Chapter 283 - 283: Synthesis Block
I stood before the five crystalline pedestals, feeling the sterile, objective pressure of the System watching my intent. The prizes offered for breaching the tutorial's hidden constraints were incredible. A custom Inner World foundation? Bypassing natural bottlenecks? An instantly forged Mythic combo?
I let my [Void Perception] scan the offerings. They were all heavy with conceptual weight. The sword was amazing, certainly, but the weapon was the lowest on the list compared to the others. The elixir felt like it'd be a strong choice, but I didn't feel like I needed it. It mentioned roadblocks before Ascendancy, which I didn't expect I would have, besides, it might disrupt my carefully cultivated base. The same applied for the Inner World Hearth. And for the skill combination Joker, I felt like it'd be better to do it on my own without System help, especially since I wanted to combine four skills not three, a feat thought to be impossible even to the Prime.
The choice ultimately crystallized not around what would give me the biggest short-term spike, but what resolved the most profound hard-coded limit of reality itself.
I reached for the blue shard on the third pedestal.
"I will take the 'Eleventh Mark'."
[Acknowledged.]
The other pedestals dissolved into the mist. The shard floated from its base and drifted toward me. I reached out, and as my fingers closed around the jagged edge of pure potentiality, it didn't cut; it melted into my skin, rushing up my arm in a vein of cooling blue fire directly into my chest.
I closed my eyes, anticipating pain or resistance as the System forced a new fundamental rule into my metaphysical architecture.
Instead, I felt a familiar, ancient presence try to manifest within my Spirit to hammer the new rule into place. It was the Prime System protocol. I felt its tools extending… and then suddenly recoiling in confusion.
My Soul, hardened by the Void and Flame, fed by [Hunger], shaped by [Syntropy] and wrapped in my [Veil], didn't resist. It just… absorbed it. I felt the 'space' where skills were stored — a previously rigid grid in my Inner World — expand comfortably. The system's presence drifted away, with a strange sensation radiating from its mana, as if its task was completed much easier than it seemed to have predicted.
"Eleven skill slots isn't even close to my absolute ceiling," I realized, opening my eyes in the empty grey void before transitioning back to the material world. "The system didn't force a hole into my core; it just removed a systemic blindfold preventing me from seeing the extra room I had already naturally expanded."
It was a sobering thought. The Prime System wasn't infallible. It couldn't perfectly map a Soul like mine, maybe because of my Hybrid nature, or maybe it's because I constantly dipped my toes in null-space. Either way, the System had some assumptions regarding my soul; they were wrong.
I woke back up in my tent in Floor 99's transit zone. I stretched. I felt whole, dangerous, and for the first time in a while, possessing elbow room. My Skill limit sat happily at 11.
"Let's go see about combining those four skills, then maybe work on expanding my arsenal."
The next few weeks in Bastion were split between management, systematic expansion, and intense, solitary meditation.
The "Systemic Tides" buff the System had applied as a reward had utterly revolutionized Ferra.
The ambient essence didn't just double; the entire color spectrum of the air seemed sharper. When it rained, the water tasted sweet and restored fatigue instantly. A child playing with a stick could realistically level up to Tier 1 in a year just from inhaling deeply.
It caused panic initially.
"Lord Eren," an exasperated village elder had pleaded over the comms system three days after the change. "Some of our livestock are glowing. A few cows seemed to have evolved in Tiers, one just lifted a wagon to get to better grass. It's deeply worrying the local butcher."
"Embrace the evolution, elder," I had reassured him, suppressing a grin. "Make sure the butcher gets stronger so he can keep up. Let Jeeves know if the situation goes sideways."
The people were incredibly grateful, of course. Injuries healed faster. Sickness was almost completely wiped out by the purifying aspects of the enhanced mana. However, there was a constant underlying anxiety. A planet getting a permanent triple multiplier to its 'Experience Rating' usually meant it was about to be put into a much harsher weight class.
To keep the populace secure and funded, I organized the grand sweep.
We systematized the clearance of the higher-tier towers for both the Void Star and our newly acquired friends, like the Solar Ascendancy. I took groups of elite teams — leading them, mostly guarding from shadows — and cracked Floors 61 through 80 on multiple Towers while maintaining a strict "Do not engage unless told" protocol. Once we smashed the localized Guardians or complex puzzles, the extraction guilds rushed in to establish fortified forward operations points.
We had ore flowing down to the cities by the megaton. Starlight shards. Deep-magma cores. Liquid wind from the air domains. Ferra wasn't only a planet anymore; it was an inter-dimensional warehouse. Leoric spent days drawing up plans to refine automated defensive perimeters with Jeeves' shadow constructs and Arthur's clones maintaining maintenance protocols to prevent sudden boss respawns in our cleared territories.
And amidst the logistical booming, I spent hours locked in the deepest meditation chamber of the Cradle or the Veiled Path.
The floors had many more runes inscribed, with stabilizing geometric circles, ambient mana enhancers, Essence purifiers and so on; the air was dead silent. I needed to have a well thought of plan before getting the fifth Mythic. I also needed some advice.
"Four skills to unify," I whispered in the dark, hovering four conceptual icons of my skills before me with pure Will. "[Void Walk]. [Void-Lattice Perception]. [Vault of the Void]. And [Apex Mana Authority]."
I focused on the weave. My recent encounter with Vasud and "The Gray" still haunted my planning. He had severed mana conceptually by shutting it off. What I wanted was slightly different. I wanted to maintain a state of Null where only my physics applied by utilizing my newly minted [Vault] skill not just to hold constructs, but hold space itself. I used [Perception] to view the fundamental lattice string arrays and used the [Walk] parameter not to move my body through it, but to drag the fabric of my domain to anchor perfectly upon those strings, severing outside influence forcefully.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
And fueling the fusion? That required raw conceptual dictation. I wanted to apply my [Hunger], hoping the sheer weight of my dictations backed by massive stores of Essence, would fuse the four properties permanently into one Mythic action — one unified understanding of nullifying existence, allowing for teleportation and perception on command.
I envisioned mixing them, using [Nullifying Veil] and my mastery of concealment magic as a baseline study but explicitly avoiding editing the Veil itself. I simply attempted to combine my manipulation to "remove" an object and apply it into my creation of "constructs" within the Void and dictate those spaces through authority while walking between them.
It was incredibly difficult and almost impossible to convey. It was like trying to teach a hurricane how to sing an opera using only sign language. I was only poking around to see how the process would even begin. Yet, every time I brought the disparate conceptual strings close, they recoiled. Their constant movement naturally rejected permanence. Perception relied on absorbing signals; Vault relied on locking them away in space. It was fundamentally paradoxical. I burned through half of my mana pool every day, just trying to force the sparks to weld, returning battered, fatigued, and endlessly annoyed.
It didn't work. The System was a wall, and my hammer lacked the required momentum. I felt like I was bashing against a ceiling, staring into my own mind unable to push past the complex problem I had formulated.
"I need to broaden my scope, before I even think about getting guidance," I sighed aloud one late evening, stepping out onto a high balcony overlooking the booming glow of the training grounds. My clone stood a few meters away, scanning the horizon stoically with a Void blade attached to his waist, while managing security feeds alongside Arthur's main form.
I needed more information, but I also lacked inspiration.
A soft chitter interrupted my thoughts. A slight disturbance in the shadows occurred as Kaelen appeared by the railing. The Glimmerfox had hit an impressive growth spurt, the influx of local planetary mana mixed with [Void] meats turning him from a medium dog-sized scout into a massive, powerful creature resembling a majestic hunting hound of star-speckled darkness and shadow-tinkling fur. He carried the presence of an assassin, albeit a fuzzy, aggressively cuddly one.
Kaelen padded closer, resting a dense chin against my knee and whining gently.
"Yeah, buddy. I'm kind of stuck," I told him, stroking his ear. "I am just experimenting around but my skills are being incredibly annoying. Trying to combine legendary skills apparently requires actual enlightenment, not just pushing a few conceptual buttons in a fancy pattern. Who knew."
Kaelen merely blinked golden, star-field eyes and let out a huff, giving my hand an affectionate nudge before pacing down the edge. His movements subtly left brief micro-tears in reality — tiny [Void Walk] traces as a byproduct of our early soul bond and shared meals. He possessed strong shadow and space affinities; he walked through distances gracefully and observed.
"A change of pace," I mused to him, leaning against the cold railing. I realized with a stab of guilt how distracted I'd been lately. With Vasud on floor 100 occupying my obsession and managing Ferra eating my days, my promises had drifted to the backburner, again.
"I promised you we'd investigate your history. And any remnants related to that assassin group that hurt your family," I continued softly. I hadn't forgotten about them. Remnants wielding a type of space magic with face masks that had signs resembling an S.
"We don't have any information yet, but we do have one lead. Aethelgard," I mentioned the continent that was the original home to the Elves, although many of them would call Ferra their home now. Elder Valerius introduced many of his scholars and scribes to me after I asked, yet nobody seemed to know any more about Reyna's glimmerfox or what happened to them. But, there were a whole host of interconnected regions within Aethelgard we hadn't properly engaged. We had trade deals along the coast and forests — all Elven territory — but the heart of it? We barely poked it. We basically protected it and declared the local inhabitants there mostly autonomous unless it concerned immigration to Ferra or universal trade under our planetary laws, leaving a majority of their leaders undisturbed unless asked for help, opting to protect our interests without changing everything. I had heard there was actually no single Prime Tower spawning naturally there either — we didn't know why, but one guess was that they took much longer to overthrow the Kyorians, passing the ten year threshold.
A new adventure in ancient woods, with magic rules completely detached from our heavy tech-mage influenced reality, sounded precisely like the change of thinking my head needed.
Kaelen let out a sudden, happy yap. His tail wagged, scattering small wisps of star-stuff against the floor tiles, and he pawed frantically at my legs, clearly thrilled. A hunting trip. Outside. Just us. He sent a low resonance rumble into the shadow plane.
Suddenly, a vibrant streak of brilliant orange and gold ripped out of the nearby skies.
A flash of immense heat bloomed a few feet above the balcony railing.
It was Bennu. The avian child-like terror who was massive but adorable with his own Flame affinity — had evolved drastically. His core used to feel like a burning inferno, now, it felt more like a neutron star. He looked dense, powerful, and regal.
Except right now, the streak of light diving from the air did not appear to be thirty feet wide.
A creature the exact dimensions of a noisy parrot dropped onto Kaelen's head with a proud squawk. It possessed all the blazing magnificence of a phoenix packed into an absurdly compressed model.
"Wait," I raised my hand in disbelief. "Bennu, did you… condense yourself?"
Bennu chirped a melodious tune and flapped small, aggressively glowing wings proudly on Kaelen's dark mane, causing sparks to scatter across the hound's snout harmlessly.
"I did I did, Enki! Now we can adventure together more often!" he giggled.
The heat output was incredibly concentrated but sealed in tightly to avoid scorching me.
I grinned widely, my mood drastically improving as the tiny, sun-bright bird hopped between Kaelen's ears excitedly.
"A Void-fox and a travel-sized Phoenix," I noted. "And me with 11 skill slots of frustration and indecision. Honestly, you guys might just be what the doctor ordered."
I walked down to the control center, finding Anna hovering next to her new healer Sprite. She looked like she had finally discovered real relaxation and hated my plan when I brought it up briefly to excuse myself.
"You sure you don't want to come? A trip to the mysterious Elven world? No political wrangling, we're going to be adventuring, I heard they have an entire continent of beast-folk!" I enticed as I approached the team sitting with Lucas over some tax documents related to Korg. "Strictly investigative purposes and punching some old bad guys, once some mystery solving included."
"Eren, you don't do simple adventuring," Anna chortled from her couch. "Your version of a holiday is picking fights with angry geography or healing a god. I'd love to, but I can't this time. I need to be here running logistics, ensuring my squads maintain the required resource rotation around Floors 50 for the extraction. And Tink finally showed me how to apply active Life Mana parameters without crushing the patient…" Tink the sprite hovered behind her neck with crossed arms sounding off a squeak to signify that fact. "We just returned a few months ago. Maybe next time."
I asked the others as well — all incredibly busy with running aspects of Ferra or their specific mastery projects. They're managing 25 world-ending factories and multiple economies after all.
I accepted their denials comfortably, walking away happily after designating the defense protocol logic directly into my high mana powered Clone — ordering him to patrol visibly as a decoy alongside Nyx and maintaining constant comms through Jeeves, knowing it had enough of my stored Essence internally to easily match a tier 7 boss at minimum capacity should they be bothered in my absence while being aided by Bastion defenses.
I slung my standard travelling equipment pack on and looked down at Kaelen shivering with joy, with Bennu perching confidently on a specially requested tiny Void leather patch sewed on Kaelen's back like a riding saddle.
"Well, gentlemen," I grinned widely, the tense aura from my constant failures within my Sanctum suddenly dissipating in front of my newfound freedom of pure discovery. "Let's go learn about old forests and solve an older murder case, to clear our minds."
A moment later, following the requested Spire jump instructions assigned by the Elves during their transition deals, ensuring we landed on an appropriate zone, the Violet vortex claimed the three of us as we zipped through space onto the shores of ancient, unspoiled realms.