Chapter 708: Practise

During the journey back, Moon didn’t waste his time idling for long.

He retreated to the small training room aboard the orbital and set to work on his Ice-Assimilation technique. His copied class window from Elsa was still ticking down, and every hour it stayed active was an hour he could learn from before the class expired and took its foundational understanding with it.

His proficiency climbed at a sharp rate, hitting thirty-five percent within twenty minutes.

Moon attributed the fast start to his earlier struggles with the technique. All those failed hours of solo practice hadn’t been wasted after all. He’d built a foundation of understanding, an intuition for what he was trying to accomplish, and now that the copied class gave him the actual structural key, that groundwork accelerated everything. He wasn’t learning from scratch like other skills he newly copied. He was simply slotting the missing piece into a framework he’d already half-built.

"Less than ten hours to learn it," he muttered under his breath, aware of the clock.

He kept drilling, threading ice into arrow after arrow, and the proficiency rose steadily until it stalled at fifty percent.

The plateau was familiar. He’d hit this exact wall with every skill he’d ever learned, the point where pure repetition stopped paying out and deeper engagement had to take over.

So he changed his approach.

Instead of arrows, he began assimilating the element into other objects, the way he had during the fight against the northern commander. He summoned a sword and worked the ice into the blade, sustaining the integration through motion, through swings and parries, the way he’d had to hold it stable in active combat.

It was harder than arrows as It demanded continuous maintenance rather than a single clean release. But his proficiency began to climb again, until it stalled a second time.

Moon switched weapons, this time he pulled a shield from his storage ring and practiced assimilating ice into its broad surface, learning how the element behaved in a dense, wide object rather than a slim blade or shaft.

Once he was done with that, he moved to a set of throwing knives. Then whatever else he had on hand, working the technique into every kind of weapon and material he could reach for, each new medium teaching him something the last one hadn’t.

Every object had its own quirks. The way ice settled into iron differed from how it settled into titanium, from how it settled into the composite of a shield. Learning to assimilate across all of them deepened his grasp of the underlying principle far faster than drilling any single one.

By the time he’d worked the technique into nearly every weapon he owned, and it stopped being useful to keep finding new mediums, his proficiency had climbed to seventy percent.

Moon lowered the last practice weapon, breathing lightly, pleased with the progress he had made.

Seventy percent, and there was still hours left on the clock.

At this rate, he’d have Ice-Assimilation maxed well before the class expired, and once he did, extending the principle to his other elements, lightning most of all, would come far easier.

He rolled his shoulders, reset his stance, and kept working.

It didn’t take long for Moon to lower his weapon and stop practising.

Repetition had carried him to seventy percent, but he could feel that it bo longer helped him improve.

Practice alone wasn’t going to bridge the final stretch. There was a concept he was missing, something about the technique he hadn’t fully grasped yet, and he needed to find it rather than grind against the wall.

He sat down, closed his eyes, and turned the problem over properly.

What am I actually doing when I assimilate ice?

Right now, he was threading the ice element into an object’s structure, integrating it at the physical level so the object became a conduit of cold that didn’t bleed off in flight or through motion. That was assimilation as Elsa’s class understood it.

Full delivery of the element from release to impact. But that framing treated the ice as a single, uniform thing. A quantity to be poured into the object and delivered whole.

And ice wasn’t uniform.

My ice isn’t just cold. It’s Cryomancy, carrying the effect of Freezing Cold, it slows what it touches, it layers Frostbite that keeps biting after the initial hit. The element has properties and a set of effects.

He’d been assimilating the element, focusing on getting the cold into the object and keeping it there. But he’d never once considered assimilating the element’s properties, or effects.

What if I don’t just integrate the element? What if I focus on bringing out its effect too?

The thought opened up a path in his mind.

If he assimilated the ice while deliberately focusing on the Freezing Cold property within the integration, weaving the slowing effect into the object’s structure alongside the raw element, then the attack would deliver a more potent, more focused version. The effect wouldn’t be a passive byproduct of the element being present.

Each property of his Cryomancy was a distinct effect, and if assimilation could integrate the element at a molecular level, then in theory he could also focus on the effects, strengthening them in the process.

I’ve been thinking about this backwards. Assimilation isn’t just about delivering the element intact. It’s about controlling the element so completely, so deeply, that I can shape what it does, not just where it goes.

He felt his understanding of the technique deepen greatly.

Moon opened his eyes, a slow smile crossing his face.

He summoned his sword again, nocked the concept alongside the technique, and began to assimilate the cryomancy, this time reaching for the Freezing Cold property, trying to thread the slowing effect into the blade rather than letting it ride along passively.

His proficiency, which had stalled at seventy, ticked upward again.

He’d found the missing piece that had stalled his progress.

’Nice...’