Mystical Journey

This complicated feeling made him feel a sense of lamentation, but at the same time, happiness.

His happiness comes from the fact that he was finally able to escape the dark days of his past. As for his lamentation, he didn’t know himself where that feeling originated from.

As the squeezing force became even stronger, Garen just kept moving through the path in front of him.

With the combination of both parties’ efforts, finally, he felt a breeze of fresh air caress his skin. It felt like a tingly, stinging sensation.

He was promptly carried up by a pair of large hands, and was slowly wiped with a warm, damp towel. As the friction from the towel increased, the pain became more and more distinct. His skin was way too sensitive, even a soft and gentle rub would cause an intense pain.

As his umbilical cord still on his belly was swiftly cut off, that further intensified his pain, making Garen scream in pain.

Just as he opened his mouth and tensed up his throat, the amniotic fluid in his mouth came spraying out, dripping into a small basin.

Wa!!!!

The deafening cry of a newborn baby immediately filled the room.

He finally opened his eyes, his light blue eyes, after such a long time, could finally see the real world again. At that exact moment, he felt an indescribable sensation.

This world was filled with livelihood, all of this was real. The rays of light and color gave him a sensory overload, and touched his heart in an indescribable manner.

From the dark days of being locked in a prison, from God knows how long ago, to the exact moment of seeing light again.

Garen felt a sudden rekindling of hope towards this world, he wanted to feel this moved for eternity, forever and ever...

In the pure white hospital room, he saw the person who was carrying him, a nurse in blue uniform wearing a white surgical mask. She had a pair of black eyes and thick eyebrows, although her face did not look pretty with numerous pale yellow freckles, in his eyes, this nurse was the embodiment of joy and warmth.

The nurse opened her mouth and said a few words, then gently placed him in a crib next to the bed. Inside the crib was radiating a sense of warmth, almost as if it was an incubator.

The crib walls were made of clear glass, so he was able to see the bed through the glass. A lady with blonde and curly hair was lying on the bed, even though she could not be considered as a pretty person, she seemed gentle, looking lovingly at the crib.

"This is a newborn." Garen opened his mouth, but due to the fact that his vocal cords weren’t developed yet, all that could be heard was a child crying.

As he slowly crawled up from the crib, moving on the soft white cloth, he slapped the glass wall of the crib. That smooth and cool sensation of the glass had him mesmerized.

In one swift motion, the nurse’s big hands rubbed some fragrant white powder all over his skin, then wrapping him once again, keeping him warm as she gently picked him up from the crib and moved him to his bed beside his mother.

His mother gently touched his cheeks and softly uttered a few words. The warmness radiating from her eyes enveloped Garen with a sense of gentleness.

******

Time flew.

Garen was only born a month ago, and his infant body was still weak. As his brain had not been fully developed yet, it was still not able to support overly complex or clear conscious, thinking.

Thus, he spent most of his time suckling, sleeping, and pooping.

This embarrassing way of life made Garen, once the high and mighty leader of the White Cloud Gate and the Heavenly General of the Southern Holy Fist Gate, utterly lose his sense of self-esteem.

It’s would be fine if it were just being breastfed, but having to have someone change his diaper, that was the most humiliating thing he could experience in his lifetime! An utter disgrace!!

Garen always had a strong sense of resistance when it came to changing his diapers. Unfortunately for him, even though his infant body was strengthened by the Living Secret Technique as compared to other babies, the functionality of the Living Secret Technique was still minute at the beginning, and only gets strong later on.

As such, regardless of how strong his soul or secret techniques may be, the foundations of this current body were still too weak, making him no different from an actual baby. There was no use in resisting.

Without physical matter, the soul has no way of affecting reality, that was merely natural law.

So, no matter how embarrassing this way of living was, he had no choice but to continue as is.

If he were to look past this issue, everything has been going well for him. His body was becoming stronger and stronger, even if he were caught in a cold breeze he wouldn’t catch a cold or fall ill. His facial features were also rapidly developing, and his brain was also improving at a healthy rate. His originally fragile bones have started to become more and more sturdy, slowly allowing his body to support him crawling around.

This was only after approximately a month’s growth.

Garen was originally planning to re-train his Frost-Fire True Water Evil Technique, but his soul seed’s evil techniques could only do so much for the development of the body at this stage.

There wasn’t much else there was to change, even if one completely followed the training for the art of the Evil Techniques, it would still have some effects, but definitely not significantly drastic changes. Hence, he started trying out different secret technique training methods. He found out that most secret techniques to enhance special abilities have all lost their functionality. On the other hand, some low-level secret techniques, due to only enhancing the vital energy and blood regulation in the practitioner’s body, were able to show decent results.

As for the Living Secret Technique, it overall only had made small improvements to the body, nothing else.

In actuality, since Garen was born, he felt there was something off about this world.

It wasn’t the fundamental construction of this world, but rather the environment of this world, it felt as if the Earth, the Secret Technique World, the Totem World, all of them seem to be slightly different.

Especially when he tried out his secret techniques, in his memory, there were easily hundreds of secret techniques that he knew, but when trying them out, he noticed that at a microscopic level, when his blood cells generate friction, or rather when matter generates friction, the amount of heat created was slightly smaller.

To put it simply, the degree of heat generated from friction was definitely smaller as compared to his past three worlds.

As the strongest Grandmaster of Combat, 6th form totem user that with a God-like existence in the Totem World, he definitely has the experience and expertise to notice even these minuscule changes.

However, this world seemed out of place to him.

Friction causes heat, this was one of the most basic concepts of the Laws of Conservation of Energy, if this had changed... It can only mean one of two things: the matter itself had been changed, or the blood cells in his body had been changed.

After two more months, Garen finally developed enough strength, he took his own diaper and started rubbing it on surrounding objects. After being grabbed and swaddled numerous times by his bearded father, he finally arrived at a conclusion to his little experiment.

It was not an issue with his own body, it was this entire world...

Not only that, there were also minor changes to the laws of physics that he once knew. This led Garen to come up with a few hypotheses.

He might be in a whole other universe right now.

Even he found this hypothesis laughable. This might also possibly be the effect caused by a change in the planet itself, but this could only be confirmed at a later stage.

Even if he managed to confirm this fact, what could he do? At this point, he was merely a baby, there was no meaning in pondering about the universe and the wider scale of things, but rather he should focus more on the development of his body and find a suitable gate of secret techniques to start his training in.

In his countless attempts trying out the secret techniques, Garen kept using his attributes ability to check his rate of growth. He also started to observe the environment surrounding this newborn’s family.

As for the issue of language, Garen, who was fluent in more than 10 languages, was easily able to figure out the cadence and linguistic form of the language. Even though his body had not yet matured, just based on an infant’s level of intellectual maturity, he was still able to swiftly grasp foundations of the native language.

His name was decided on the 2nd week, at that point Garen was able to make some simple audible syllables, so he kept repeating the 2 syllables "Ga-ren". After frustratingly declining every new name his parents came up with, they finally saw how insistent Garen was about this name, hence deciding on the name. The name was, of course, "Garen".

The environment of this world, or rather this planet, was normal. It was at the technological level of the Earth, as well as its degree of civilization, but this family seemed to be a bit special.

His father, Emmer Thomas, was a University Professor, he was gentle and wise, a pacifist, had a bushy beard and glasses, and had a soft personality. For the sake of his ecology research, he brought his family to live in seclusion in a small, remote town.

His mother, Trish Jeff, was a Psychologist. She was one of those people who applied her psychological training in her daily life. She was kind and understanding, but had an independent personality and a strong personal stance. She could be extremely kind, but when she got angry, she will be strict and harsh.

There was also Garen’s blood-related brother, Jason Thomas. This lad was 4 years old this year and had on numerous occasions tried to poke Garen with a stick while he was resting in the crib. He had a cheeky personality, at the start, he would be beaten up by their mother Trish every few days. Now that she was recovering on her maternal break, she was going to him daily. Luckily, under his father’s gentle guidance and persuasive education, he spent every day undergoing ideological education. With the combined efforts from both sides, even taking up Jason’s playtime, he finally realized his mistakes and apologized to his parents in tears. He promised to be a good boy from then on and turn over a new leaf, no longer harassing his younger brother, resolving this entire issue.

The Thomas household lived in a remote location in North America, isolated from the rest of the world and surrounded by woods. The air over here was fresh, and definitely made for a great retirement home.

Apparently, in this world, there was also an America. He learned this information while eavesdropping on his parents’ conversations, but he had no other information on this. However, the description feels quite similar to his original world, but there was still no word on the existence of oriental and eastern nations like China.

The small town they were living in was miles away from the city, as in, up to 1000 kilometers miles away. It was the very definition of being in isolation. The name of the town was Grano.

After vaguely getting a feel for his surroundings, Garen returned his focus to regaining his potential and strength.

Remembering the last crisis in the Totem World, he started to suspect that this might be due to the change in the surrounding environment, causing secret techniques to lose their compatibility. The weakening of the Living Secret Technique might also be attributed to the limitations of the environment. Luckily his soul seed wasn’t get affected, and functioned like a perpetual motion machine, slowly emitting influential nutrients deep within his soul as if it were slowly increasing Garen’s soul limit.

One’s soul limit was the deciding factor about the maximum attribute point cap one’s body could achieve at a genetic level.

In the Secret Technique World, he was able to increase his attribute point to multiple times that of an average individual; whilst in the Totem world, he was able to manipulate his body and absorb the consciousness of the Nine-Headed Hydra, increasing his attributes up to 10+ points.

To put it simply, it was precisely his soul limit that decided the final strength he can achieve.

Originally thinking that the soul seed was no longer of any use to him, finding out that the soul seed could raise his soul limit made Garen burst with joy.

If he could increase his attribute limit to 100 points, he would attain unimaginable power.

Unfortunately, the evil technique of this soul seed worked very slowly. According to his calculations, Garen estimated that it would require at least a year to raise just one attribute point.

As the attributes got stronger, the potential points required were also higher, this was an issue that Garen hadn’t found a solution to as of yet. However, this world looked nothing out of the ordinary, and seemed that there weren’t any unnatural powers present in this world. There were only average people around.

Since there weren’t any risky factors, he decided to temporarily take time to decide on his actions. Without the existence of unnatural powers, the source of potential points would be another problem.