"Fatima?" Lloyd exclaimed in surprise, something he himself didn't understand since the chances of her going to the military academy were high.
After all, Mr. Khan, the man who had adopted her, was a military man and a general in the army.
"What, didn't expect me here?" Fatime asked with a little bit of pride in her voice, as if the memories of her trial had completely disappeared, not that Lloyd was even aware of her trials.
"No... I should have seen it coming." Lloyd shrugged before Fatima shoved him over and sat right next to him.
Everyone on the table took a quick scan of her core and body cultivation and widened their eyes.
While some widened their eyes because they didn't expect someone like Lloyd to know someone like Fatima, others were simply surprised to see someone as strong as she sit with them to eat rather than mock them for their weakness.
"You're a half-step?" Lloyd asked with a tinge of surprise.
"Yep. One more shove and I'll be in the X class." She grinned.
"How!?" Lloyd asked, simply shocked that she could reach the half-step second commandment in such a short time.
"Me, Mr. Khan, and a few of my siblings went into one of our privately owned dungeons and trained there for about two years.
But you're one to talk. I expected you to at least be in A Group, but with that commandment, there's no way you're not in D Group." She spoke with disappointment laced in her voice.
"Eh... I had a few problems to deal with." Lloyd smiled, and Fatima knew exactly what he meant since she had asked about him after she had come back from the dungeon.
"Yeah. I was a little worried you might have died after, you know..." She narrowed her eyes, not knowing if the people he was sitting with knew about the dungeon break he was a part of.
"I think you expected a little too much from this bastard. He's a weakling. I don't even know how he got into our class." Haley sneered.
"We're in the C group by the way." Jay sighed at Haley's rudeness and shook Fatima's hand before introducing everyone to her.
"Lloyd doesn't usually sit with us because he's a workaholic who forgets to eat and sleep. I had to drag him here today." Jay sighed like an exhausted single mother of 10.
"So you're Fatima Khan? I'm assuming you're one of Mr. Khan's adopted children." Luna asked with the same stoic expression as always.
"Yep. He's adopted many kids without homes, so we're more like an orphanage than a family." Fatima joked.
"What's the S group like?" Lloyd asked after everyone finished laughing.
"Eh. There's only one class, and there are only about 50 of us in that class. Most of them are kids from higher families, some are military-born kids, and very few of them are extremely talented kids from any other social class." She shrugged.
They continued to talk like this for a while as they ate. Lloyd and Fatima caught up pretty quickly since they couldn't talk about the dungeon right in front of the others, but they made sure to exchange contact details before leaving to do whatever they were going to do that day.
Lloyd left for the library like always, while the rest had fun going to parties, drinking quite irresponsibly, or even sparring with each other for fun.
People in this day and age no longer had time for regular sports. Sure, some sports based themselves around using their abilities, elemental affinities, and classes to win a game, but all the sports people needed now were sparring and dueling.
Power, skill, and talent were everything now. Putting a ball into a hoop was nothing. Shooting a ball across a stadium was child's play. People wanted to show their power and dominion. Their intelligence and skill.
It is one of the main reasons why strategy games, fighting tournaments, martial art tournaments, and so many other 'sports' had become popular.
It's why the entrance ceremonies are one of the empire's biggest yearly entertainments.
However, Lloyd, too, had no time for all of those. For the next month, Lloyd spent it all reading, cultivating, training, attending class, and repeating the same thing the next day.
He made sure to go to breakfast, lunch, and dinner with Jay every weekend so he wouldn't lose his mind from the lack of interaction.
He also made sure to hang out with Fatima every 3 days since her positive mood always rubbed off on him and allowed him to go a few more days without collapsing in on himself.
Spending so much time with himself always ended badly for Lloyd. Sure, he would rather be working and training, but it was good for his mental health.
Spending more than 12 hours with no one to talk to but himself usually threw him down a horrible rabbit hole of depression as he would be reminded of all the friends he had lost during the dungeon break, and how he could have stopped it if he had just revealed himself sooner.
But he also knew that such a thought was illogical, yet it didn't help.
He knew that it would probably be for the best if he had taken a little time to deal with their deaths, yet he had no one to talk to it about.
Tina was in a coma and was probably going to suffer the same grief when coming out of it; Rex was long gone, and Hime would probably betray him if she ever woke up, and his family wasn't with him right now...
And the worst part of it all was the fact that he could still feel faint lingering feelings for Veronica inside him, as if her manipulation tactics had surpassed her death itself to make sure he suffered the maximum amount of torture possible.
Yet Lloyd had stayed strong the entire time, and now that a month had passed since the moment he first learned how to cultivate his body with the void energy, it was finally time for him to make a small breakthrough.
Sitting cross-legged inside his shadow in the middle of his empty room circulated mana around his body, shattering his pieces of his shell and recreating them strong than ever.
Body cultivation, just like core cultivation, was usually put into 4 stages. To take a person from initial to early first commandment, one needed to destroy their skin and recreate it stronger than ever with the element of your choosing.
After recreating their skin, they would go on to their organs, muscles, and finally, their bones, adding the elements of their choosing into those too. After that, they do all of it simultaneously until they break through to the second commandment. Of course, the problem for Lloyd was simple. He didn't have any of those.
While Lloyd would have loved to add an element in there, the process was way too slow already, so he didn't bother. Plus, he didn't like the idea of limiting himself to an element that wasn't the void one.
As he had seen before, the void element is capable of enhancing other elements, like his lightning or fire affinities. They become either void lightning or void flames.
He could do the same with shadows, but he hadn't seen how the amplification worked with that since he didn't understand the shadow affinity enough to control it and use it to the extent other professionals had shown, Lachlan being one example.
All he knew was the shadows had a sentience of their own, but it didn't make sense to him no matter how many books he read on the subject.
To make matters worse, the books in the libraries weren't very helpful since the good ones needed points, something they would only get after the end of the term.
Anyway, Lloyd continued to cultivate until he felt like his shell had been fully cultivated to a good standard. When this happened, Lloyd felt the mana circulation slow down, as if it had become heavy and hard to push through.
It was the sign that told him he was about to break through.
With everything he had, he used the limits of his aura and will to push as hard as he could.
He stayed like that for several minutes. He could feel the mana pushing against him as if it was screaming for him to stop.
The seal Lloyd had put on his shadow was forcefully broken as mana gushed in way too fast for any of it to leave his shadow.
His shadow realm immediately felt rich with mana as it all circulated around Lloyd, turning into void mana the moment it reached within two meters of him before being sucked into his core and pumped throughout his mana veins, forcing it to be circulated around his body.
It was as if the mana was being forced into his shell. And just when the mana began to seep out of his skin like a cloud of purple smoke, he heard a crack.
The crack echoed throughout the shadow realm as Lloyd's eyes opened wide.
Before he could fully understand what was happening, the outer portion of his shell shattered completely for a moment.
Void energy shot out as well, sending a powerful shockwave that sent fluctuations through the shadow realm, but not enough to leave it.
What lay below his shell was a cosmic essence, yet one darker than the abyss around him.
If the shadow realm was space, the body beyond Lloyd's skin was a black hole that no light could escape.
Yet, that only remained for a few moments as the pieces of his shell came back together over his skin, recreating his shell once more with the mana that was circulating around him, putting it together like a puzzle piece before sowing the pieces together with a powerful thread.
In an instant, Lloyd was whole again, yet despite having been shattered to pieces seconds ago, he had never felt so powerful before.
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