His time with Julian and the rest of the orphanage had jolted him back to reality.
It had altered his perspective of time.
He was forty years old, although only thirty-eight years had passed since his birth in the real world.
However, he felt and looked twenty-six years old physically.
The combination of having broken through to the Senior Realm and having consumed a particularly potent life-prolonging potion at the biological age of twenty-six meant that his aging had slowed down significantly.
For every year that passed, his body aged a few months at the very most. It had warped his perception of time significantly. So much so that three years was nothing to him. It was what a season might be to a normal human.
He felt as though someone had put the Quarrier Orphanage in the Mellow Manifold in the time that he had been away.