After receiving congratulations from his friends, Kayden returned to his mansion, where he stocked up on food and water, deciding to remain there until the next dueling championship. His focus at the moment was learning the concept of hopelessness.
It was a mid-level concept and, oddly enough, there was a lot of supporting material about it, mainly due to humanity’s great moments of despair. Kayden just had to buy some books online.
The learning method was different for everyone, but at its core, you had to feel like no hope was left. A level so deep that he didn’t even want to breathe anymore so that he could end his life.
Kayden had a powerful mindset, and this would be completely impossible. So what he was doing was forcing emotions into his mind. It wasn’t very difficult, especially with him using some drugs to increase the expression of his emotions.
In this state, anything was capable of messing with his psychology. For example, the mere act of remembering a bad taste caused a ridiculous hatred for that food to rise over him.
Kayden was using the only memory where he truly felt true despair and that his life was over. This was when he faced the guide in the final assassin guild challenge.
He smiled thinking about how his life had changed. At that time, he didn’t want to kill the baby, but if it were today he would have no qualms about killing him, logically considering only his life at stake.
"Why am I still at this?"
"In the end, I won’t die anyway?"
"Maybe I should just give up."
"This is a losing fight."
Kayden was sitting on the floor, actually sprawled was a better word. He didn’t have the willpower to even get up, his breathing was becoming rare and low frequency.
Even his circulation seemed sluggish and unwilling. Suicidal ideas began to well up in Kayden’s mind. Not even suicide was right, as he just didn’t want to live or do anything. He didn’t want to kill himself, he just didn’t have any desire to.
Within a few minutes, Kayden’s consciousness fell closer and closer to unconsciousness, his breathing finally stopped after a few seconds and his body looked like that of the dead.
His heart was giving the last beats of its own accord, his body decided to simply stop working on its own. There was no pain, there was nothing, just the desire to disappear and give up everything.
Suddenly, Kayden was woken up by an electrical shock. His entire body rose and he took in a huge gulp of air. His entire body was aching from returning to his rushed life.
His rapid breathing caused him to choke and cough as if he had swallowed a basketball. After almost a minute, Kayden recovered. His entire body was in pain and it felt like his blood had solidified.
Practically every corner of his body was tingling heavily, tears came out of his eyes unconsciously, and a cold feeling that was present began to go away as he circulated the blood.
"Success," Kayden thought. He didn’t care about anything as he made his way to subdue the new concept he learned. This must have been the 6th time he almost killed himself and woke up with the help of a sequence of runes.
Every other time he was unable to take the last step, the one that truly meant hopelessness, one in which his life no longer mattered at all. Kayden achieved this before 4 weeks.
At this point, he was at six concepts when considering adding hopelessness. His spiritual sense increased again and was now approaching 250 meters. His control over mana became even stronger.
Without even giving his body time to breathe, Kayden ate a world-tree seed he received from the championship. It was only of the 3rd realm, but it was still a good help and enough for him to be able to pass the rank.
As soon as Kayden ate it, mana began to well up inside him and spread throughout his body. Calmly, he began to circulate mana in his body. In just a few minutes, he felt the usual breakthrough process.
As soon as the impulse came, Kayden took control and began to improve his veins to withstand the pressure of his sixfold mana. Once again, the pain of forcibly changing his constitution took over Kayden and he just ignored it.
Just a few minutes later, all the veins in his body underwent a good improvement and Kayden could now feel the mana circulating easily throughout his body in a fluid manner. After that, it just improved his heart to pump faster. With the increase in density, it became a little slower than before.
After that, he just let nature take its natural course, mainly because he no longer knew what to do. As his body improved overall, he tried to use the momentum to come up with new ideas.
Instantly, he began to think about the idea of only having one heart. Kayden had already had a glimpse of this idea before and now it started to make some sense to him.
With just one heart, he could increase his size considerably and in the future, he would not even have any use for blood in his body. In which realm this would happen, Kayden didn’t know, but some of his organs would be useless in the future.
The outline of the idea stayed firmly in Kayden’s mind, but unfortunately, he had the momentum cut off before he could continue. His body has officially advanced to the eighth level. Kayden didn’t pay attention and tried to continue with the heart idea.
A new world was opened to him. His organs wouldn’t last forever. Some functions would be discarded. This was information that only impulse could give him. Their digestive organs would likely be removed over time.
In the distant future, perhaps he would no longer have any function supported by nutrients and water and would only live on pure mana. The boy took a few hours to elaborate and develop what he learned. New spaces meant he could build other hearts.
"Sorry about that, I just got obsessed with a concept and lost track of time," Kayden was apologizing to his friends in the stands where the monthly duels were held.
This time Heimer and Sarah were there too. The two were having a day off and considering all the time that had passed, Kayden was having his first contact with Sarah within a year. Fortunately, their relationship was not based on emotions but only on appearances.
"But was it worth it? What rank are you now? How many concepts have you already interconnected?", they asked. Most of the year Kayden had learned two concepts and was trying to intertwine them. The best were in the process of learning a third concept and not even one had managed to learn three different ones yet.
Sarah and Heimer were in the process of integrating the fourth concept and they represented the peak of geniuses of their period. It may seem like they made little progress compared to Kayden’s class, but in reality, Kayden’s year students just did the easy part.
Integrating the third concept should take at least 1 and a half years for geniuses and around 3 years for normal students. After that, learning another concept should take at least another year and a half, and connecting it was an even longer process than all the others combined.
Regarding cultivation rank, Kayden’s room reached the easy part which was the sixth rank. After that, it would take most a few years to overcome this classification hurdle, perhaps not so long since resources were now much more abundant, at least for the cream of the cream.
"I’m at the eighth level and my concepts... let’s just say it’s a secret," Kayden said, taking everyone around by surprise. Locke and Luan didn’t expect him to advance to another level, while the rest only discovered that he was at the eighth level, but the shock was still great.
Even more so for Heimer who was also at the eighth level. The small seed of jealousy that had opened earlier blossomed strongly at this moment. He always saw Kayden as a genius, but a genius inferior to him, and at this moment things were proving otherwise.
The group continued talking for a few more minutes until the dean appeared in the sky in the same position as before. The scene caused déjà vu in everyone, as even the weather conditions were the same.
"Hello students, I don’t think I need to explain the rules again. I’m just going to make an addition that I didn’t mention before, those in the top ten don’t need to fight the first fights, they will only face each other in the bubble with other students who reached the top 20. "
Author’s note: we didn’t get this week’s bonus, I’ll just reduce it to 50 stones again