Chapter 231: Monstrous Leaps In Comprehension!
Creed was violently expelled from the vision, his physical body slamming back into the obsidian floor of the Path Resonator.
"HAAAH... HAAAH... HAAAH!"
He was drenched in cold sweat, his fingernails split and bleeding from clawing at the stone. Blood poured freely from both of his nostrils, staining his collar crimson.
Within his core, his Path of Killing had detonated.
The faint, fragile crimson thread he had carried out of the Unexplored Rift was gone. In its place was a roaring, crystallized river of dark, coagulated blood-light that coiled around his Force Core like an ancient viper.
Partial Realm... shattered.
Profound Realm... bypassed!
Peak Realm!
The conceptual breakthrough slammed into his marrow like a freight train. Peak Realm Path of Killing!
In the modern classification of human Awakened, reaching the Peak Realm of a Superior Path was a feat reserved for Gold-stage warriors and elders who had spent decades meditating in isolated rifts.
To touch it as a Silver Stage 1 Awakened was a cosmic violation of common sense! His mind expanded, his perception of mortality sharpening to a microscopic edge.
He could look at the empty air of the chamber and instinctively identify fourteen different structural flaws where a single thrust would cause the stone to collapse.
It was pure, unadulterated power.
But Creed didn’t have time to celebrate. The brand on his forehead pulsed again, a high-pitched, metallic whine echoing behind his eyeballs.
"Wait—stop—!" Creed gasped, his hands flying up to clutch his skull. "Not another—!"
SNAP.
Reality folded like origami.
He was suspended in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.
The winds howled with the force of continuous nuclear detonations, ammonia-laden storms screaming at ten thousand miles an hour.
Floating in the center of the tempest, untouched by the hurricane, was an ethereal woman. Her skin was a translucent, pale azure, her four long, featherless wings composed of woven light. She wore no armor, only a tattered shroud of white silk.
And etched into her smooth, blue brow, glowing with terrifying intensity, was the slave brand.
She did not flap her wings to stay aloft. She was not fighting the planetary storm.
She simply existed outside of it.
’They anchored my world to the void,’ her thought drifted into Creed’s mind, sweet, melancholic, and terrifyingly vast. ’They put iron around our sun and called it civilization. But the wind does not ask the cage for permission to blow.’
She tilted her head, stepping into the violent, crushing eye of the storm.
Where she stepped, space ceased to exert friction. Gravity forgot she possessed mass. The screaming hurricane parted around her silhouette like an obedient hound bowing before its sovereign.
The Path of Freedom!
Creed watched through her eyes as she crossed millions of miles of empty void with a single, unhurried stride. It was not speed; it was the total dissolution of tethers. She was not fast because she pushed harder; she was fast because the universe had no authority to hold her back.
’To be free is not to run away,’ her voice whispered, echoing in Creed’s ears as the blue light engulfed his sight. ’To be free is to understand that the cage is an illusion born of your own consent. Step through it.’
GASP!
Creed convulsed, his heels drumming violently against the floor.
His lungs burned. Faint, prismatic light rippled across his skin, shedding the oppressive weight of the chamber’s localized gravity.
Path of Freedom: Faint Realm → Profound Realm!
The jump from Faint to Profound was a chasm that separated ordinary skirmishers from true masters of the sky.
The conceptual understanding of movement within his soul solidified into three interlocking crystalline rings, humming with weightless authority.
Before he could even draw a breath, the brand flared a third time.
"FUCK—!"
CRACK.
He was standing on the continental shelf of a dying world under the bombardment of orbital warships.
Beams of superheated plasma the width of city blocks were raining from the heavens, vaporizing oceans, turning the bedrock into bubbling lakes of glass.
Standing before the apocalyptic barrage was a four-armed warrior made entirely of jagged, volcanic granite.
His chest was wide as a fortress wall, his legs rooted deep into the tectonic plates of the planet.
On the center of his stony brow, scarred and chipped from thousands of impacts, was the slave brand.
A plasma lance that could boil an empire struck the stone giant directly on the shoulder.
The giant did not move. He did not grunt.
He didn’t use an energy shield. He didn’t construct a barrier.
He simply was.
’They drop stars upon our heads,’ the stone titan rumbled, the vibration traveling through Creed’s phantom bones. ’They think the sky can crush the earth. But the sky is empty air, and the earth is the cradle of the cosmos. A mountain does not negotiate with the rain. A mountain simply endures.’
Creed felt the titan’s consciousness align with the core of the planet. It was not a defense; it was an absolute weight. The concept of the Path of the Mountain was the refusal to yield an inch of reality to external force.
BOOOOM!
Creed slammed back onto the floor of the Path Resonator, vomiting a mouthful of bile and dark, oxidized blood.
He lay flat on his back, his limbs trembling so violently he couldn’t close his fingers.
Path of the Mountain: Faint Realm → Profound Realm!
Three paths.
Three impossible, monstrous leaps in comprehension in the span of less than six hours.
Path of Freedom: Profound Realm!
Path of the Mountain: Profound Realm!
Path of Killing: Peak Realm!
If any instructor from the Ambassadors Academy—if Varien, or the Director, or the elders of the Twelve Accords—were standing in this room, their minds would have broken.
This was progress that should have taken two decades of bloody warfare, tens of thousands of rifts, and mountains of divine treasures.
And yet, Creed felt no joy.
He felt no triumphant rush of adrenaline. Because deep inside his soul, something was going horribly, catastrophically wrong.