The Place Where Everything Begins

Chapter 23 - The Two Diagrams

Not long after, when Jeremy had tried to search for his soul within the depth of his mind, he suddenly entered into his sea of consciousness.

It was quite an easy feat for him to access it because his sea of consciousness had already been formed ever since his breakthrough into an Apprentice Mage stage.

Concurrently, he was standing right in the middle of white space, an original shape, place, and structure of most people's sea of consciousness.

Its interior was completely white, with a seemingly infinite border distance away from him.

Jeremy could only see whiteness in every direction of his sight. The ceiling was white, his left side was white, his right side was also white, even the floor underneath his dashing eggs was white.

He couldn't even fathom that he was standing on a white floor or floating still in a white space.

It was just white...

Everything was white...

Seeing those sights, Jeremy suddenly closed his virtual eyes and imagined a scene from one of his countless memories. It was an explicit scene of a clear light blue sky with solid brown soil underneath. Then he thought about a pond of water in the middle of the land.

Afterward, he opened his eyes to see that everything was being depicted according to his imagination.

The sky was splendid blue...

The high-quality brown soil was astonishingly beautiful...

The moderate size pond was filled with transparent milky white water...

It was like he was in the middle of an unhot desert together with an oasis pond of water in the middle.

Except...

When he took a look around, he saw that the supposed unlimited white space, which should be able to generate an infinite area of land and sky, was changed with only a tiny circled enclosed part of around 10 acres into the said land and sky area.

As for the outside of the 10 acres area, they were still white, and it was clear that there was an invisible wall separating between the sea of consciousness area and the white space into a circle area.

That meant his sea of consciousness was only as big as this land and sky area, and the white space was still inaccessible to him at the moment.

But Jeremy never cared about that; he only took a look around briefly before focusing his sight on the center of the land, the 'pond'.

Right now, the pond of unknown water was situated around 20 meters away from him.

So, he strolled in the direction of the pond. Soon, he reached the edge of the pond. But he never stopped his footsteps at all, even after reaching the pond's edge, and without any hesitation, he took a step into the pond...

Step by step...

Until the unknown water submerged his entire body completely.

Then he closed his eyes and tried to recall every piece of information related to Enchantment.

Sometime later, a massive amount of information about Enchantment from his past life started resurfacing within his mind once again. It began with the knowledge from his acquaintances, books, then experiments, later ancient sites, and many more related knowledge came up, following after one another.

This information about Enchantment actually belonged to him since his past life. But because his current soul and mind were too weak to host all of the memory and information, it could only be sealed away within this murky white unknown water.

Why his mind and soul were weak, you asked?

Even though the former great sage had put forth one condition within the time-reversing spell, stating that his mind and soul must be unaffected by 'time' itself, still, they were eventually affected somehow by the laws imposed by the Universe.

As the side effects of casting a magic spell on the Universe's core forcefully, there tended to be some setbacks reflected back towards the caster himself. And the said setbacks were that his mind and soul were to be regressed back into their original ones within the said timeline.

Fortunately, his overall memory was unaffected by that in any way, but...

Unfortunately, his memory was too enormous for his own body, mind, and soul to bear. So, it could only be sealed within the deepest part of his soul, which could only be extracted by accessing his sea of consciousness via meditation.

Come back to the situation within his sea of consciousness...

As a matter of fact, the unknown water within the pond was acting as the inner layer of his sea of consciousness. Meanwhile, the land and sky were working as a middle layer, protecting his soul and mind. Lastly, the white space could be called by many names, but most people usually referred to it as an outer layer of soul and mind.

Right now, after drowning himself under the milky-white water...

One by one, the information and details about Enchantment reappeared within Jeremy's mind.

Following that, he discarded every other information unrelated to the second stage of Enchantment by simply willing it using his mind.

Another period had passed by, only a sizable part of knowledge remained inside his mind. Then he started to filter out every other Enchantment diagram that wasn't associated or was unusable with his current resources.

Afterward, only three diagrams, which had different synchronization rates with the various materials, remained inside his mind.

Still, Jeremy wasn't in a hurry. He kept those three diagrams inside his mind for the time being. Then he thought about the related runes for the three diagrams, and those runes must be highly compatible with the materials of the 'staff'.

After an unknown amount of time passed, another vast amount of information started to resurface within his mind once again. However, this time, its sheer amount was so much that Jeremy had a frown appeared on his forehead.

If someone were currently staying near his main body in the basement, they would have seen that Jeremy had several beads of sweat seeping out from his forehead and his back also drenched with sweat.

Not wanting to burden himself for long with the vast amount of Runeword knowledge, he started to filter it down by comparing them with the three diagrams to see whether they were compatible with one another or not.

Until only some odd thousands of runes remained inside his mind.

After that, he relaxed a bit and started calculating the synchronization rates of the three diagrams with runes and materials.

Sometime later, there were only two diagrams, and almost a thousand runes remained inside his mind.

The first diagram had a comprehensive success rate of 76% and a synchronization rate with the material and runes of around 82%.

Meanwhile, the second diagram had a 53% success rate and synchronization rate with the material and runes of around 94%.

It was clear that there were pros and cons to the two diagrams. If Jeremy wanted to risk it with the second diagram of 53% success rates, he would get a better staff out of it.

Still, it might fell because of its low success rate...

However, if he decided to play it safe with the first diagram, he would have had a higher chance to enchant the staff for his use successfully. But of course, with a tad bit lower quality than the second diagram.

Jeremy was thinking very seriously about the two diagrams...

Furthermore, time was never his ally in his current situation...

As Jeremy wouldn't be able to gather another set of materials and mana to enchant another staff if this one were to fail.

So...

Right now, Jeremy had to decide about which diagram he would use to create his 'staff'.

Then after some minutes passed by, Jeremy thought relievedly, 'It was not that hard to decide after all... Let's use the first diagram then.'

He only had one chance at it, after all...

After deciding to use the first diagram and its corresponding sets of Mana Runes to create the 'staff', Jeremy removed everything about the second diagram from his mind letting it submerge back into the milky white water.

'I'm feeling a bit lightheaded now. I should go back to the outside world for the time being.' Jeremy thought tiringly to himself after his memories about the second diagram got submerged into the water completely.

Then he closed his virtual eyes, trying to pull his consciousness back into his real body.

...

Soon, Jeremy, who had been closing his eyes while sitting cross-legged in meditation beside the leather doormat the entire time, suddenly opened his ice-cold eyes.

*Fwuuu...*

Jeremy exhaled lightly and thought to himself, 'This task has put quite a toll on my current sea of consciousness. I think I should take a short rest before proceeding with the Enchanting process then.'

After thinking so, Jeremy took out his phone from the right pants pocket. Then he looked at the time on the phone; he saw that it was showing 4:43 p.m., which was almost time for his dinner.

'Hmmm... only 3 minutes have passed by since I did the meditation to access into my sea of consciousness. After that, I spent around 2 minutes and a half to reach the white space; then I only stayed inside my sea of consciousness for around 30 or so seconds to filter my memory about Enchantment...'

Jeremy pondered to himself after seeing that he tried to access his sea of consciousness at around 4:40 p.m., and the time was 4:43 p.m. right now.

Then he thought further, 'I'm sure that I had stayed inside my sea of consciousness for more than 12 days... but the outside world's time had just passed by for only some odd 30 seconds...'

'If it were me in my past life, I should have done dozens of times better than this. The time passed by couldn't be more than 2 seconds at all. Still... this is an excellent start for me...'

Jeremy lightly smiled, then he stood up and walked back up the staircase into the living room. He wanted to chill for a bit with some animes before ordering McDonial for his dinner.

Currently, Jeremy was in a perfect mood...