I hid myself from the others and asked the librarian for a book on Transmutation. The librarian happily obliged and then gave me the book. It seemed to be fairly old, but it was good enough to use. It didn’t seem like it’d deteriorate at any moment. I turned the book’s hard cover and moved to the part about [Transmutation]. It read:

[Skill: Transmutation]

Collection by: Mark

It seemed that the author of this book was Mark. Although oddly enough when I looked at the other books, it mainly seemed to be by Mark. I wondered who this person could be, but I decided to put the thought away and continued to read.

Transmutation is a skill that works on the principle of modifying the form of an object. It only has a radius of 1M. The skill can be activated by moving the mana from your heart to your hand, i.e the activation medium. The skill’s problems arise with accuracy. Having a 1M range, it’s too big for precision work, but also too small for massive amounts of work. In short, it’s pretty pointless. The skill’s activation time....

It seems that this book is pointless. As I read more and more, it seemed like he was just pointlessly rambling on and on about the problems of the skill. I thought this would be the case since we were already separated. At least on earth, most professionally published books had a check done on them, so you had some level of confidence, and you could always check the information yourself. But with books here, even if there was a wide variety, you can’t really make sure that there isn’t author bias within them.

It’s certainly frustrating to see this but we don’t really have much of a choice here. When I continued to read the other books, the content was similar, the way you activate the skill was just by ‘getting the mana from your heart to [blank]’.

So deciding that reading any more of Mark’s books isn’t going to help. I asked the librarian, “Could you please guide me to where I can practice?”

The librarian nodded their head and I followed behind, we passed by Dai, Amy, and Isabella. But I kept my head down and kept walking. I knew that I didn’t even have the right to look at them. Not after that. We went to an open ground with a few targets hung up on the wall. There was a table with a few weapons on it and the practice dummies were placed at one corner. The librarian left, and I placed my hand on the table. I closed my eyes and focussed on my breathing. What was mana? What was this feeling? Why was it that this energy could manipulate the world? I felt a slight coldness, almost penetrating my heart and flowing through my arm, and then through my hand. When I felt it on my hand, I placed it on the table and whispered, “[Transmutation].”

And immediately the table bulged and grew, unable to take the modification I wanted, it started to shake violently, but I slowed down my change, and just shortened the length of the table while widening out the breadth. I slowly moved around. Trying to figure out how I knew this, though I decided not to dwell on it.

I imagined the legs of the table getting shorter, and it did exactly as I thought. But something was odd. The range. Didn’t it say it was only 1M? Why was it working like this? I didn’t know but the best thing to do was to keep on exploring why.

“Elise, you dare talk to that boy?” A man whispered. He had long black hair that flowed down to his waist, and his body was honed to its limits. His face looked gentle yet you could see the terrifying nature beneath his eyes. He wore a simple cloth on his bottom and he wore bracelets that seemed to be made with space itself.

The woman he talked to was slender, she had a feminine charm and her waist showed through her clothes that covered her top and bottom. She had a pale and gentle face and she held a deep sadness within her eyes. A crystal-like headdress softly rested on her forehead and its colors reflected her eyes. A pure glitter silver. She was Elise, the Goddess of Time.

“Did I not do what you asked for? Why are you interfering now!”

“Elise, you know as well as me that the moment that Leo comes into the picture, you are an enemy. I won’t even consider the fact that you’re my sister.”

“I-!” She simply paused. She knew well enough that after Leo she doesn’t have any one who can really protect her. Because... Leo, The God of War was no more. The God of Calamity won the great war, and that God of Calamity was Elise’s brother, Johan.

“Goodbye sister. I hope you don’t forget.” Johan disappeared and that’s when Elise collapsed on the floor and whispered to herself, “Dai... I hope you succeed. No... You have to.”