[Haki]
[Trait: Immortality]
Strength: 0.2
Speed: 0.18
Agility: 0.25
Defense: 0.4
Spirit: 0.35
He rolled, took a deliberate breath, and sank again.
"Continue."
He thought it, and the basin obeyed.
* * *
Time did not just pass in days, at least for Haki, It passed in heartbeats held between drowning and '[HEAL]'.
At first, he had tracked ten, then fifteen, and then twenty heartbeats, but after that, counting each beat became like counting each grain of sand in a fist.
'This is quite pointless, at least for now…' he had thought at first, then remembered something from his past.
So, in response, he divided his existence differently. This time, it was not by counting heartbeats but in Iterations.
To him, an iteration was simple, just dive, hold breath, move, burn through pain, cut unnecessary pain off with [Heal], think, and finally, His good old 'Continue.'
The 'not so large' cliff-ringed pool became his whole world.
The kind of will one would need to possess to avoid land, even as a creature biologically suited for land, would probably forever be a mystery. To him though, it really didn't matter, all he knew how to do was cont…
* * *
Even more time passed as the sky above changed colors and moods. It went from pale blue to bruised red, and back again.
Rain came sometimes, adding more cold and more noise… ah, he hated noise.
Wind scraped over the rim of the shore and shoved at the falling stream and he watched seasons turn as the vegetation clung to stone.
Even with all that, there was not a single day Haki did not remain in the water.
Every time he felt like falling from the path, memories of his past would surge into him in waves, bombarding his Spirit and making him feel the threat of death.
This feeling was actually his own self-inflicted punishment for even daring to think of slacking off.
He never touched the shore, not even when he felt he had to.
He remembered times in his past, when he was in a particular place, designed for the sole purpose of "cleansing of souls",
'What was it called again? 18 Levels of hell?' he had thought.
He remembered times he literally had casual staring contests with black holes, out of boredom, and he won.
He never moved his focus away from the black hole, only until eons later when it died due to hawking radiation.
'Hmm… the lifespan of an average black hole is roughly 1 googol years.' A googol was, 1, with a hundred 'zeros' at the back.
'So, this is who I once was,'
He admired himself for a brief moment, blinked, and then continued focusing on his current grind.
He had felt he had to move to the land, to collapse onto the slick stone shelf just for a second because his limbs simply refused to move and even immortality couldn't make more training visibly productive at that moment.
He also felt worse temptation, which was the urge to drag his body out long enough to chew on something that could barely be called food.
He endured all of it until it became background noise in his mind. The process was gruesome and painful, though less physical.
He re-learnt patience, looking at one spot in the water for hours on end, sitting as still as a rock, and most importantly, running iterations as efficiently as possible, bereft of any external/internal factors that might shift his focus.
For a long stretch, years actually, by any normal measure, he treated land as a convenient variable for abstinence training.
He didn't run away from where the world originally placed him, he silently roared in defiance by mastering it, bit by bit.
* * *
'Continue.'
Now, he turned the basin into a training map.
The shallows, deep pocket, waterfall throat, all of that. In the shallows, where the bottom rose toward an almost-beach, he learned to move even better.
He had planted his feet in the slick stone, filled his lungs, and pushed.
The first weeks, each push was hardly more than an embarrassing convulsion. His legs straightened; his body lurched forward a hand's width and sank. But he did it again. And again. And again.
The pattern refined itself while adaptation did its work with immortality by its side.
He had long stopped throwing his limbs randomly and started paying attention to the angle of his ankles, the timing between leg drive and arm sweep, the way his small body rolled when he moved one side harder than the other.
The water would push back the same every time.
He would adjust, he always did.
Sometimes he surfaced after a push, took a single measured breath, and then dropped back down. Sometimes he forced himself to stay submerged and turned each push into a glide, letting momentum carry him while he counted heartbeats.
'One. Two. Three. Four…'
When the annoying burn in his lungs crossed from "uncomfortable" into "interesting," he endured for a few more beats.
'Continue.'
[HEAL – Lungs]
His chest would clear, the 'knife-edge' feeling of pain vanished, but most importantly, the imprint of it stayed, somewhere in his neural lattices.
[Defense: 0.4 → X]
[Speed: 0.18 → X]
'Better,' he thought. 'But still… continue.'
* * *
In the deep pocket, he practiced letting go and reclaiming himself. He would use the deep pocket of the basin, where the bottom fell away beyond the reach of his toes. There, he would fill his lungs and go utterly slack sinking towards the bottom in a slow descent.
The cool pressure would envelop him while sound muted to a thick murmur. The sound of the waterfall, that is.
He ignored his lungs' complaint every time, watching the light thin as he dropped, counting the frantic beats of his heart until his vision sparked.
Only when his body shuddered violently did he bend and kick upward. His newly obedient legs drove him back toward the light. He broke the surface without a gasp, exhaled slowly, and reclaimed his breath on his own terms.
When his rhythm was steady again, only then did he call the panel.
[Haki]
[Trait: Immortality]
Strength: X
Speed: X
Agility: X
Defense: X
Spirit: X
'Continue.'
He rolled onto his stomach and sank again.
* * *
He met the waterfall properly in what would have been, on someone else's calendar, the latter part of his first year.
Just like that, it had almost been a year since he had been underwater…
Before that, he had only let the edge of the waterfall spray slap at him, but now, he simply swam towards it.
As he did, the sound grew from a muffled rumble to a battering roar even before his eyes made sense of anything. The water around him turned more chaotic, with currents tangling, bubbles thickening, and pressure punching at his skin.
He edged closer, counting seconds, no, heartbeats.
'One. Two. Three—'
SPLAT!!!
A stray tongue of falling water hit his shoulder like a thrown stone.
It felt as described and evidence showed from how tightly he was gritting his baby teeth.
'…Huff…Huff… Continue.'
The effect of the hit was not over as it spun his body, specifically his head, into the direction of a rock.
BAM!
A sharp line of pain blossomed above his ear, he used it as an advantage and let it carry him out of the main path, then righted himself with short, sharp and precise kicks.
Also,
[HEAL – Head, 30%]
The sting faded from his skull, leaving a faint echo.
'Continue.'
He went back in.
This time, he didn't stop at the edge.
He always inched closer, and closer and closer each time.
For a heartbeat, the world became nothing but force.
WOOOOOOOOOSHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Water slammed into his chest and shoulders, a solid weight hitting at liquid speed. It drove him down, flattening his small frame toward the bottom.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
That was the first time a sound had ever come out of his mouth.
He experienced real pain in this world for the first time. His ribs creaked, his spine compressed, but above all, even in that chaos, he chose to ride it. To feel this magnificent gift called pain.
Somewhere at the back of his mind, he looked at his pathetic self, trashing, shrieking and flailing about.
'The body will learn. Continue.'
He never stopped repeating this waterfall iteration, at least not until his body could finally manage the pressure.
At that time, he had tucked his chin, and rounded his back just enough that the force slid on him instead of planting him flat. Still painful, but manageable. He also learnt to time his kicks with the pulses of impact.
Later, he started recording how long he could spend under the bombardment.
'Five heartbeats under direct bombardment.'
'Six. Seven.'
Huh?
'67? Hmm, what a weird number, no matter, Continue.'
Pain became his friend once again. He slid sideways, out of the waterfall's path, and let the calmer water take him and when he surfaced, his chest was mottled with deep, gruesome bruises, some still waiting to form.
[Defense: 0.6 → X]
'Continue.'