I had been unconscious for about 1 day in the real world which equated to a little over 23 days inside the mind-space. Do note that my body still perceives time like I'm in the real world so I was technically only out of it for one day.
When I woke up I felt different, like until that very moment my body had been imperfect in every way and now it had finally achieved perfection.
I could see everything with perfect clarity, sounds were clearer, smells and tastes were stronger and I could feel ... particles.
I could feel the elements, both chemical and magical.
What I mean with chemical is that I could tell what something was made up of. So if I were to touch a diamond and didn't know that it was made up of carbon, I would know it just by touching it.
It was weird, everything felt so ... loud. No that's not the right word for it. I don't know the word but my enhanced senses were starting to hurt.
"Sorry, I forgot how strong the effect is when I truly bond with someone. Your body is enhanced to the point that if I were to be going any further I'd be breaking laws created by beings beyond the gods. I hope I'm not too loud myself."
The voice was coming from a woman standing in front of me. She was wearing a full set of armor, was holding a spear and had a shield strapped to her back.
"Who are you? How did you even get in this space?!" I asked.
"Hello, I'm the soul that was used to give the pen it's strength and now that officially bonded you can see me." she said happily.
Now that I think about it, she did definitely sound the same as the pen. I started taking her in, she was definitely from ancient Greece. Then I noticed something that made me want to puke and run away.
It was a shield that had a hideous face mounted onto it. After puking my guts out, realization dawned on me.
"You're Athena, how did your soul get inside a pen?" The shield she had was the Aegis and the only people known to ever wield were Zues and Athena and since Zues is a dude... I took a guess.
"You're right, I'm Athena. You can bow if you want to. As to how I got inside this pen, that is none of your concern." She looked at me, genuinely expecting me to bow.
"Oh, I'm not going to bow. Stop looking at me like that." I said after about 10 minutes of me just being mindblown and her looking at me with expectant eyes.
"Sigh. Well, one can only hope. Right now, it is time for you to learn how to use me. The first thing you need to do is gain control over elemental particles." And so another gruesome training regiment began.
Everytime the training started I could not eat or sleep until I had been able to control a certain amount of elemental particles.
The way to control elemental particles is to either force your will on them or coax them into doing what you need done.
The first thing mages learn is to use spells, this forces the particles to follow your will. Coaxing is much harder and only done by highly experienced mages or geniuses.
Because Athena has standards that are way too high I had to learn coaxing. It wasn't all bad though, if you can coax then you can use spells and they will be much more powerful because the particles willingly follow your command.
Another year went by and I could coax massive amounts of particles without breaking a sweat.
One thing I started noticing is that though Athena's training regiments were brutal they were also extremely effective. after a week of learning how to coax Athena remembered that I was still wearing adapting weights to train my strength. When I took them of, well, let's just say that I also nearly took of. I also smashed in a few trees, created indents in the ground when I walked and just moved too fast.
That was another thing I had been getting used to.
"Now that you can coax like a master, try to make the particles form me. With that I mean the pen!" She shouted that last part when I started to make a statue of Athena.
At first I thought it was going to be easy but the longer I tried the more I noticed how hard it was.
I sat down in a meditative position and sure enough, after one hour I had formed a pen. I was exhausted because I had been pushing my mind to the limit, you could even start to see obvious mistakes in the mind-space.
"Good job, now that I see that you have enough control to summon it, it's time for you to start practicing that." And the smile on her face told me that I was going to go through another one of her grueling training regiments.