Chapter 166: Getting Used To It

He was wrong. Again. Admittedly, that should no longer be a surprise to him or anyone anymore.

The pain was definitely not temporary. The pain was very much so constant and painful. Did he mention painful?

The first couple of days were the worst. He was coming to dread the mornings whenever he woke up. It also didn’t help that the actual sleep he was getting felt amazing and refreshing.

It was kind of like taking a shower after an exhausting day, only to quickly find yourself getting a face full of mud right after you get out of the shower.

It wasn’t only the pain that was the difficult part of his new situation. The most emotionally challenging thing he had to do was to explain his new circumstances to the people he knew. While Lily already knew, he still had to tell the others the bad news.

He didn’t share with them everything, like he had with Lily but he told them enough that they understood the general gist of his problem. He gave an abridged version about how his soul had been damaged and he would have to go through some treatment for it.

Derek, Edgar, and Kyle were all very sympathetic to his issue. They made sure Julius felt supported by them, Derek even offered to ask his grandfather for help. Julius declined, of course, they didn’t know that he already had the help of two Tier 6s.

Aubrey on the other hand, was not as gracious as they were. She made sure she took the opportunity to say “I told you so” multiple times to him whenever she could. But that was expected.

Declan was a bit more problematic to explain his situation to. Julius had gone over to the guardhouse after he left Dante’s and told him the same version he ended up telling his friends. The issue is that Declan was more angry at himself than he was at Julius.

Rae and Orus were there, so it was nice to catch up with him. They also helped keep Declan from overreacting. The vice-captain kept beating himself up about not keeping a better eye on Julius. No matter what Julius said to try and appease the man, Declan wasn’t listening.

He took the entire responsibility for Julius’s soul damage on himself. It showed that Declan really cared for Julius and made Julius appreciate the man even more than he already did. The problem though, was that the man was back to babysitter duty, but dialed to eleven.

The first thing Declan did was take back the rift access card. While it didn’t really affect Julius that much considering that he wasn’t even going to use it for the foreseeable future, it still hurt for his privileges to be taken away like a parent taking away a gameboy from the child who wasn’t doing well in school.

***

He had just woken up, blinking out the sleep from his eyes. He peeled Drasil off of his face, the arm of the spirit had somehow gotten lodged in Julius’s mouth in the middle of the night, and then got out of bed. It was early so Henry was still fast asleep in the bed on the other side of the room.

Julius checked the time and it was only around six in the morning. Which meant that he had gotten almost exactly eight hours of sleep. He had found out pretty quickly that the combination of excruciating pain throughout the entire day and the soul potion Alice gave him worked pretty well to knock him out for some proper sleep.

He took a calming breath to prepare himself and activated the torture device on his wrists with a soft grunt. The pain was still just as bad, but thankfully, constantly using it got him acclimated to the pain quickly.

The familiar pressure and crushing force on his soul was becoming part of his routine. It was funny how fast he was adapting to the new pace. If he wasn’t in so much pain, he would have laughed at the irony.

Once he changed into his uniform he made his bed and left for the library for his daily morning meet-up with Grace. He hadn’t told her about his condition like he had with the others. He told her that he wasn’t doing very well when she noticed his pained expression the first morning back, but that was all. It wasn’t like he had known her for all that long.

He did enjoy her company though, so if it ever came down to it, he wouldn’t mind sharing with her about some of it. He just didn’t see the need to unload his issues on her yet. He mainly did it for others because it would affect their schedules and what they would do with Julius as a result. Whereas with Grace, the main thing they did was eat and read together, and his condition wouldn’t affect their routine that much.

He made sure to warm himself up with some fire mana as he entered the library. The mornings had been a little more chilly than normal as it got closer to winter.

That was another thing he noticed about the suppression device that Dante made for him. Since it restricted his soul, it also meant that using his skills or mana had become much more challenging. That of course meant that even heating himself up took more effort than it should have. Not only that but the amount of mana he had available to him was significantly lower.

It wasn’t like his mana capacity was permanently lowered, but being able to access it was close to impossible. He could only use a fraction of what he was normally capable of. For a person like him, who was so used to having such a vast amount of mana, having this handicap affected him more than he would have originally thought.

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But on the bright side, it would probably help him appreciate his larger pool once he was done.

***

After he met up with Grace he had to go to the rest of his classes. Grace had constantly given him worrying looks the entire time, but she didn’t pry. It was nice, the two of them pretended like nothing was wrong and continued hanging out like normal.

It was the rest of the day that was difficult. In particular, it was Applied Combat that was the most affected class from his new condition.