Hey guys! This is the beginning of the Tournament Arc. I plan two chapters to cover the 10 year time skip that happened. This is the first half of the time skip the next chapter will be the latter half. I hope you guys enjoy this chapter! Please rate and review if you can.

Also, there is now a donation button. I will be using the donations to get drawings or illustrations or anything else that may be needed for the story. It is a donation button, you do not need to donate if you do not want to. All I just ask truly is that you like my story.

Now... to the story!

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Ten years passed since I got back from Hell. Many different things happened as well as many surprises around every corner.

As soon as I got back from Hell, I felt my summons disappearing from me. I didn’t know what was going on until I heard that ever so crazy voice that I had hoped not to hear again say, “Oh by the way, I’m taking the summons you got for now. I’m sealing them up until you find something that corresponds to them out in that world. Have fun!”

My clothing disappeared as they were all my summons true forms but a ring still remained. It was Galahad.

The voice said, “I’m leaving him to you, just because I’m so nice.”

Suddenly, I felt myself covered with clothes and Malakir said, “Master, you must cover up, it is too cold.”

It was simple brown clothing that Malakir made out of mana for me to wear.

“Malakir, meet Galahad. Galahad meet Malakir,” I said as I introduced them to each other.

“It is nice to meet you Galahad,” said Malakir, “I trust you took care of master?”

“Yes, we did,” said Galahad as he appeared in a spirit like form.

I was surprised at this and Malakir said, “This is merely a way for them to appear in the world without affecting it. See, he is still bound to the ring.”

I looked at the ring and sure enough, Galahad’s legs were stretched to the ring.

That was the beginning of Galahad’s stay with us.

When I got back to the mansion, I explained to everyone what happened. Arthur, Sasha, Kaiser, and Alex were shocked, scared, angry, and all sorts of emotions as I was telling of my journey to Hell.

In the end, since they couldn’t do anything about it, they just let it go but not after Arthur told me very sternly that I could not leave the sight of any one of them. If he found out that I was out of sight, he threatened to punish me with grueling exercises that included running or swimming with weights.

He also forbade me to do any competitions because of my overwhelming power. Of course no one knew yet that I could use Ethereal magic and they all thought that it was Malakir who did all of it.

After telling me off, he left to do something leaving me with Sasha, Alex, and Kaiser in the living room. There I told them the whole truth. I explained about my Ethereal magic which shocked them. I also explained about my summons and the reason why I did it.

Sasha was crying as I told the story, Kaiser looked distraught and Alex had a mixed expression. At the end of it, Sasha grabbed me and bawled while leaning on me. Kaiser apologized about what had happened and I said that I wanted to do it and that we were family. At that point Kaiser started to cry but he was holding back. I couldn’t tell what Alex was doing but I imagine he was smiling.

All in all, they too decided to not do the competition until I could. So instead we trained our magic as well as our bodies in preparation for the time we could do it.

I myself did not do that all the time. Since I had a lot of free time and my magic did not need training too much, I decided to try and set things in motion for the safety of Sasha and Kaiser.

When I was eight, I had an audience with my father. I showed him the Battle seeds and their capability. I had to use one of the prisoners that we had, he was a pirate from the Lunaria Federation. They plagued the western border of the Lunaria Federation and the Rigel Kingdom. Mostly, they attack the Rigel Kingdom for reasons they say that we have better places to plunder but some officials actually say that they were a part of the military and attacked specific areas that were capable of weakening the Rigel Kingdom. It was a debate that lasted long if talked about and some people do not wish for war so it becomes a heavy topic.

That being said, my father’s guards stabbed the prisoner with their lances. The prisoner was a man with wild red hair possibly in his 30s, his skin was tan from the sun, eyes were black. He was frail and weak so the lances did a lot more damage than what I had anticipated. He started spurting blood in front of me in the throne room.

Quickly, I made him eat a Battle seed and his wound started healing. His malnourished body became lively and healthy again. I sighed in relief that it worked for others as I had not tested it before and I didn’t realize that he would make me test it on a live human.

Suddenly, I felt my body be strangled in some sort of lock. The prisoner was trying to choke me! My father yelled something that I couldn’t hear and the guards around us started trying to stab the prisoner. The prisoner used me as a shield but before he could really put me in front of him, he suddenly let me go.

I fell to the ground in all fours and gasped for breath. I looked behind me as I was helped up by one of my father’s guards and I recognized Galahad’s swords killing the prisoner.

My father and everyone was shocked and so I had Galahad reveal himself and greet my father. He was surprised and merely said, “Hahaha I was right to make you go to that school!”

Oh if he only knew…

After the prisoner’s corpse was cleared and the blood stain was cleaned, I proposed to my father an establishment of the Institute of Magic Technology. I explained that the Magic Guild and the Coalition of Science should be able to work together.

The two groups had completely opposite thoughts. The Magic Guild believed that magic was the key to understanding the world and the only way to advance our power. Most of the commoners hate magic but they cannot deny the advantages they give.

The Coalition of Science was the opposite of the Magic Guild. They believed that there were other ways of understanding the world and advance our power. They proved that an explosion from a Fireball spell could be made from simply burning up some black powder. Most of the commoners support them but these same commoners merely back the Coalition simply because they are not magic aligned. The Coalition was slow in its advancements but they proved time and time again that magic was not the only way to advance.

The two groups always fought for the right to gain funding from the king so that they can continue their research. I had proposed this plan to, in the end, merge the two so that only one group would receive the funding as well as to produce more things similar to the battle seed.

The seed had problems currently. One, if it was planted, it would grow into a forest and never end until the seed was uprooted. A mistake that happened when I wondered what would happen if I planted it. Two, I was very worried about its healing capabilities. It healed all wounds instantly and I was worried that the stress would be too much for a body that wasn’t trained to handle it and would merely collapse it and kill the person rather than save him.

Another reason was my interest in the black powder. I wanted to get my hands on some of it and experiment with them. The only way I could though was to get the Institute running because the powder was regulated heavily by the Coalition. Sure my father can get it for me but I’d rather not have too much debt towards him.

My father agreed to the Institute and asked my brother Leon, to help me set it up. He did give me a condition though, the Battle seeds could only be used by the military and he commanded me to give them any that we made. I retorted saying that I was to be paid for the Battle seeds that we make, it would take time to develop a seed that had the same power as what they saw all the time.

My father laughed and commented to how shrewd I was getting but settled for our agreement. He would pay a reasonable fee for the battle seeds and since we had to make sure that we could make them with the same strength, he gave me five years to make all the seeds we make be the same.

One year after that, the Institute was formally founded. It was located on the Aurelian Plains. Galahad seemed to have some sort of connection to this place as he seemed out of place whenever we went there.

With my brother’s help, it was funded by many different nobles in the Rigel Kingdom and so we were able to make a fort-like structure that suited our needs. It had four towers that surrounded the central structure with walls of stone connecting them. The structure in the middle had large sloping roofs and its height reached about six stories. The towers were taller standing at about ten stories.

The structure’s first floor was a lobby with stairs leading up and down in the left and right respectively. Behind the counter that was the first thing you would see when you entered was a cafeteria similar to the one at Asmodeus Academy. Floors two to six were either offices or bedrooms. They worked to make sure that the Institute was capable of functioning in terms of finance.

Since I was considered the leader, I was given the position of Archmage and given the highest floor as my room and office. I refused the position saying that my age was too young but the people who agreed to join the Institute pressured me into choosing it, even Malakir did.

The lower floors were the testing areas. There was a total of five floors down. Each successive floor had a stricter set of rules and regulations of entering.

Concerning our organizational structure:

Archmage

Master

Researcher

Apprentice

Guardian

The Archmage, me, was in charge of the whole Institute and had to make sure that it worked smoothly without any mistakes.

The Masters were different sections that needed a sort of leader to handle them. These included the Master of Finance, Master of Research, Master of Floor 1, Master of Floor 2, Master of Floor 3, Master of Floor 4, Master of Floor 5.

The Researchers were self-explanatory. They would sometimes collaborate with each other or work alone depending on the project they were working on. We had several different projects at a time so most of our people were actually researchers.

The Apprentices again were self-explanatory. They are assistants to the Researchers but we never have a lot of them as these people are merely either there to observe and decide whether they want to work with us or us observing them to determine if we would want them to work with us.

The Guardians protect all of us from threats like spies from other countries as well as bandits who want to capture us. They are comprised of mages and warriors. Sometimes they also do the work of a Researcher or Apprentice.

Now to the floors themselves.

Each floor had a specific subject to research. Floors 1 and 2 dealt with small scale or research that we expected to not impact too much. Floor 3 and 4 dealt with issues that my father wanted us to do. Floor 5 was my personal floor and it dealt with things that I wanted.

Currently at Floor 3 was the Battle seed research that my father wanted.

At first when we started, we had a hard time trying to gather the mana to create the seed. It took weeks of instruction telling the Researchers what mana to place in which part. Then it took weeks making sure that they all placed the right amount. All in all it was stressful to do it.

By the time one more year passed, we finally got to be able to produce 1 Battle seed with the same strength as what I can make. It took five Researchers to do but it was a start.

Now, we were trying to stop it from turning into a forest. Some of them reasoned that it was the Nature mana that needed to be more controlled by Arcane mana. We tried that and sure enough it did stop creating forests but it still turned into a tree.

Seeing that since it was a seed, we let it grow and tried the fruit that it made. The fruit didn’t have the same strength as seed but it did the trick. We presented the fruit to my father and he was much more pleased with the fruit than the seed.

Then we tested the effects of the fruit and seed to the pirate prisoners. They were subdued this time and were paralyzed to stop them from doing too much damage when they are healed.

We kept them in a room on Floor 3 for the rest of the year.

It was not until the beginning of the next year that some things didn’t work out so well.

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