The following day was a Sunday. The trashiest day of the week.
For Leonidas, this was the day when 70% of all human beings on earth would strut around bearing their naked ignorance and lack of understanding for the whole world to see.
That's right. Those shitty church goers. The Christians. The Muslims. The Hindus. Any Theist. They're all So Annoying.
Leonidas has never gotten along with Theists because he believes there could never be a living being who can go against his own interests.
Egoism.
It's ingrained inside every human being. It's in everyone's DNA.
1) Human decision making is motivated by perceived profit.
2) Every human interaction is a transaction. People exchange services they have to offer for services other people have to offer for a price.
3) The price of those services is determined by their demand.
4) Winners in life are people who make the most profitable exchanges
Perception is the key here. Perception, as Leonidas knows, is never right or wrong. It just is. That's why people feel like it's okay to do whatever they want as long as it feels right, and as long as they end up gaining what they wanted to gain anyway.
Leonidas believed one thing... People don't sacrifice themselves unless they gain something in return. As long as they gain something, it wasn't a true sacrifice. They don't really care about who they're sacrificing for, as much as they care about what they get in return.
That's why the stories of self sacrifice in religious scriptures is so laughable to Leonidas. Even if the stories are true, which they most probably aren't, these heroes, are nothing more than self serving crooks who took what they wanted and left everyone else to deal with the mess. All the religious wars. All the death. All the cultural destruction. Just more Egoism.
Live not for thyself, but for thy God. What bullshit. Those words should go against every fibre of a human's being.
Egoism, for Leonidas, meant being human. And humans are allowed to make mistakes. That's why, when he realized that he had made a mistake with the way he handled Fiona this whole time, he rattled his brain for the whole night on how to fix the situation.
Fiona was a human. She had her own life. Her own experiences. If Leonidas didn't start treating her as such, he might lose her.
So he made a conscious decision to start truly listening. And maybe start communicating properly. Not as a mentor, but as a friend...
'Friend...'
Uggh... That word did not feel very nice to think about for a cynical misanthrope like him. But he would try.
Although admittedly, at the back of his mind he knew that what he was doing was still in alignment with his egoist beliefs. The only reason he was changing was so that he would not lose her. It was nothing more than a fake self sacrifice...
'Jesus christ...'
He gave up on finding the perfect words and decided to just go and talk to the girl. He would let the issue resolve itself.
As soon as he stepped outside, he was met with the image of a girl who was coming over.
She was wearing a pink dress that hugged her upper body and flowed freely down to her knees on her lower body. She was carrying her characteristic 'study bag' which barely had books in it.
When she saw Leonidas she looked at him tentatively, confused about what was happening.
"Hey Leo, are you going out?"
"No, 'we're' going out. Don't you feel like a change of scenery?" Leonidas said with a smile on his face.
"Where are we going?"
"Let's go to the park. Give me your bag, I'll leave it it inside for when you come back.
And so she did. She couldn't help but wonder to herself 'Is he feeling guilty about yesterday?'
Whatever the answer was, Fiona would not pass up the chance to go to the park.
They walked side by side exchanging small talk for a few moments. Fiona felt like it was about time so she breached yesterday's happenings with him.
"About what happened, I hope you don't feel guilty. It wasn't your fault. I jus-"
"You know... My birth mom and dad were Christians too. They went to church every Sunday. They prayed too, every Morning after they woke up, even every night before they go to sleep. They even prayed before every meal to 'thank the lord'."
"And I would pray with them. Not because I believed it, but because I believed that you should always support the people you care about. Even if I'm not a Christian. It was only a few minutes of prayer every day. Just a tiny little sacrifice."
Leonidas couldn't help but wince at the thought of the 'sacrifices' he's made, in this life or the previous. Leonidas knew he was a selfish, calculating, and ruthless human being. It was in his nature.
Leonidas continued, "We've all made sacrifices. We've all done or said things we weren't proud of. And most importantly, we've all lost things or people we cared about. I think a defining characteristic of a human being is their ability to bounce back from that. To keep moving. That's all I've been doing. And I hope that's what you'll do to. In your own way."
Leonidas looked to his left, where the pink dress wearing girl was, and he saw tears dripping down from her eyes.
'Oh no...'
But he looked slightly lower and was surprised to see a bright smile, which could make any man's heart palpitate one day, plastered on her beautiful face.
They continued to walk forward and although no more words were said, they both seemed to come to a deeper understanding of themselves and of each other.
××××××
The park was a huge area filled with trees and trimmed grass where people could be seen occasionally taking walks with their dogs or spending time with their loved ones. But Leonidas and Fiona were currently sitting down in the lotus position below a huge tree.
They both had their eyes closed so from the outside they looked like they were meditating, however they were currently speaking telepathically while talking about cultivation.
Since Fiona could now separate units from her soul sea, Leonidas told her to try shaping a single unit into a straight line of energy.
As soon as she did that, he told her to shape it into various basic shapes, ranging from a circle to a square and triangle. Then to letters, and numbers.
Fiona understood what this was for. She was doing training so she could weave her first rune. Her bubbling excitement was shown by the blush that was visible on her cheeks.
This was true Sorcery.
After an hour of shapin training, Leonidas gave her the drawing of the tier 0 *Force Application* rune and told her to weave it.
'The thing with runes is that they are condensations of rules. You'll know when you drew it correctly because it will feel like it is resisting you. But once you complete it, it will click into place.'
Fiona listined intently to this and as soon as Leonidas was done with his explanation, she went on with her own experimentation.
Leonidas wasn't idle throughout this time. Ever since confirming from Fiona's awakening that the quality of awakening determines the quality of the soul and the talent, he has been holding off on the awakening of his other energy centres.
Instead of awakening mediocre energy centres, he would rather do as much research as he possibly could into the energy dimensions that the energy centres are linked to and then take it from there.
Although he had been dabbling with Life energy, all he had done was merely feel the energy's existence and experiment on moving it to certain places to observe the healing response.
The reason he was able to so easily find it and move it around was because he was already used to the life energy baptism that was given by the universe at every breakthrough. Using his experiences he was able to shorten the amount of time it took for him to find and utilize life Energy.
Right now he was working on an array that could possibly get him to glimpse into the different energy dimensions. A tier 6 array that he would like to call 'Projection - Dimensional Projection'
This array is an array that would be capable of separating his awareness from his own body and sending it to an energy dimension of his choice for as much time as possible.
While he's there, he would try his best to grasp the rules of the energy and build up a Knowledge base for the energy before he attempt his awakenening.
But of course, a Tier 6 array's consumption is way beyond what he's been dabbling with previously.
As the tiers go up, the number of runes within an array goes up, and thus the number of units consumed to create or maintain an array goes up exponentially.
Even if he could conseptualise the array he could not execute it until he broke through to the King realm.
This further motivated Leonidas to breakthrough as quickly as possible.
The Major Realms are characterized by 1000 levels in between each layer. He was now in the 8th level of the Noble Realm layer, which meant that he could utilize 8000 units of spiritual energy.
Everytime his cultivation increased, he would modify his script to cultivate even quicker. Even he could help but think of himself as a monster.
Meanwhile, it didn't take long for Fiona to be able to draw the rune.
'Leo, I finally did it!' she screamed mentally.
'Great... Congratulations.' Leonidas said truthfully. He noticed that she started calling him Leo, but he let it slide.
'By the way... I have a question. Yesterday my maximum units were 5,but today there's 6. How?'
'As long as you've awakened, spiritual energy will flow freely though your spiritual soul. When you're in the Human Realm, this energy naturally accumulates until you're in the Awakened Realm. That's when you start true cultivation.'
'Hehehe... I can't wait' Fiona said excitedly. A smile was even visible on her face as she 'meditated' in the park, all to the surprise of the teenage boys passing by.
'Well you're gonna have to wait anyway. Now, while you're waiting, I want you to move this matchstick'
Leonidas fiddled in his pockets and took out his matchstick which he then placed on his outstretched hand.
'...'
'go ahead... Do it.' Leonidas said teasingly.
'Are you teasing me?' fiona said, with playful anger.
'Not at all. I promise. You can do it.' Leonidas replied with calm confidence. Fiona felt like he couldn't let him down.
'Okay I'll try'
Meanwhile...
A short, fat man, with a large mole on his nose, wearing a black hoodie and sweatpants was sitting a few hundred meters away watching the two. He would occasionally take pictures of the two with his phone. His name was Jeffrey.
Jeffrey was a private investigator, and he had recently received a job to fully check out the background of a 13 year old boy from a big money client.
After thoroughly doing his job he found out all he could and then sent the information to the client, for which he was paid generously.
From his investigations, Leonidas was a misfortune kid. He didn't think much of the job. That was until he received a new job from his client telling him to tail Leonidas whenever he can. Find out his daily schedule. His habits. Who he hangs with. And So on so forth.
He had been following Leonidas for a week now and so far he found nothing. Leonidas would never go out, unless it was to school or to drop off his female friend.
This female friend seemed to be very precious to Leonidas and when Jeffrey told the client about it, the client wanted pictures of them together. The client was convinced that this girl seems to be Leonidas' potential love interest.
Jeffrey couldn't help but smile wryly. This client seemed to have a deep obsession. He was sure to milk a lot of money from him in the long run.
As Jeffrey sat beneath the tree and imagined himself swimming in money, he heard a voice which jerked him back to reality.
"Haaah... Beautiful day isn't it?"
A dark haired teenage boy with frighteningly cold eyes smiled at Jeffrey as if he was meeting an old friend. He sat a few meters away from Jeffrey, much to the shock and dismay of fat man.
'How did he get here? Anyway, he must know something. Mission abort.' Jeffrey told himself.
"It's a really beautiful day, but it seems like it might rain soon ahahaa", Jeffrey said as he tried to get up.
But shockingly, he couldn't move.
"Hey where are you trying to go? I thought we were getting to know each other." Leonidas complained with a pained expression.
"What did you do to me?!" Jeffrey questioned domineeringly, but a squeak in his voice betrayed him as a sign of his fright.
"pfft... You were right. It is gonna rain today... " said Leonidas as he looked up with surprise in his face.
'Blood Rain... Sweet, sweet, blood rain.'