Chapter 259
“Huh. This is ridiculous. He’s entered a state of self-contemplation, which is neither meditation nor a trance… he’s just looking within himself, but he’s been able to stay in that state for three whole days?” Quiet Heaven looked at Merlin while saying the same thing that Mary, who guided Merlin during the DIO tutorial, had once said.
Self-contemplation, an advanced spiritual ability to look inside oneself, was an ability of a completely different concept from meditation or entering a trance-like state, which erased one’s distracting thoughts and allowed one to organize one’s thoughts.
If one had to describe what self-contemplation was most like, one would state that it was most similar to a trance state. However, unlike being in a trance where one’s sense of body awareness and time was much shorter than the actual time that passed, self-contemplation had the same sensory time flow as real time. In other words, time passed relatively quickly when one was in a trance state, allowing one to be in such a state for a longer period of time. Nevertheless, self-contemplation was a state in which beings could normally only be in for an hour at best, no matter how long they tried.
Yet Merlin was already on his third day in this state of self-contemplation.
“Come to think of it… this guy is Level 19. Could it be… Is he going to achieve some great enlightenment and reach Level 20? Is he going to enter the realm of transcendence?”
Of course, the speaker, Ellie, was gently wagging her tail as she spoke these words. She stated this aloud more as a joke than anything else.
In the first place, transcendence wasn’t a level that could be reached easily.
It took thousands of years even for mysterious creatures, commonly called spirit beasts, to reach the transcendent realm, and even that feat required the spirit beasts to overcome countless difficulties and adversities. So how could such a young human achieve transcendence in just a few years? This went against all common sense.
Of course, it was quite common for humans who received the blessing of a creation god and the protection of a planet’s supreme being to become a transcendent within an [extremely short] period of time, but even that was tens to hundreds of years. However, the ‘quite common’ was an infinitesimally small probability when considering the entire population of beings in the whole universe. Even on planets with developed superpowers, there were numerous cases where not a single being reached transcendence after a thousand years.