Before Leon could notice, four months had passed since his life on that island started. Since he was always focused on his training and thinking of new ways to return home, he didn't notice how fast time was passing. While Leon was staring at the marks he put on the tree showing how many days he spent on that island; he had another idea that made him forget about the time he spent there.
"Mmm... maybe I can control the wind and create something like a suit that will grant me the skill to fly."
Leon's control over element earth was still far from perfect and controlling wind was harder, but he wouldn't know if it was impossible or not unless he tries. As it turned out, Leon did it. It required a stupid amount of time concentrating, but he could make the wind envelop his body. However, just as he had expected, soon, he found a few problems. Using wind, he could levitate and could even maneuver his body in mid-air, but he couldn't do it for long. Not only that, the moment the wind covered his body, he almost lost contact with everything. He couldn't feel the sand, the heat, or the outside air. Thus, he couldn't eat blue angel leaves to keep the wind around his body.
"I can't cover my entire body... I guess I should only cover my torso."
Leon also tried that, but by doing so, he couldn't carry the backpack made of stone, and he couldn't carry the blue angel leaves. He tried to control the wind to cover only the front side of his torso, but then he lost completely the ability to fly. He only could levitate without moving.
"Ah... it is impossible... maybe if I someday learn how to create wind, perhaps I will be able to fly by using it the like propulsors, but until then... it is impossible to escape flying."
Leon put that plan at the bottom of his list of plans; he had no idea how to create earth, and the chances of him learning how to create wind before earth were close to none.
"Maybe I should change my approach... instead of trying to make my mana become earth, I should use mana to change earth first..."
That kind of thing still was part of the Earth Manipulation, so it would help Leon train the skill. It wouldn't be a waste of time, but Leon had no idea how to do it. Leon tried to do that for two weeks until he decided that he was making a mistake somewhere. Several more days passed while Leon was trying to discover where he was failing. Fortunately, his memories gave him a good hint. He recalled his battle against the Sahuagins and the single time he used the water ball. Leon didn't notice when the monsters attacked, but when he used the skill, he saw the water ball appearing in front of him. However, the water ball didn't suddenly appear. Only a small droplet of water appeared at first, it was hard to notice because the ball would increase its size stupidly faster.
"I see now... I can't just change a whole object suddenly. I have to do it in parts..."
That was a valuable hint, perhaps with that, Leon couldn't even learn how to transform his mana into earth, but first, he decided to change what he could see.
"Calm down, calm down... baby steps, baby steps."
To start from the absolute beginning, Leon moved to the beach, and there he dirt his hand with sand. It was easy to see the grains of sand in his hand, so he decided to change those that got stuck in his hand. He barely used any mana to obtain control over those grains, but that wasn't his objective, he had to change those grains of sand.
After a while, the grains of sand were floating above Leon's hand, and his hand was completely clean. It looked like just seeing and wishing for the grains to change wasn't enough. Leon had to do something else…
"Now what…"
While Leon was pondering, he had an idea. What if while he is using Earth Manipulation, he isn't actually manipulating earth, what if he was manipulating his mana and his mana was manipulating earth? When he thought that, it became clear why he had to use more mana to keep controlling the earth.
"Do I need to put more mana?"
Leon tried to infuse more mana into the grains of the sand, but nothing happened. However, when he did it again while wishing for the grains of sand to become steel, he ended up spending a lot of mana, and the white sand became grey.
Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Earth Transformation.
You obtained 01 status points.
"Finally…"
Leon finally understood the principles of magic, and why he failed so many times, to do everything that wasn't normal, he needed mana. To obtain control over objects, he needed mana to control those objects he needed mana, and to transform those objects; he needed to use even more mana. To make sand become something sturdy like steel, he needed to use mana to strengthen the sand.
"That explains why that water ball didn't suddenly appear… with enough mastery, perhaps I can create something fast like that."
However, Leon noticed a few problems. Obtaining control over something like earth was easy while doing the same with other elements was hard. However, the more dense the element, the more mana he would have to spend to strengthen it… it looked like Earth would be the hardest element to transform and create following that logic.
"Oh, well… I wasn't expecting anything easy anyway. What is the matter now is that I can something thin, but sturdy."