The next day.
Amaniel entered into Xeron’s personal dimension with high spirits.
After yesterday’s ’victory’, he was sure he had changed Xeron’s perspective of him for the better. Well, probably from a weakling to a slightly shrewd weakling. But that was still better than nothing!
"You sure look energetic for someone who is about to suffer," Xeron remarked.
Amaniel smiled faintly. "I figured it’s better to accept reality and make the best out of it."
Xeron let out a dry, short laugh and hopped down from his floating seat, landing without making a single sound on the cracked earth.
"I like that attitude. But, let’s make one thing clear..."
He stopped a few paces away, his youthful face looking almost bored.
"I’m only going to help you with your Void mastery. As for your weapons, your elements, your lousy tricks, or whatever else you’ve got in that brain of yours, that’s on you. If you want to improve those, do it on your own. Clear?"
"...Understood."
"Good. Then let’s start."
"Yes... Teacher."
Xeron froze for a moment at the unexpected title. A flicker of something, maybe amusement, maybe annoyance, passed over his face before he shook it off with a dismissive wave.
"Don’t call me that."
"Then... what should I call you?"
"... Address me as the Emperor or Sir Emperor."
"...Understood."
Amaniel nodded and mentally prepared himself for the upcoming torture.
However, it never came.
Instead of the brutal beatdown he expected to get, he was forced to sit and listen to a lecture for ten hours.
Xeron taught him the basics of void. He spoke about the fundamental nature of Void, demonstrating techniques and explaining concepts that Amaniel had never properly grasped before.
Then came the practical demonstrations.
When Amaniel attempted to replicate what Xeron showed him and made mistakes, a swift flick to the forehead or a light kick to his shin served as immediate correction. Nothing life-threatening, but enough to make him think twice before repeating the same error.
In short, the first day went with mastering the fundamentals.
However, this ’peace’ was incredibly short-lived.
From the next day, they started applying that knowledge in practice.
Xeron stripped away everything Amaniel relied on. For example, during combat drills, every time Amaniel instinctively reached for his Ice affinity, Xeron’s palm would strike his ribs. When he channeled Darkness, a fist would connect with his jaw. Fire, water, and even his beloved daggers were all forbidden. The moment his hand moved toward a weapon, pain followed immediately.
"Void only," Xeron stated coldly. "Everything else is a crutch. Break the habit or break yourself trying."
The punishment wasn’t brutal in terms of lasting damage. Xeron’s healing light always mended the injuries afterward. But having years of muscle memory forcibly dismantled left Amaniel feeling raw and exposed.
By the third day, the dimension itself became an opponent.
Gravity started to shift without warning. The ground beneath his feet became unreliable, solid one moment and intangible the next. Distances felt fundamentally wrong, and light behaved strangely, bending at impossible angles.
Nothing about the environment was violent or overtly hostile. It was simply, persistently wrong.
Amaniel had to learn to function without trusting his physical senses alone. The training forced him to reach deeper, to perceive reality through different means.
The first week stripped him down completely.
Every old reflex, every familiar response, every instinctive reach for a comfortable technique had been systematically broken. By the seventh day, Amaniel felt hollowed out. His fighting style no longer existed. He stood at the edge of an abyss with nothing familiar to hold onto.
The second week introduced a new nightmare.
Void constructs began appearing during training sessions, shaped directly from Amaniel’s own power signature. They mimicked his exact fighting style, moved with his timing, anticipated his habits, and knew every pattern he unconsciously fell into.
The only way to win was to abandon everything they could predict. Since the constructs were born from his non-Void techniques, they had no framework to mimic Void itself. This forced Amaniel to actually rely on what Xeron had been teaching him.
The third week brought emotional pressure into the equation.
Xeron actively humiliated him during training, mocking every mistake, every hesitation, every moment of weakness.
"Is this really the best you can manage?"
"You’re too ugly. I wonder how you managed to seduce my aunt."
"Perhaps my niece would be safer with a trained dog as her guardian."
"You’re thinking too much. Or maybe not thinking at all. Hard to tell which is worse."
"Are you really trying? Because it feels like you’re forcing yourself to move to me."
And the purpose of these not-so-light insults became clear after the first few days. Amaniel couldn’t simply use Void when calm and centered. He needed to learn to wield it while frustrated, humiliated, and exhausted, because real battles would never wait for perfect mental clarity.
By the end of that week, he began to understand his emotions and how to control them.
The fourth week pushed everything further.
Xeron sealed away all light, plunging the entire dimension into suffocating blackness. In this environment, Amaniel was forced to navigate, react, and fight using only his developing connection to the Void.
At first, it was terrifying. Because he couldn’t use Pulse of the Unseen as well.
He stumbled, fell, and failed repeatedly.
But gradually, something shifted. His awareness expanded. He began to perceive the space around him differently, feeling the subtle shifts and distortions that his eyes could never catch. The emptiness stopped being an obstacle and started becoming something he could read.
By the end of the fourth week, navigating through absolute nothingness began to feel natural.
Throughout this entire month, Xeron never once offered verbal praise. There were no encouraging words, no reassurances that improvement was happening.
The only indication that Amaniel was advancing came in the form of escalating difficulty. When the training became harder, when Xeron introduced stranger challenges, when the Emperor himself began joining the combat drills more frequently, Amaniel learned to interpret these shifts as signs of approval.
And so the days blurred together in an endless cycle of breaking down and rebuilding, of pain and adaptation, of losing everything familiar and finding something new in the emptiness.
A month had passed in the outside world, but inside the time-dilated dimension, Amaniel had endured three full months of training.
And....
The only light in this void, the only warmth he could return to, the only reason he could push forward, was none other than his ’daughter’, Cathiel.