Now, scientists and workout freaks seemed to have come to a consensus that a man’s prime, if he was in good health, took care of himself, ate well, and religiously exercised, would be around his early thirties, where his physicality would reach its peak. Not like football players whose peak is around twenty-six due to the incredible amount of abuse during their career. This only applies if those exercise and eating habits start earlier than that though, like around 19. But, that wasn’t me. I’m 28, and while I had used my flesh magic to put me back into decent shape, I needed a restart. A real one. Years of desk job work and ice cream had not been kind to my overall health. But first, a test, cause I am not going to try this shit out on myself. I went outside, feeling secure in the moment due to Norn keeping watch. Reaching out with my senses, I found a robin’s nest in the tree across the street, with two eggs inside, perfect. In no time, I was back in my basement with one egg cupped in my hands, eyes closed, fumbling around my flesh sorcery instincts, trying to see how much of it would be explained on its own.

It’s hard to describe, as sorcery is literally a part of my soul, but imagine being really good at soccer, and not finding out until someone kicks a ball at you and you do a bicycle kick from forty yards away and score a goal. Sorcery is having understanding and innate talent with a particular element of magic. Wizards seem to have the handicap of not having the magic work with you, but rather against you. After about twenty minutes of meditation, I reached out my senses to the battery generator and connected to it, turning the flow on and as low as it could go. Then, soaking the egg in my magic, I slowly began to age the embryo, speeding it along its journey. I saw the yolk sac inside shrink and the baby bird actually begin to form. [SUCCESS] I thought, because if I could age it, then reversing that would be possible. And it was, just way fucking harder than I thought. As soon as I began to reverse the age, the power requirements spiked. I amped up the generator to match the flow. It seems that with de-aging something, the power requirements are massive, as in multiplicatively massive, and doing it fast takes stupid amounts of energy, but it can be done. Whew. That’s all I need to know, as I have three generators that could help me out if necessary. I put the egg’s age back to where it was, and then returned it to the nest, magically wiping off the smell of human.

The plan was almost ready, but one thing stuck in my mind from my house getting attacked earlier. The generators are awesome with their constant outflow of mana, but what if something can put out more damage in an instant than their output can manage, like a bomb or a deity? I need a battery, a big one. In the corner of my basement was an old cast iron boiler that we had never moved due to its size and weight. Banishing it was the work of seconds. I then conjured in its place a diamond, which was easy as a diamond is simply very well stacked carbon, and carbon is one of the most abundant materials on Earth. I made this diamond five feet tall, four feet deep, and eight feet wide. This was going to be anti-nuke/anti-giant battery. If something hit my house and it was too powerful for the constant output of the generators, then this would be the extra oomph came from. I took about thirty minutes to make another stone cylinder generator and put it on top. I linked the diamond battery to the house wards so that it could automatically be engaged if something attacked the house or World Tree, then I linked the new generator to the battery and put a conditional trigger on it. The new generator would operate at full power to charge the humongous battery, and shut off when it was full, and turn back on if it ever went below full. This may seem paranoid, but I have precious cargo in my house AND it’s the base for the infant World Tree on top of it.

Sarah kept a full length mirror in the yoga room in the back area of the house. After inputting my anti-giant measures in the basement, I went there with my first pocket generator. I wanted to watch this; the goal was to put my age at nineteen tonight, and then eat and sleep. No human has ever grown younger before. Tomorrow, the plan would be to work out with the gravity armor while the healing enchantments would keep me in tip-top shape and bring my body to the absolute best it could possibly get to, and then slowly bring my age back up to twenty-five while continuing the hellish workouts. This would simulate years of working out and taking care of myself and put me at a magically-induced base level of an Olympic athlete. [Breathe in, breathe out]. I stood in front of the mirror and took my clothes off, kicking them to the side. Weaving the enchantment of reverse-aging through my entire body took twenty minutes as I kept checking it. Setting the reverse aging process to be glacially slow, I set it in motion. The pull of energy required was instantly about seventy-five percent of my pocket generators total outflow. My muscles were slightly twitching as horrible smelling greyish black stuff began to ooze out of my pores, all of them, and my eyesight began to fade while my hair grew rapidly. The smell was so bad that I turned off the enchantment and stumbled to the bathroom. I conjured water from my hands to wash and peel the stuff off as it hardened within seconds. Every pore on my body had this crap in it, the smell was unbelievably wretched. I turned and puked in the tub, nothing on this green earth was this gross. A hacking sound from the dining room told me that Rath was hurling too.

“What in the wretched seven hells is that stench?” he gasped, hopping off the table and peeking in the bathroom, “Only cultivators do this kind of shit, and they have the decency to do it far away from anyone else!” He puked on the floor, adding to the putrescence of the experience. “Uhck, filthy, nasty, disgusting humans, purifying and expelling weird shit all the damn time.” He muttered as he went to the basement, slamming the door behind him with his tail. Checking with my flesh sorcery revealed that it was rotten, aged flesh and cells that my body expelled in the de-aging process. So fucking gross. I took five minutes to wash and peel everything off and conjured more water so that I was standing in two inches of filth in the tub, then banished it all. [So glad Sarah can’t smell this right now], I thought, [Her cleaning OCD would have her burning the house down to fix this]. Three hours of this is what it took to take off six years. I was back in my twenty-two year old body. [Good enough, twenty-two works, fuck nineteen. I can’t take much more of this shit]. Exhausted after another hour of cleaning up after that horrifying process, I skipped dinner and hit the hay.