Leon stood at the rocky plateau, wind whipping around him as he surveyed the vast dimensional landscape below.

Time to push my limits.

His main focus for this training session was advancing his darkness element mastery and leveling up the new skills he’d recently acquired. But more importantly, he needed to investigate that weird Hellfire skill—the one that had given him that strange, visceral vision unlike anything he’d experienced before.

That cloaked figure wreathed in crimson and black flames... who was that? And why did the vision feel so real?

Normal skill absorption never produced anything like that. Even legendary-tier abilities just transferred knowledge directly without the intense imagery.

Something about Hellfire Control is different. Fundamentally different.

Leon took a deep breath and began channeling his darkness element.

WHUMMM!

Tendrils of pure darkness manifested around his hands—black as the void between stars, writhing like living shadows. The element was still incredibly difficult to control, requiring absolute emotional calm.

The slightest spike of anger or excitement made the tendrils become unstable and chaotic.

Maintain serenity. Complete emotional detachment.

He practiced manipulation techniques methodically—forming shapes, compressing the darkness into concentrated spheres, extending tendrils across vast distances. Each exercise pushed his understanding deeper.

After several hours of focused darkness training, Leon switched to testing Hellfire.

He called upon the skill cautiously, uncertain what to expect.

FWOOOOSH!

Flames erupted around his right hand—but these weren’t normal fire. They burned crimson-red at the core with edges that flickered black, giving off an ominous, predatory quality.

It’s beautiful. And terrifying.

The Hellfire didn’t just burn—it consumed. He could feel its hunger, its desire to devour mana and corrupt lesser flames. It was fire with malicious intelligence.

Leon experimented carefully, launching controlled bursts at distant rock formations.

BOOM! CRACK!

The stone didn’t just shatter or melt—it disintegrated into ash, the Hellfire consuming the very essence of the material before dissipating.

This is far more destructive than my normal fire element. The power scaling is on an entirely different level.

He continued testing various applications—defensive barriers of black-red flame, concentrated beams, and area saturation attacks. Each use gave him a better understanding of Hellfire’s unique properties.

Meanwhile, his clone trained a considerable distance away—far enough to avoid interference but close enough that Leon maintained full awareness through their shared consciousness.

The clone was also working on darkness mastery, effectively doubling his training efficiency. But Leon had given it an additional critical instruction:

Check the outside world periodically. Don’t let another disaster nearly happen like before.

He’d barely stopped the catastrophe previously if not for arriving just in time to prevent wholesale destruction. That couldn’t happen again.

I need to stay aware. Can’t let myself become so absorbed in training that I miss critical developments.

The clone would go out into the Pyrrhan realm every every hour in terms of outside, ensuring no emergency situations were developing that required his immediate intervention.

Leon trained at absolutely full force—no holding back, no restraint. He unleashed combination attacks, merged different elements together, and pushed his mana reserves to their limits repeatedly.

CRACK! BOOM! WHOOOOSH!

The rocky plateau became a testing ground for devastation—craters forming, stone melting, the very air crackling with residual energy.

After exhausting himself thoroughly through conventional training methods, Leon decided to accelerate his progress dramatically.

He reached into his inventory and withdrew the tome of eternal practice, his go training partner.

Let’s see how far I can push this time.

SHIMMER!

The scroll activated, wrapping him in his own mind acceleration as he trained.

Hours became days became weeks became months became years.

His consciousness remained locked in the training trance, body moving through forms with mechanical perfection while his mind absorbed every lesson.

After every 10000 hours, it has its cool down, for which Leon trained at normal in the dimensional realm, and after it was over, after a day, he repeated the process over and over again.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity.

FWOOSH!

Leon staggered slightly, his head pounding with incredible intensity.

Ugh... that was... intense.

He checked the time dilation ratio and felt genuine shock at the result.

Nearly sixty years of subjective training time had passed—compressed into just slightly over an hour in the outside world.

Sixty years. I just lived sixty years in less than one and a half hours.

The mental strain was enormous. His head felt like it might split open from the sheer volume of compressed experience and memory.

I can’t do anymore. If I push further, I’ll actually go insane.

He needed to take a break, just like every other time he used this method. The human—or Divinordial—mind could only handle so much temporal compression before it started fracturing.

But despite the pain, Leon felt satisfied. He’d broken his previous training record of fifty years.

I understand why I could go further this time. My increased strength, my higher intelligence stat, my more refined mental fortitude—all of it allowed me to withstand the strain longer than before.

His power had grown, so his capacity for this kind of extreme training had grown proportionally.

Leon sat down on a flat boulder, breathing heavily, letting his mind settle and decompress from the experience.

Currently, he hadn’t left to rejoin Seraphine. Instead, he opened his cosmic shop interface directly—the familiar transparent golden screen materializing before him.

SHIMMER!

I need to find something specific. Something I should have prioritized much earlier.

He began searching through the vast catalog of items, filtering by function and category.

His goal was clear: find an item that would make his time dimension more complete and self-sufficient. The people living inside shouldn’t have to rely exclusively on him for their growth and advancement.

They need their own path to power. Their own challenges. Their own dungeons.

Seraphine had mentioned recently that a few of the older people had died inside the dimensional space, not from violence or accident, but simply from old age.

Those were individuals who had given up on entering the awakening dungeon back during the initial integration—people who’d lost hope or been too afraid to take that first step.

Only a couple of them, thankfully. The rest of the older generation participated in the dungeon and became awakened.

It had been their choice not to fight, and Leon respected that decision completely. He couldn’t force people down a path they didn’t want to walk.

I gave them a peaceful life as I promised. A safe place to live out their remaining years without fear or suffering. So be it.

He’d provided refuge and protection. That was what he’d offered, and that was what he’d delivered.

But I can’t control everything. Can’t save everyone from natural mortality.

Still, for those who wanted to grow stronger—who wanted to push their limits and advance—they deserved better opportunities than what currently existed in the dimension.

Leon scrolled through page after page of cosmic shop items.

Dungeon cores—too expensive, starting at 100 million of causality, and quite limited.

Realm enhancement artifacts—promising, but most didn’t create leveling opportunities.

Monster spawners—dangerous if not properly contained.

Small Dimensional upgrades—various functions, but not quite what he needed.

There has to be something. Some item or artifact that can generate appropriate challenges for cultivation advancement and earning cores in some way or another.

He filtered the search parameters more precisely, adding keywords like "progressive difficulty," "automatic scaling," "cultivation support," and "safe training environment."

More results appeared, but none quite matched his vision.

I need something that creates dungeons or challenge zones automatically. Something that scales with the users’ strength. Something that rewards completion with genuine power growth.

Leon continued searching methodically, his enhanced intelligence allowing him to process dozens of item descriptions simultaneously.

Minutes passed, then an hour, as he dove deeper into the cosmic shop’s extensive catalog.

It’s here somewhere. It has to be. The cosmic shop has items for nearly every conceivable need.

His search continued, eyes scanning rapidly across the golden transparent interface while his mind calculated costs and effectiveness ratios.

I have around one hundred seventy million causality available. That’s my budget constraint. Whatever I find needs to be within that range.

The search narrowed further as he added price filters.

More items. More possibilities. But still, nothing is perfect.

Leon’s frustration grew slightly, though he maintained patience. Important decisions require thorough research.

I won’t settle for something inadequate. The people in my dimension deserve the best solution I can provide.

He expanded his search to include combination items—things that might work together to create the desired effect, even if no single artifact accomplished everything.

The cosmic shop responded with different items, and his mind worked to create new configurations and bundles that might create the desired thing he wanted.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Maybe the answer isn’t one perfect item, but several complementary pieces working in concert.

Leon leaned forward, studying the new results with intense focus, determined to find the solution before moving on to anything else.