He had seen and studied many bearers of the Elder Blood, and their characteristics were vastly different from Karl's.
Hen looked at his talented yet enigmatic student before him.
His heart was full of research enthusiasm, but a slight worry also arose.
The path Karl was on seemed a lonely and unknown one, never before explored by any other sorcerer.
And whether he, as a mentor, could provide the right guidance on this path left him feeling uncertain.
......
Time flew by in focused study, and Karl spent a fulfilling and productive half-month at the academy following Hen's teachings.
That day, the morning mist hadn't fully dissipated, and Karl was on the academy plains near the forest.
He took a deep breath and began testing his speed, the muscles in his legs tensing.
The ground suddenly blurred beneath his feet, the wind howled in his ears, and the trees turned into flowing green streaks.
He ran through the forest, and with a light touch of his foot on the ground, he could leap a considerable distance.
When he stopped, the soil beneath his feet was gouged out into two shallow trenches.
His breathing remained steady; he was indeed much faster than a cheetah, but far from supersonic.
Next, with the bio-field, he took a pebble and held it in his palm, squeezing hard. Stone fragments fell from between his fingers.
However, the part in contact with his palm remained intact; the bio-field could protect objects according to his will.
Karl picked up another dead branch. This time, he deliberately controlled the extension of the force field, and the dead branch snapped between his fingers; the force field could be properly controlled.
Then he thought about flight, but the test went poorly.
He concentrated on feeling gravity, visualizing it as a tangible entity, slowly rising from the ground, swaying dozens of meters above the earth.
He tried to propel flight with the force field, hovering forward, swaying faster than an ordinary person's run.
Maintaining this anti-gravity state was extremely exhausting, and soon he fell to the ground, leaving deep footprints in the mud.
"It seems the bio-field isn't strong enough yet..." Karl thought to himself.
Furthermore, there was Heat Vision: his gaze fixed on a nearby tree trunk, his vision gradually becoming transparent, and he could see the rotting wood texture inside the trunk.
Besides the moths gnawing at the internal tissue, he could also see snakes sleeping underground, rooted in caves.
His eyes turned lava-red, and a familiar burning sensation emanated from behind his eyes, trying to focus and release the heat.
ZING!! Two arm-thick lasers pierced through the tree trunk, and the line of sight cut through two more trees.
After a few seconds, the Heat Vision stopped, and the amount of solar energy in his body had decreased by a little over half.
"This state between perspective and burning is quite difficult to control precisely, and it consumes a lot of energy." Karl muttered to himself.
And Frozen Breath was simple; he walked to a puddle and exhaled into it.
A thin layer of ice immediately formed on the water's surface. He touched the ice with his fingertips, the estimated temperature was minus twenty or thirty degrees.
It was useful for slowing people down, but not enough to instantly freeze them into ice sculptures.
Then he heightened his hearing. The sounds of crows flapping their wings, the whispers of students in the academy castle, and even the conversations of villagers kilometers away poured into his ears simultaneously.
This time, he didn't feel the burning sensation he had when his ability first awakened.
Karl calmly filtered out the noise until he returned to normal hearing.
His other senses were no less acute. He could smell the rotting leaves in the soil and see every speck of dust floating in the air.
He could also taste the salt brought by the wind—from the Skellige fleet that had passed by two days ago.
Finally, there was Steel Body. He drew the steel sword he had taken out earlier and gently sliced his arm with it.
The blade and his skin produced a grating sound, sparks flew, but not a single white mark was left.
So Karl added a little more force.
TING! With a sound, the sword's blade suddenly broke, and fragments clattered to the ground.
Karl glanced at it; only a small half of the hilt remained, and the corners of his mouth twitched slightly as he tossed the hilt aside.
......
Hen's initial study plan for Karl was relatively relaxed.
The original plan was to teach Karl a new spell every two to three months, ensuring his foundation was solid.
Then he soon realized that his plan couldn't keep up with Karl's learning pace.
Especially after that first successful spell and the anomaly that accompanied Karl.
Karl's learning ability and memory seemed to have made a qualitative leap.
A book hundreds of pages long, filled with complex diagrams and profound theories, could take weeks for an ordinary student to read just once.
If you wanted to fully understand and memorize it, it usually took half a year or even longer.
Karl, on the other hand, could close the book in less than two minutes after quickly flipping through it.
He not only answered freely about the book's content but could also easily recite it backward from the last page...
This almost miraculous learning ability inevitably surprised even the well-informed Hen.
He stroked his beard and said, half emotionally, half self-deprecatingly: "I've lived for nearly five hundred years and have seen geniuses with strong memories."
"But I've never seen such a terrifying existence as you. Perhaps I've accepted a student who should only exist in mythological stories..."
And soon, Karl discovered that when mobilizing his own solar energy to cast spells,
those cumbersome incantation syllables and complex gesture instructions became completely unnecessary burdens.
As long as he clearly understood the energy construction pattern of a certain spell, he only needed to move the energy with his mind.
It could act according to the established path and instantly complete the construction and release of the spell—that is, instant casting.
Karl also told Hen about this. When he asked him to abandon the incantation and gesture, Hen's reaction was firmly opposed.
Hen frowned and warned in an unquestioning tone: "Nonsense! Karl, spells are a complex science."
"Incantations and gestures are the most stable and safe guidance methods, tested by predecessors over millennia."
"You are not skilled enough... If you rashly abandon the foundation, it's impossible to successfully cast the spell!"
While... Karl, neither incanting nor gesturing in front of Hen,
simply calmly raised his hand, and with a "poof," a fireball instantly condensed above his palm.
Then, with a slight movement of his mind, the fireball dispersed, and a miniature arc flashed again at his fingertips.
Seeing this, Hen's words abruptly stopped. He opened his mouth to look at Karl's relaxed demeanor.
In the end, he swallowed all the discouraging words and turned them into a long, mixed-feeling sigh.
Since then, he never again questioned Karl's "unconventional" casting method.
He turned to retrieve the theory on whether the study of dark energy matter could be mastered.
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