Following my friends we made our way to our classroom and I managed to avoid thinking about what happened the last time I was here, or better, the last time I dreamed about being here. The only thing that doesn't make much sense about all of that is that I felt pain, real pain, I still feel some of it even now.

We entered the room to find the rest of our class already seated in their respective desks with exam papers in front of them. We made our way to our desks and sat down, in front of us there were our exam papers.

"Now that everybody is here, you may begin your test. You have until the end of this class to finish it" our math teacher said with her snobby tone of voice.

I pick my exam and take a look at it. It was a bunch of mathematical equations that looked like they were just mashed together to make this Frankenstein of an exam. There were quadratic equations, percentage equations, geometric equations, all you could think of really. I began to do them as I answered the exam, I only had a limited time and wouldn't waste it complaining about how nonsensical this exam was.

As I was in the end of the exam, my time running out, the teacher got up from her seat and began addressing the class, but I was mostly concentrated in the exam because if I stopped to listen to her I would totally miss the deadline, so I just kept one ear listening to her as I kept doing the exam.

"Everyone, I want to announce that later this day we will be having a celebration for the upcoming anniversary of the school. It'll be a feast, so I want you all to bring food and-... [ Proficiency points have reached the threshold. Extra skills [Mathematical Processing] and [Advanced Mathematical Processing] successfully obtained. Skills [Mathematical Processing] and [Advanced Mathematical Processing] have combined into Normal Skill [Complex Mathematical Processing]... dri…nks"

I stopped and immediately got up from my seat. Everyone was looking at me with a surprised face as I looked at my teacher who was looking over at me as well, looking just as surprised as me after hearing the skill announcement.

“...I wasn’t expecting that” Everyone in the room spoke at the same time. “But I guess I set that up after making you do a math exam, huh?”

“W-what is happening?” I managed to speak as I began turning my head to try to look at everyone.

“What’s happening is that I’ll need to restart everything uurgh” Everyone spoke at the same time again, even making the same noise.

“Wait, what are you tal-...” My voice was cut short as everyone put their hands in the air and snapped their fingers and then everything went white.

I suddenly woke up with a terrible headache that was almost splitting my head in two, but just as it began it almost vanished in an instant, the only thing that made me aware of it was a constant buzzing on the back of my head and a pounding pain that wasn't too unbearable. As my mind focused on the world around me I noticed a familiar ceiling. I turned my head around to confirm what I was seeing.

I was in my old bed in my old room before everything happened. I could see my wardrobe, my bedside table, my desk with my computer on it. As I looked over at the monitor I saw it was turned on and showing the menu of a game called "Magic and Dragons" and the character on the menu was extremely similar to myself as a solar dragon.

Suddenly my head was assaulted by a strong headache and I dropped in my bed as I held my head with both arms and almost bit my tongue with how strong the headache was. After a few seconds my headache had vanished like it wasn’t even there. My phone’s alarm was ringing in the bedside table right by my side, as I moved my hands to grab it, I froze as I stared at my hands. My hands weren't the dragon paws I was expecting to see, but my human hands as I remember them. I immediately grabbed my phone, opened the camera and looked at myself.

It was me, my old self from before that thing that sent me to another world. I put my free hand on my face, seeing it on the phone screen as I moved my hand around my face, touching it all to confirm what I'm seeing is really real. Just as I began to think it was all just a weird dream, the headache that had already vanished hit me like a baseball bat, causing me to drop my phone as I grabbed my head with both hands again and let a growl of pain escape my lips.

A gentle hand brushed against my hair as my headache seemed to go back to just being a constant buzzing. I looked over and saw my mom seated next to me on my bed with a gentle smile on her face, the door to my bedroom opened. The headache was so strong I hadn't even noticed my mom opening the door to my room and seating next to me.

"How are you, sweetheart?" My mom asked me as she brushed her hand against my hair. "Are you feeling better?"

As I was about to nod my head, I heard my cell phone speaking.

I stopped and my mom rolled her eyes.

“Again, serious?” She said with a bored tone of voice.

I jumped off my bed and pointed my finger at the person who was impersonating my mother.

“Who are you, or what are you?” I asked in a demanding voice.

“Everything was going so well. How could I know that my [Thought Acceleration] would increase your [Thought Acceleration]’s level?” She said Indigantaly. “You want to know who I am? I am your second trial”

As she said that, the room where I was changed shape and turned into an infinite lake. The water was only up to my ankle, but I could feel there wasn’t actually anything below my feet but water and I was standing on nothing.

The headache returned and made me close my eyes for a second as I endured it, but by the time I opened my eyes again, I wasn’t human anymore, but I wasn’t a dragon either, I was something like a mixture of both.

“Who would’ve thought that a dragon, who used to be human, would come straight to me. With knowledge from an entirely different world on top of that!” A disembodied voice echoed throughout the place. “You can’t blame me for being a little too excited with it, and, hmm, it looks like your conscious mind didn’t accept your new reality completely, huh?”

I extended my hand and tried to cast a few [Fireballs] and [Fire Spears], but nothing came out of it. I would try to cast some of the ice versions of the spells, but the constant buzzing on the back of my mind was distracting me too much.

“This is my realm, Denaru, you don’t have any power here” the voice said.

The thing that was keeping me above water suddenly vanished and I fell into it, and in a couple of seconds I was so deep underwater that I didn’t know which direction was which. I couldn’t give myself the luxury to blow some air and see where the air bubbles go because it all happened so fast I didn’t manage to get too much air inside my lungs, and if I blew the little I have, I would totally drown in whatever place I was.

As I began to become desperate, I used [Parallel Processing] to think about ways to escape and anything that could’ve given me a clue, unfortunately [Thought Acceleration] wasn’t working properly or else I would have used it as well. That’s when my mind clicked.

[Thought Acceleration] wasn’t not working properly, in fact it was working in overdrive, as if it was a wheel turning way faster than it should’ve been turning because there was a rope tying it to another wheel that was turning faster, and that’s why it leveled up.

If [Thought Acceleration] is already being used but the world isn’t any slower… I thought and then I began rapidly experimenting, that is, I used [Parallel Processing] to move my right arm in two different directions. If what I thought about this place was wrong, nothing would happen, or my arm would move in the combined direction of where I was trying to move it, but instead, my arm was suddenly split into two of itself and each moving in each direction I was trying to move it, proving me right.

The reason I couldn’t cast magic or use [Thought Acceleration] was because I was inside of a mental landscape, and one where my mind was already accelerated beyond my skill could do, meaning that my body was somewhere I didn’t know together with the body of whoever was creating this landscape.

So, if my body is still out there and this is just a mental landscape, this constant buzzing should be… I moved my magicules and used them as fuel for my [Abnormal Mental Condition Resistance] skill, and then the buzzing in the back of my head became louder and louder and louder until it just shot outwards out of my body as a thin film that consumed the water around me in a sphere. I was standing floating inside of a sphere of nothing and outside this sphere was all the water I was just inside of.

“So, it looks like someone noticed the properties of my realm… Mental resistance skills are the most tiring stuff I’ve dealt with, and yours is especially troublesome to deal with, really” The voice said. “So, let’s just cut the case and bring your trial right now, what do you think?”

The water dispersed and I was then inside of a theater, together with all my friends and family.

“You’re going to use the people I love to attack me? That’s really… cliché, not going to lie” I said at the voice. Now that I knew this was all a kind of mental attack, I wouldn’t be tricked like I was.

“Attack you?” The voice said in a teasing tone. “No, no, no. I’ll be testing your will. I’ve looked over your memories and now I’ll push you until you break. By the way, that little mental shield of yours is a bother, let’s give something to be busy with, shall we?”

The thin film of [Abnormal Mental Condition Resistance] suddenly shrunk and moved to block a sphere of mental energy. Everything it had was being used to block whatever that thing was. My anxiety almost shot through the roof as I saw all the energy the skill had being used to block that thing that was designed to have just enough power for me to have no other mental defenses because if there wasn’t any energy left, what would be stopping [Instincts Overdrive] for coming over and eating my mind like a snack. I calmed down once I noticed that was not the case, as the shield protecting me right now was the leftover after the skill blocked [Instincts Overdrive], but that meant it really couldn’t grow any stronger, because there wouldn’t have more protection from [Abnormal Mental Condition Resistance] to stop it.

Without much choice, I looked forward to a copy of my friend, Leo, who was staring at me like one would look at a human scum.