RUDRA POV
As my training with Great-Grandma began, I started to regret my wish to meet her. The romanticized idea of a gentle, wise guru was shattered on the very first day. When I asked about the first objective of my training, she simply replied, "The more stamina you have, the more training you can take in a day." Her voice was like granite—cold, solid, and utterly unyielding.
And Lord, she was brutal.
The regimen started with skipping ropes until the muscles in my calves screamed and the ligaments in my ankles felt like they were turning to jelly.
After that, she led me to a machine that looked like a futuristic torture device. Instead of pedals, it had grips for my ankle bones, designed to isolate my feet so my already-sore ankle muscles could begin to heal for the next day's beating.
I was shocked when I saw the rest of the equipment in the sheds deeper in the forest—they were more advanced than the best gyms I had ever known. And the electricity, a stable supply in the middle of nowhere? The inverters hummed silently, a testament to the fact that the temple had far more influential connections than I could have ever imagined.
After the pedaling came agonizingly long arm crunches, followed by swimming breaststroke with my feet bound, and then back exercises with my stomach facing down and my torso hanging in the air. I held the position until all the muscles in my back and core were completely exhausted. She was an expert at deducing my upper limit, pushing me to the point of collapse without actually letting me fall apart.
As if that wasn't enough, my head was dunked underwater, and I was taught to hold my breath for as long as I could—a lesson that felt more like torture. Finally, I had to keep my arms parallel to the ground while holding weights with only my fingers and thumb, my palms completely ajar, for half an hour at a time. The cycle repeated once every two days, three times a week.
As my capacity increased, so did the handicaps, obstacles, and weights used in my training. I was trained every single day until my lungs felt like they were on fire and even the breaths I took felt like burning air. It truly was hell on earth. Even the other trainees, their faces etched with a grim understanding, sympathized with my predicament. But in the presence of Lady Yama, no one dared to help me out of my suffering. The best they could do was pray that my soul would find peace in the afterlife.
Despite all the complaining and the overwhelming pain, I didn't escape. I don't know why. Something just kept me from giving up—a quiet, unyielding voice in my mind that reminded me to keep going, that the pain was all but nescessary to give way to something greater, something I needed.
The agony was temporary, but the chance I had been given was once in a lifetime.
Even on the alternate days when I didn't have to do the stamina and physical conditioning, I was given no rest. For the first two months, I was given medical, physics, and chemistry books on how the physical aspects of our senses work. I was to read and comprehend how we perceive information and how our minds process it, all to better understand my own senses.
And finally, Sunday. Did I get a break? Hell no!!
It was spent trying to bend my body into weird angles in the name of developing flexibility and agility.
The next four months were spent utilizing the theoretical knowledge I learned to better understand and sharpen my senses in the field. The three months after that were dedicated to training the balance and coordination of my body and mind. It was not a pleasant experience. Every failure to perform properly was met with pain, and every training session was accompanied by a physically stimulating contraption that activated the moment my balance faltered or my body's coordination was not maintained.
For the next ten months, these days were spent learning to move and hide in different terrains, both natural and artificial. And yes, they even had an artificial desert that measured 100 by 70 meters square. Don't ask me how or why they have a desert in a jungle; I still don't know. Oh, and the "stimulation" for this training were honeybees, snakes, and wasps.
The next two months were rock climbing, with the number of safety devices reducing every two weeks. The last two weeks were with additional handicaps. And believe me, the possibility of falling was all the stimulation I needed.
The following six months were spent training with dampened senses. They first deactivated my sense of smell by feeding me a foul-smelling concoction, and with no scent, the forest felt artificial. My hearing was muffled with noise-canceling muffs, my eyesight was messed with by glasses that had different eye corrections, and a specialized suit and weird shoes messed with my sense of touch. Finally, a concoction was used that messed with my balance, making me sway like a drunken master. The training further escalated when they started completely blocking one or two of my senses over the next four months.
The next two months were my Lady Yama testing my senses, followed by being dumped in animal territories to hide from their senses and accomplish some objectives in each territory. I was asked to paint a wolf cub in a wolf den without injuring any of them and without dying.
The final few days were spent with Lady Yama testing all I had learned. When she said I was done with the training, I ran away the very next morning without looking back.