The elevator opened up directly to the guild masters office but from the inside it was no different from a normal door.
He looked up and saw the beauty that sat there waiting for him, and while not as severely as before, he was still struck.
As she looked up at him from her desk, his blush left his face as he gave a polite greeting. "Goodnight Guild Master, Instructor John has informed me that you would like to speak with me before I leave."
"Yes, in fact it is a very important matter. Please sit." She smiled as she pointed the chair across the table from her, which he gladly did.
"In the past month you have shown exceptional growth, even I am impressed."
'What bullshit, she is a natural S rank. I bet her stats were at 200 after the first week.'
"And I know what you are thinking, while my talent does increase my stats. Naturally increasing them is exceptionally difficult, in the first 6 months they increase by around 10."
"What, that's not possible. Only 10?" This may seem like he was insulting her directly to her face but he was too shocked to even care. His stats grew by 15 in under a month but hers increased by 10 after 6. He was naturally skeptical.
"Oh but it very much is, and I thought it was blazing fast at the time. If my younger self could see you know then she would be burning with jealousy."
"But how is that even possible?" He was genuinely confused and although he had gone through rigorous training for a month, he didn't believe that it was that bad. Compared to his life before awakening, it was more of light sparring than intense training.
"Many things really, the location of this building is exceptionally rich in mana. The training that you have done was so rough that most would have died after the first week. But most importantly, your talent."
"What? My talent? I am an F rank." He was so taken back by her last statement that he almost ignored what she said about the training. "And what do you mean about the training, it was hard but it wasn't that bad."
"Oh but it was. Think about it. Every single one of your instructors are powerhouses in their own right whose names spread far and wide. And these living legends were called back from the new world to train some random F rank. They went especially hard out of spite but you still held on."
"I thought you said that they were here for other reasons. Why would you call them back to train me? All that I can offer is my unique method, and not even that seems difficult to mimic. Why go through all this effort for an F rank?"
He didn't like referring to himself as 'An F rank' but in reality he was right. If all she wanted was his method then all she had to do was ask him how he did it and then pay him 7 million, and for a guild 7 million was loose change. His talent didn't necessarily give him much of an advantage over others, if it did it would be ranked higher than F rank. If she wanted to train someone then she could have gone for someone of much higher rank with a better head start than he had.
"You seem to misunderstand something about ranks, but I don't blame you. The government of this country doesn't inform the public about such matters for… Let's just say reasons. The ranking system is almost 400 years old and is naturally outdated. Back then, talents were ranked based on the immediate effectiveness they provided. It didn't matter if you could be a powerhouse if you died on the first step, so talents that gave a boost in power from the moment of awakening were naturally more valuable than the ones that needed some time. Active above passive, immediate over long term."
She looked at him to make sure that he understood what she was saying. "While such a system was good at the time, it is inappropriate now. There there have been some tweaks, but the basis of it is still the same. 'How good is it now', not 'How good could it be later.' But that's not really fair is it? Every Awakened today gets some form of training even before their rank is known, how can a system that judges them based on what they would be if they didn't have any training still be any good?"
He looked at her with a sense of understanding, they trained him not because his talent was rated F, but because of what his talent could do for him in the future.
"But still, my talent doesn't seem that useful even in the future. It gives almost no benefit to me, no increase in stats, no increase in mana, no magical abilities, no god slaying weapon."
She shook her head as she listened to his complaining. "You will understand in the future the benefit of having a solid foundation with no effort in building it. But that's not what I called you here today, I could only convince your previous instructors to stay here for a month. That's why your training, even if you don't think so, was so hard. They needed to teach you a lot in that small time frame."
He remembered that all of the instructors just seemed to beat him up for hours on end every day for a month and wondered how she called that training but he could only agree with her. "Then what have you called me here for?"
"The first part of your training was to hone your physical body through combat. The next part is to train your control over mana and build up your knowledge of spells as well as your capacity. This will take the longest, maybe a few years."
"What about skills then, I haven't trained in them in any way yet?"
"Don't worry about that for the time being, what I am doing is teaching you how to ride a bike and skipping the training wheels. While skills can be powerful, they are not efficient with mana usage and over reliance has led to the downfall of many."
"Okay, okay." he nodded to himself as he listened to her. "One more question, why?"
"Why what?"
"Why go through all this effort to train me? Even if talent rating is not a good way to determine future success, I can't imagine that every newcomer to your guild has veterans and mages hand picked by the guild leader to train every single one of them. So why?"
She smiled at him and gave him a non answer. "Because I wanted to. Now go home and rest, the rest of your training will start a week from now. What you do between now and then has nothing to do with me."
Feeling defeated he had no choice but to go home, it was the middle of the night and both hunger and tiredness overwhelmed him. He had been training all day and while [regeneration] had him heal much faster, it wasn't a full heal and he still needed rest for his body to naturally fix itself. Plus forcefully increasing the rate of regeneration isn't free, his body still needed to use energy making him much hungrier than normal.