The remaining months passed by fast, the days passing by in a blur.
Over the past few months, my academy life had fallen into a strict schedule.
Every day, I'd wake up at dawn, running around the Academy's vast campus, working my body like a dog. After that? Well, obviously, breakfast. After breakfast, I'd go to the combat classes, sparring with the other sleepers while learning to handle my flaw and observe the properties of soul essence. Heading down to the cafeteria at lunch, I'd study using the communication devices that were given to us for free, browsing the internet and searching for any morsel of useful information. After that, I'd head down to the training grounds, finding an isolated spot to train.
Right now, I was reworking my swordsmanship, recreating it and revising its forms to suit my new form.
I was shorter in this new body, weaker, slower, and because of that, the movements of my personal sword art were uncomfortable and inefficient.
I stripped my swordsmanship down to its barest parts, breaking my transcendent sword dance into a husk of what it was, but a husk that my current body could handle.
Transcendent swordsmanship often dealt with concepts, using starlight and sword aura to bend reality to your will.
By stripping it down, I had removed the conceptual aspect of my sword art, while still keeping the underlying principle.
Right now, the thing I lacked most was strength, a weakness I'd be compensating for through the swordsmanship I was creating.
When you play rock, paper, scissors, scissors gets beaten by rock, paper gets beaten by scissors, and rock gets beaten by paper.
The rock, while far harder and stronger, gets beaten by paper, a soft mailable sheet of white.
Softness overcoming hardness, the gentle overcoming the rigid.
It's a principle attributed to Lao Tzu, a Chinese scholar from my first life.
"Nothing in this world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it," as he would say it.
When I had just achieved transcendence and possessed very few stars, my sword art had followed Lao Tzu's words carefully.
All of the early iterations of my swordsmanship were counter based, my parries and defensive forms generally being more "yielding". Instead of facing my opponents' strikes head on, I would "flow" with them, accepting the force of their blow instead of resisting it, guiding that force and "dissolving" the momentum behind it.
As I fought stronger opponents, my swordsmanship naturally evolved to incorporate more conceptual aspects, but that's unimportant for now.
Currently, I was focused on incorporating that dominating softness into a sword art that was fit for my new physique, one that would bolster my combat effectiveness no matter the situation.
I still wasn't as flexible as I would've liked, my new swordsmanship lacking optimization, but it would have to do for now.
The past sixth months of preparation hadn't been a waste, I had done all I could to prepare myself for my looming venture into the dream realm, and I knew I was ready.
Realistically, it couldn't throw anything that crazy at me.... Right?
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It was the day of reckoning.
i could see the nervousness in everyone's eyes as we were led to the Academy's medical center.
For once, i wasn't the only one with crippling anxiety.
Many of the sleepers here probably wouldn't make it back, perishing in the cold embrace of the dream realm, and it was all because of the spell.
I was still unsure whether the nightmare spell was something aiding humanity in their struggle for survival, or if it was the thing behind humanity's current struggle.
A solemn atmosphere took hold as we were ushered into our personal rooms, a sleeper pod contained in each one.
The moment i closed the door to my room, I could hear the muffled sobs and hysterical cries of the sleepers in the rooms next to me.
At the end of the day, they were all basically kids. Teenagers forced into a dire situation with nothing but their wits, facing life or death scenarios for reasons unknown.
Sleepers retched, vomiting, and calming their nerves as they prepared themselves for the worst.
I felt pity for them, but I was powerless to do anything.
I couldn't offer any words that would console them, nor did I have the power to save them from this harsh reality.
They were residents of a fucked up world and I guess this was simply their fates.
I sighed before opening the pod, fortifying my mentality as I stepped in.
Darkness surged forward, the room quickly fading from my view as I fell asleep.
Waking me from my slumber, a voice echoed in the darkness.
[Welcome to the Dream Realm, Audun!]
A sense of weightlessness over took me, my body floating in the nothingness.
In the next moment, however, i realized that I wasn't floating in the nothingless, infact, I wasn't floating at all.
I was falling.
And fast too.
On my first visit to the Dream realm, I ate absolute shit, crashing face first into the ground.
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(A/N: I had a bit more free time today so I ended up putting together three chapters for you guys.
This chapter was a little bit shorter than I would've liked it to be, but I didn't think there was really a point in dragging it out and writing a bunch of chapters about his stay at the academy, so I decided to just jump into the forgotten shore.
Hope you guys enjoyed the chapter!)