Unlimited Power - The Arcane Path

In the end, things only changed when the last piece of the dimension fell from its position. Before he could notice, Leon was back on Sekundez's temple. His spirits were still there and Sekundez as well. Suddenly, he fell on her knees as if she was suffering or extremely tired.

"Oh, you guys are still here..." Leon said.

"What are you talking about?" Celsius asked.

"Did you do something? Why is nothing happening?" Undine asked.

"I was hoping to see something flashy, but I guess time magic isn't something so special, after all," Efreet shrugged.

"...What did you do?" Sekundez asked. "My mana..."

"I destroyed that dimension," Leon replied. "I couldn't focus anymore on the training since I had too many questions in my head... but I guess, as usual, I was just overthinking things."

"So... the trial already begun and ended?" Sylph tilted his head.

"You don't look much different, Leon," Gnome said. "How many years did you experience there?"

"I see now... in order to change too much and lose your focus, you decided to delete some of your memories," Volt said. "That is a very surprising way of using Mind Melding..."

Leon already had imagined that, but Volt was probably the smartest one of the groups, maybe Undine was on his same level, but that was hard to confirm given her usual behavior. Regardless, while Sekundez was recovering from the exhaustion, Leon explained that four hundred years have passed in that dimension.

"I see... I was hoping that you grew up a little, but you look like the same fool," Celsius said.

"Ouch... such sharp words," Leon sighed and dropped his shoulders. "Well, let's finish this conversation later... what is going to happen now? I was hoping that you would recover pretty fast, but it looks like I was wrong."

"... Fragments of spirits can't exist by themselves; they need mana from external sources to exist," Sekundez explained. "You made me lost all the mana I obtained by destroying that dimension. I won't last long at this rate."

"Well, that is a problem... I want your power, but I didn't complete the trial," Leon rubbed his chin. "Wait a minute... how do you obtain mana here? You don't look like someone who has many visitors, and since you test them quite harshly, there is no way they would leave after failing and give you some magic weapons full of mana."

"Many tried to obtain my power, and failure isn't an option... you are the first one who didn't die," Sekundez explained. "As you can imagine, I only transported your mind to that dimension... that being said, if the mind of someone dies there, their bodies would die as well. But before that happens, I consume their mana for quite a while as a fee for the trial."

"... I see... so you use people like me as batteries when they fail," Leon narrowed his eyes in annoyance. "I must say, you are quite brave in saying that given that you are about to disappear and your sole existence depends on me now... Well, no matter. I still want your power, even though your methods are dubious, I can't condemn someone who wants to live."

Leon tried to transfuse his mana to Sekundez, but before he could do that, she disappeared, and Leon started to sweat cold. Although he obtained a great deal of power, he endured those four hundred years to obtain the power to control time.

Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Summon Sekundez's Fragment.

Cost: 300 mana per second.

You obtained 01 status points.

Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Time Manipulation.

You obtained 01 status points.

Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Accelerate.

Cost: 10000 mana per second.

You obtained 01 status points.

Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Stop.

Cost: 10000 mana per second.

You obtained 01 status points.

Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Death Sense.

You obtained 01 status points.

Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Temporal Awareness.

You obtained 01 status points.

Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Temporal Armor.

You obtained 01 status points.

"There is no need. You defeated me in a way that was supposed to be impossible," Sekundez said inside Leon's head. "It is clear that you have what is necessary to endure and succeed in completing the trial. You will have my cooperation."

Leon was quite surprised, but then he sighed in relief. It looked like he saved himself of a few thousand years of isolation, but he still was a bit worried about Sekundez. Leon still needed some explanations.

"Although I would like to hear directly from you how those new skills work, I think I want to hear first about the trial," Leon said.

"Of course. As you know, the goal of the trial was to test your patience... but the real goal was to make you understand the importance of the time," Sekundez explained. "My power can change the universe much more than any other spirit, after all."

"I already know that I want to know about why I was facing dragons after only four hundred years..." Leon said. "What would I face for the next centuries? Before answering me, I think I should use Mindscape Transportation and increase the passage of time there... I still need to learn several skills, after all."

"That is a good idea, but first you have to understand that I lost all my powers, so I won't be able to replicate the environment of the trial," Sekundez said. "You will have to level up the skills you obtained to do that."

"Is that so... let me check something for a second," Leon said that and then began to focus.

While he was destroying the imaginary dimensional, he discovered the perfect way to increase the scope of any skill... he just had to focus all his mana and then send it toward the direction he wanted. Although he was pretty sure he still wasn't at the level of Ilyana, with that kind of action, he would be able to become as powerful as her in a sense for at the least a moment.