"How ?" Wondered Midas with an astonished gaze as he looked the wound on Tom's leg close under his gaze.
"Oh, it's not all, I can also heal my arms" said Tom before cutting his arm with a small makeshift knife.
As blood started to follow from his wound, Tom concentrated himself and under Midas still surprised gaze, Tom's etherium flowed into the wound, and it began to close at a visible rate!
"It took me three days to be able to heal my arms and the remaining days to be able to heal my legs" explained Tom as his wound finally closed.
"You finished the last step in three days?" Asked Midas.
"Yes" replied Tom with a proud smile.
'How can he be so fast ?' Wondered Midas, as he knew that the last step was the most painful and arduous of all the other steps.
The first step consisted of having an intimate knowledge of your different body parts, the second was to be able to shape your Etherium in the forms of said members and the last step was to heal yourself by using the shaped etherium.
The second step might be the one that takes the most time, but if the threes steps were to be evaluated, the most difficult would undoubtedly be the last one.
There were two reasons why it was the most difficult step, for one: the pain.
Since you can't possibly heal yourself if you aren't injured, you need to constantly hurt yourself in the process of learning and if you don't have a serious mental fortitude you might even give up on learning the technique, Midas had seen many wisemonkies doing so.
The second reason and the most challenging was the fact that you needed to understand immediately where your wound was situated and heal yourself.
Let's say that you were cut on your arm and that you need to use the healing technique, to do so, you need to understand the exact position the cut was situated in, what types of muscle tissue, muscles, or tendons formed that part of your arm, Next, mold your etherium to match the shape of the muscles, tissues, or tendons that got cut and finally put the Etherium in the areas where they are missing, you need to achieve all those step while still in pain.
Knowing all of this, it was normal for moved to be in a state of shock when he sees Tom completing all of those steps in mere seconds, it would normally take months or even years to do such a thing for one part of your body, but Tom didn't just do it for one part of his but two!
'I was mistaken, this kid is not just talented, he is a monster' thought Midas with a sigh.
'But I guess it's a good thing, that means that we will finish his training much more quickly, which is crucial as even that sorry excuse of a king will remark that something is amiss if we take too much time'.
"Ahem, I suppose congratulations are in order, good job kid".
"Thanks, but you know that I'm technically your boss, right ? So why are you calling me kid, you should call me boss" said Tom with a teasing voice.
"Don't push it young man, don't push it" replied Midas with an irked face, making Tom burst in laughter, during those past weeks of training he had come to like this elder wisemonkey, especially the kind of face he would make after being teased.
"Since you are occupied laughing, I guess we can postpone the force shaper training to another da-"
"Sorry sir, we can start right now!" Said Tom, interrupting Midas.
"That's what I thought" replied Midas with a chuckle.
"Let's start" said Midas, prompting Tom to concentrate on what he was going to say.
"As you already know, the first requirement to the force shaper technique is to know how to shape your Etherium in your desired form".
Tom nodded and Midas continued:
"Since you already achieved the first requirement in your training of the healing technique, we will skip this part, which will significantly reduce the needed time to learn the force shaper technique. Now I will tell you what the second requirement is, this requirement is, are you ready to hear it-"
"Out with it already old man" said Tom annoyed, he was sure that Midas was intentionally stalling to tell him the second requirement just because he knew that Tom was eager to hear it.
"Fine, fine, the second requirement is quite simple. In fact, if you had pondered on it, you might have deduced it by yourself, it's balance"
"Balance? What kind of balance ?" Asked Tom.
"You know that everything in this world has a balance, right?"
Tom nodded his head
"It's the same for the things you materialize using your Etherium, let's take a sword for example, when a blacksmith creates a sword they need to make sure that the hilt and blade are balanced, if not, the sword will be of poor quality, that's the same thing when you try to turn solid something that you made using your Etherium, you need balance."
Midas materialized a sword of etherium that was floating in the air and continued:
"The first thing you need to do after you shape your Etherium into something is to inject more etherium in your construct to try to give it life, basically you just increase the concentration of etherium in your construct" explained Midas.
"Wait, that's it ?" Asked Tom, a little disappointed.
"Yes that's it, however you shouldn't underestimate that simple thing because you need to find the balance of everything you make"
"What do you mean ?"
"You know that each thing in creation has its own balance right, well, the different things you can construct by shaping your Etherium also have different balance, a sword construct balance is different from a spear one, which is different from a shield one and so forth".
"I understand, but what is this balance you are talking about ?"
"Instead of explaining, I will show you" said Midas before trying to seize the sword construct that he made, unfortunately his hand passed right through it.
"Just now I had increased the potency of my Etherium in the construct, but since the increase in potency wasn't enough to reach the balance of the sword, it remained ethereal".
"Now if I increase even more the potency, and it exceeds the balance, here is what will happen"
As he finished speaking, Midas concentrated on his sword construct and a split second later, it exploded, stunning Tom.
"As you can see, if the Etherium you inject into your construct exceeds the balance, your construct explodes, so, you need to find the perfect balance of something if you want to make it solid, you understand ?"
Tom nodded and Midas said :
"Good, because you will start right now"