Time Twister

Xander celebrated his 7th birthday the month after new year's, and began preparing for the college entrance examination.

He wasn't lazy in the past few months; he managed to breakthrough to Elite cla.s.s and managed to climb to Elite-2. However, his magical fluctuations only showed he was Mundane-9, a side abiity of [Absolute Defense]. His magical fluctuations could be disguised.

The astonis.h.i.+ng speed his magic cultivation was growing surprised, relieved and confused his parents, as it seems teaching magic and science at the same time to Xander was the right thing to do. They were confused because they felt that the strength and nimbleness Xander had was way lower than others at Mundane-9.

Some of their old friends hypothesized that it was possible for their son to have a 5-elemental body, a rare physique among magicians. Having this body means that the owner could control and manipulate all 5-elements and their derivatives, but the body had to overcompensate to handle all these elements, causing lower strength and nimbleness.

Xander, upon hearing this, just smiled and continued to busy himself. He knew about his abilities and true strength.

For the college entrance examination, colleges all over the world had a standard 2-phase testing: Magical and Scientific Testing.

Other specialized or renowned universities may have extra tests, but most of the time these tests were specialized forms of the 2 phases.

For example, the university Xander was applying to, Grand Hyatt University in Callows City, had 3 additional tests focusing on students applying for Physics, Biotechnology and Mathematics, but these tests were integrated in the scientific testing. The additional tests would measure various components of the student's talent and apt.i.tude for learning of the subject.

What worries him is the magical testing. He wonders whether or not his true abilities would be detected by whatever measuring device or technique they use.

And if it was revealed... It would be a problem for him to survive. Although there are laws to protect the people, in this world, based on its historical trend, relies heavily on the idea, "Might is right."

Those in power would rather become more powerful and would not hesitate to step on others to reach their goals. Although he could handle anyone below the Mythic level, what if they send someone stronger? And someone else?

Xander didn't like that, not one bit. He wanted to be the one who reaches their goal because of their own hardwork, whether it be forging connections, or forging ahead against all odds.

Xander shook his head off of these thoughts and began to practice magic once more.

He decided this time to practice on replicating items, as well as banis.h.i.+ng them.

After a few hundreds of trials and errors, Xander was able to create 2 new spells, namely [s.p.a.ce Crush] and [Temporal replication]. This time, the two spells were Advanced magic spells.

First, [s.p.a.ce Crush] basically causes an object in a given s.p.a.ce coordinate to implode to its smallest, concentrated level possible to s.p.a.ce. Essentially, this leads to the ma.s.s of the object becoming insanely large due to the compression, leading to an exponential increase of gravitational power. This causes the object's

[Temporal replication] allowed Xander on the other hand to replicate anything that doesn't have a so-called 'soul'. That involves common plants, animals, inert and active materials, etc. This spell was derived from [Absolute Time].

Basically anything that he needed to accomplish his plan of investing for the future. Money really is an aspect of life that is always needed to move forward at the start.

With that in mind he opened bank accounts in several large banks, banks that he knew would still be present 1000-2000 years from now.

He began to acc.u.mulate hard currency, such as minerals and gold, and began to replicate them, and sell them in different gold and jewelry stores. However, he didn't stop there. He had gotten some rare materials and herbs from his mother's collection; he also began replicating them.

Sadly there wasn't any sort of universal currency system that was in place yet, but seeing into the future, he realized that there will be in the next 2500 years, rapidly devaluing the price of Eta currency, the currency of the country where Xander is.

He managed to gain a total of 50,000,000 Etas from the selling of gold and rare materials, a hefty sum given that he was just 7 years of age, and deposited it with a compounded interest rate of 2.5% for 2000 years. He made several ways methods to access the account in the future, making sure only he can access the account once he travels to the future.

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Time pa.s.sed and it was already May. The examination date was 1 week from the start of May, while college begins in August.

Xander was not studying for exams, but rather improving his magic control. He had already studied for all the possible topics that may appear, as well as prepared for practical examinations that may occur.

Right now, he was trying to breakthrough to Elite-3.

As he sat inside the Meditation room, he furiously gathered the magic energy in the surroundings before compressing it within him, continuously folding and compressing, until it was in a shape of a small seed.

After 2 hours, he finally had results, with the small seed joining the other 2 seeds in rotating within his mind s.p.a.ce.

Finally, he has reached Elite-3.

For the following week, all Xander did was consolidate his power and continously practiced, making the seeds larger and larger. If the seeds were taken out from his body, it would have the circ.u.mference twice bigger than a basketball.

Now, since he was already an Elite-3, he could already choose 3 magic skills from any magical branch that was within Elite rank.

The Mundane stage just gave everyone a foundation of manipulating magic energy from the environment and into the body, strengthening it and shaping its magical reserves. It didn't give anyone the capacity to use magic skills, but enhanced their affinity with them in preparation. Basically, besides the luck attribute, which was fixed at birth, everything else amplified by magic cultivation, slowly and steady.

For his 3 skills, he selected [Void wind], [Golden Light] and [5 elements Foundation] after a long period of scanning different skills available for public and restricted use. After all, with the system, no database is safe.

[Void Wind]: Excite the elements of the void, giving your magical energy properties of the void: silent, empty and hidden.

[Golden Light]: Create an orb of light. This...o...b..of light can morph and be manipulated within the imagination and magical reserve of the caster. There is no limit to the amount of orbs created.

[5-elements foundation]: Increases the affinity of the caster to the 5-elements, allowing one to cast spells from the 5-elements series. The strength and quality of the spell depends on the magical reserve and own comprehension of the caster.

Xander continued to refine his control and practice with these magics for the remaining week. Of course, with the help of his time and s.p.a.ce magic, he was able to practice for a long period of time mastering these skills, allowing him to be ahead of his peers.

Within that time frame, he began experimenting on rapidly s.h.i.+fting elements from one to the other, as well as transforming one element to the other, like fire to ice, ice to water, water to earth/metal, then to wood, then wood to air, then air to lightning, etc. This continued on with Xander being able to use the secondary and tertiary elements under the 5-elements series.

Afterwards, he tested the limits of the [Golden Light] spell; and lo and behold, even after summoning more than 10000 orbs of light, he could still continue to summon them. He began playing around with them, making the lights focused, then forcing them to move nearly at the speed of light. He then checked if he could convert the orbs of light into darkness element, since light and darkness were a derivative as well; he succeeded after 300 tries. He began imbuing his spells with the characteristics of the void: silent, hidden, and deadly.

After a few days, he could practically apply all his current spells without any elemental/physical disturbance or warning to the target, adding another layer of lethality. Within these few days, he also practiced simultaneous multiple casting, and he could cast around 20 spells per second.

He tried it on a testing dummy in a private room located in the magic training gym just a few blocks down his parents' house.

Immediately, he began casting myriad of 5-elemental spells and derivatives, and after a second, the testing dummy was gone, with smoke surrounding the area of the dummy. He checked the power of the attack, and saw that it was categorized above Master Cla.s.s, meaning it was either half-step to legendary or already at the legendary cla.s.s kind of strength.

Pity the gym testing dummy only manages to test up to Master Cla.s.s; if Xander wanted to check the actual power, he would have to ask for some of the gadgets his mom had in her laboratory.

Day 134, 2057.

The sun was brightly s.h.i.+ning outside, waking Xander up.

The exam was finally starting.