Chapter 227: You overthink things.

The next day arrived unceremoniously.

There were no trumpets, no omens, no dramatic feeling of “something important is going to happen today.” There was only Damon opening his eyes too early, his body too alert, as if sleeping had been merely a tolerated inconvenience.

He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds.

Nothing hurt anymore.

Nothing weighed him down.

In fact… that was exactly the problem.

It was as if his body had completely forgotten the concept of weight. Not light in the comfortable sense—light in the dangerous sense. As if he were always half a step away from ceasing to exist on the same plane as the rest of the world.

He got out of bed with exaggerated care.

His feet touched the floor.

No thud. No crack.

Minimal victory.

Damon exhaled slowly, but the strange sensation didn’t go away. His body was… ahead. Always ready. Always reacting before he finished thinking. Each muscle felt strained, like a rope stretched beyond its necessary length.

“Great,” he murmured. “A disaster with a conscience.”

Hours later, he was back in the forest clearing.

The place looked the same as the day before, but he didn’t. Damon noticed it in everything: in the way the light reflected off the leaves, in the way the wind moved between the tree trunks, in the almost musical rhythm of the insects. Everything had a pattern now. Everything made sense too quickly.

Elizabeth was already there.

Same light clothing. Same seemingly relaxed posture. But Damon noticed—again—the contained weariness, as if she were always conserving movements that could be fatal if used unnecessarily.

“Today,” she said bluntly, “you’re going to fail quite a bit.”

“Oh, good. I was afraid I’d do well.”

She gave him a dry look.

“You’re going to fail because you’re trying to use power. Not inhabit power.”

“That still sounds like something someone would say before disappearing into a mountain to meditate for thirty years.”

“If you disappear for thirty seconds, that’s enough to pass through three trees and half the mansion.”

“Fair enough.”

Elizabeth pointed to an open space in the clearing.

“We start with speed. A short displacement. From here to that rock.”

The rock was, at most, fifteen meters away.

Damon nodded.

He took a deep breath.

He thought about the step. He thought about the ground. He thought about not breaking the world.

And he moved.

The mistake was instantaneous.

There was no sensation of running. No jumping. There was only a tear. An abrupt displacement that ripped the air from the place, scattered leaves like a silent explosion, and made Damon pass not only the rock, but another six meters beyond, stopping only when his body, by pure reflex, planted his feet on the ground.

The impact opened a shallow crater.

Damon blinked.

He looked back.

The stone was intact. He… wasn’t.

“Shit.”

Elizabeth didn’t seem surprised.

“Excessive intention,” she said calmly. “You thought about ’arriving.’ Not ’going.’”

“What’s the difference?!”

“One involves result. The other involves process.”

“That doesn’t help at all.”

“It will help when you stop trying to conquer space.”

Damon breathed rapidly. Not from exhaustion—his body no longer knew that—but from the absurd tension of holding onto something that clearly wanted to escape.

He walked back to his starting point.

Slowly.

Each step seemed like a temporary agreement with the world.

“Again,” Elizabeth said.

Damon closed his eyes.

He tried to imagine the movement as something small. Contained. He tried to want less.

He took the step.

This time, it wasn’t a tear.

It was a blur.

The world stretched for a second and he appeared beside the rock… only to keep going. His body didn’t stop when he wanted it to. It stopped when his reflexes—the only sons of bitches that worked properly—decided that a tree two meters away was a problem.

He spun in the air, landing sideways, rolling across the ground and stopping with his back to the sky.

Silence.

Elizabeth sighed.

“Better,” she said. “Still awful.”

Damon laughed. A short, almost hysterical laugh.

“I feel like a car without brakes going down an icy hill.”

“A fitting metaphor.”

He sat up, running a hand over his face.

Inside, it was worse.

Because it wasn’t just a lack of physical control. It was the constant feeling that any emotion could turn into action. A more intense thought, a frustration, an impulse… and the body obeyed without asking.

That was frightening. “Very much.”

“Let’s change,” Elizabeth said. “Strength.”

She handed him a simple spear. Reinforced wood, ordinary metal tip. Nothing magical.

“Swing. No force.”

Damon raised the spear carefully, as if it were made of glass.

He thought of a slight movement. A test. Something almost symbolic.

He swayed.

The air screamed.

The spear didn’t cut through space—it swept. A wave of invisible force spread ahead, tearing up bushes, breaking branches, felling two medium-sized trees as if they were poorly placed toys.

The impact echoed through the forest.

Damon froze.

The spear fell from his fingers.

“I… I didn’t mean to—”

“I know,” Elizabeth said immediately, firmly. “Breathe.”

He breathed.

But his heart—if he could still call it a heart—was beating too fast. Not from ordinary fear. It was something deeper. A primal reaction to realizing how easy it was to go wrong.

“That’s not strength,” she continued. “It’s leakage.”

“Leakage of what?!”

“Of you.”

She walked to the destroyed area, observing the damage with a critical, but not accusatory, gaze.

“Your strength isn’t being applied—it’s being released.” As if his body no longer knew how to distinguish gesture from discharge.

Damon felt a knot in his stomach.

“So everything I do turns into… this?”

“For now,” she replied. “Yes.”

He clenched his fists.

The ground beneath his feet creaked.

He opened his hands immediately, frightened of himself.

“Great,” he murmured. “I’m officially a walking disaster.”

Elizabeth turned to him.

“No,” she said. “You’re a conscious chaos. That’s rare.”

“Doesn’t seem like an advantage.”

“Not yet.”

She made a short, firm gesture for him to drop the spear.

“Your reflexes,” she continued, “are the only thing aligned now. They don’t go through your conscious will. They’re pure instinct. There’s no excess… because there’s no intention.”

That clicked.

Damon remembered the stones from the previous day. The way his body had moved before he even understood what was happening. There was no decision, no calculation. Just response.

“So… thinking is the problem,” he said slowly.

“Overthinking,” Elizabeth corrected. “You’re trying to control something that now responds better to the subconscious than to reason.”

She crossed her arms, watching him like someone assessing a structure about to collapse—not with fear, but with surgical precision.

“Let’s test this. I’ll attack. Don’t react. Don’t prepare. Don’t decide.”

Damon grimaced.

“That sounds like a terrible idea.”

“Trust your reflexes.”

She moved.

It wasn’t fast.

It was wrong. In the most disturbing sense of the word.

A stone came first, thrown from an angle that made no sense. Then another, too low to be comfortable. A branch cut through the air, spinning. Then Elizabeth moved diagonally, not to hit him, but to break the rhythm—to force a choice.

Damon didn’t think.

And it worked.

His body simply… knew.

He dodged before the rock existed for him. He turned when the branch was still just a peripheral shadow. He ducked, retreated, adjusted his weight with absurd precision. There was no wasted effort. No movement too big. No force released in vain.

It was as if, for the first time, his body was breathing in the same rhythm as the world.

When Elizabeth stopped, silence fell again over the clearing.

Damon was whole.

No impact. No mistake.

He stood still for a second longer than necessary, as if afraid of breaking that feeling if he moved. Then the air returned to his lungs all at once.

He gasped—not from exhaustion, but from raw adrenaline, vibrating beneath his skin.

“See?” “When you get out of the way, your body knows what to do,” Elizabeth said.

Damon laughed, a short, tense, half-incredulous sound.

“So the solution is not to think?”

“The solution,” she replied, taking a few steps back, “is to learn when to think.”

She made a sweeping gesture, indicating the marked clearing.

“Today we’re not going to fix everything. Today you needed to understand the problem.”

Damon nodded.

Inside, the chaos hadn’t lessened—it had only changed form.

There was fear, yes. The honest fear of someone who realizes how easy it is to make mistakes. There was frustration at not being able to master something that was now part of him. But there was also excitement. A dangerous, almost intoxicating impulse to test limits. To go faster. Stronger. Just to see how far he could go.

And that… that scared him.

Every wrong attack. Every accidental explosion. Each unintentionally destroyed tree reinforced a truth he could no longer ignore:

He wasn’t just learning to use power.

He was learning not to lose himself within it.

When the training ended, the clearing seemed a silent record of everything that could have gone wrong—broken trees, churned-up soil, marks that seemed too small for the damage that almost occurred.

Elizabeth was clearly exhausted now. Not dramatically so. It was a contained, deep, accumulated weariness.

Damon approached, more cautious than ever.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For… all of this.”

She shook her head once.

“That was to be expected.”

Her gaze fixed on him, serious, steady, without unnecessary harshness.

“Damon, listen carefully. What you feel now—this feeling of excess, of chaos—is temporary. But the real danger isn’t losing control.”

“Then what is?” he asked.

“Enjoying too much not being in control.”

The shiver ran immediately.

Because, somewhere too deep to be comfortable, there was a part of him that… liked it. The impossible speed. The overwhelming force. The feeling that the world needed to adjust to his presence, not the other way around.

That part didn’t scream. It didn’t demand.

It just waited.

And that scared him more than any broken tree.

Elizabeth turned, starting to walk back along the narrow forest path.

“Tomorrow,” she said, without looking back, “we begin the hardest part.”

“Which is…?”

She continued walking.

“Teaching you to want less.”

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