"Then, it's goodbye, for now," Swamp Dragon said after everyone talked about a couple more things.
"Yep," Manny said with a smile. "I still have to be a Rarity Hunter, but I'm pretty sure that I can handle it. It's just a new team."
Kyle nodded. "When we're all Crushers, we can probably choose to be in a team again."
Everyone said their goodbyes and split up.
As Kyle returned to his home gym, he thought about Swamp Dragon's power.
'It's actually crazy that Swamp Dragon grew this much. It's obvious that he's very talented with his Center and mind, and yet, he is also going to be a unique Primal. That's crazy. Was he always this talented?'
Kyle thought back to the time he had been in the Star Seeking with Swamp Dragon.
'Actually, no,' Kyle thought. 'He didn't even know the Law of Body back then. His Momentum had also been quite a bit weaker than mine.'
'Something has changed.'
After thinking about it, Kyle came to a possible explanation, but it sounded a bit unbelievable.
'Is it because of me?' he thought.
'Back then, he said he never went through a lot of pain while training, but after he saw me, he changed his approach. He became much more extreme in his training.'
'I also had to convince him a couple of times to enter some True Battles.'
'The additional effort he put in allowed him to become a Unique Transcendent.'
'Then, when he thought I had died, he started to enter battle much more frequently.'
Thinking about these things felt strange to Kyle.
'I admire Swamp Dragon's personality. He's sacrificing a lot for his own morals. He was willing to take a low-paying but dangerous job just so he could help the weaker people in the Supreme World.'
Kyle sighed. 'I can't do that. I'm a rat… or a weasel. Whatever that one guy said.'
'I couldn't risk my life for my moral beliefs.'
'I just want to survive and become stronger.'
'And yet, Swamp Dragon has changed his way of training because of me. It's almost like he admires me.'
Kyle snorted. 'Or, more precisely, he admires my power. He sees what I do to become stronger and takes inspiration from it.'
'Sadly, that doesn't work the other way around. I'm a weasel, and I will stay a weasel, even though I sometimes feel like a rat.'
At that point, Kyle thought about something.
'If Swamp Dragon keeps running after my power, he might go all the way… or die like me.'
Kyle became a bit nervous about his eventual betrayal in the future. If Swamp Dragon actually managed to keep up with Kyle, his problem wouldn't be solved.
'Just forget it! Just keep going!' he thought as he shook his head. 'Just gotta continue!'
'As long as I keep growing, everything will be fine!'
'Anyway, back to the entire wind thing. The chances are low that we will get another alert before our shift ends, but the chance is still there.'
Kyle returned to the wind tunnel and spent another five years in it.
As expected, he wasn't called for another Planet, and when he checked his Communicator, he saw that his shift had ended.
Even more, no new shift had been assigned to him.
Right now, there were no official appointments or deadlines.
'A bit less than 400 years are left until my fight, assuming the Chief Overseer was right with his suspicion.'
'This should be the perfect time to get the Law of Mind.'
Kyle left the wind tunnel and returned to his home gym.
Then, he opened the thick book.
He had only seen the warnings, but he had never seen the book's actual contents.
He still had no idea how this book could help him understand the Law of Mind.
Directly teaching someone a Law was very bad since it would cannibalize the experience gained by understanding the Law oneself.
If someone played a puzzle game with 50 levels and finished the first 30 puzzles by looking up the solutions, chances were low that they could suddenly solve the 31st puzzle without help.
In comparison, if they had solved the earlier puzzles themselves, the person would already have a strategy to solve future puzzles.
So, while it was technically possible to just directly explain how a Law worked to somebody, something like that was so bad that it bordered on illegal.
It increased someone's current power in exchange for future power.
There was no shortcut to supreme power. There were supplements and resources that made comprehending something easier, but in the end, someone had to comprehend everything oneself.
So, how could a book teach someone a Law without just directly explaining it to them?
It was just a book.
What could it do?
When Kyle opened the next page, he saw a simple set of instructions.
'There are 99 squares inside a grid. Each square has 99 smaller squares.'
Kyle blinked a couple of times in surprise.
'Are you serious?' he thought.
'Every line, column, and bigger square can only have one number between one and ninety-nine. Your goal is to fill out the entire grid.'
'Brah, no way!'
'This is just Sudoku!'
Kyle leafed through the book, and sure enough, every page contained a huge Sudoku grid.
'Sudoku can teach you Laws?!'
However, as Kyle kept reading, he saw a couple more rules that normal Sudoku didn't have.
'I am not allowed to take notes. I am not allowed to take any references as help. I have to solve everything in my head.'
'And if I make a mistake, I have to clean the entire page and start from the beginning again.'
Kyle went to the next page and saw a densely packed Sudoku grid.
99 by 99 squares.
As he saw the grid, his brain started hurting in anticipation of the stress it would be under.
'Fucking Sudoku man!'
'Yeah, well, if it helps, it helps.'
When Kyle looked at the grid, he could already see a couple of numbers he could put in.
Surprisingly, it only took Kyle a couple of seconds to fill in all the numbers, and he just looked at the page.
'Well, that was easy.'
He went to the next page and solved that one as well.
Kyle was progressing at a reasonable rate, and he even started having fun.
Within just ten minutes, he had gone through a third of the book.
'This can't be that easy, right?' he thought.
As he turned another page, he was not greeted with another grid but with more rules.
When he read the rules, he took a deep breath.
'Brah!'
'Now, I'm not even allowed to write my solution down?!'
'I have to solve the entire thing in my head and put in all the numbers within a single second!'
Naturally, this was not just a normal book.
There were subtle Formation Arrays inside the papers, and whenever Kyle solved a page, it became green.
Just as a test, Kyle put in one correct number on the next page and waited.
Sure enough, a second later, the page turned red for a moment, and the number Kyle had put in was deleted.
Kyle took another deep breath.
'Oh boy.'
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