long eroded, and something else was taking its place.
"...In truth, I don't think I'm feeling any better, honestly."
The spear could sense the intent in his mana alongside the words and take that as a point of comparison. Using this method, it had long learned to understand its companion's language.
However, it rarely relied on it, since feeling the intent behind each word made it understand him a thousand times better than any word could convey.
"You know… humans normally define themselves through change. Goals achieved, places visited, relationships formed, and all that. But you also know how I had almost none of that for a long time, right?"
The most prominent emotion felt behind those words was loneliness. It had always been.
Even at the moment of its birth, when it felt that emotion, it did not belong to it, but to him.
"Sometimes, my past feels like a dream. Like I was never that man…"
Loneliness dug into the spear and drowned it, twisting its concept further. But the spear only offered its usual sad smile and did not rebel.
"I'm afraid… I will eventually stop thinking of myself as Ashen Hart, the man…"
The feeling intensified even further, but Mel welcomed it. As long as it could give its companion a moment of respite, it would always welcome it, no matter how melancholic it felt.
"...I'm afraid, I will simply become a thing that holds the stone."
The spear… for the first time, vibrated. It was a minuscule twitch, but for Ashen, who was currently coating it with his own mana, it was as clear as day.
Ashen wasn't shocked; for him, Mel was his friend. And a friend being sentient was a matter of course.
He always thought so, even before it had become aware. If he did not, then how would he chat with it so enthusiastically?
Instead, a pleasant smile appeared on his face, "What's this? Are you comforting me now? How cheeky, it had always been me doing the comforting though!"
Ashen spoke so, but sadly for him, the truth had always been the opposite.
The spear had taken on his loneliness without question. It allowed itself to be corroded by it, changed and twisted until it could no longer even call upon its concept.
And it had never once resisted… because that same loneliness that he tormented it with was the same source that gave it birth.
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90 years beneath the rock.
Ever since his last breakthrough, when he was able to kill with mere intent alone, Ashen's progress stagnated.
He could feel himself moving toward something, but he did not know what it was, nor how much he had to still push through to reach it.
And that drove him crazy.
So his answer was to create his own goals. The objective he created was to drive his Spear Harmony skill to the Masterful stage, since going past Zenith on the other skills seemed to be an impossible task for now.
But even the goal he set was easier said than done.
To achieve it, he had to integrate a concept into the skill. That point that he always seemed to breeze through turned out to be a huge obstacle instead.
And so the next decades until the present time taught him that his earlier success was as much a coincidence and luck as it was effort. Because, despite doing his best, Spear Harmony remained stubbornly at the peak of Skilled.
But along the way, he also recognized that it was the skill that was special. Something in it held a quality that defied the rest, making the task of elevating all the more difficult.
'The Kingmaker is called as such for a reason, huh.' Ashen reminisced about the time when he gained the skill under his teaching.
Needless to say, Ashen did not just mindlessly train when he found that the returns were not to his liking.
In parallel, he decided to employ Somatic Autonomy to upgrade something new in his body.
He had already tempered every inch of it until it reached its maximum potential. He also added to every organ and nerve qualities that any normal man would dream of having.
His liver could process alcohol, poisons, or spoiled food without a single consequence.
His lungs could now breathe in smoke, water, or thin air without losing a beat as long as oxygen was present.
His stomach could probably eat anything, whatever it was, raw, rotten, or foreign, and digest it perfectly.
His bones were made elastic enough to withstand fractures, heavy impacts, and extreme strain without fail.
Eyes, ears, skin, nerves, muscles… everything was covered and accounted for, even his intestines now extracted calories and nutrients with supernatural efficiency.
But Ashen did not stop there.
He remembered back in the first Fragment of History how he had temporarily raised his body's instincts using Fox-Alice's enormous amount of mana.
Back then, those instincts not only saved him from the Great Beast Snipers but also allowed him to save Alice from Cassius's gaze in the last moments.
He would be a fool not to get that permanently now that he had so much time to burn through.
So he fed Somatic Autonomy every instance when his instincts saved him. Whenever he felt a bad premonition, and it turned out to be true, or his intuition was spot on, he recalled all those memories with dreamweaving and allowed the skill to study them.
He knew that the elusive sixth sense was probably made of the mix of all the first five senses, alongside the information gathered in someone's subconsciousness, but he never understood it perfectly; that was why he used this method.
Thankfully, Somatic Autonomy at the Zenith stage did not seem to have any problems with this amount of information to do its task as long as time and mana were provided.
The process lasted for a couple of years, and Ashen spent it mindlessly chasing the ascension of Spear Harmony in the meantime.
The results showed themselves only when he finally hit the ninety-year mark, and they manifested in the shape of an evolution.
To be exact, his Observant trait has evolved.
Standing in the dreamscape, Ashen decided to take a breather to check the changes.
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Observant: Keenly attentive to details and the environment, often noticing subtle cues that others might overlook.
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That was his old trait, but after whatever Somatic Autonomy did to his body, it changed into this.
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Insightful: The senses and instincts fuse, forming two primary consequences.
Subtle cues trigger immediate, accurate reactions, as if the body "knows" before the mind finishes thinking.
Every observed detail is processed at an accelerated rate, allowing the user to reconstruct situations, predict outcomes, and detect anomalies with near clairvoyant precision.
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After many changes to his status window, Ashen had learned not to waste time overthinking when he could just test the changes until he figured them out.
And so, he did just that.
As he resumed his dance with the spear, he felt nothing new. It was the same seamless motions that he already could do by heart.
Perhaps it was because of just that. He became so proficient that with or without instinct, it was the same outcome in the end.
Either way, he did not relent, nor did he feel any disappointment or anger. He was long past that.
His mind was tempered by the weight of ninety years of loneliness, so such feelings had naturally become beneath him.
Perhaps he would revert to a more anxious version of himself someday when he went back to the world outside the circle, but for now, this was who he was.
Whoosh—
"Good!"
A particularly satisfying thrust snapped out, followed by words of praise. Ashen understood that his earlier momentary break had brought yet another ghost.
Thankfully, this one was a ghost he did not mind. It was his teacher's ghost.
"Do you feel tired? weak? Do you feel like you want to give up?"
"Well, ignore those feelings!"
"Search within you! There's always inner strength that you're not aware of, waiting for you to call on it."
The reason he did not mind this ghost was simple enough. Unlike the others, it represented one of the few voices that kept him striving forward.
And so, under its encouragement, he brandished his spear, chasing that illusory feeling that always seemed to elude him by a hair.
Day after day, he repeated the three flawless moves. From dawn to dusk, not once did he quit.
"You are very close! Keep going!"
The ghost of Edward also persisted, as if it wanted to see his success as much as he wanted to reach it.
After a month, Ashen slipped into a state he called the Flow. In it, he became so fully immersed that loneliness seemed to vanish.
And with it, the white space of the dreamscape that symbolized that loneliness changed accordingly.
Sometimes, it was sunny, other times it was stormy. In the flow, his dull feelings seemed to emerge, expressing themselves. He felt rage once more, and he felt happiness as well as contentment.
It wasn't that he couldn't feel them before this; only that his emotions dulled whenever loneliness grew so overwhelming it consumed nearly his entire emotional spectrum.
But now, without it, the dreamscape trembled with the rapid turn of seasons, bending to the rhythm of his emotions.
He moved like a man seizing the chance to reveal everything before it slipped away.
Wrath, sorrow, joy, lust, happiness… whatever he felt, he let flow, never holding back.
His spear strikes also changed accordingly, sometimes brutal and lightning-fast, other times precise and slow.
The ghost that witnessed everything from the side did not disappear. Its mouth curled up before a booming laugher erupted from it.
"Bahaha—! That's right! Let it flow! Feel it within you! That's the way."
Ashen did not understand what he meant, but he did not really care either. He was content to just express himself through his spear and let every suppressed emotion flow through it.
He did not pause when the wind hurled him across the ground, nor when the sun scorched him.
He did not pause when snow fell or rain pelted down.
Years passed, and he remained none the wiser.
All that mattered was chasing the spear and letting himself be.
Then one day, something occurred.
For a brief moment… instincts overtook him, and when he moved, he was faster than ever.
Ashen did not understand, nor did he try.
But since then, the feeling kept repeating every once in a while, and he unconsciously started chasing it.
He couldn't help it. Each of those strikes felt like a high note in a song. Landing it… was ecstasy.
His misconception was shattered when his teacher's voice rang once more.
"It's not you getting faster, son! It's the other way around!"
That was when he noticed it. The air around him felt somewhat stagnant… the drops of rain fell more slowly, almost as if the gravity was just too lazy to function at its normal capacity.
It wasn't just the air. The trees, the earth, the light, even his conjured enemies. They all lagged behind him, caught in the same haze. He alone moved unaffected.
When he became aware of this phenomenon, everything clicked into place. The state did not vanish after a momentary appearance like it always did; it persisted, letting him soak in it.
And when he moved again, a spear demon was born.
Narkals rose under the rainy sky.
Gorefiends, Great Beasts. Thousands of them in all kinds of shapes and forms. They attacked him from every side like they wanted to grind him to dust.
But in his eyes, it looked like they had stopped.
Whenever he passed, the only remaining thing was corpses with holes in their foreheads.
The monsters were helpless. It was like a fleeting shadow passing by for a moment before blackness overtook them as their brains shattered.
Soon, titanic versions came over, alongside hidden snipers, but it did not change the outcome.
The arrows that were akin to a death knell once upon a time became effortless to dodge. The massive forms of the Narkals were equally useless against his unfathomable spear.
Ashen had long recognized the reason for this change.
'It's Sloth.'
He remembered attempting to integrate Sloth with Spear Harmony, never imagining it would lead here.
Everything but him had become slothful. Being in Harmony with his own Spear and Sin allowed him to exist within its effects without being affected by it.
And that… created something absurd.
It was like he was the sole man in a domain where everything else lagged behind. He felt free, he felt… limitless.
His spear flew a thousand times. Felling a thousand more.
He kept walking among the monsters, harvesting them until he forgot that he was thrusting the spear.
Then, he even forgot himself.
His eyes grew unfocused, but his movements flowed even faster instead of slowing down.
The ghost of Edward did not scream or encourage him anymore. He only watched with a faint smile.
"So it is… a hundred years, and you have become this."
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