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.