“All right!”
I shouted with jubilation.
I can win… I can win!
If I had this much time, I would definitely be able to defeat Dodriel, no matter how much of a prodigy he was!
“I can’t believe it. He was actually telling the truth.”
I would have to thank the Time Hermit as soon as I got out of here.
“I can’t just stand around!”
Drawing my sword, I began swinging right away. Time tended to move faster than one might have expected. I was sure one hundred million years would pass in no time.
I’ve been given a huge opportunity. I can’t waste a single second!
After that, I devoted myself fully to wielding my blade and didn’t look at the clock again until my stomach gave a massive growl.
“Huh, it’s already been this long?”
I looked at the clock in the sky to see that twenty hours had already passed. Given the absence of the sun, it was a bit hard to tell the time here.
“All right, might as well go find some food.”
Taking a break from practicing, I entered the large white house in front of me.
“Wow, it’s way bigger on the inside!”
Not only was it significantly more spacious than my mom’s house and the dorm where I lived now, but it was also tremendously clean. There wasn’t a single speck of dust in the place, as though it were cleaned every single day.
“Hmm, where was the food again?”
According to the Time Hermit, a magical storehouse produced an endless supply of food in this world.
I searched the house and quickly found a giant refrigerator in the kitchen. I opened the large double doors.
“Huh?!”
Meat, vegetables, fish, milk… The fridge was packed tight with every conceivable kind of ingredient. I grabbed a tomato that was directly in front of me, wiped it gently with my clothes, and sank my teeth into it.
“…! Th-that’s delicious…!”
It was as fresh and juicy as if it had been picked that morning. The sweet taste filled my mouth.
Next, I ate some dried meat and vegetables that didn’t require any preparation and headed right for the bathroom.
“It’s huge…!”
The bathtub was ten times bigger than I expected. I quickly got in.
“Ahh, the water feels so good…”
Even though I didn’t adjust it at all, it was somehow the perfect temperature. Neither too hot nor too cool—it was perfectly warm. The muscles throughout my body slowly relaxed.
After my bath, I got ready to sleep and headed for my bedroom. Additionally, I glimpsed what looked like a library on the way there, but I passed by it without stopping. I wasn’t going to spend my time on anything other than training. That level of focus would cause one hundred million years to pass by in a flash.
“So sooooft…”
The bed in my bedroom was spacious and otherworldly soft. My body sank into the plush mattress.
“This is incredible,” I muttered to myself while wrapped in the fluffy, warm comforter.
I had delicious food, a relaxing bath, and a soft bed. And more than anything, I had one hundred million years. Nothing could beat this. This was the best environment I could have asked for.
“Heh-heh, I’ll train for the full one hundred million years. Then I’ll surely become an amazing swordsman…”
Filled with great hope and ambition, I slowly drifted off to sleep.
Ten years had already passed since I’d come to this world. By honing my skills with the blade every day during that time, I came to grasp the essence of swordcraft.
I wonder if I can consider this optimized yet…
I knew the best timing for both when to put force behind my sword and when to let up during a downward vertical strike. This wasn’t vague intuition—I had come to completely internalize it.
One hundred years later.
By this time, I had learned a great many moves. For example…
“First Style—Flying Shadow!”
…I’d even mastered a projectile slash attack.
I’d been trying to name the various moves I devised. It felt as though I’d become the founder of a new school of swordcraft. This was a blast.
One thousand years later.
…I’d gotten a bit tired. Probably more mentally than physically.
I was repeating the same thing day in, day out. First, I would practice, then eat, then sleep. That was all I had done for an entire millennium. My days were dull and monotonous, with zero new stimulation. I just did the same thing over, and over, and over again. This lifestyle was beginning to wear on my mind.
One day, I decided to take a walk as a little diversion and quickly discovered that this world was much smaller than I had assumed.
I concluded that it must be shaped like a small sphere. If I left the house and walked straight, it didn’t take long to end up at the back of my house. This world was tiny—even smaller than the schoolyard at Grand Swordcraft Academy. I suppose this was the first time I’d felt lonely since arriving.
“I wonder if Mom is doing okay…”
I spent that day swinging my sword as well.
Ten thousand years later.
Humans being the strange creatures that they are, I eventually fully adapted to my new environment.
Thinking back on it, things were toughest around the five thousandth year.
At that time, all the food I would eat—meat, fish, vegetables, you name it—had come to taste like flavorless rubber. When greeting my doorknob had become part of my daily routine, I’d really started to worry that I was spiraling.
However, I had been able to overcome that crisis surprisingly easily. The moment that I internalized living in total solitude with no people around as “normal,” my mind was set totally at ease. Nobody found it weird that humans couldn’t fly through the sky. Since we didn’t have wings like birds, that was merely common sense. So if you could accept living in solitude as “normal,” then it would simply become another part of your everyday routine and cease to bother you.