Chapter 14 - Chapter 14: Harder Than Steel

Today, I start my body mimicry lessons. It is currently in the morning hours so I am busy trying to turn the both pieces of paper into cloth. No luck today either it seems. I have decided that starting tomorrow, I will start a fresh from the salt to sugar and vice versa exercises. From there will move slowly till I reach a point where I am confident in resuming my assignment. "Kid, welcome to the body mimicry lesson." Mr. Albert said. I have been excited for this since I saw him transforming his arms to metal and crushing nuts by simply forming a fist. "I have determined that your body is strong enough to withstand the change, here take this piece of wood." Mr. Albert said handing me a piece of wood about 40 centimeters long. "I want you to hit that piece of wood against that rock as many times as possible though very lightly. I want you to take note of the sound produced. Now go ahead and do that." Mr. Nathan said. And so that was what I did till the early hours of the night taking occasional breaks to eat and drink water. By the end of the day, I could hear the sound of the wood hitting the stone all the time in my head. Even as I went to sleep the sound rang throughout my brain, 'ku ku ku'. The next day I started with the salt to sugar experiment. At first it took a few minutes to convert a single bowl of salt into sugar using memory as reference. Later on in the mid-morning hours, the process became instantaneous. I was now starting to get a hang of things. A secret I learnt was that instead of thinking about the current object, it is more efficient to only think deeply about the final desired product. An example would be if I am turning a bowl of sugar to salt, then I only need to think deeply about salt and nothing else. Not the process of turning sugar to salt or thinking about the expectations when the fork enters your mouth. Only think about the grains of salt. In fact this process went on to be so successful that I lost my fork while in the trance of turning back the salt to sugar. This briefly interrupted my concentration so I opened my eyes only to see that the quantity of sugar in the bowl had increased. I had without a doubt turned the fork to grains of sugar. This used a lot of mana and before I knew it I blacked out."Hey kid are you okay? This is not like you to miss a training session." Mr. Albert asked. I explained to him what had happened. He then took me to Miss Lavender who also listened to my story. "Aah yes you turned the fork into sugar. There is a process that is specifically meant for dealing with metals. What you may be feeling now is just exhaustion because you used an ineffective method to jump from complex to simple substances." Miss Lavender said. According to her explanation, at my stage I have only learnt changing the form of simple objects to those are closely related with each other. Morphing a dense complicated object such as metal to grains of sugar requires another technique that I am yet to learn. I was feeling rested so I insisted on moving on with Mr. Albert's training. Nothing had changed. I was to hit he rock with a piece of wood until the early hours of the night. That is exactly what happened.The next morning, I was feeling confident enough to turn the pieces of paper to cloth. Within an hour, I had completed my assignment without the need of even closing my eyes. In the next two hours, I alternated changing the objects into paper or cloth until I could do it instantaneously. I almost felt like a fool for not realizing the secret sooner. No, in fact I felt like a fool for taking such a long period of time to figure it out. I guess this is why my 'companion' did not want to help. I needed to increase my mental prowess and not be a parasite who constantly feel the need to depend on its guidance. I later took the results to Miss Lavender who seemed satisfied that I had mastered changing states between two simple objects. "Tomorrow I am going to teach you about matter disintegration. This is the critical step you missed that caused you to be exhausted when turning the fork to sugar. If you had broken down the metal in the fork then changed the state to sugar, you would have not felt any exhaustion." Miss Tamayo said.It is now the body magic session. "Kid, today you are going to start the practical exercise of body mimicry." Mr. Albert said. "You have been hitting the piece of wood against that rock for long enough. I believe you have now mastered the vibrations in your hand and the sound produced on impact. Now you are going to hit the rock with your hands while imagining the sound produced is similar to that of hitting it with wood. Now begin!" Mr. Albert concluded. I was already used to getting vague instructions and then figuring things out for myself. I followed the instructions and began slapping the rock lightly to not hurt myself. I had already memorized the sound produced by wood so imagining it was not a problem.The exercise went on for two hours until I heard a familiar sound. My hand's composition had turned to wood. I believe that this was due to borrowing various lessons from Miss Lavender's tuition that I succeeded in a very short period of time. I showed my right hand to Mr. Albert who was a short distance away. "Very good, now try to increase the area covered with wood to your whole body." Mr. Albert added. This was not a difficult task because the area covered by wood felt like a warmth of wearing gloves. It is not difficult to imagine the whole body enveloped with cloth and so I succeeded in the third attempt. My body was now covered in a wooden membrane including my clothes. Surprisingly, this did not inhibit movement at all. "Very good now remove the membrane and try equipping it afresh." Mr. Albert said. I now imagined the feeling of the skin after taking off gloves and applied it. The wooden membrane disappeared. Now I had to re-equip it, I remembered the feeling not long ago of having my body covered with the entire wooden frame. It was easy to do and within few minutes, I was back with the wooden membrane. "Very good, now we are going to start the same process with metal. You will be hitting two pieces of metal against each other for two days. On the third day, you will use your hands once more while imagining the sound of the metal. Proceed." Mr. Albert said. I went on to learn the theory of matter disintegration in the morning and hitting the metals later to nightfall. The same results were observed but unlike wood that felt like a warm cloth enveloping my body, the metal membrane seemed to fluctuate with the environmental temperatures. The metal membrane was warm within my body in the afternoon but went freeing cold at night. This is probably because metal is a conductor while wood is an insulator."Very good kid. Now I have taught you enough in body magic. Any other membrane you make is now up to you. The combat instructor should be coming in the next two weeks. Continue with your personal training and you should be fine, probably." Mr. Albert said. "Wait, what do you mean by probably?" I asked. "Well the person coming to train you was also my master. Let us say that the training methods are strict and very tough. But don't worry about that, you can protect yourself with a metal membrane if it gets too rough." He said. Well that is not very reassuring. Well no use of thinking about it now, that is next two week's problem.