In a room with little furniture, sat what could be considered by Rululus standard, a handsome young man.

His parents called the young man Utopia, a symbol of perfection unattainable by simple mortals, squabbling for their own petty ideas and gains without consideration for the greater goal.

Behind him, at the entrance of one of the 2 existing doors of the room, with long brown hair arranged in a rough low ponytail and clear blue eyes inherited from his parents, stood Rune Tudor.

“So we finally meet Utopia, or should I call you Mr. Fanaru? I finally reached your level, I think I’m now worthy of becoming a part of your league of heroes,” the brown-haired human said seriously with a smirk on his face.

“Oh, interesting… Very interesting…” Rising from his crossed legs position, the blue-haired hero didn’t even glance the way the young human with brown hair stood on.

“You reached my level… You said?” Turning abruptly to look in the eyes of his interlocutor, two pairs of piercing blue eyes stared into each other.

The situation could have been a serious and dramatic theatrical encounter, if not for the smirk on their 2 faces.

“I learned to split my awareness the way you did Utopia, I even surpassed you, you have no choice but to accept me now,” exclaimed Rune, while erasing his smirk, looking now like a proud young man who succeeded in his life.

“You only learned 1% of what I’d consider acceptable, but good enough… As a fellow hero, I’ve been observing you for a long time, and the world now more than ever before needs heroes like you to save it from its doomed future!”

Looking to the side, where nothing but emptiness existed, Utopia too erased his smirk and spoke like a senior having lived his whole life sacrificing himself for the sake of the greater good.

“Then train me! My talent is even more than yours! I’ll do every training you did in less time, I’ll learn everything you learned in less time! Believe in the future generation, believe in me!” Like a hot-blooded man, Rune truly entered his role.

“There’s only a single problem that talent and confidence cannot resolve. There’s not enough time!!!” Utopia exclaimed, “You are too late!” He exclaimed a second time.

“Do you believe you can achieve tier 2 in one month?! Don’t overestimate yourself! You're only a prospective hero!” With spittles flying everywhere, the blue-haired hero said as if he really believed it to be the current situation.

Despair started to cloud the room, making even the air feel heavy.

“If you didn’t believe in the new generation deep in your heart…”, looking directly into the eyes of the despairing hero, “then why did you release all those training videos, wouldn’t it just be a waste of your time?”

Arguing logically, Rune continued, “If you weren’t a true hero inside, would you still be in this building, the one where you’ve trained your whole life, where you did your 10 years of death training each day without ever missing one?”

Silence invaded the room, letting the despair emanating from Utopia fill the room, like a never-ending vicious cycle.

“Am I right, president of the League Of Heroes, President Utopia?” With burning willpower contained in his eyes, he kept staring intently at the pair of dead eyes.

“Maybe… If it’s you… Maybe a hundred of you could change our fate… Sigh, the young always surpass the old…” Lamenting the fate of the old people, the young man finally conceded.

“I’ll train you, come with me to the training room, I’ll teach you a variant of the legendary Momentum Technique, I called it the Ninja Momentum Technique, you must never pass it to outsiders and non-heroes, its power is infinite in talented hands, be it evil or good.”

Concluding on this, Utopia started to walk to another door, where another elevator was located, “Come with me, we only have 2 months before the end comes, and you will not be able to run from this one.”

With this serious sentence and tone, Utopia opened the elevator and invited Rune inside.

The two didn’t talk during the descent, it’s only upon arriving that Utopia talked again, “My information about you report 2 close friends, where are they? Are they coming too?”

“They will, but they belong to the hybrid path of spirit and energy, so unless they learn the newly created energy wings, they will not be able to climb up with their spirit only,” Rune admitted his friend's weaknesses with a bitter tone.

“Serve them right for being indecisive, they would have already reached the spiritual stats tier 1 medium mastery if they didn’t branch out, you’re the only reasonable one in your group of friends, I pity you.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t reason with them… Your wisdom precedes you, president Utopia,” the elevator door opened, and before them appeared a gigantic open space, empty if it wasn’t for the central unit of unknown purpose sitting in the middle of it.

“This is the holy ground of momentum training, nobody with an evil heart should ever take a step here, let me show you the basics of the Momentum Technique, your common sense will disappear after seeing it in action.”

Walking to the central piece of machinery, he activated it with a quick vocal command, the immediate result was that gravity ceased to exist in the room.

Without any impulsion from his right or left foot, Utopia floated and stopped at a height of 10 meters.

“Momentum! The mysterious power created by the momentum stat is called Momentum! Don’t confuse it with any other powers, moving with the strength stat or using energy wings produce an acceleration, it can be used to hit harder, but so can momentum!”

Like a sergeant informing the new recruit, Utopia entered the teacher role, “Momentum can break away from the constraints of the established common sense, even that of the Ether Law itself.”

“Do you know why? It’s because it uses your own spirit and will to be created. Let me show you an example of a newbie, don’t close your eyes and watch carefully, I’ll not do it a second time.”

Floating in the air, Utopia started to accelerate in the direction of a pillar that mysteriously appeared before Rune even noticed it.

Accelerating to the speed of 8 meters per second easily, Utopia charged head-on against the established convention to stop and not collide head-on against something that wouldn’t break.

Rune watched carefully and even cut his sense of touch, taste, and other non-essential senses, his eyes could now perfectly observe every change that occurred to Utopia, his perception sphere was going to help as well.

The momentum technique intricacies unveiled themselves before his eyes.

Just before colliding against the pillar, against common sense, Utopia shot to the side with no delay with a margin of what Rune concluded to be 1 centimeter.

In an instant Utopia executed multiple maneuvers and like the pillar didn’t exist, Utopia bypassed with no loss of speed the 2 meters wide pillar.

After executing this miraculous action, Utopia landed in front of Rune and said, “Once you can do that, you’ll have mastered the beginning of the momentum technique, a part of the spiritual mastery knowledge, even I couldn’t go further than this in 4 days.”

Breaking his role at this moment, Utopia advised Rune, “You’ll see that it’s pretty easy with the reaction speed you have with 500 in perception, but later I’ll show you videos of true momentum master, it’s just unbelievable.”

Letting a smile appear on his face, Rune answered, “What you did just now is already mind-blowing, I wonder what can blow your mind much more than what you just showed me.”

With a smile also appearing on his young white blue face, Utopia responded, “Practicing with friends is just better, you’ll catch up to this level in 2 days with your talent that is at the apex of the young generation, hahaha!”

Laughing as the 2 started to comment on their performance, hours passed before finally Astride and Nelo also arrived by elevator.

…

“So you really learned to create energy wings? That’s some hard work you put into it,” Utopia was sitting on the floor with sweat covering his body.

The room returned to normal gravity to welcome the guests, so Rune and he naturally stopped their training.

“That’s the only next-generation spell we learned, it took us 20 days to learn it after days of foundational energy training, we’ll try the energy bullet spell next, but only after capping our spiritual stats and farming some points,” a young kajo woman answered.

Kajos weren’t that different from humans, they had different ethnicities and different skin, hair, and eye colors.

More often than not, they had platinum hair and white skin, only differing from Humans with their average heights, similar to that of the rululu’s, as well as their unique clear white eyes found in a large majority of them as it was a dominant gene.

“We’ll do like Rune’s plan, try everything bit by bit and see where our talent lies,” the young man emanating a friendly vibe just next to the young woman was Nelo.

Disobeying the rule of a kajo’s height, Nelo stood at the same height as Rune, at 1m70 or so, with short platinum hair and dressed in white training clothes, similar to that of his sister’s.

Astryde was the spitting image of her brother, with only an effeminate face, long hair attached in an elaborate haircut, and lower height to differentiate them.

“If you take everything into account, then the rhythm of new dimensions opening will be faster than the training time available,” Utopia interrupted and said.

As a rululu, his natural eidetic memory could help him in optimizing his path more than any other species in the IGS, so the other didn’t hesitate to ask him for some advice.

“To become a true hero, or you take a risk and rush your stats, then use every second to train in where your talent lies, or you only focus on one path and use hard work to advance faster than even balanced geniuses,” the legendary analytic tone of the rululus was heard, and the believers followed.

“I believe the only reason Utopia didn’t try other mastery training is that he’s still farming and preparing to enter the dangerous grounds, or maybe he already did, after all, he has at least a 2 month and maybe a half advance on me,” Rune added matter of factly.

“In the future, I’ll tell you how to optimize your path, and in real-time too, you just have to prepare for every eventuality and it’ll be easy, but yeah.

The farming becomes very irregular upon entering dangerous grounds, some have the famous 20 or 50 tier 1 stat points stones and crystals, but others just have an increased resource density, so it’s useless for me…

Unless I act long term in them and reduce my 30 seconds of a sprint between every absorption by only 10 or so seconds.”

Taking a deep breath he continued, “or if the value of each resource doubles or triples of course, currently I’m in a dangerous ground with resources worth 150 EP, so I doubled my EP gain.”

“Sigh, I’m still retracing my steps to start farming in one,” Rune informed them of his current situation of investing in his physical stats while training his spirit mastery, but his sphere training encountered a big problem.

“You can’t even move it a little?” Nelo was surprised by the situation, even he could modify his perception sphere a little after reading the guide from the psychic union and training for 4 days.

“In this case, you should belong to the ether soul case,” Utopia simply said, “Do you all know what the ether soul is in detail?”

“Ether soul case?” Rune muttered to himself, “nope, never read about it before.”

“Same.”

“Same,” Astryde and Nelo echoed their answers and then looked at each other like mortal enemies crossing path.

Utopia didn’t care about their antics and started his explanation, “the ether soul is the immaterial center of your ability to interact with ether, it was only recently awakened, and even if it’s destroyed or suffered damage, it would reform in seconds, as long as you live it will exist. That’s its current definition accepted by the wiki.”

“Ether soul case refers to people having special stats anomalies, you’re not the first one to complain or explain about their very abnormal situation, be it negative or positive.

Some have a perception sphere that interferes with that of others, some said they can move at maximum speed with no focus at all, some can clearly feel special resources with an increased affinity stats, things like that…” Letting the information sink in, he then continued after a pause of 10 seconds.

“The board decided to attribute the cause of those cases to be the ether soul, eventually, everyone should have a special effect applied to one of his stat, it’s referred to by the scholar as the awakening ability and in the future, there should be a way to make it show on the status window and have it really affect your stat.”

“Be happy that you realized it now and that you know what your specialty is about, there’s necessarily an advantage hidden in your sphere being so solid, maybe this hardness is your advantage but you don’t know how to use it.”

A rululu was a rululu, ignoring his age, the knowledge Utopia accumulated after 6 months was insane to others listening to him.

“Ok, I’ll research more about it later, thank you,” Rune thanked Utopia sincerely before redirecting the conversation to the momentum technique.

…

“Yes, the whole building can be used for as long as we see fit, there’s prepared room for the monthly sleep, depends on you, my mother is the 5th district administrative head, so I don’t lack money and influence, and especially not here, it’s my home after all.”

While the information could be shocking for others, Rune, Nelo, and Astryde just heard it and let it flow out from their ears because they didn’t care.

“Maybe the 3 others will join us if they feel like it, I already told them I could pay for their tickets but I don’t know if they will really come or not.”

Maybe Utopia was bragging, or maybe he was just too used to using money like it was water, but like every other shocking info, it was flushed from their minds in a few seconds.

Then they continued on with the casual conversation.

“I always wanted to try and have a discussion with people after cutting my energy loop, make a contest about who can resist and be the last standing, I’m sure I’ll win,” Nelo said, with Astryde affirming they already did it, but at 4, the ego stakes would be much higher and more motivating.

…

‘Training with other people… Really a new era I’d have never done…’ Rune spent 6 days training and mastering the beginning of the momentum technique, doing it with actual friends had an overall motivating effect.

Universal soft background music was being diffused from somewhere, not causing any reverberation even though the room was only made of hard materials that didn’t absorb sound very well.

On this point Utopia was very similar to Rune, music could boost anything he did.

The general friendly and relaxed mood led to the current situation where he shared a part of his plan he had kept hidden deep inside his brain.

“At the same time it makes my determination overflow, but it has a gigantic impact on the following after it succeeds,” with a purposely mysterious tone he breached the subject.

“I think I trained with awareness the most in our group, and my plan of only splitting 50% of my awareness to be able to farm and explore on one side and train on the other side is becoming more and more likely to be possible.”

“Even if I followed your way of doing it… It’s a bit different from the one advised in the psychic union guide, they don’t manually transmit it, they just slow down the transfer so much that it effectively stops,” Utopia wasn’t optimistic about his plan of automated farming.

“And with only 50% of your awareness, your avatar would be like… 50% more useless right? Equally divided awareness… Wait, did you succeed in finding the different senses of the avatar?!” Exclaiming like Santa Claus just delivered his presents, he stared straight into Rune’s eyes.

“I only have a very primitive idea, but at least I got to the starting line. The only unsolvable problem is momentum, even with my full awareness it takes close to 80% of my focus to reach maximum speed, of course, I never expected to have the same yield with less involvement...

But if I can cut everything apart from perception, then 50% of my awareness should be enough to have somewhere around 45% of my usual yield, and that’s considering I already doubled the absorption time of resources.”

Rune’s careful planning impressed Utopia and upon hearing it, they started to discuss the problem linked to the execution.

20 minutes of Utopia adding info and details to the plan later, now they only had to do what they were currently doing but for awareness.

Training. A lot.

“The plan to dominate the dimensions is complete Sir Nelo and Ma’am Astryde, we can go at it again,” with a simple word, the 2 kajos were on their feet and ready to go again.

…

2 weeks passed by, making it the end of the 7th month since the awakening of the Ether Law.

Isolated in their training building, the 4 friends were having a contest.

In a contest to decide who was superior in willpower, everyone had a chance to become the alpha of the pack.

“Rune, why are you closing your eyes? If you want to sleep just go to bed, no worries bro…”

The one talking was Nelo, in real life he was always hiding his intentions behind a simple smile, but his smile was terrifying like he just killed his father and was enjoying the thrill of doing it.

“The revitalization spell isn’t a necessity for me, I trained my will during long gaming nights with friends, as long as I don’t want to sleep nothing will make me do it.”

Rune appeared to be completely sleep-drugged, fatigue making him talk like a chuunibyou high in the seventh sky dimension.

“Utopia, you sure you don’t want to go to sleep now? I’ll even accompany you and sing you a little lullaby, so you can go in peace,” Astryde having become crazy wasn’t different from her usual self, and everyone knew it.

“You bunch of masochists! I never slept late before! I’m also too young! You cheaters!” Utopia surrendered and departed to go to bed.

Followed by Astryde.

Followed by Rune.

Followed by Nelo, walking to his bed at the speed of a drunken turtle with a limp.