Defiance of the Fall

"We have it! We're on our way back now." Ogras' voice was barely audible through the static, but his message was received loud and clear.

Zac could cry, except he was too exhausted for anything beyond an affirmative grunt. Finally, there was light at the end of the tunnel. The past seven days of his breakthrough had been almost unbearable, where he'd been forced to keep going despite his tank running on empty. Zac didn't know it was possible to be this exhausted. His Soul Cores felt so drained that a slight nudge would reduce them to dust, and his bodies had shrunk to half their original size from extracting every little scrap of excess energy and Vigor.

He'd reached the wall that even successful cultivators were eventually forced to face. Zac wielded power far beyond the norm, and he had spatial tools filled with enough treasures to trigger bloody wars. He had trusted companions who would go to the ends of the earth to help him. And yet death crept closer and closer.

For the lucky few, that insurmountable wall was advanced age and their lifeforce drying up. Most who wholeheartedly pursued the Dao didn't get that far. Their journey reached its end after they failed to overcome the many challenges on the road of cultivation. Zac had ample company in that sense.

Zac looked at the devastation on the screen hovering before him. The dozens of planet-sized pieces of rubble had somewhat stabilized. They moved in locked trajectories around the five stellar rivers that had turned the subspace into a furnace. How long the scenery would last was impossible to say. Debris was constantly pulled in by the rivers' immense gravity and dragged off into the spatial tears at their end.

The exit of the Eternal Guardians was the final nail in the coffin for the Centurion Base. The outer band was gone, ripped into pieces by the destruction the puppets caused on their way out. Some pieces remained afloat, more had fallen into depths to never be seen again. The stellar rivers weren't powerful enough to destroy the outer towers, but the force of the collisions had pushed half of them out of sight. The others were left in a wretched state.

Only the central tower looked roughly the same as before, though the stellar rivers wound around it had left it superheated to the point that space around it kept bending. All throughout, there were streaks of deadly heat and pieces of burning debris darting about. The trajectories and Daos involved were completely different, but Zac felt the infernal scenery matched the microcosm inside his Quantum Space quite well.

It was this environment his subordinates had kept braving to give him a fighting chance. Zac had wracked his brain for ideas to overcome his breakthrough before the trial began, consulting with his companions every chance he got. The consensus was that he couldn't. Even if the countdown had stabilized by now, they only got 18 days out of the 31 Zac's quest initially showed. It was more than what he got for his previous breakthrough, but not enough considering the added complexity and effort needed to reach Late Hegemony.

With three days left on the clock, Zac estimated he had a week of work remaining on his core. That was if he were in a decent enough state to work on his core normally. It also didn't take into account the final step, the Formation, when the newly formed core was compressed and stabilized into a final product.

Conventional Natural Treasures and recovery pills were of no help. His mind and body were too drained, to the point that the fierce energies in D-grade pills and Natural Treasures would do more harm than good. Not that it mattered much. His body had already built up an immunity to get him this far.

The logical answer was to finish the breakthrough after the trial had begun, except that meant putting his life in the System's hands. There was a high risk of losing control of his unstable, overloaded core when whisked away by the System. The sudden change in environment could also cause tears in the subspace, triggering its collapse or a deadly influx of energy.

Worse, another change had occurred over the past few days. Zac glanced at the motes of destiny floating around him. They'd more than tripled in number since they first appeared, and their luster had grown stronger. Some had already gone beyond being ornaments. Each evolved light held a lifetime's worth of experience. Literally.

It wasn't the clarity of Ultom. It was like the motes were a complete soul, holding memories and emotions. Janos was the first to discover the phenomenon. A day later, it was impossible not to notice. It had become a constant struggle to stave off the faux souls' attempt to resonate with him, especially the memories that resonated with his path.

A few of his sealbearers had already lost themselves for hours after a slip of concentration. Zac had relied on his Void State to avoid such a fate, but he feared it was only a matter of time. They were growing more insistent by the hour.

Zac doubted holding them off to the end would change anything. It couldn't be random that these visions appeared. They believed it was meant as an opportunity to get a leg up on the trial, where finding the right set of memories would be useful somehow. The theory also lined up with full sealbearers getting more memory motes than those with incomplete seals.

For Zac, the opportunity was a disaster. He suspected the first stage of the trial would take place within an illusion. The moment he was dragged into a memory was the moment his core would go supernova. Despite the odds being stacked against him, Zac hadn't given up. If convention said his breakthrough was impossible, then he'd overturn convention.

He stubbornly kept going, using his dwindled resources to their utmost. Zac wasn't making much headway by now, but each piece of debris he upgraded and added to his growing core would stave off disaster a bit longer. The flame of hope would keep burning so long as he kept struggling, which was exactly what Ogras' message had proven.

Each second felt like an eternity until the doors finally slid open to let Ogras and Catheya inside. Zac's heart clenched upon seeing their state. Both were covered in burns, their auras flickering precariously. The item he needed was located in a treasury inside one of the burning pieces of debris. Reaching its depths had clearly been a brush with death. And yet, they didn't take a moment to rest, coming straight to deliver salvation.

"Buddy, are you ready?" Ogras asked as he hurried over with a crystal carafe in his hands.

"As ready as I'll be," Zac said, looking at Catheya. "What about you?"

"I'm—I still don't know if it'll work. It was never designed for this. I'm afraid you'll…" Catheya's voice trailed off as she looked conflicted and scared. Ȑ

"Girl, don't jinx it," Ogras muttered under his breath.

"You're giving me a chance at life. To turn a calamity into an opportunity. What else can I ask for?" Zac said with a smile.

"That's right," Ogras grinned and winked at Catheya. "Who are we dealing with? This is just another Tuesday for him."

Zac made a final mental check of his state, ensuring that he hadn't missed anything. Similar checks were taking place around him. Galau and K'Rav were inspecting the chaotic mesh of arrays set up, where Jaol and Ship Spirit had helped with the complex calculations. Vilari and Kruta were sitting nearby, ready to assist when needed.

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Everything was in place. The treasure in Ogras' hand was the only thing missing, and they'd recovered just in time. Zac felt the universe urging him on, telling him it was now or never. If he waited much longer, he would have too little energy left to endure the next step. Zac took out an ancient box and began unlocking its intricate seal.

Warning signals went off in Zac's mind the moment he unclasped the lid, and a fierce aura filled the hangar. It almost felt like they'd let loose a Beast Emperor, and the suppression brought forth reserves Zac didn't know existed. Rejecting his primal instinct to flee, Zac ensconced the box in an embrace between his bodies.

Undoing the ancient lock was like introducing a weakness to a pressure cooker, and treasure jade turned into shrapnel when the box erupted in a tsunami of pent-up energy. A cloud of blue dust utterly bereft of any energy fell onto the ground, forming a neat pile between Zac's halves. It was the only thing remaining of the box and its contents.

Zac didn't get to see the Body Refining Treasure's true appearance or figure out the best way of absorbing it. The problem had solved itself, with the medicinal force pouring into his wounds like it was attracted by his tempered flesh. The relief was short-lived and quickly replaced by utter, inconceivable agony.

The pain was close to the levels of his temporal backlash, and it grew worse when he felt the horrifying bite from the Four Laws. The experience was completely different from enduring the Four Desolates, though. The Laws found in the Body Tempering Treasure he traded from Esmeralda weren't pure. Instead, they were with a fleshy force reminiscent of the Fiend Crystals he'd collected in the Centurion Lighthouse.

There was even a hint of resentment and madness mixed in. Its origins were clearly different, though, and closer to what he felt from the Eternal Guardians. Zac also felt the lingering power of stars inside. Likely, the Starfall Court had managed to extract some of the force that birthed the Foreign Gods. From there, they'd purified as much of the corruption as they could without damaging its nature, like with the puppets.

Left was an unattuned Body Tempering Treasure containing a sliver of Starclad's perfected power. Zac would have normally been exhilarated by the pain, knowing it brought tremendous benefits. It was different now. His body was starved for the very energies spreading through every inch and corner, but the hurricanes and ponds in his cells were too weak to extract it.

It was a losing battle where his body was being ground to dust before it could digest the benefits. Zac had already entered his Void State to endure the pain, and unbreakable will forced his limbs to move when his muscles had stopped listening. A deep thump reverberated through the hall as Zac stomped down onto the array disks while forming mudras with shaking hands.

It was the first step of something both foreign and familiar, echoing concepts from [Void Vajra Sublimation], [Stellar Dominion], and various Draugr bloodline methods. Death and life moved in perfect sync, and Zac's suffering reached new thresholds as the energy was drawn deeper into his cells.

He had to keep going. Zac glanced at Ogras, who moved over the carafe. It stopped right between the Core Formation arrays, and a hand made from shadows pulled out the stopper before disappearing. A shroud of starlight resembling Starclad's cape poured out of the vase, and Zac's soul shuddered with both fear and hunger. A second source of Law had appeared in the room, one mixed with profound, enduring spirituality.

The newly engraved runes surrounding Zac's arrays lit up, and the Core Formation Arrays interlocked with patterns Zac had seen thousands of times. They were almost identical to the arrays Zac used when practicing [Nine Reincarnations Manual]. The liquid Soul Treasure was already drawn by the hunger in Zac's mind, and the arrays helped drag it all inside before it could get sidetracked.

Zac put theory into practice by activating his Soul Nurturing Technique. The twin galaxies in his Soul Aperture were soon invaded by an overbearing star system seemingly intent on consuming the existing system. Zac's Soul Core trembled as they were drowned by their radiance, and Zac couldn't even think from the pain.

He didn't need to. Zac's heart knew what he had to do. Pure will kept him going, maintaining the [Nine Reincarnations Manual] while he transitioned to the second stance of his redesigned body tempering method. The movement caused a shockwave that reached the depths of his soul, rallying its faltering forces, and Zac's mind was once more clear.

The heart drove the body, the body nourished the soul, and the soul strengthened the heart. The Void was the bridge, forming a complete cycle of nourishment and stability. This was what he'd seized from Ultom's light. A grand unified method where everything could become part of something greater.

Zac had discussed this issue with Rava more than once, whether it would help or harm to expand a method to include more aspects than one. Zac had initially believed it a bad idea. The System's path was one of specialization, extracting the most out of each technique for efficient advancement.

Combining all one's manuals into one technique could be likened to an even distribution of attributes. The total attribute tally would be the same as someone like Zac. However, that lack of focus meant no aspect would stand out, leaving you worse off than if you specialized. Instead of cramming Heart Cultivation into his [Nine Reincarnation Manual], it would be better to nourish the heart separately.

That parable didn't capture the whole picture, even if Zac suspected that was the most common outcome with the ancient manuals. There were instances where one plus once didn't equal two and where the fusion of two separate aspects could bring forth something completely new. That was the purpose of the [Void Emperor Apotheosis]—divinity from the mundane, a unifying method combining his path.

What Zac exhibited was only a crude prototype of what he'd envisioned, but it managed to accomplish what he needed. A weak cycle had formed, synchronizing his Heart, Body, and Soul. None could withstand the destruction of the two Law-imbued treasures on their own. Together, they barely managed to hold on.

More importantly, his methods suddenly exhibited a trait exclusive to his bloodline—the hunger of the Void Emperor. The uncontrollable forces rampaging through his bodies briefly paused as threads of pure energy were absorbed by his cells and Soul Cores. All the energy didn't disappear into the Void Realm, either.

It was his [Void Vajra Sublimation] and [Nine Reincarnations Manual] that had gained the hunger of the Void, so it was they who drew on the unclaimed energy to improve their efficacy. Of course, the Supreme Treasures wouldn't let themselves be refined without a fight, and Zac didn't have the strength to keep the fight going for much longer.

"Do it," Zac wheezed, and Catheya clasped her hands.

A boundless chill came like a punch to the gut, forcing the others to retreat to the edges of the hall. The source was a small blue scale that had emerged from Catheya's forehead. It looked like it could have been hewn from primordial ice, but its unmistakable aura exposed its origin. It emitted the tyrannical might of dragons.

The scale flew forward, taking the empty carafe's position. Zac's skin immediately began freezing over, eliciting a feeling of being stabbed by a million daggers. The glacial chill crept deeper and deeper, guided by Catheya's will. Zac showed the way, leading the bulk of the cold into his Quantum Space. It swept forth like a time-accelerated avalanche, covering every inch with terminal chill.

Life halted, Death was delayed, and all Conflict ceased as the Quantum Space entered an artificial ice age. Even the inflow of energy from the Cosmos ground to a halt when the spatial fractures froze over and became impermeable walls.

The scale was something given to Catheya by her master, a safeguard at the same level as Sendor's brands. Even if its strength was limited to that of a Monarch, its source was a genuine top-tier Supremacy wielding the Authority of Ice. Nothing could withstand its power, least of all Zac. Catheya had tried to aim as much of the scale's power into his Quantum Space, but perfectly controlling such power was impossible for her.

Thankfully, that was part of their calculation. The destruction of his bodies stopped as his cells froze over, and the ebullient lights harassing his Soul Aperture were rooted in place together with his nebulaic swirls. Zac felt his mind slow to a crawl as even his thoughts froze over, but he retained enough presence of mind to hold onto the effect from [Void Emperor Apotheosis].

After two weeks of unrelenting struggle, an absolute calm had descended on Zac's harried bodies. He was frozen solid, helpless, and at the precipice of true death. He was also alive, struggling, and growing stronger by the minute. Things were finally moving in the right direction.

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