Caecus woke up from a numbing pain that was emanating from his soul core.
Gah!
A groan escaped his lips, the pain making him tense up. It felt like his soul core was being torn in half.
'This is probably the side effect from soul drain…'
For around five minutes, Caecus was unable to move due to the agonizing pain he was experiencing. Then it got manageable, and he was able to slowly leave his bed.
The black-haired boy quickly showered and changed into his everyday clothes. When he was done, he still had a slight ache that stemmed from his soul core, but he was able to ignore it to some degree. The pain lessened with time. He pressed the button on his wall to call for Amelia. Caecus grabbed his radio and listened to the voices of the reporters.
After ten minutes he felt Amelia's soul approaching, and when she got close enough the fragrant smell of breakfast entered his nose.
"Good morning Young Master, I hope you're well. I have brought you your breakfast," her voice resounded through his room.
"Good morning, yes I'm well," he lied.
Amelia placed the tray with his food right in front of him on the table. He started eating while listening to what Amelia had to say.
"I told you yesterday that our schedule will change from now on. First of all we'll start with cultivating your soul essence so that you can digest your food. After you cultivate your soul essence, we'll go over to physical training and combat without soul essence until you replenish it. When you do, we are going to eat, cultivate again, and you'll sleep to recover your soul essence. After that sleep, we are going to train soul essence control and combat with soul essence."
"I thought with the technique you showed me, the one where you circulate your soul essence, I cultivate already?" Caecus' voice sounded confused.
"There is a difference between passive cultivation and active cultivation. With passive cultivation, your cultivation progress will be indescribably higher. The reason why you will have a chance at competing with the other kids from the corpora is due to them passively cultivating. They currently need to focus the most on soul essence control, not cultivation."
"Right…" Amelia had made it clear from the start that Caecus had a monstrous talent at soul essence control. People his age needed many years to reach the same level as him.
'It's probably the same reason as to why I have superior cognitive abilities. While advancing, the enhancements that should have gone to my sight have spread out to my cognitive abilities and other senses. This allows me to control soul essence with better accuracy.'
"Advancing your soul core to a new rank without sufficient control is not a smart move. It could end up in various bad things. Losing control of your soul essence is the most common."
Caecus gulped down the last bites of his food and stood up, going to the concentration room. This time Amelia didn't bring the food away but just called other servants to clean up the mess.
Click.
Clack.
The walking of both of them could be heard echoing through the halls of the manor.
When Caecus entered the concentration room he remembered yesterday's event and shuddered.
'Let's not take that many risks today…'
The teen sat down on the floor cross-legged as always, and when he touched the spot where he had bled yesterday, he noticed that it seemed to have been cleaned up.
"Alright, let's start now. Stop when you feel your soul essence reserves go under five percent."
Caecus heard Amelia taking something out and could feel her using her fingers to tap on something. She was on her phone. Well, it made sense.
'Of course she's not going to watch me the whole time.'
Caecus started using the breathing method his servant had taught him and got deep into a trance-like state. When his focus was solely on his soul essence, he started moving it around and cultivating.
Time flew for him, as he wasn't really aware of his surroundings to begin with. It was just a repetition of the same thing after all. Draw on your soul essence, cover your core with it and assimilate. Now, with increased control after reaching augmentation, he was able to pull it off much faster.
'So this is why they want to focus on soul essence control before ranking up. My cultivation speed is way higher than before.'
Some time later Caecus noted that he only had around seven percent of his soul essence left and carefully applied it. Just when he reached five percent he stopped cultivating.
"Phew… that tired me out."
He breathed out a sigh and leaned backwards, propping himself up with his two hands on the ground and leaning his head back.
Amelia turned off her phone and helped him up.
"Let's go to the training hall now."
Caecus felt her hand close around his wrist as she pulled him up. He was humming a song he heard on the radio. Both of them walked toward the hall, and he felt the space around them expand when he entered.
'Wait what? How did I feel the space shift?!'
When he looked at his soul core, Caecus noticed that he had subconsciously reinforced his ears with the little soul essence he had left.
'Is this like echolocation?'
Immediately his humming stopped, and indeed he stopped feeling his surroundings.
"Amelia! I just did something super cool!" His voice was tinged with excitement as he nudged her.
The humming started again, and the black-haired boy extended his finger in one direction, pointing at something.
"Right there there is a water dispenser! And over there a stray dumbbell lying on the floor!"
Amelia seemed confused.
"Huh… how did you know that?"
"Echolocation!" he said joyfully. "When I hum and enhance my ears with soul essence, I can sense my surroundings to some degree!"
"What?!" Feeling the air shifting, Caecus sensed her covering her mouth with her hand. "This is huge Young Master. Like really huge! We can apply this in many different ways. I'll gather some ideas so we can try them out during soul essence control later."
'This is super cool!'
Caecus was practically floating toward the weights section of the training hall. With newfound motivation he already started warming up. After he finished warming up, he began training, the routine already memorized after all this time. Today it was leg day.
The blind boy went up to the squat rack and loaded a few plates onto the barbell. He worked his way up until he finally did his working set. One repetition shy of failure, he re-racked the weight and went to take a small break.
Another set later with a little less weight, he went to the leg extension machine and started training his quadriceps. After he was done with quads, he hit his hamstrings, adductors, glutes, and calves. Finally he did some deadlifts and weighted crunches along with weighted leg raises to hit the core.
Resting on a bench and sipping on a drink with electrolytes, he took a break.
"This training was refreshing. Is running first or the sandbag?" he asked Amelia.
"I suppose now that your legs are still warm it's best to go running now. I doubt you'll be able to when your legs are sore later."
"Alright!" Caecus exclaimed. He was well recovered after ten minutes of sitting on that bench and jumped up to go running immediately.
Lap after lap, the tempo increased until he was doing full-on sprints. When he finally couldn't increase or hold his pace anymore, he jogged up to his bench and drank a few sips of water.
"Haaa. I really need to get new training clothes. These make me sweat like crazy."
"I think your metabolism has just increased after gaining weight, Young Master."
"That too, but it doesn't change the fact that I need clothes with more breathable material. Running shirtless would feel weird."
"Since when did you care about that?" Amelia asked, clearly puzzled. She had seen him solely in boxers multiple times after he got out of the shower or when she measured his progress.
"Well here it's something else… sigh… well I suppose you're right." He shook his head and draped his shirt off.
After recuperating his stamina, he went back to running. Repeating this two more times, Caecus finished up and went to the sandbags to practice punches and kicks without soul essence. This helped him get the technique down.
The teenager's stomach growled, and feeling himself being overcome by hunger, Amelia brought him food to his room where it was all devoured. Now that his belly resembled a bowling ball, he listened to some audiobooks to digest his food.
"Young Master, I'm going to go now for my own lunch break. Meanwhile, please cultivate and go nap."
"I will, thank you Amelia. Have fun."
Caecus went to the toilet, took a shower, and then started his cultivation in bed. During physical training all of his soul essence had already refilled. Around an hour of cultivation later, the drowsiness was overwhelming and he fell asleep while cultivating.
Waking up with a groan and his soul core full again, Caecus drank some water, used the restroom, washed his face and called for Amelia.
When he felt his servant approaching, he left his room already and greeted her. Leading the way to the training hall, Amelia seemed a bit quieter than usual and wrote something down into her notebook.
"Amelia?"
"Yes Young Master?"
"You seem focused. What are you writing down?" Caecus got curious. Maybe it was going to affect his training after all.
"Well, you mentioned that you can do a sort of echolocation, so I'm thinking of ways to use that. You're a really original case, you know. We need a few creative solutions here."
"Oh, okay. Will we start with practicing augmentation first?" he asked, turning his head sideways and 'looking' in the direction of Amelia's voice. He was able to guess where her eyes were, and he quite literally could feel her blinking, so making out where her eyes were located was child's play.
"Yes. I have been thinking about what sort of weapon we should use for you. We'll be trying out different ones," she explained while still writing down ideas into her notebook.
"Amelia, say, how many notebooks do you have? I always see you writing in them…"
"Huh? Ah, this is an artifact made by a soul smith. The pages are almost unlimited, as it's soul bound. It's like I'm writing something into my soul basically, and this is displaying it."
"Oh, that sounds cool…"
Just when he said that they arrived at the training room. Amelia grabbed different wooden weapons for him and placed them in front of him.
"Right now your only option is to fight in close quarters, so I chose weapons based on that."
Caecus snorted. "As if I'll be able to use a bow."
The black-haired boy grabbed the first weapon in front of him. It was a spear. The weight felt a little heavy in his hands. He swung it around a few times and noticed that his mobility was extremely limited too.
Following that, he grabbed the next weapon, a mace. It was like a blunt version of the spear with less dexterity and versatility. A spear could be thrown, used to cut, stab, or even deflect. Meanwhile the mace only had blunt damage through swinging and deflection. The weight distribution was a little more unbalanced on the mace, but this would probably help with the force of the attacks.
Next was a battleaxe. Gripping it with both of his hands he swung again and again. It had a blunt side and a bladed side. Dexterity-wise it was a great weapon, but Caecus still felt like his mobility was very limited.
"None of these seem to suit you… I wanted to give you a halberd after, but seeing how you use these weapons maybe it's something else." Amelia's fingers drummed against the familiar notebook in her hands. "Maybe something lighter? The sword is the standard weapon used by most people among the corpora. I figured we'd try to give you something original so the cadets won't win against you easily due to having superior sword skills…"
The servant walked away to a sort of wall that contained many wooden weapons, taking out a few different ones. With a thud she laid them in front of him and gave him a normal straight sword.
Caecus cut through the air, feeling much more secure and flexible with this weapon.
"This is goo—"
He felt Amelia take the weapon away and place a katana in his hands.
"Try this out," she said after interrupting him.
Feeling that it was a one-bladed weapon, he gripped it in the correct direction with both of his hands. When he performed a few cuts he felt the mobility improving.
"We're on a good track. It seems like cutting is the play for you… but the katana is still too restricting for you…"
Suddenly the fourteen-year-old felt two weapons in his hands. They were medium length. Curved swords.
'They are a bit shorter than the katana and feel lighter… I actually prefer this.'
"These are curved swords. They are called scimitars. You can dual wield them."
This time Caecus cut through the air with more momentum and movement-focused attacks, turning and spiraling around himself a lot.
"Th-this feels great! It's like it's made for me—"
"No. Not yet. I think I know your perfect weapon. The constant turning will come to bite you in the back later on."
She took both weapons out of his hands and then placed two new ones in them. They were even shorter than the scimitars. The blade's edge was one-sided too and curved. Toward the tip, the thick spine of the blade meant for parrying tapered down until it met the sharpened edge, forming a narrow but deadly tip.
'These are twin daggers… well I suppose it wouldn't hurt trying them out. If Amelia thinks this is my perfect weapon, there must be some truth to it.'
Gingerly he gripped both weapons by the hilts and started performing a few cuts. These curved twin daggers really left him with much dexterity and didn't hinder his movements in the slightest.
"Yes! This is it! Perfect, we found your weapon!" she exclaimed happily.
Caecus stayed silent for a few seconds, deep in thought, but then chuckled.
"So my main weapons are daggers? Well I suppose it fits me."
Augmentation training would start now.