The Roamer

Chapter 16: Training begins

“Old monster, any chance you can tell me why you wanted to pick me?” Aeolus asked curiously, as he truly didn’t understand why an old man like him wanted to take him in.

“Quite easy, I want to refine you from a coal into a diamond!” the monster said, while shining a smile at Aeolus. At first, Aeolus thought that the monster was a senile old monster, but he was now scared that this monster might be gay.

“Sorry, I don’t swing that way sir!” yelled Aeolus in an apologetic tone, which confused the old monster. After thinking for a little bit, the old monster realized what Aeolus was referencing to, and began to laugh.

“Youngin, you got quite the head on you to think I meant that!” the monster said while tearing up from laughter. After about half a minute, the laughing piped down, and the old man kept walking. At some point, they left the village, and after another half hour, they reached an old shack.

“Old geezer, is this where you have been staying?” asked Aeolus, while looking it up and down. It resembled a home back in the village he came from, so he felt warm feelings radiating from this house.

“That's right, and no complaints either. I took you in to train you as much as I can until two years have fully passed!” the old geezer answered him while also telling him the goal of him taking him in, which shocked Aeolus greatly.

‘For what reason does this old geezer want to train me?’ Aeolus thought to himself, and put up his guard. He was scared that he would just begin to suck up his soul, and he didn’t want all his progress to go away, so he was ready to jump out of a window or break down a wall.

“Calm down, I don’t want your soul. It’s like I’ve said before, I’ve seen all your abilities and think you have a chance to shine even better than now.” the old man replied to the aura of Aeolus, which was filled with caution and wariness.

“For now, let’s start with this. Right now, you have a limiter on how far you can go in life when it comes to cultivation, and you can only go to the third layer. Though that may seem weak, for some reason, you only have a single layer right now, but it’s power is greater than three layers combined. Just what have you been doing?” the old man asked, while also showing that he understood the situation Aeolus was in.

‘I should lower my guard for now. Besides, even if he does want to take my soul, with the difference in power we have, he can easily catch me no matter what I do.’ Aeolus calmed himself, and began to talk about all the experiences he had went through.

--- Sequence 2 ---

After an hour or two of describing all his experiences since he came to the slave prison, he had finally finished. The old geezer had nodded most of the time, and rarely spoke up to question all of it.

“Alright, it’s about time that your training begins now that I know your situation. Since you can’t break past the third layer with your spirit, we’re gonna have to make you strong using a different technique. You’re going to, altogether, just stop cultivating.” the old man said, as if it was the most normal thing within the world.

On the other hand, Aeolus was seriously considering running or suicide, as he truly wished to just cut off the head of this geezer! Just who did he think he is, going on about stopping my cultivation?

“Don’t go killing yourself now, that’d be a waste. You’re just not going to go down the path of cultivation, but something different. If you continue cultivating now, then you won’t become so powerful in the future. What we’re going to do is focus on you, physically and mentally!” the old man yelled, while also spitting onto Aeolus’ face.

The old man led Aeolus out of the shack, and they walked for a couple of hours before they reached some desert area, though it was also black and white.

“Sadly, you won’t be able to fit in with the rest of your humans, not even the ones who came before you, down into hell. You’re going to have to stumble down another path since your cultivation has been cut off. In this area, there are creatures that are absolutely terrible, and even I won’t survive against most of them. Now, get in there!” roared the old man, while kicking Aeolus’ ass and sending him flying a mile or two.

“This old geezer, he truly doesn’t know the limits I’ll go to just to kill him” roared Aeolus in an angry tone so loud that even the geezer who was so far away heard him.

“Well, I better book it!” said the old man while laughing, and then made a mad dash back into the shed. Though, right before he left, he sent a message to Aeolus telepathically, saying only one thing:

AFFINITY INTO SOUL.

Aeolus was confused at what such a message meant, but stopped questioning it. He stood up, and thought of escaping here first. However, no matter where he looked, he saw monstrous creatures even worse than the ones at town, and he would even see titans who were taller than the clouds every now and then.

‘This old man truly needs a whipping to his ass, that damned monster!’ Aeolus willed himself in his mind to beat the old man until he actually died, and went to a place worse then even hell. While thinking of all this, he seemed to have attracted some attention from the creatures within the desert area.

“I’ve been damned by the gods, and even the creatures down here are kicking my ass into such a location! If I don’t get out of here and kill them, then who will?!” Aeolus roared towards the rocky ceiling, while rushing out of the area. He tried to fly into the air, but he was still too weak to do such a thing.

“Right, didn’t that damned geezer say something about putting affinity and soul into one?” Aeolus questioned himself, trying to think of how to do such a thing. After a while, he still had no idea on what to do, so he just winged it.

At first, winging it hurt quite a bit, and that didn’t really help when he was trying to outrun some creatures, but after a while of just doing random stuff, he came up with the idea of sending his affinity into a layer, specifically. He had tried sending his affinity into all of the layers within his soul at once, and it didn’t look like a good idea when he was throwing up blood afterwards.

However, as soon as he did this, he automatically gained insight into something. Once he fused an affinity with a layer, he wouldn’t be able to switch it out. Basically, whatever affinity he used would be stuck with him, forever. After realizing this, he immediately ran as fast as he could to escape from the monsters and think deeply, as he couldn’t just make up his mind about such an important thing while running.

After a day of running, he finally found some weird trench thing and jumped right into it. He then began to dig a hole deep inside, and covered himself underground in dirt, as if he was trying to become a fossil. He then closed his eyes, and focused completely on his spirit.

He began to see the layers, and all of the spirit flowing through his body thanks to the soul infusion technique. He wandered into the center of his soul, and contemplated what to put in there for a while.

‘To be honest, my affinity with wind is the best, and will probably continue to be my best for a while, so I’ll infuse my wind affinity into the center.’ Aeolus thought to himself, and thought that this conclusion was the best. He then began the process of inserting his affinity, which he could feel lingering within his body, into the center layer.

After about ten minutes of pure torture and suffering, he had fully infused the wind affinity into the center. The size of the center seemed to have grown extremely small, and he didn’t understand it until he inspected it a little.

‘I see, once you link an affinity to a part of your soul, the amount of spirit within the layer of the soul it’s linked to is up to you. I can put as much spirit as I want into it, and as little as I want while I’m at it too.’ Aeolus realized within his mind, and smirked at himself for actually understanding something like this.

Right now, even though he was only a first layer cultivator, he had the amount of spirit a third layer at the very top would have, so his current situation was pretty decent when it came to spirit.

He put all of his spirit into wind right now, because he wasn’t going to be linking another affinity for a while. He felt like he should give it some time to find out more affinity and then proceed to link them, considering that his selection of affinity to pick from was pretty limited at this point in his journey.

He saw the center layer of his soul, and it was much bigger than before, maybe tenfold the size? Now that he could distribute spirit between the layers, he could make any of them different sizes, though the center was still the strongest.

He began to shoot himself out of the little hole in the trench, and succeeded terrifically. He soared into the sky, not being held back like before now that his affinity with the wind was pretty amazing. He then began to just fly around the desert like area, just to examine the area itself, while also seeing how long he could fly.

After an hour, he was still flying, and felt like he had barely scratched the tip of the iceberg when it came to how long he could fly.

“Now that wind has became my main affinity in cultivation, my level of doing things related to the affinity are much higher than before!” Aeolus hollered into nothingness, but still beaming with excitement. After all, he was still just a brat, so he couldn’t hold in the excitement.

He then descended onto the highest point he could find while scouting the area, and began to walk down from the little hill. He saw a group of monsters, and immediately rushed towards them. However, while rushing, he had felt that he could do more with his affinity with the wind.

In fact, he felt like he could fuse the wind into the layer of spirit covering his whole body, including the spirit within. He backed off before the creatures could detect him, and flew into the sky. He then began to tinker with his wind affinity, and found that he could lead his wind affinity into the spirit outside of the layers as well.

He began to send the wind affinity into his inner body spirit first, and could feel it slowly strengthening, but the speed increasing dramatically with each little drop of spirit. After a minute or two, he had fully infused wind into the spirit flowing throughout his body.

Though he did gain a major boost in strength of the spirit, the biggest boost was speed. The spirit flowing throughout his body was going so fast, that even if you infused spirit into your eyes, you would still struggle to see it unless you infused wind affinity into your eyesight.

He then began on the outside, and felt the same effects again. Strength was rising slowly, while speed was rising at a tremendous pace when he walked. For every step he took, he went farther and farther, until he could literally walk a mile in a single step. He looked at the spirit around his body, and saw wind circling around it, forming a mini hurricane sort of domain around him.

He ran into the creatures just to test out the power, and was immediately dumbfounded. Running was simply too much, as he had lost full sight of them. If he had to guess, he had probably just went tens, or maybe even hundreds of miles away. For god's sake, he wasn’t even in the dessert area anymore!

“Alright, I’ll have to learn about controlling that.” Aeolus said, while taking steps and running in circles. After about half an hour of it, he thought he had gotten used to it. He immediately went in search of monsters that he could fight, and found some in a few seconds a couple of miles off.

He rushed into them, this time controlling his speed so that he didn’t just fly past them. It was a success, as he had appeared behind them before they even noticed. He punched towards a blob monster, and before he could notice it, the blob was completely gone. At first, he thought that it had used some sort of technique, but after seeing a spirit lying on the ground, he realized what had really happened.

“I… completely obliterated it with a single punch.” Aeolus said to himself, while sighing at the same time. This wasn’t even considered training anymore, this was just straight bullying. He proceeded onto killing the rest of the monsters, which wasn’t much of an issue when they couldn’t even keep up with him.

He then absorbed all of their souls, and began to wander in the direction that he believed was the shacks. All the while, he was absorbing the spirit of the souls he had just absorbed, because he had never seen a monsters soul before.

He found many techniques and attacks, but what intrigued him more was the affinity behind them. Some of them were called monster, while other affinities could also be found, such as sludge, vampirism, and more. Of course, he still wouldn’t pick any of those affinities, as he still wanted a wider variety.

Just like that, his first true experience with affinities had been set in stone, and Aeolus had taken a mighty step on his journey.

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EXPLANATION

*1: Literally just made that name up on the spot, but watch me get some sort of copyright even for doing that XD.

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ABOUT ME

Name: Abdul Kareem

Age: 13 (Almost 14)

Occupation: Middle school

Goal: Idk, I’m just making a novel for now

Location: Why would I say that?

Relations: I’m not married (duh)

Favorite food: da asian stuf!

Anyway, on a more serious tone, this is my first novel I’ve ever tried writing. Thanks for being with me on this first experience! If you could also somehow get others to read this novel too, I would be pretty grateful!