Transmigration: I Made A Deal With A Man in Yellow

Chapter 11: Understanding

The days were passing in a blink, and during those two weeks I did nothing but train nonstop and familiarize myself with my new body.

It was strange. I had expected to wake up back in my real world at some point, but somehow I never did. I kept waking up in the same dream, and so I kept training.

I was not really a training obsessive, but I had to push this hard if I wanted to match the other kids.

Each day I followed the same routine:

Wake up early in the morning and run more than ten kilometres, sometimes alone, sometimes alongside the knights while Ezio slept lazily inside my shadow.

The guy simply refused to show himself and only came out when we were alone.

After the runs, I would have intense training with Ezio, starting with hand-to-hand combat. It was something I genuinely needed because I knew I would eventually find myself in a situation with no weapon available and no mana left to create one with darkness.

During the sessions I made sure to integrate moves from the martial arts I practiced in the real world, like jiu-jitsu, to make my attacks harder to read.

But when it came to being unpredictable, Ezio always took the top spot. Every time we fought, he pulled a completely different attack, so memorizing his patterns was pointless.

And every time I punched that bastard, it felt like hitting a stone boulder, leaving my arms swollen and red. Sometimes I broke my fingers and knuckles, but despite the pain I kept going.

I needed to get used to the pain.

On top of that, Ezio was no longer just blocking but attacking as well, by my own order, because I couldn’t train against an opponent who only defended. It needed to feel like a real fight.

And I won’t lie — I kind of regretted giving that order, because he was constantly beating my ass.

Whenever I missed a low hook, I was punished with an uppercut that broke my jaw.

Each time I did something wrong he would either kick me in the face or punch me. It was so consistent that he was clearly targeting my face on purpose — probably seeking revenge for calling him ugly. The fucker was trying to ruin my face.

Each time something in my body broke, he would feed me a healing potion and then beat my ass again.

Guys, getting punched in the face is not nice at all. And whenever I complained, he would just tell me to improve my hand-to-hand.

Seriously, that corpse bastard was a piece of work.

Despite all the complaints, I was improving at a fast and frankly abnormal rate. Not wanting to keep getting punched in the face was a great motivator, so I did everything I could to block and fight back.

My movements became more refined and accurate, and I could predict some of his attacks to a degree.

Unfortunately, despite the improvement, I was still not able to land a hit on that corpse-faced bastard. A guardian was still a guardian.

After Ezio was done breaking my bones with his fists, we moved to katana training.

And this was my favourite part.

Ezio was no longer only dodging — now he clashed blades with me as well. Every time we moved and our blades met, sparks flew.

The guards outside could only hear the ringing of steel and the sound of my breathing.

My sword attacks had improved greatly. The blade no longer felt foreign in my hand but like a part of me. Each slash and stab was made with calculated precision. It was not as clean as Ezio’s, but I was getting somewhere.

Just like in our hand-to-hand sessions, Ezio did not hesitate to cut me up. Instead of bruises, my body was now covered in dozens of cuts — the bastard did not even spare my face, though he did avoid my eyes. freeweɓnovel.cøm

I never thought I would one day find myself being cut by a blade, yet there I was, clenching my teeth as Ezio’s katana tore through flesh and stained the floor red.

The pain was sharp and merciless. It hurt so much that I sometimes wanted to scream and let all the frustration out, but I refused. I never let the screams come.

I had to endure.

This was necessary if I wanted to beat that monster. This approach would bridge the gap between me and the others by around 50%, but hell, it was going to be painful.

We kept training day and night, improving every single day.

And of course I did not slack on my magical abilities either.

During those two weeks I researched and experimented with everything I had.

I started with the abilities of my first Main Story, [He Who Yearned For Death].

Beginning with [Esoteric Darkness Manipulation], I first tested the limits of my imagination and control in forming things out of darkness.

I created all sorts of things — weapons, objects, and more. I discovered some limitations along the way. For example, I could only maintain up to five objects made of darkness at once, and keeping them from falling apart required constant concentration on each one, which was difficult since it was essentially like trying to multitask. The longer I kept them in existence, the more mana they consumed.

The objects were not a one-time creation either.

So I had to train my mind to maintain them while doing other things at the same time, like fighting, which I failed at miserably in the beginning.

I kept working on it by doing activities that demanded focus on multiple things at once. At the end of each session, my brain felt wrung out and my head was pounding, but there was progress.

Then one day I thought of a way to cheat through it.

The idea involved using [Clear Mind] while maintaining the objects. Since it was an ability that kept me calm at all times and directly affected the mind, there was a chance it could also help with this kind of multitasking.

So I tried it.

And just as I had hoped, it worked. The moment I activated [Clear Mind] I was able to hold my attention across all five objects without losing focus on any of them.

Since it only worked with [Clear Mind] active, I trained both with it on and off, trying to copy that same state of mind when the ability was off — conditioning my brain to adapt.

I also discovered other things about my darkness ability. I could sense things through darkness up to a certain distance, and my senses received a boost at night.

It was genuinely baffling.

For example, my room was on the second floor, and if another room was directly below or within roughly 20 meters, I could hear what someone was saying or sense what they were doing, provided there was darkness inside that room.

Crazy, right?

So I called it Darkness Sense.

It worked similarly to mana sense, the difference being that darkness had to be present at the target location for it to function.

The ability could theoretically let me track someone who had their mana signature suppressed. But I had one question: could the person on the other end tell they were being watched?

So I had Ezio go into another darkened room and asked him if he felt anything when I used the ability on him.

Apparently all he noticed was that the darkness seemed to deepen slightly. Meaning he could sense something unusual, but not that someone was specifically watching him.

I ran a few more tests and then turned to my second Main Story, which I had not been able to test much since it had no name or description yet, only one ability.

[Eyes of the King]: a passive ability that made me immune to illusions. I had no real way to test it since I had no means of putting an illusion on myself. fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm

But there was actually one way.

Getting drunk.

When people get drunk they tend to see things — vision blurring, body turning heavy. And most people cannot remember what they did while drunk, which I figured counted as a kind of illusion. So I tried it.

I can honestly say this was not an excuse for me to drink.

I never liked alcohol anyway.

So I drank wine, a full bottle, enough to get drunk. Funnily enough, I could not get drunk at all, which made Ezio skeptical and so he kept pushing more alcohol on me.

Still nothing, which proved my point that the ability treated alcohol as some form of illusory substance.

I just bet that any drunkard out there would kill to have that problem.

The days kept going, and finally two weeks had passed.

The day had arrived.

The day I would go monster hunting