Second Time

Chapter 79 - Seclusion

The five years passed quickly for Shao Yue.

In the past, she had identified how time sped up and slowed down randomly within the world. Typically, nobody would notice, as it affected everyone equally. Only someone who cultivated the Dao of Time would notice the strange fluctuations.

Shao Yue spent the five years studying those fluctuations. She tried to learn how to control them, how to increase or decrease the speed of time's flow. She felt like she made good progress, but whenever she peeked into the river of time, she didn't notice her thread changing at all relative to the others.

The timer array concluded, waking her up from her meditation. She stretched her body.

"Well, I'm getting closer, I think."

She hadn't expected too much from her period of seclusion, so she wasn't disappointed with the lack of results. She took a moment to organize her thoughts, then emerged and swept her divine sense around to check on things.

Everyone still seemed to be working hard, Shenyu aside. Xiao Shi'er hadn't broken through to the Heavenly Realm, which surprised Shao Yue.

She headed to the bedroom and stepped inside. "Mind if I join you?"

"Eh? Yue?"

Cai Fei sat up, her face flushed, panting. Hu'er glanced back over her shoulder. Both of them had confused expressions.

"Did something go wrong?" Cai Fei asked. "Were we being too loud? Why are you out so soon?"

"What do you mean? It's been five years."

"No, it hasn't even been three." Cai Fei looked to Hu'er. "Right?"

Hu'er nodded. "Right. Thirty-two moons."

Shao Yue cast a suspicious glance towards Cai Fei. "You didn't make the array shorter, did you?"

"Of course not!"

Shao Yue's eyes sparkled. "Then, it seems I had success after all! I'll go back to meditating, you'll have to notify me when the five years end."

"Ah, sure."

"But, since I'm already out, there's no harm in playing a bit..."

After getting her fill of Cai Fei, she returned to the meditation chamber and resumed her seclusion.

She focused on speeding up the flow of time as much as possible. If time flowed ten times faster in her meditation chamber than outside, then that would let her spend ten years meditating while only a year passed outside.

She didn't have a good understanding of what flows correlated with what increases. She couldn't specifically increase the flow of time by five times, for example. She could only recognize "faster" and "slower."

Controlling time didn't come freely. She had to expend her qi to do it, but she had a lot of spirit stones. She surrounded herself with dozens of high-grade spirit stones to keep her energy levels high.

Her learnings fed into each other. The faster speed of time gave her more time to learn how to make it go even faster, giving her even more time.

Once she reached a wall where she couldn't increase the speed by much, she turned her attention to other aspects of the Dao of Time.

Like that, another two years passed on the outside, though how many years passed for Shao Yue was hard to say.

Cai Fei knocked on the door and sent her divine sense in. "Yue, it's been five years now."