Chapter 303

“My strength… It’s increased again.”

Deep within the forests of Tenrou Island, Marshall was testing the results of his latest experiments.

There was no denying that the Curse of Ankhseram was a thoroughly miserable affliction.

It had forced him into isolation, made ordinary human relationships dangerously complicated, and threatened the lives of practically everyone he cared about.

But if he simply hated the curse because it caused him suffering and refused to acknowledge any of its potential benefits, wouldn’t that be equivalent to surrendering to it?

Marshall had no intention of admitting defeat so easily.

Since he couldn’t remove the curse or fully control it yet, he might as well figure out how to make the most of what it offered.

For example, he was now effectively immortal.

That meant he could afford to conduct experiments on himself that would previously have been far too dangerous to attempt.

As long as the curse continued restoring his damaged body, even injuries that would ordinarily be fatal were no longer necessarily a serious obstacle.

If he couldn’t die, why not push himself right up to the limit?

And then keep pushing.

The most obvious place to begin was with his physical-conditioning Magic.

Previously, Marshall had used these spells rather conservatively.

After all, the human body could only withstand so much punishment, and overexerting himself could easily cause permanent injuries.

Of course, the more important reason was that he was afraid of pain.

He had never been particularly enthusiastic about subjecting himself to unnecessary suffering.

But things were different now.

After witnessing Acnologia’s overwhelming strength, Marshall understood that his previous training methods simply weren’t going to be enough.

If he continued improving at a comfortable pace, the day might come when he returned to his original timeline only to discover that the Black Dragon could still swallow him whole without the slightest difficulty.

That was not a future he wanted to experience.

The threat of Acnologia forced Marshall to consider far more aggressive methods of strengthening himself.

He began by raising the intensity of his physical-conditioning spells to their absolute maximum.

Each activation subjected his entire body to such tremendous force that his muscles and bones were practically crushed throughout.

Under normal circumstances, the resulting injuries would have been catastrophic, but the enormous reserves of vitality provided by the Curse of Ankhseram immediately began repairing the damage.

His flesh regenerated, his bones reconstructed themselves, and his body gradually adapted to the terrible forces being imposed upon it.

The process resembled repeatedly breaking something apart and rebuilding it into a stronger version of itself.

And the results were extraordinary.

A single session of this extreme training produced improvements comparable to an entire month of his previous physical-conditioning routine.

Unfortunately, there was one rather significant drawback.

It hurt like absolute hell.

Whenever Marshall activated the spell at full intensity, the pain was so overwhelming that he inevitably lost consciousness.

By the time he woke up, the curse would already have repaired his body, leaving him physically intact and noticeably stronger than before.

The surrounding environment, however, wasn’t nearly so fortunate.

Every time Marshall subjected himself to this kind of torture, the Curse of Ankhseram would erupt while he was unconscious, stripping the life from the surrounding area.

That particular reaction didn’t surprise him.

After all, he’d recently begun to suspect that the curse responded to powerful desires, and the instinctive urge to survive was one of the most fundamental desires any living creature possessed.

When his body was being crushed and desperately attempting to remain alive, it made sense that the curse would react.

What Marshall hadn’t anticipated was another consequence of his increasingly extreme training.

Although his physical strength was improving dramatically, his appearance wasn’t changing at all.

He still possessed the body of a fourteen-year-old boy, and even his muscle definition showed very little visible development.

Apparently, the Curse of Ankhseram had fixed his physical appearance at the moment he received it.

No matter how extensively his muscles, bones, and internal structures changed, the curse continued restoring his outward form to the same youthful state.

That led Marshall to an extremely unpleasant realization.

He might be stuck looking like a teenager for the rest of his life.

He would never naturally grow any taller.

Of course, he could still use Transformation Magic to alter his appearance whenever he wanted, but that wouldn’t change his actual body. Beneath the spell, he would remain exactly as he was now.

The discovery gave Marshall yet another reason to hate Ankhseram.

He silently swore that if he ever got the opportunity, he would personally find that damned god and beat the living hell out of him.

Still, that was a problem for another day.

Compared with the immediate threat of Acnologia, remaining a little shorter than he’d hoped was a relatively minor inconvenience.

His current priority was increasing his strength as quickly as possible.

Fourteen years might sound like an enormous amount of time, but Marshall knew better than to underestimate what he was up against.

Acnologia had lived for centuries, and compared with the Black Dragon’s accumulated power, another decade or two of ordinary training hardly seemed worth mentioning.

So Marshall began looking for ways to make his already brutal training even more effective.

Eventually, he came up with another thoroughly insane idea.

He called it his Deep-Sea Training Method.

The premise was straightforward.

Marshall would descend approximately ten kilometers beneath the ocean’s surface and activate his physical-conditioning Magic at maximum intensity.

At that depth, the crushing pressure of the ocean would become an additional source of resistance, forcing his body to endure both the external pressure of the deep sea and the destructive force of his own spells.

For an ordinary person, attempting something like that would be suicide.

Even most powerful Mages would have difficulty surviving such conditions without specialized protection, let alone deliberately using them as part of a physical training program.

But Marshall was no longer an ordinary person.

He was an immortal cursed by Ankhseram, and his body possessed extraordinary regenerative abilities.

That meant he could attempt a method of training that practically nobody else in the world could survive.

And the results were astonishing.

Marshall could practically feel his stamina and physical strength increasing from one session to the next.

His progress was so rapid that it seemed almost unbelievable, even to someone accustomed to the extraordinary advantages provided by his abilities.

At this rate, he began to suspect that his physical capabilities might eventually reach a level comparable to his Magic Power.

Just imagining the possibilities was enough to make him excited.

What would happen if he could throw an ordinary punch with physical force equivalent to 100,000 Magic Power?

Against an opponent without exceptional physical defenses, that would be a terrifying attack.

Apart from dragons and a handful of similarly monstrous beings, who could possibly withstand something like that?

The more Marshall considered the matter, the more convinced he became that focusing on his body was the correct approach.

After all, Acnologia possessed extraordinary resistance to Magic.

Simply developing more powerful spells wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem if those spells couldn’t properly affect the Black Dragon in the first place.

Physical attacks, on the other hand, were another matter.

Instead of relying entirely on magical techniques, Marshall might have a better chance by developing enough raw physical strength to fight Acnologia directly.

That would at least give him an alternative when his Magic proved ineffective.

And for that purpose, the deep ocean was an almost perfect training environment.

The pressure was enormous, there was nobody around to interrupt him, and he could push himself as hard as he wanted without worrying about accidentally injuring his friends.

Even if the Curse of Ankhseram erupted, there was no human settlement nearby for it to devastate.

The only problem was that the training consumed an extraordinary amount of vitality.

Marshall could clearly sense that whenever he trained in the deep ocean, the Life Points stored within his First Origin were depleted at a much faster rate than usual.

The constant destruction and regeneration of his body placed an enormous burden on those reserves, forcing the curse to compensate for the energy being consumed.

Consequently, the more aggressively he trained, the more frequently the curse erupted.

But Marshall soon realized that this drawback could also become an advantage.

Every outbreak gave him another opportunity to study how the Curse of Ankhseram actually functioned.

Whenever he sensed the curse beginning to activate, he concentrated on tracing the movement of its power, attempting to understand the precise process through which it extracted vitality from nearby living creatures.

He paid particular attention to the interaction between his First Origin and the Life Points being drawn into it.

Previously, outbreaks had been irregular and difficult to observe under controlled conditions.

Now, however, his extreme training was provoking them frequently enough that he could study the process again and again.

With each observation, his understanding of the curse’s life-draining mechanism deepened a little further.

And the more he understood, the more plausible it seemed that he might eventually learn to control the phenomenon himself.

The entire arrangement gradually developed into an extremely productive cycle.

Marshall trained his body until it sustained catastrophic damage.

The curse then repaired him, consuming stored vitality in the process and triggering further outbreaks.

Those outbreaks gave him additional opportunities to study its mechanisms, while the regeneration itself allowed him to resume training with a stronger body.

Physical development and magical research were effectively reinforcing each other.

For the first time in quite a while, Marshall felt that practically every day was bringing him closer to his goals.

Sometimes, after spending several consecutive days training beneath the ocean, he found it difficult to adjust when he finally returned to land.

The sensation was similar to removing an enormous amount of weight after training under heavy resistance.

Without the crushing pressure of the deep sea constantly restricting his movements, his body suddenly felt almost absurdly powerful.

Unfortunately, that sometimes made it difficult to control his strength.

Marshall would reach out to pick something up, only to discover that he’d crushed the object in his hand without intending to.

Even relatively hard materials could crumble beneath his fingers if he wasn’t paying attention.

It was becoming increasingly obvious that his body was moving beyond ordinary human limitations.

In fact, Marshall sometimes felt as though he was gradually becoming less and less human.

But he didn’t particularly care.

As long as he continued growing stronger, he could live with the changes.

Besides, between his immortality, his artificial life creations, and the enormous variety of Magic he’d mastered, he had already stopped resembling an ordinary human being quite some time ago.

While Marshall was spending most of his time training beneath the ocean, Mavis and Zera continued visiting his house whenever they had the opportunity.

The two girls were certainly charming in their own ways, but Marshall was now so thoroughly absorbed in his research and physical training that he rarely had time to entertain them.

He had also stopped using his Thought Projection to divide his attention between multiple activities.

Normally, that would have been a convenient solution.

He could have left a Thought Projection at home to handle visitors while his real body continued training elsewhere.

Unfortunately, his Thought Projections were also capable of triggering the Curse of Ankhseram.

That made using them more dangerous than helpful, so he’d decided to stop relying on them altogether.

As a result, Mavis and Zera rarely found Marshall at home.

Most of the time, the only person waiting for them was 2B, his mechanical maid, who remained diligently occupied with cleaning, cooking, and maintaining the house.

Strangely enough, Marshall’s frequent absence didn’t discourage the girls.

If anything, they began visiting even more often.

From their perspective, Marshall was an extraordinary person who had suddenly appeared on Tenrou Island without warning.

He was mysterious, powerful, and knowledgeable about all sorts of things neither of them had ever encountered before.

Despite possessing such remarkable abilities, he didn’t demand anything from them, and whenever he was available, he generally treated them with kindness.

It certainly didn’t hurt that he was also very handsome.

Both girls genuinely enjoyed spending time with him.

If Marshall wasn’t home, they would simply wait for a while, hoping he might return before they had to leave.

On the rare occasions when they happened to arrive just as he came back from training, the encounter was enough to put them in a wonderful mood for the rest of the day.

Children could be remarkably easy to please.

Eventually, Mavis began bringing some of her books over to Marshall’s house so she could read while waiting for him.

Zera occasionally joined 2B in doing the household chores, partly because she was bored and partly because she still wanted to be useful.

After all, there wasn’t much else for either girl to do.

They’d already spent years exploring practically every corner of Tenrou Island, and by now, the island held very few surprises for them.

Marshall was the only genuinely new and interesting thing to have entered their lives in a long time.

Thinking about it, Marshall finally understood how Mavis had managed to memorize the contents of so many magical books despite being so young.

The poor girl had simply possessed an extraordinary amount of free time.

Seeing how bored the two of them were, Marshall eventually decided to make them a chess set.

It was a simple enough project for someone with his abilities, and he figured it might give them something entertaining to do while he was away.

The result exceeded his expectations.

Mavis was absolutely fascinated.

She had never played a strategy game quite like it before, and the combination of planning, predicting an opponent’s moves, and finding clever ways to win immediately captured her attention.

For a while, she seemed perfectly content to spend hours playing chess with Zera.

Unfortunately, that enthusiasm didn’t last.

The problem wasn’t that Mavis had grown tired of the game itself.

It was that Zera was absolutely terrible at it.

No matter how many times they played, Mavis kept winning, and eventually she found it difficult to enjoy a competition in which her opponent presented almost no challenge.

So she started pestering Marshall to play against her instead.

Naturally, Marshall didn’t have the time to spend hours sitting around playing chess with an exceptionally clever little girl.

Rather than become her permanent opponent, he taught Mavis several additional board and card games, hoping the variety would keep her occupied.

That solved one problem but created another.

Zera was not nearly as quick-thinking as Mavis, especially when it came to games requiring elaborate strategies or careful calculations.

Whenever the two played together, Mavis inevitably found some clever way to outmaneuver her, leaving Zera feeling thoroughly defeated.

After suffering one embarrassing loss after another, Zera eventually developed an intense dislike of practically anything involving cards or chess pieces.

She began wishing Marshall would teach her some genuinely powerful Magic instead.

Ideally, something that would finally let her get the better of Mavis for once.

The ordinary Fire Magic she’d been learning simply wasn’t impressive enough, and it wasn’t particularly useful for settling their little competitions either.

Consequently, Marshall’s return home after a long day of training usually followed a remarkably predictable pattern.

“Marshall, teach me! Teach me! I want to play a new game!”

“Marshall, please! I want to learn some new Magic!”

The two girls would immediately surround him, each making her own demands and refusing to leave him alone until he paid attention.

For Marshall, who had usually just spent hours having his muscles and bones crushed beneath the ocean, the experience was almost comically exhausting.

He would return home after subjecting himself to unimaginable physical punishment, only to discover that his evening had been reserved for an entirely different form of torture.

First his body suffered.

Then his patience was put to the test.

Well, perhaps torture was a little excessive.

Mavis and Zera were both sweet children, and their enthusiasm was usually rather endearing.

Marshall couldn’t honestly claim that spending time with them was unpleasant.

Nevertheless, he was beginning to think he should reduce his involvement with the people of this era.

After all, he had traveled into the past to train and eventually return to his own time, not to become permanently entangled in the lives of people who belonged to history.