Eric had a newfound respect for the Mistress.
Not only had she allowed him to cultivate in her presence, but she had even gone out of her way to give him motherly wisdom.
After making sure Eric understood why he wanted to become strong, she asked him another question.
“What is the essence of combat?” Eric wanted to say things like, To protect what you care about or To keep yourself alive.
But he had already realized that the Mistress didn’t simply ask questions and expect obvious answers.
He had to dig deeper.
He thought about the few encounters he had witnessed involving awakened warriors.
They had been protecting the carriage and fighting for their lives, but what was the end result?
The beasts died.
So, in the end, it was either the beasts died or they did.
Eric smiled, finally confident in his answer.
“Death.” She dismissed the chair and stood up, and Eric followed suit.
She then handed the sword to him.
He bowed his head and stretched out both hands to receive it.
The moment the weight of the sword pressed down on his hands, his arms gave way, and it slipped.
He quickly caught it by the hilt.
He hadn’t expected a sword to feel heavy after awakening, but this one was abnormally heavy.
The Mistress smiled and continued her lesson.
“The sword shouldn’t be just a tool for combat in your hands.
It should become an extension of your body.
Every swing and every slash should be like a well-practiced dance, not a desperate attempt to survive.” Eric groaned as he raised the sword to his shoulder.
“How on earth can I fight with such a heavy sword?” Eric complained.
“If you can swing that sword a thousand times in a single session, I will ask Night Hunter to train you.” Eric froze.
“A thousand?” The Mistress simply smiled.
Eric looked down at the sword in his hands.
It didn’t look particularly large, yet its weight was absurd.
He could barely keep it raised for a few seconds.
He took a deep breath and swung.
The sword came down heavily, nearly pulling him off balance.
One.
He raised it again.
Two.
By the fifth swing, his arms were already trembling.
Eric stared at the sword in disbelief.
A thousand of these?
For the first time, he began to understand exactly what the Mistress had meant.
This wasn’t going to be training.
It was going to be torture.
With that, the Mistress transformed into her true form and dove back into the water.
Eric stood there in stunned silence, staring at the sword.
His arms were already aching, and he could only imagine the pain his entire body was going to endure in the coming days.
Eric swung the sword in a downward motion.
Then he swung it a few more times before becoming exhausted and sitting back down.
He looked toward the lake, wondering if the Mistress would come out and scold him.
He couldn’t run away either, since he would become beast food long before reaching the edge of the inner layer.
But at least he was nutritious now, so no beast was going to complain about his food value.
Eric sat down and rested for a while.
Before long, boredom set in, and he decided to meditate.
He closed his eyes and activated his Soul Sense, but limited it to the area immediately around his body.
Though all he could sense was his own soul, it was quite peculiar to understand himself on such a deeper level.
Then he willed the mana around him to change form.
This time, he didn’t turn it into liquid.
Instead, a green gas formed into thread-like strands and connected to his soul.
The gaseous state of the Breath of Life was less potent than its liquid state, but he was only experimenting to cure his boredom.
Nothing too grand.
The strand elongated forward, absorbing mana along the way.
It moved in a somewhat zigzag manner since he wasn’t putting much effort into controlling it.
The thread was a piece of Eric’s soul, so his consciousness expanded through it, though only to a tiny extent.
His thread of consciousness moved slowly forward until it was obstructed by a tiny flower growing from the place where he had awakened.
The thread lashed itself onto the tiny, fragile soul.
Then he felt it.
The flower’s individuality began feeding information into Eric’s consciousness.
It was a tiny, feeble plant that dreamed of becoming a mighty tree.
One day, it would spread its branches across vast landscapes and bear sweet, fragrant fruit.
Until a few hours ago, it had been nothing more than a seed, waiting for its chance to sprout.
But then, a surge of vitality had filled it.
A beautiful and potent soul had swept through its resting place, giving it the strength to emerge from the earth.
Eric quickly severed his connection with the plant.
“I almost lost myself there.
I almost thought I was a plant.” Eric shivered, imagining what might have happened if he had connected to a more powerful plant.
He then created a new thread of consciousness and began searching for insect life to broaden his understanding.
He could simply spread his soul sense to its maximum range, but he decided against it.
The Overlords nearby might not be as merciful this time.
Wait…
Overlord?
How did I know what an Overlord was?
Eric thought, startled.
He had just gained knowledge he had never been taught.
Was it the flower’s knowledge?
Or the beasts’ knowledge?
A possibility suddenly occurred to him.
Perhaps he had subconsciously absorbed fragments of knowledge from the living beings around him.
After a brief search, the thread of consciousness latched onto a spider.
Eric refrained from probing too deeply into its soul.
Even so, the experiment wasn’t fruitless.
The spider’s soul was mundane, yet it still possessed traces of supernatural properties.
It seemed that the creature had evolved under the influence of the world’s dense mana.