Chapter 1268 – Season’s Passing

The Sword Saint sat with his legs crossed and his sword placed across his lap, not meditating, but with his eyes wide open as he watched from atop the small mountain. He saw the green treetops extending into the horizon; the river running down the sides of the mountain as ice melted, and much of this water entering a lake before evaporating, forming clouds that once more drifted toward the mountain, only to fall as snow and rain.

Animals filled the idyllic valleys below, not a single powerful creature anywhere in sight. The strongest one could find was a recently evolved E-grade, but they tended to stick by themselves, hiding away in caves or sleeping in clearings no other monster dared enter.

As time passed, the temperature began to drop, and the trees lost their green color, with leaves shedding from their grand crowns just a few months later. When winter came, the valley was covered in a layer of snow, making most of the monsters hide away as the temperature got low enough for ice and snow elementals to appear. These elementals fought amongst themselves and any other monsters they came across, but they also proved to be prey for some, especially the E-grades.

When winter started coming to an end, and the temperature rose, all these elementals sought out the mountains, where it was cold enough for them to survive and perhaps even grow in power, to one day reach E-grade themselves.

New leaves grew on the trees, the river started flowing once more, and with the arrival of spring, another cycle of seasons had begun once more. Miyamoto watched all this as he sat there atop the mountain, his passive aura enough to scare off any creatures on this planet, where not even a single D-grade could be found.

Time kept passing as the cycle continued until it was summer, then fall, winter, and spring yet again. With every passing year, another full cycle was completed, and with it, the world grew just a little bit.

Like this, years passed as the Sword Saint never moved, only took in the environment and watched this cycle repeat itself eternally.

In an entirely other space, two figures kept a good eye on the C-grade’s contemplation, one of them doing so while cleaning the internals of a small wristwatch. The other was what Jake would have recognized as a hobgoblin, who was just lazing around, though he did have a bunch of already assembled watches behind him.

“He’s just watching time pass, huh?” the hobgoblin, who also just happened to be a god, asked curiously.

Aeon didn’t even look up as he answered. “In part, yes.”

“But not really, right?” the hobgoblin smiled as he shifted slightly, making what looked like ethereal sand move around him. “His Transcendent is weird. Related to time and seasons, yet also intrinsically tied to himself.”

Aeon just nodded, using a miniature pincer to place the tiny cog into its slot.

“I can see why it’s hard to figure out how to train someone like that, but throwing him in on a time-dilated planet like that is one way, I guess,” the hobgoblin casually shrugged. “Do you believe it’ll work? We all know how notoriously hard it is to do, yet you expect a C-grade to succeed?”

“I do,” Aeon confirmed, putting the final touches on the watch. “He’s an old soul. He has the patience, will, and ability to do so.”

“If you say so,” the hobgoblin said, still a skeptic. For good reason, too.

He was trying to make the C-grade Sword Saint do something even gods had no confidence in accomplishing. No, something most gods couldn’t even try to accomplish, as they didn’t meet the basic requirements:

Being a Transcendent.

Despite Transcendences and Bloodlines often being compared as both were considered abilities “outside” the system, they were vastly different from one another. A Bloodline was an innate augmentation of the Truesoul and the person with it, and while becoming a Transcendent also led to a mutation of the soul representing this new status, it was far less pervasive.

What’s more, a Bloodline heavily affected the person with it at all times. Bloodlines shaped the personalities of the people around them, with no real way to separate the two. Meanwhile, a Transcendent was entirely the opposite: it was born from who the person was.

However, far more importantly was what it meant to become a Transcendent. To get such a status, one needed to have made a Transcendent Skill.

Key word: skill.

And skills could be upgraded.

That was exactly what Aeon Clok, the Primordial of Time, had tasked the Sword Saint with doing before evolving to B-grade. It truly was a ludicrous expectation of a mere human who’d recently been integrated into the system, yet the Primordial seemed assured he would succeed.

The hobgoblin god questioned his old master, but after looking at the human for the last few years, he began to understand where the belief came from. Few could do what the C-grade was doing, even among gods. At least not without having an Avatar or something else going on, because, man, the hobgoblin could only imagine the boredom felt by the old-looking human.

Usually, when one sat in a place for so long, it was during meditation. Meditating was a bit like being half-asleep when it was over long periods, and it was easy to disconnect oneself from reality and merely allow time to pass by without noticing.

That wasn’t what the human was doing. In fact, he was doing the exact opposite. His eyes were open, his mind clear, and he experienced every moment of every day without even blinking as he took in the changes of the world around him. It took respectable mental fortitude to do something like that for several years, and it required a mind built for it. Some people, no matter how much training, would never be able to do it, as something like that simply wouldn’t fit their Path.

The hobgoblin had only come by for a visit and spent some casual time there, but from the human’s point of view, it had far longer, and based on him having already sat there when the god arrived, he’d likely been going for years already. Being able to do something like that…

“I can see why you say he has an old soul,” the hobgoblin smiled. “Say, how long has he been sitting there? A decade?”

Aeon only briefly looked up as he was putting the glass screen back on the watch, after ensuring both dials were working perfectly.

Seeing the lack of recognition of his question, the hobgoblin raised an eyebrow. “Longer? Two decades? Three? Man, I would have been bored to death by now, and if you’d done that to me when I was your Chosen, I would have turned heretic real quick.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“No, you would have kept trying as long as you could before acting like you suffered a mental breakdown to escape, and I would have allowed you despite knowing you were faking it,” Aeon said, not even looking up this time.

“Okay, true,” the hobgoblin chuckled, feeling all melancholic after remembering the good old days. “But you didn’t answer. How long has he been sitting there?”

Aeon looked like he needed a moment to think before answering. “Six, closing in on seven.”

“Decades?” the hobgoblin said as he truly pitied while also respecting the human. Most would have gone insane or just gotten up to leave or at least stretch by now, so for him to just sit there and experience the change of seasons for so long was-

“No, and to clarify, he was the one who asked to do this,” Aeon answered, looking toward the projection showing the C-grade human meditate. “Centuries. In total, it’s been 689 years and 124… 125 days since he first sat down.”

The hobgoblin needed a moment as he looked at Aeon in disbelief before his gaze drifted back to the human just sitting there. “That… if his mind survives something like that… what do you expect to come out on the other side?”

Aeon once more didn’t hesitate much as he joined the hobgoblin in observing the man known as the Sword Saint.