Maxwell looked around, trying to make sense of his situation. He could see birds flap their wings in the air, but he could barely call the motion flapping as they just swayed slowly.

  He could see Gendor’s eyes move slowly as he read his system notifications. He could see Bob in the middle of a cry, but he had no idea what the boy was shouting about.

  All he could hear was a slowly changing, drawn-out "a" sound. He also wished he wasn't looking at the boy, as he could see inside his mouth in slow motion as his face morphed to make the sound Maxwell couldn’t understand.

  He suddenly started to hear a very high-note sound, but luckily, this one was coming from inside his head. He could guess that this was a system notification.

  Soul Stat Reached 100

  Tutorial Mode For Spirituality Stat Terminated

  Tutorial Mode For Mind Stat Terminated.

  He could clearly see what the tutorial mode for the mind stat did, as his mind was working at its standard capacity now. While this would not cause any immediate problems for his physical well-being, it would definitely cause some problems for his mental well-being.

  He was much more concerned about what the tutorial mode of spirituality stat was in charge of as that could become dangerous fast.

  He activated his prima sense fully as he concentrated on himself. And he found what he was looking for pretty fast. Before this, he couldn’t control his mana as it traveled through his vessels like blood. Maxwell never even considered how it traveled through his body in these last hours because he was quite busy for obvious reasons.

  Now, he could see the mana not traveling as it should. It moved like a sluggish stream as it pushed on the walls of his vessels. If the feeling he got from his body was right, these vessels were not happy about being pushed around.

  He would probably have a stroke if he didn’t figure this out. The thing was that he had a fuck ton of mana to work on. He took a very very long deep breath to calm himself down but it only agitated him more as he waited for a cycle of breathing to end.

  Everything was stupidly slow in this world he found himself. He couldn’t help but be a little grateful for the mind tutorial termination. If it didn’t end, he would need to actively focus on achieving his current state, as it was pretty helpful for controlling mana.

  He quickly started guiding the mana through his vessels bit by it as some places were more problematic than others. Small vessels were overcrowded with mana as his body didn’t know where to direct the mana

  First, he started to fix the vessels in his brain, as he didn’t want to have a stroke while prioritizing elsewhere. With his mana control right now, it was unrealistic for him to control mana at a very microscopic level, but he focused on retracting the mana from the important organs.

  He could feel that there was a primary path for the mana to travel on. Right now, it seemed to think that his capillaries were very spacious, but he would need to change its idea if he didn’t want all of his tissues to explode.

  He slowly and carefully pulled the residual mana away from his brain little by little. He couldn’t tell how much time was passing but guessed it was not much as Bob and Gendor still hadn’t moved.

  Are they even slower than before? He thought, but he fought back against the desperation that came from that possibility. He would deal with his mind later.

  Surely enough, when he stabilized his brain, he found that the world was almost 2 times slower than before. Turns out your brain slowed when it was being pressured by countless mini mana vessels.

  Maxwell let out a maddeningly long sigh as he continued downward in his body, reorganizing mana. He checked his brain from time to time to make sure that there was no relapse but mana seemed to understand where it should travel after being set in a path once.

  He could hear a system notification coming, but the unending sound deafened him. He wished he could mute it, and he was surprised when it worked.

  Maybe I can tweak the fucking speed too. He thought, but that was something he would work on later.

  When he was done with all of the mana in his mana, he could feel little drops of sweat all over his body, traveling as adhesion dictated. He could clearly sense them coming out of his skin as they spread over it. He had many things to say to the system, none of which were pretty.

  He focused on the whole mana stream to see how it was moving. Apart from being a bit unrefined, it seemed to follow the right path. He tried to increase the speed of the mana as he felt that this might stabilize it. He was happy when he saw the mana move neatly along with his normal circulation.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  It was still far from perfect, but he suddenly had an idea. As he was fixing the circulation, he realized that the path mana and blood followed was the same. Maybe he could link them together for better circulation?

  I might as well try, he thought as he focused on the stream. He was not sure how he could feel his blood, though. He was a bit lost for a moment, but an idea came to him.

  Could it be so simple? He thought as he remembered how he infused blood affinity in his blood. At that time, he didn’t actively direct his blood affinity to his blood. Just infusing it inside the vessel in a general direction was enough for it to attach itself to his blood. Now, he planned to take advantage of that. He focused on his vessels as he tried to differentiate the blood affinity in his blood.

  Soon enough, he could sense it faintly outlining the blood in his body. Right now Maxwell didn’t have much mana inside his small blood vessels as he couldn’t control mana on a microscopic level. But he didn’t need to. Guide Mana was a skill different from regular manipulation.

  He concentrated as he activated Guide Mana and Soul’s Voice at the same time. He focused on the mana stream as he sent his intention to it. He could feel a weak channel form and he was embraced with a feeling of familiarity.

  He felt then that he was not communicating with the individual mana particles. This stream he was communicating with would exist as long as he existed. It actually felt like it existed even before the integration, as it was fundamental to his existence. It was the manifestation of spirituality. How much mana it contained was an entirely different matter.

  He kept sending his intent and was delighted to see mana change its form as it started spreading out. It filled his capillaries like before, but now it behaved like it knew how much those vessels could take.

  Maxwell, of course, did not delude himself into believing that it knew anything, at least not beyond following blood affinity mana. What Maxwell told the mana stream was simple. In other words, it could explained like this: Follow the blood affinity mana, keeping it in the center of the stream. Keep the mana stream size proportional to the blood mana quantity.

  In word form, it looked like something Mana wouldn’t be able to understand. Luckily, Maxwell could simply send abstract ideas using his Soul’s Voice. When one thinks about it, the whole point of his class was this principle. He didn’t need to control mana actively. He just needed it to understand where it should be.

  How does it know, though… Maxwell couldn’t put into words how he felt about this. For his method to work, mana needed to have at least a basic awareness. That, on the other hand, was not very realistic.

  More questions, even less answers… Maxwell thought. His mood became better when he checked the stream once more. It was completely aligned with the vessels throughout his body. Maxwell probably could map out his blood circulation just by feeling right now. And the best part? He didn’t even need to control the mana to achieve this.

  Now that he was done with his spirituality, he could actually deal with his almost broken mind. Even his migraine felt slow to his senses as he tried to find a way to get out of this situation. He already realized that the feeling of making things slower before was just a system assistance. He didn’t feel like being able to do that in reverse right now.

  I definitely don’t want to live like this. He thought as he saw Bob talking with him. This time, all he could hear was a consonant sound, and he couldn’t even say which one it was.

  Wait, what language is this? Maxwell suddenly thought. He was startled. Since coming to this world, he has never had any problems understanding people, but that used to be the case in Zephyr too because of the telepathy, so it never came to his mind that there were actually different languages.

  How do I even not think about this for a day? he thought, feeling like an idiot. Maybe the system inserted the language in his mind during transmigration, but that seemed idiotic. Languages had different thought patterns attached to them, so it shouldn’t be possible to translate them seamlessly.

  He focused on the language he had been speaking since coming here, thinking about the different moments they had on the last day. He was clearly speaking in his native tongue, Universal Zephyrian—at least that was its name after they united the world.

  I should probably think about this later, too. He thought, returning to his subject at hand. He was still stuck in this slow-motion world, after all. He brainstormed for some time, but every solution he could find led to turning himself into an idiot or limiting his mind somehow.

  He was unsure how he could accelerate his perception of time without actually limiting his mind's capacity.

  Wait. He was suddenly interrupted by a lightbulb going on his head. Wasn’t that the thing the system did before the tutorial was terminated? He was a bit too prideful to limit his mind actively, but the system didn’t care about his pride before he had 100 in his soul.

  Before, he could slow down time by removing that limiter in battle automatically because of the system, and just before this ordeal, he also realized that he could do it on command. So, the regular way of getting out of this situation was actually limiting the mind somehow.

  Maxwell really disliked that idea. He wanted his mind to be awake at all times. If he needed to awaken his mind whenever he needed it it would be more like a skill than an attribute.

  He decided to try something absurd, but he felt that it might work. He tried to remember the math he had learned in school in his previous life. He could still remember the general format, and that would be enough. Harder was better for him right now.

  He slowly started solving random equations he had made up in his mind. Slowly, he increased his focus on the subject. He could feel that he was solving the equations and making up new ones faster and faster.

  Quantifying how much of your mind you were using was a bit hard, but Maxwell had a very large mind to practice with at the moment. He didn’t need to solve the equations in high efficiency or even correctly. He just needed them to be there using some -or most in this case- of his mind, keeping it occupied.

  He started to feel the effects soon. As he increased the amount of his mind he was using, he focused on the feeling of equations being solved faster. He thought of himself as a bystander as equations were solved by someone else at faster and faster speeds.

  He couldn’t even differentiate between equations at some point, and he smiled. He probably created a new kind of mental disease. He couldn’t care less though as he opened his eyes he could hear the snores coming from Bob very clearly.