Chapter 271: Time after Time
As soon as everyone exited Benton’s office, he got right to work. He’d given himself a week to get everything on his list accomplished, which would have been impossible without his ability to manipulate time. With his new Aura, though…
Well, he had no idea. It all depended on how long certain elements took and if he got sidetracked and various other unknowns. He might finish with days to spare or seconds from his self-imposed deadline.
The first item on the list was rebuilding the towers, which he had to do from scratch. Parts of the process were easier on the second go around since experience had taught him the most efficient methods for inscribing the particular arrays he used, but one aspect was a major headache—both the towers had been sheered into two pieces just below the ground level. And while it was tempting to use a combination of alchemy, formations, and good old construction knowhow to simply rebuild atop the old foundation, the fact was that there was no way to make the new joint as strong as when the trunk had been a single log.
Benton had no choice but to demo the entire foundation and start over from scratch.
Making judicious use of his Time Aura, he worked through the night digging, getting rid of the old structure, and building back up to level with the surface. As the sun crested the horizon, his sect members from the Formations Pavilion showed up to watch, seeing two bare logs sticking up out of the ground.
Benton slowed way down for a while and explained all his actions—how and why he was inscribing so many different paths for the qi to travel, the purpose of the sticks jutting from divots in the base’s surface, all the arrays he used on each rock. He even let them practice those arrays, though he didn’t dare use them on the tower. They just weren’t up to the standard needed to protect the sect.
Once he was sure that they all understood the what, why, and how, he utilized his Time Aura once again to finish the tedious part of layering the rocks all the way up the tower. Eventually, they reached the main weapon array and the turret, and he again went into instructor mode, using his Gravity Aura to levitate them up to the top of tower to watch him inscribe those arrays as well.
Those guys and gal might not have been the most accomplished of his sect members so far, but they showed true dedication in spending the entire day watching him zoom around rapidly finishing the tower. And by sunset, he scratched that item off his To Do list.
His next task was to create contingency rings. He wanted to make sure that every person on the council, at the very least, got one. Other than that, he really didn’t have a plan on who to distribute them to or how many to make.
The thing about manipulating time the way that he did was that, while he might look like he was moving faster than a speeding locomotive from the outside, on the inside of the bubble he was moving at his subjectively normal speed. Meaning that he couldn’t just blow through chores. He got to experience each and every tedious second.
Joy.
After the pure boredom caused by most of the individual parts of constructing the towers, he was in exactly no mood to forge and inscribe nearly a thousand rings. Though his eventual goal was for each member to have one, there was no burning need for that to happen that night. Or even in the next day, month, or even year.