Markus surged through the final layers of the rift, his 100% Space Mastery allowing him to fold the distance back to the heart of Oakhaven Borough in a fraction of the time it took to enter.
Upon reaching the secure transit station, he didn't waste a second, hauling the shattered Vane heir into a military Med-Pod. As the glass lid hissed shut and the internal systems began flooding Saylor's crippled form with a stabilizing nutrient gel, Markus signaled the pilot.
The private jet's engines roared to life, banking sharply toward the horizon as he prioritized an immediate return to the Valerian Royal Academy.
"I couldn't contain the corruption that was expelled from Saylor," Markus thought, his gaze fixed on the passing clouds outside the airplane window. The memory of the viscous, black discharge from the Vane heir's orifices remained vivid, a stark reminder of the sheer volume of rot that had festered within the boy's mana circuits.
Despite his 100% Space Mastery, even Markus had found it difficult to anchor such a volatile, necrotic force as it tore itself away from its host.
The black, oily corruption didn't just exit Saylor's body; it seemed to resent its own exposure to the world. As it splashed onto the floor, the necrotic sludge began to hiss and evaporate, dissolving into a foul, dark mist that turned into absolute nothingness before it could be contained.
Markus recalled with a frown of frustration; despite his 100% Space Mastery, the essence was too volatile to anchor, vanishing into the fabric of the rift before he could secure a specimen for study.
He had hoped to contain a pressurized sample of the Heart Demon's residue, intending to reverse-engineer its frequency and develop a standardized remedy—or a more efficient weapon—for future encounters with corrupted awakeners.
**
Upon his arrival at the Academy, Markus secured the med-pod and went straight to the administrative spire.
There, he shared the crystal-clear recording of his encounter—captured through his watch—with Headmistress Elena and Elder Isaac. Standing before the leaders of the Valerian Royal Academy, he provided a clinical, concise debrief of Saylor Vane's betrayal, the manifestation of the Heart Demon, and the subsequent spatial purging.
Without lingering for their praise or the inevitable political fallout, Markus left seeking the familiar solitude of his dorm room.
**
Finally alone, Markus retreated into the absolute privacy of his dorm room.
With a sharp, fluid motion, he reached into the tethered void of his spatial inventory. The air rippled like disturbed water as he withdrew a heavy, ancient tome: "Time: An Eternal Construct." The book's cover felt cold, humming with a temporal resonance that seemed to challenge the very 100% Space Mastery he had so effortlessly displayed hours prior.
Markus flipped the heavy cover open, the parchment groaning as it yielded to his touch. Before him lay a dense thicket of an ancient, flowing language—a cryptic alphabet of shifting runes that seemed to vibrate against the paper.
Surprisingly, he didn't need to use artificial intelligence to translate it; the symbols resonated with his spatial laws, and the meanings began to assemble themselves in his mind with unsettling clarity.
It was as if his 100% Space Mastery had already prepared his consciousness to perceive the underlying geometry of the universe, allowing him to read the "code" of time as easily as a book in the Valerian Royal Academy.
The first page of the tome was deceptively sparse, containing only two cryptic lines of text that seemed to pulse with a gravitational weight of their own:
Relativity
Time is what happens when nothing else happens.
The Absolute
Time is absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.
Markus reached out to flip to the second page, but the parchment remained as unyielding as a slab of stone. It was a conceptual lock; the book demanded more than a simple reading.
To Markus, the message was clear: he had to fully comprehend and harmonize with the dual nature of these statements—the fluidity of the relative and the unbending flow of the absolute—before the tome would reveal its next layer of secrets.
A flicker of nostalgia crossed Markus's mind as he stared at the unyielding parchment. He recalled how, as a five-year-old wandering the sprawling corridors of the Blackwell estate, a single summer afternoon felt like an eternity, the golden hours stretching on in a boundless, hazy crawl.
Yet, the past three years at the Valerian Royal Academy had vanished in a flash, consumed by a relentless cycle of grueling tasks. It was the living embodiment of the first line: time was not a static measurement, but a relative experience dictated by the intensity of the "nothing else" happening within it.
As Markus aligned his internal tempo with the memory of those endless Blackwell summers, the first sentence on the parchment ignited with a brilliant, silvery light. The words "Time is what happens when nothing else happens" didn't just fade; they dissolved into a shimmering mist that surged into his chest, rooting a preliminary understanding of temporal relativity deep within his soul.
The abstract concept had transformed into a foundational pillar of his consciousness, confirming that his understanding of time was finally expanding beyond the three dimensions of physical space.
A holographic flicker rippled in the air before Markus as his system panel synchronized with his newfound realization. There, in a stark, crystalline font, a new entry manifested:
[Law of Time: 0.000001%]
Markus exhaled a long, heavy sigh, the sound echoing through the silence of the room. He had spent years achieving 100% Space Mastery that made the Vanes tremble, yet this minuscule decimal was a humbling reminder of the sheer scale of the eternal.
Markus was used to absolute control; seeing his progress represented by a millionth of a percent was a cold, mathematical insult to his current power.
"So, time can speed up or slow down depending on the observer's engagement," Markus pondered, his voice barely a whisper in the hollow silence of his room.
"When the mind is occupied with tasks, the years pass in a flash, yet in stilness, a single moment could stretch into an eternity. It's a subjective filter—a psychological distortion of the 'Relative' law. My perception was changing, but the 'Absolute' time described in the tome remained indifferent, flowing with its own mathematical precision regardless of my boredom or my joy".