Tyr returned to the plum blossom tree garden to continue his training.

So far, Tyr had gotten to the point where he could balance three petals on his index finger, one on top of the other.

The more he balanced on his finger, however, the more difficult it became.

Tyr closed his eyes, exhaling as he concentrated his full attention on the task at hand.

As soon as his eyelids flew open, he caught the first petal that was drifting down from above.

With that, he swiftly moved his finger to catch the second petal.

‘The first petal is soft and clean, the second one is fast, and the third one…’

He moved slowly, allowing the third petal to rest on his finger.

‘The third one is also calm and slow.’

He glanced at the fourth petal gently floating downwards.

‘The elusive fourth petal… being fast doesn’t help, and neither does being slow.’

He tried to be fast, keeping up the pattern that he had been using.

However, the petal closely slipped his finger, causing the rest to fall to the floor as well.

He took a step back in annoyance, furrowing his eyebrows.

“Tsk!” he exclaimed. “I’ve tried for several hours to go from the third petal to the fourth. Yet… it seems close to impossible. I can’t go too slow and calm, or else it will be hard to catch the petal in the first place. And if I go too fast, the other petals will be disturbed.”

He thought about it for a moment. ‘Hmm… I shouldn’t be arrogant about it. This just means that I am the one who is the factor that is slowing me down. I have to come at it from a different perspective entirely.’

He closed his eyes, trying to rewire his brain. ‘If I am the problem, I have to force myself to completely forget the way I’ve been approaching this, and try a new way.’

First, he recalled what he had been doing so far.

‘I have been trying to slow down and speed up my own body to get the petals.’

Then, he imagined what the opposite of that would look like.

‘If I were to completely change my strategy, that would be something along the lines of… not trying to speed myself up or slow myself down. In fact, I wouldn’t have to chase the petal at all. The opposite of my current plan would be to let the petal come to me…’

He squinted his eyes. He was puzzled. He had thought of the opposite solution to what he had been doing, but how could he actually execute this new plan?

“Have the petal come to me… that would be impossible, unless I have some sort of petal magnet.” He said, trying to think of other ways.

“I guess there is one other way… but that would have to do with me being able to predict the future, so my finger can be where the petal will fall before even the petal knows of that location.”

He slightly chuckled to himself on hearing this. “Predicting the future is impossible though…”

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Then, he noticed a bright-pink petal drop down from above right in front of his face.

It was oddly rich in color, capturing his attention for a split second.

A gentle breeze flushed past him, coming from behind and waving forward toward the petal in front of him.

At that moment, instead of moving with the current of the wind, the petal suddenly flew toward Tyr.

Tyr felt a sudden impulse to catch the petal since it was close to touching his face.

However, just before his hand made contact with the leaf, it was abruptly pushed away by the wind from before.

‘Huh…’ Tyr mused. ‘What just happened… it was like me being unable to catch a punch coming toward me.’ He couldn’t help but relate the two things together.

‘Even though I saw the petal coming toward me, I was not able to catch it. Not because I was too slow… but because I didn’t anticipate what its next movement was going to be. If I had my hand slightly back, I could have caught it as it floated away.’

He paused.

‘The only way I could have known that it was going to fly back was the slight wind that I felt right before. Due to the wind coming toward the petal, it was sucked in due to the negative energy that was leading the wind. That’s why the petal came toward me. Then, it finally met with the real wind and was carried away by it, successfully juking me.’

Tyr thought about how a car moved through a highway. Moving fast, it created a vacuum of air right in front of it, pulling in wind and throwing it backward even though the car itself moved forward.

But, if that same car were to stop, all that momentum would be pushed forward, causing all the wind to travel in front of the car instead of behind it.

‘Wind… that’s what I need to focus on. That’s the only way these petals can move, or else it would be extremely easy to catch them all.’

As he said this to himself, Tyr suddenly felt the air around him for the first time.

Like a placebo effect of noticing more of what you want to notice, Tyr finally felt the air around him in a much more obvious state.

‘I need to study how these petals move according to each movement of the wind, and have an easy time predicting where it will go next. In that way, I can also learn how to predict an enemy’s attacks, not from how their attack comes toward me, but how their body reacts to their own movements—telling me the truth of what they actually intend to do, despite their showing of movement outright.’

Tyr grinned, feeling as though he had figured it out. ‘I’m a fucking genius.’

But it wasn’t over yet. He actually had to put this theory into practice, and begin studying how these petals were able to move.

And so, that’s what he did. Standing silently, and feeling the wind around him, he began to see how all petal movements occurred.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep