Chapter 233: Mindset Flaw.
After resting for a few minutes, Creed finally stood up. The dizziness was gone. In its place was an unprecedented, terrifying lightness.
His paths were at levels ordinary mortals couldn’t even dream of. But a Path was only the philosophy; the Arts were the weapons that brought that philosophy into the physical world.
He had the Line of Death (Partial Realm).
He had the Wings of Freedom (Faint Realm).
And now, he had the embryonic Death Gaze (Faint Realm).
"If the mark wants to feed," Creed muttered, his eyes narrowing with savage greed, "then let’s feed it until it chokes."
He reached for the brand on his forehead, no longer fearing it, but demanding its aid.
He summoned the Wings of Freedom.
FWOOSH!
The ethereal, translucent wings of light that normally flared behind his shoulder blades exploded outward. But this time, bolstered by his newly mastered Profound Realm Path of Freedom and the geometric resonance of the brand, the wings did not merely glow.
They refined.
The simple, feathered edges of the light smoothed into razor-thin, geometric aerofoils composed of pure, compressed spatial distortion.
Creed didn’t just hover; he vanished.
Crack-crack-crack!
In the span of half a second, Creed appeared in eight different locations across the spherical chamber, leaving behind fading afterimages that didn’t just blur—they displaced the ambient air with sonic pops!
Wings of Freedom: Faint Realm → Profound Realm!
The flight was no longer a crude burst of upward momentum. It was omnidirectional, effortless, and instantaneous.
He could alter his trajectory at right angles mid-flight without shedding a single ounce of kinetic force. Inertia had ceased to be an obstacle.
He dropped to the center of the ring, not slowing down for a heartbeat.
He retrieved the Pale Horizon spear.
He assumed the stance. Left foot forward, right hand anchoring the butt of the pale shaft against his hip, his eyes locking onto a phantom target sixty paces away.
Line of Death.
The Art that had previously required a full three seconds of intense concentration, the art that had demanded he sacrifice his entire tactical awareness just to find that singular, inevitable thread of mortality...
Now, backed by the Peak Realm Path of Killing, it answered him instantly.
Creed didn’t need to search for the line.
He saw forty of them!
The empty air was suddenly crisscrossed with glowing, blood-red vectors. Every single one of them was an absolute trajectory of destruction.
He thrust.
SHING!
The spear didn’t cut through the air. The space along the spear’s path simply folded inward upon itself, leaving behind a pencil-thin, pitch-black vacuum scar that hung in the atmosphere for three full seconds before collapsing with a thunderous BOOM.
Line of Death: Partial Realm → Profound Realm!
The speed was terrifying. The power was catastrophic. At the Profound Realm, the Line of Death didn’t just pierce armor; it ignored physical density entirely, transposing the spear’s tip directly to the fatal point of impact.
And finally, the Death Gaze.
He practiced the ocular Art against the reflective surfaces of the chamber. Over the next two hours, with the brand guiding the mental circuitry, he drilled the activation time from a full second down to a split-second reflex.
By the time he was done, the Art had stabilized firmly into the Profound Realm. A single flicker of his eyelids was enough to project a localized aura of slaughter so dense that the air temperature in a three-meter cone before him dropped by ten degrees.
Three Arts. All elevated to the Profound Realm. His combat power had not merely doubled; it had undergone a qualitative, geometric multiplication.
It was almost too easy!
Brimming with unbridled excitement, Creed planted his boots into the stone.
"Now," he whispered, a fierce fire burning in his chest. "The third one. The Path of the Mountain."
He had two offensive paths that had produced arts. He had an evasion art.
He desperately needed an absolute, unshakeable defensive Art.
He closed his eyes. He channeled the Profound Realm Path of the Mountain.
The phantom weight of the continental peak surged around him. His skin shimmered with a dull, granite-like hue. His bones locked into their unyielding geometry.
He tried to condense the mountain. He tried to shape it into an Art—an impenetrable shell, an immovable fortress, a barrier that could turn aside the strike of a Beast King.
Minutes ticked by.
An hour.
Two hours.
The granite light flickered, swelled... and then sputtered out like a dying candle.
Creed opened his eyes, panting slightly, his brow furrowed in deep frustration.
"Nothing," he muttered, looking down at his trembling palms. "Why the hell can’t I close the loop?"
The brand on his forehead remained cold and silent. The visions had completely ceased. The well was dry.
Creed sat down heavily, resting his forearms on his knees, staring into the middle distance. He was smart enough to know when a wall was made of paper and when it was made of solid lead. This wasn’t a lack of energy. It wasn’t even a lack of comprehension.
It was a fundamental flaw in his mindset.
To create an Art from the Path of the Mountain, one had to truly believe in endurance. One had to possess the heart of an ancient monolith that was content to sit in one place, weathering the storms of an eternity, accepting the erosion of the world without moving an inch.
Creed Walden wasn’t a mountain.
He was a scavenger from the gutters of Section 7 who had spent his entire life running, dodging, scheming, and fighting dirty just to survive to the next sunrise.
His instinct wasn’t to endure a punch; his instinct was to duck the punch, kick the guy in the groin, and stab him through the throat with a piece of rusted iron.
His heart was fundamentally aligned with Freedom and Killing. The Mountain was a tool he wielded, but it wasn’t who he was.
"Tch," Creed clicked his tongue, though a small, self-deprecating smirk touched his lips. "Can’t force a wolf to play a tortoise. Fair enough."
He glanced up at the chamber’s timer.
[ELAPSED TIME: 11 HOURS, 48 MINUTES.]
[REMAINING TIME: 12 HOURS, 12 MINUTES.]
Exactly half his time was gone.
His paths were maxed out for his current stage. His arts were refined. The brand had retreated back into a cold, quiet slumber beneath his skin.
Creed stood up, his gaze dropping to the floor where the Pale Horizon lay waiting.
The sleek, bone-white spear hummed softly, its pale surface catching the faint ambient light of the chamber. It was a True Grade Artifact, a masterpiece that didn’t just pierce, but folded and erased space itself.
And yet, for all its power, Creed had only ever treated it like an exceptionally sharp stick to channel his paths.
His Spear Intent was still stuck at Stage 2.
Stage 2 Spear Intent was impressive for a Bronze Awakened, even respectable for a Silver. But in the grand arena—among the monsters of the Hope Alliance, the heirs of the Twelve Accords, the prodigies who had practiced weapon forms since their fourth birthdays—Stage 2 was merely the baseline.
Stage 3 Spear Intent was the realm where a weapon ceased to be metal and became an extension of the soul.
At Stage 3, a spearman’s strike didn’t just carry physical force; it carried conceptual penetration that could pierce through pure energy shields, elemental constructs, and even dimensional barriers without needing an Art to bridge the gap.
"Twelve hours," Creed whispered, picking up the Pale Horizon. The cool metal sent a shiver of pure electricity through his fingers. "Just you, me, and the edge."