Little by little the world tree grew larger, growing from a tiny plant with few leaves into a small sapling, proud and sturdy. Withstanding smaller disasters shouldn’t be a problem for the sapling now.

Glancing toward the barrier that had remained completely untouched by my attempts to absorb the environment mana, I fell into contemplation.

Six months…

Has something happened to Rin? Shouldn’t she have reloaded by now? While I estimated eight months at maximum that was an extreme situation. Realistically, by six months, Rin should’ve tried checking up on me.

The only entertainment I really get everyday is heading into the wristband. I’ve already read and re-read all the books inside the library and built various gadgets inside the workshop. As that got boring after quickly, I’ve taken to diving into that illusionary world.

I’ve had to use self-control to avoid entering it constantly. If I enter the wristband’s illusion all the time and no time passed by in reality, I’ll never leave this place. With the ability to leave that place anytime, there isn’t really any danger like before.

I tried activating the teleportation array in the cavern several times, but it seemed completely inert. I’m beginning to suspect that it isn’t a teleportation array at all. More likely, it might be the barrier array.

I would need to study arrays more to know for sure.

---

Time passed… The tally marks on the wall grew, every day until eighth month arrived and passed. The evenly-spaced tally marks filled up the entire wall.

The sapling had only grown a small amount and, although the mana absorption had increased, it wasn’t nearly enough to affect the overall density of mana in the area.

I never figured out how to utilize the time shard. Meditating, injecting mana, and carrying it around is doing bugger all. Either it has a very specific activation sequence, or it might just be inert.

Regardless I’ve basically completely given up on trying to use it.

Rin should reset any day, so trying to figure it out is meaningless at this point. There's not enough time left to escape and find Rin.

---

As more and more time passed by, the sapling grew into a small tree. There weren’t any seasons in this place or several of them would’ve passed. Tally marks appeared on another wall, growing significant in number.

Unlike the marks on the previous wall, the tally marks were less organized and more randomly placed about.

Sitting inside my residence in the caverns, I lifted up the glasses and gazed up at the ceiling.

How long is Rin going to take to reload? Maybe, I should get a hobby in the meantime. Practice various arrays to learn about that array in the center. Might help me escape.

Rin shouldn’t take longer than two years to reload? Yeah, by that point, even without Stanley telling her about it, Rin would’ve realize something was wrong.

Best to assume something happened to Stanley that prevented him from passing on the info.

---

Within the cave, my residence had various leaves and plants remains with it. A small bed of comfortable plants in one corner, and several flowers near the corners.

The walls were completely covered tally marks each in random places.

Stared at the walls with a defeated expression summoning a dagger to mark another spot. Before shaking my head and laughed. Dropping the summoned dagger and letting myself collapse to the floor.

I need to stay calm.

Picking up the dagger again, I stood back and lifted the dagger toward an empty spot without tally marks on the wall before lowering it.

What’s the point?

Rubbing my hand across my face, lifting up my glasses and squeezing my eyes. I tightened my grip on the dagger and removed the glasses on my face, throwing them against the opposite wall. “WHAT THE HELL IS TAKING SO LONG!”

The glasses slammed into the wall, the shattering of glass breaking echoed throughout the cavern. Snorting, I sat back down and rested upon my back; staring upward toward the stone ceiling with florescent blue ore running throughout it.

Am I ever going to leave this place? Why do I even create tally marks anymore? The initial deadline has long since come and gone. Even the delayed deadline had long since passed.

It’s been at least seven years by now. Probably far longer, I stopped counting the exact number. I didn’t even want to know the exact number.

Unless this place is inside a sub-universe or a place with a time acceleration effect (which I doubt, Gromrit confirmed neither of those were true), Rin must’ve forgotten about me by now. Guess I vastly overestimated my importance to her.

The world tree plan failed, or at least hasn’t shown any benefits yet. The tree can still barely be considered a sapling at least by world tree standards. I vastly underestimated the amount of time world trees needed to grow. It’s currently only about the size of a normal tree, the mana it absorbs (while far greater than the amount I can absorb) is nowhere near enough to interfere with the barrier.

Trying to mess with the array also failed. Whilst I learned about creating specific effects from the books, even with that and the various other topics inside the wristband’s library, I couldn’t seem to understand the slightest part of the array. Forcefully messing with it also did nothing. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the array was completely decorative.

The illusionary world in the wristband has only managed to delayed boredom. I’ve explored it to a decent extent. It isn’t nearly as perfect a world as I thought it was. The rules of that world are flawed in less obvious ways.

For example, a bucket with water dripping into it will never overflow, nor will it empty of water if begin removing water from it. Even the amount of water that you’ve removed is far larger than the amount the bucket can actually hold.

There are tons of other small, normally unnoticeable glitches in the illusionary world. Rubbing two sticks together will always makes fire, near instantly.

I hadn’t quite appreciated how flawed it was as I’d been focused entire on leaving the place before and dismissed any strangeness as superpowers or something.

I suppose if there’s one upside to this experience, it’s that my strength has grown a significant margin.

My physical strength has more than tripled. If I would bet that my scale defenses have also grown in a similar margin, sadly I don’t really have a sharp enough instrument to test that out.

Not that it would matter, if Rin reloaded like she was supposed to. It's already seven years late… There had better be a VERY good reason why Rin hasn’t reloaded yet.

---

Time continued pass at a peacefully slow pace.

Slowly, I watched as the little tree grew into a ten-meter in diameter world tree. Even a fruit was being created on the leaves.

Gazing at the tree with various emotions. Pride, melancholy, happiness, excitement.

At a some point, I stopped holding out hope for Rin to fix all my problems. It was childish, pining all my hope on someone else. I’m not even sure if I wanted to reload away these past years of life anymore.

The years have been abnormally peaceful.

No life and death struggle, no real worries. While it slightly boring, I could chat with Gromrit and travel into the wristband’s world to reduce the boredom.

Gromrit isn’t that bad, at least as a chatting partner.

Slightly murderous, but apparently that was brought on by frustrating circumstances. Everyone has bad days… although Gromrit’s bad days are apparently far more deadly than other people’s.

I’ll still escape when I get the chance, though.

Even if he’s not completely terrible, Gromrit still refuses my requests to let me leave. He might give all sorts of excuses, but that simple fact alone is enough to diminish my trust in him by a large margin.

Shrugging at the thought. I continued staring at the world tree, an excitement hidden beneath my gaze began to surface.

It won’t be long, now.

To grow the fruit, the world tree would have to absorb a large amount of mana from the surroundings and purify it. Achieving that level of mana density in the fruit… it would definitely disrupt, or at least weaken the barrier.

I only need to prepare a massive strike on it during that time period. The strongest attack I can manage. Everything I’ve got, everything I’ve learned over these past years. All of it put into one singular attack.

I refuse to believe the barrier will be able to stand my blow in a weaken state.

I’ll set up various explosive arrays, prepare a deadly strike with spear aura, and utilize the strongest fire array for forging I learned from the books.

It’ll be the best chance I’ve had in years.

I only have to be careful not expose my plan to Gromrit beforehand. I’ll need to drug him with a combination of the various sedative plants. All I need to do is causing him to stay asleep until I get off-world.

I refuse to believe the mark on my arm can be sensed at that large a distance.

While Gromrit normally doesn’t care about my escape attempts, this time I actually have a chance of succeeding. Obviously, I have to be more cautious to avoid ruining my chances. If he manages to discover my position is outside the barrier through the mark blazed onto my arm, my escape attempt will be foiled before it has a chance to even get started properly.

---

The fruit slowly matures and the preparations for escape were completed. Everything merely needed to wait until the fruit matured.

Improved explosive arrays had been set, ready to blow up at a moment notice. It had taken awhile to figure out the method, but the explosive arrays should explode directly onto the wall and cause minimal damage elsewhere.

The fire forging array should burn the specific area of the barrier near the world tree. That should be the weakest point of the barrier as the most mana should be absorbed from there.

After that, for a final blow, the spear aura shall attack the weakest point atop the forging array’s fire.

It will be the final blow that cracks open the barrier!  

The sedative has already been placed inside Gromrit’s cave. I had to make it a sleeping gas to make it work, otherwise I had no method of getting Gromrit to ingest it without arousing his suspicion. Although the sedative is slightly weaker in this gaseous form, the more convenient delivery mechanism is worth the trade-off.

Gromrit should already be fast asleep. Although I have no idea how effective the sedative concoction will be on a dragon, when I accidentally ingested a similar concoction in the past, Gromrit complained that I fell asleep for months.

The fruit will mature soon.

I can feel it.

The amount of mana getting absorbed by the tree has increased nearly a hundred fold and is still increasing. There's no way the fruit of the world tree won't mature soon.

When it stops absorbing mana from the surroundings, I'll strike.