Dimensional Descent

Leonel didn’t have an answer to his question. And, unsurprisingly, neither did the dictionary. But, Leonel didn’t mind. Even if this ring led to a dead end, he could still accept it. 

Leonel knew that Variant Zones only appeared when a world was on the verge of collapse. According to Kaela, Valiant Heart managed to use a treasure they earned participating in the Morales family’s Heir Wars to maintain this Zone and continuously benefit from it. 

Other than these facts, everything else was too variable to make any conclusions on. So, Leonel didn’t waste any brain power on things he knew he didn’t have enough knowledge to reach a logical conclusion with. 

Instead, Leonel stood and began to make his way to Valiant Hall. 

… 

”Hello, I’d like to take a look at the training rooms you have available.”

Leonel soon found himself on the second floor of Valiant Hall once again. In fact, he could even see some black belts getting ready to take their own Exams and the receptionist he spoke to was the very same dead-eyed man whose disposition hadn’t changed a single bit. 

Without a word, the man pushed a booklet to Leonel. 

With a quick look, Leonel realized that the training rooms of Valiant Hall were different from the ones you might find on Hero Peak. 

Rather than having specialized rooms, Valiant Hall had their training rooms separated into grades. The grades decided the intensity of the setting within the room, or more accurately, the range the settings could be used within. 

Though Valiant Hall was less specialized, and also more expensive to use, it made up for it in convenience. For the current Leonel, they were actually quite perfect. 

”I’ll take the S-grade Training Room, then.” Leonel decided. 

There were three grades below this. And, unfortunately, the grades above this all require elder or equivalent status. So, this was the best Leonel could do. 

The receptionist looked at Leonel. The prices were very detailed, so he didn’t believe that Leonel hadn’t seen them. A single day cost 1000 merit points, and that was only if you used the simplest functions of the room like weight training or target practice. If you planned on using anything more special than that, the points would quickly rack up. 

Yet, Leonel hadn’t hesitated. 

It seemed that this receptionist with a dead look was quite the recluse. There were very few who didn’t know of Leonel’s wealth by now. It was almost amusing that he was surprised. 

…

Leonel took a deep breath, standing at the very center of a spacious room. 

The S-grade Training Room looked almost identical to the Exam room. It, too, was constructed of large meter long and wide tiles, each of which was a perfect in between for white and black. And, it also happened to be in the shape of a perfect cube. 

The only different aesthetically was that the S-grade Training Room was a hundred cubic meters large while the exam room was only 20. 

Leonel waved his hand forward in a command gesture. Without much lag, a hovering control panel appeared before him, filling his eyes with fascinated lights. He was once again certain that this level of Force Crafting was beyond Valiant Heart. But, now that he knew that these things came from the Variant Zone, it was all easier to accept. 

’First things first, I need to work on my body’s flexibility. Let’s see…’

Leonel had already decided on this long ago. Having a Metal Body was great, but he had noticed during his run-in with the Oryx that his body movements were growing stiff. 

If things continued like this, his Lineage Factors would end up restraining one another rather than complimenting each other. 

His Snowy Star Owl Lineage Factor should have given him great speed. But, if his joints became a rate limiting factor, then what good would that do him?

The good news was that there should be a solution to this. The Morales Clan’s Metal Body, a Lineage Factor they relied upon to reach the top of the Dimensional Verse, wouldn’t have such a glaring weakness. At least not so early, anyway. 

The bad news, though, was that while Leonel’s father had left him any and all techniques he would ever need with regard to Force Crafting, when it came to matters of actual combat, he abandoned his son completely. 

Leonel could almost imagine his father cackling somewhere far off in the universe, his feet up on a table and a grin on his face, watching his only son struggle. 

Why his father had done this, Leonel had no idea. But, if there was anything his father was good at, it was being really stubborn about arbitrarily drawn lines. If he wasn’t like that, Leonel probably wouldn’t have spent his whole life thinking that his mother had abandoned them. 

Leonel still had a shred of luck left, though. At the very least, the dictionary didn’t leave him hanging this time. 

Dealing with the stiffness of his body was all about taking a pre-emptive approach. The immediate aftermath of a breakthrough in Metal Body would leave the metal Essence he had absorbed in a very malleable state. While it was like this, it was the best time to lay the foundation for a more flexible body. 

Thankfully, Leonel realized this issue early on, or else he might have great problems to deal with later down the line. 

Not wasting anymore time, Leonel opened the technique library. 

This was a second benefit of using a Training Room in Valiant Hall. Members of Valiant Hall had access to the techniques of all peaks as long as they paid for it with merit points. Though the price here was more expensive than if Leonel went to each individual Peak. It was once again matchless in convenience. 

Leonel soon found what he was looking for. And, not long later, he used the help of the dictionary to decide what the best choice was. However, his face couldn’t help but twist when he realized what it was. 

He really wanted to cry tears but had none to shed. His hand hovered above the screen, twitching. 

[108 Rising Suns]