A whole month passed quickly for Rune, and it was literally, this month passed very quickly.

During this month, Rune noted 2 things, one, magic was becoming a thing really quickly, and second, Utopia was a true friend.

He was a cultured and handsome gentleman, probably as much in the universe as he appeared to be on the board.

[Utopia: I reached it Rune! I achieved it! I’m so amazing! I’m so intelligent! I’m so perfect! I can’t describe my feelings! It’s 1.5 minutes Rune! 1.5! It’s 30 seconds!]

[Rune: Cosmic Jesus Universe Christ you really reached it?!]

[Utopia: I did an entire 8 hours round and my gathering log doesn’t lie! I reached the limit of the sapiently possible! I - Did - It!]

[Rune: Let me calculate real quick, 1.5 minutes per resource, dividing 60… 40 resources per hour, 2 800 EP per hour, and… 67 200 EP per day! You absolute monster!]

[Utopia: Even a little above that, I gained 23 943 EP in total after those 8 hours, so just a bit more than predicted for the hour’s yield. But it still says everything about my divine luck! Now give me my music! Gimme! Gimme!]

[Rune: Your stats? How much momentum and perception? It’s not proven by the wiki or anything, but I feel like perception is primordial to succeed. I needed 260 PER before only getting a weak sense of hearing from my original body so calm down, it’s really not a complete thing]

What the duo was talking about was the supreme farming speed, and 30 seconds was the result Utopia reached between finishing absorbing a resource and sprinting to another one while keeping in mind that 1 resource per minute was only possible if teleportation was a thing.

It wasn’t. Not yet.

At a density of 75 resources per cubic kilometer, you needed to theoretically scan a cube of 237 meters of edge length to be sure to get at least one ether resource.

From that point of view, investing more than 120 points in perception was useless, except if you were in a special situation like extreme misfortune or a near anomaly.

Boosting it beyond 200 brought a case like Rune, he could see resources, but he wasn’t fast enough to reach them in a short time.

So the apex farming plan was to invest enough in perception, then only invest in the momentum stat, then you just had to rush a predetermined path planned by your perception sphere to eventually reach the limit of sapient farming yield.

[Utopia: 500 MO, that’s the limit of tier 1, I searched the board and some already reported that amount, 500 is the individual stat limit of tier 1 and I can prove it, as for my PER, it’s at 130]

[Rune: Ok]

[Rune: Go farm, it’s really unfounded but before I started my training, I reached 260 points in perception, and I really think it has an effect, that was fifteen days ago, and from then on I only focused on dividing my awareness]

[Rune: I think 200 perception is enough]

[Utopia: Now that you did it you’ll return to farming right? Everyone else became crazy with energy magic… We are the only remaining survivors!]

[Rune: Yeah, I’ll go back to farming soon, so, how to describe it…]

...

Half a month ago.

“It’s like catching a goldfish by hand… F*cking d*mb,” Rune stopped farming after reaching 260 in his perception stat, he gathered 448 665 EP in 15 days and tried himself to the task of manipulating his awareness.

And he was now frustrated enough to talk loudly.

Avatar (Basic Rank) (Tier 1)

EP: 35 461

Stats Total: 459

Health: 10

Health Regeneration: 1

Strength: 1

Cohesion: 1

Energy: 10

Energy Regeneration: 65

Purity: 10

Affinity: 1

Momentum: 100

Perception: 260

Rune was completely sure he could have, in fact, done what he was doing when he attained 200 perception, his current training was primitive but effective, but as it was full-time training he had stopped increasing his perception stat.

Or any other stat for the matter.

‘I only need my hearing sense, why can’t I do something so simple? Not being a protagonist isn’t an excuse.’

But reasoning had a limit, and being frustrated at his training was normal for even the most talented.

‘Am I going crazy? How did I do that trick?’ Yes, he succeeded, and his irate mood came from this one-time success of 2 seconds.

‘I’m so frustrated I just want to launch a bunch of water balloons at children passing by!’ Rune just began his awareness training and like it was only a probability of success, he did it one time and failed every other.

“Whatever…” Returning to a calm inner-self and emotionless external-self, Rune started his primitive training method again.

His method was to switch back and forth between his original body and his avatar, as that action was linked to moving his awareness, he just had to try and do it as slowly as possible, or slow it down as much as he could and feel every change happening.

And once he felt in control, he tried to stop it in the middle, but it was like a pierced water balloon that he wanted to throw at children’s faces.

He could slow it down but never stop the switching process from happening.

‘I already made Utopia in charge of finding the ideal mix for farming, and I promised that when he found it I'd have a way to listen to music again…’ Thinking about the pact he made only rekindled his determination, he really wanted to hear music again!

‘Why doesn’t it stop? Hum… Maybe It’s like energy training, you can’t succeed at the beginning, even if your stats told you you’re able to do it, it was but an illusion… Let’s just passively switch my awareness and become more familiar with everything involved.’

Being a pioneer was hard, and while he wasn’t interested in fame, it didn’t mean he would say no to some ego boost once he successfully proved that this method worked.

Another of his motivations was just contributing, maybe as a form of atonement to the profit, he got from all the dead avatars who then gave all their intel to help the others.

He wasn’t a saint, but deep inside, the values of the IGS were anchored in his very being, and keeping was also straight-up worse than giving, it was basic civility.

Ten days after starting his awareness splitting training session, Rune could feel a consequent change compared to when he started.

His control over the switching speed was becoming better and better, meaning he could at the last start his ‘sense of hearing only’ training.

Awareness manipulation seemed to be a long process, Rune only became able to slow the change down to a 5 minutes switch after hours of dedicated effort, and in fact, he didn’t even start to hit the hard part, the true manipulation.

The central point of awareness was the ether soul, the wiki gave away this knowledge to those who involved themselves in deep search on the subject, true awareness manipulation also implied control over at least 1% of one’s total awareness cloud.

Rune didn’t know what percentage of his awareness needed to be left in his original body to have access to his hearing sense, but he at least wanted the music he heard to be complete.

He didn’t want to hear crackles and cuts, so he didn’t target a percentage but a concrete objective.

After 10 days of trying to control his awareness, he already learned how to manipulate his awareness if it was only in one body, but this level of manipulation didn’t involve dividing it, only cutting a sense completely or keeping it completely.

“So trippy,” Rune just disconnected all his senses except his sense of sight, he was talking without being aware of what his mouth was doing.

He could move one of his arms and from his point of view it just floated up without making any sense. (pun unexpected)

“A lot better than the first time, hehe,” because the first time he disconnected his senses, his body spontaneously started to vomit probably because his brain short-circuited.

“Ok, so it really increases one sense,” the experiment he did was roughly about the myth of blind people having more refined senses than others.

And in Ether Law terms, this myth has an explanation, your awareness is more focused because you use one less sense and everyone has an equal awareness.

Cutting every sense except one forced all of one’s awareness to go all-in on only this one sense, and by biology breaking means, his eyes could now see insects crawling in the front garden of his house after looking from his open velux window.

‘So if I cut every sense except my sense of hearing, I’ll only need a minute amount of awareness to be on my original side and be able to hear from my avatar side.’

Over the course of 10 days, his training completely transformed from a switching process observation to original body senses manipulation.

It was just so fun, those who trained with energy should feel the same as he did if they liked accomplishing completely new things without any guidance.

‘If I wanted to know what part of my ether soul corresponds to the hearing sense of my original body, I’d need months and months of training, it probably means it’s not the right way.’

Thinking outside the box was easy to say when it was just about a simple riddle, but reality often made a point of making everything harder than it had to be when you wanted something simple to happen but everything around this goal was complex.

“I just need a drop! A single drop of awareness and I’ll know how to progress!” Expressing one’s determination loudly helped a little to hype the spirit.

‘The answer should be to do it manually, I need to switch manually, take all my awareness, and send it to my avatar.’

If to just hear the music you needed months and months of training, then Rune would do it, but he also wouldn’t say no to a little shortcut or a different approach.

And so, four days later, Rune attained apotheosis by hearing for the first time music in the Void dimension.

The amount of awareness that was on his original body side wasn’t even enough to be called a droplet, it was the equivalent of a molecule.

The amount was so tiny that he only heard sizzling and crackling like his original body was a broken radio that was on the wrong wave.

But with the ultimate reward just some practice away, Rune really entered the zone, pushing his awareness so gently and minutely that molecule by molecule amount of awareness passed to the other side.

It was his outside-the-box answer, and the more he did that, the clearer the music became.

‘4%, 4% is enough.’

A day later, with bright and lively eyes, Rune was listening to “The Riddle Anthem, by Mike Candys & Jack Holiday” in the Void.

He never felt so hyped up to continue farming as he felt at that moment.

…

[Rune: From my estimate, we’ll need months of practice just to become able to send enough awareness to activate our sense of hearing in under an hour]

[Utopia: And how much time do you take to do it like, now? Right now?]

[Rune: Five hours, 5 hours to send 4% of my awareness without engaging the switching process]

[Utopia: So do I need to bring my perception up or not?]

[Rune: It being possible at 10 PER didn’t mean it’s REALLY possible, bring it to 260 and it’ll take you 15 days, I don’t know what higher stat bring to the time needed, I’m only a lone man after all]

[Rune: That’s why I’m going to release it on the board, once people give their own training time, it’ll gain traction and reach out to lots of people, I hope it’ll help those like me who have enough of being in complete silence all day]

[Utopia: That’s admirable! Utopia Out!]

‘My rush for 500 MS can start now, but yeah… All the others are really into this new energy magic thing, they didn’t even talk for 10 days.’

Ten days ago the government released a mini announcement.

They used the Aspera AI, a universe-class AI core of the IGS defense department, to create a training regime for energy mastery.

The result once it was released was an explosion in the number of energy specialists, energy was now the go-to field in the forum, minor spells, major spells, killing-yourself spells, there was no stopping the advancement of the newly pioneered energy manipulation field.

Heroes with already over 1 000 total stats or commoners with 100 total stats, everyone could follow this training regime if they invested enough in their energy stat.

The devised training was very complete and very time-consuming, a true shonen-like training including the 24 hours in a day after application of the energy revitalization loop technique.

[Training regime for energy mastery by Aspera:

4 hours: Create an O energy shape in the air, must be stable and be able to flow.

2 hours: Maintain an energy orb without sending it, the more energy the harder.

4 hours: Repeatedly use your energy by colliding multiple energy orbs, the more complex and unfamiliar the energy orb the better.

2 hours: Create a normal energy orb and compress it, keep compressing for 2 minutes before dissipating and starting again.

12 hours: Redo the same training while understanding what a diminished amount of energy brings to all the training. Never reach zero energy in your energy pool]

Thankfully Rune wasn’t concerned by this boring training without anything concrete to gain at the end, so it had nothing to do with his life, he was going to farm.

…

In one month of farming, after he gained the ability to listen to music in the Void, he gained 1 104 446 EP and brought his momentum to 213.

The second month, he gained 1 634 412 EP, bringing his momentum to 376.

In the third month, he reached his goal of 500 momentum after 20 days and continued to farm for 10 days to bring up his survivability, gathering 1 980 677 EP in total.

‘Utopia’s crazy, he was ahead of me by at least 2 and a half months, was my EP optimization so bad, or are Rululus just innate divine beings even when they’re teenagers?’

Wondering how that situation could have happened, Rune was aware that soon he would reach the end of his spirit's maximum period of activity of one month.

Switching to his original body, he was welcomed by a totally normal bedroom with chill music playing in the background, his first action upon coming back was to turn them off and then make his end-of-month rendering.

Avatar (Basic Rank) (Tier 1)

EP: 394 996

Stats Total: 895

Health: 10

Health Regeneration: 10

Strength: 10

Cohesion: 10

Energy: 10

Energy Regeneration: 65

Purity: 10

Affinity: 10

Momentum: 500

Perception: 260

“I also have Void initiation rewards to claim,” having already deactivated his energy loop, fatigue was coming fast, hitting like a deadly asteroid.

Travel more than 1 000 kilometers in the Void Dimension: 100 000 EP (COMPLETE) (Claim?)

Travel more than 10 000 kilometers in the Void Dimension: 1 000 000 EP (COMPLETE) (Claim?)

“Well… Probably just got it, or maybe my past self was being stupid and was enjoying the music too much to hear the notifications?” Musing to himself with confusion, Rune didn’t expect the 10 000 kilometers traveled distance objective to be complete.

“Let me see, let me see… 500 meters per minute, 2 minutes for one kilometer, so 20 000 minutes if untouched, it’s equal to… 14 days?” He immediately linked this result with something else that bothered him a few minutes ago.

“Sigh, I think I know how Utopia reached 500 so quickly, he just took the optimization I decided to forsake in favor of doing awareness manipulation training, and here I was, thinking my long-term memory was pretty good…”

He had the answer but he didn’t remember it, it was that simple.

Overcome by the fatigue invading his mind, Rune decided he couldn’t continue living in this state and undressed before going to bed immediately.

He slept immediately the moment his head touched his pillow.