He had just faced a true Foundation Building cultivator.
That earlier sensation that he and the old man detected was wrong. The faint feeling that Lucien was only at half-step foundation realm was wrong.
Completely wrong.
And that made him paid the price.
The price of underestimating your enemy.
Where in truth, Lucien's strength had been firmly within the early stage of the Foundation Realm.
In a way, Hero refused to believe it. That even the Old man's sense could be fooled, someone whom had once stood at the top of the cultivation world.
Despite being in the soul state, the powerful divine mind was still there.
Strange...
Absurdly strange...
But then, it taught him a lot. There are oceans beyond oceans, mountains beyond mountains.
If not for the forbidden technique, forcing out a portion of the old man's strength.
He would already be dead.
To add in to it, that was his final trump card! And he was barely controlling the situation for a brief moment.
Hero shifted slightly, his body reacting with a dull ache that spread from within.
The cost was heavy.
Too heavy.
If the fight had dragged on even a little longer, he might have been crippled on the spot.
"Just that brief surge of Foundation Building energy cruising through my body…" he muttered under his breath, voice low, "and I'm already like this…"
His fingers tightened slightly against the ground.
The gap was larger than he had imagined.
And that realization only made something inside him grow colder.
This strength…
It wasn't enough.
Foundation Building?
A realm that could kill him so easily—
Even that wasn't enough.
What he wanted… was far beyond that.
Something that could tear through heaven and earth itself. Took control of his destiny and be the decision maker of the world
"Spurt—!"
Another mouthful of blood spilled from his lips, staining the ground beneath him.
He didn't react much.
It was expected.
Forcing that kind of power into his body was like cramming a mountain into a bottle.
If not for the old man controlling the flow, he might have exploded from the strain alone.
Hero pushed himself up slowly, his movements stiff.
Standing there, he turned his head toward the direction Lucien had left.
After a moment, he shook his head and let out a quiet scoff, rubbing the back of his neck.
"What a lie…"
His voice came out hoarse.
"One more punch and he'd die?"
He exhaled slowly.
"He wasn't even serious… just testing me."
A dull pain crept along his body, surfacing bit by bit now that the fight was over.
He winced slightly, then closed his eyes for a brief moment.
"Old man… you still there?"
A snort answered him almost immediately.
"What do you think, brat? We share the same body. If you're injured, I will be in trouble."
Hero let out a small breath, tension easing just a little.
At least they were both still alive.
He opened his eyes again, glancing once more at the ruined surroundings before shifting his weight.
"Let's get out of here," he said, voice quieter now. "I don't want to deal with the city guards."
He took a step forward, steadying himself as he moved.
The so-called city guards now weren't the same as before.
The original guards hadn't been replaced, but they had been overshadowed, pushed to the side by a new force that carried a different set of systems.
It was part of Ilya's plan.
With the City Lord absent and the city left in poor condition, she chose to take matters into her own hands. Using the steady flow of guards sent by Liam, she began reshaping the structure from within.
Not forcefully replacing it.
But outclassing it.
Then, eventually the people will choose to follow which rules. The strong make the rules for the weak.
With what she had, turning the city into a base of operations wasn't a difficult decision.
And Liam had no objections.
In fact, he supported it.
Take control of the city, sure why not.
The direction she proposed matched what he wanted, more people, more resources, more control.
A growing city meant more opportunities.
Trade routes expanded, movement increased, and with proper order, security followed.
Step by step, the place began shifting into something else.
Something closer to those distant immortal cities.
It was a long plan.
But it had already started moving.
At the same time, Liam had his own things to do.
Scouts were sent out continuously, moving through dangerous lands in search of rare and powerful beast eggs.
Not just any.
The stronger, the better.
With his current strength, he had begun expanding the range of demonic beasts under his control.
He believed that once a certain threshold was reached, something would change. Of course, once the gauge level up, something would definitely change.
It was only a thought.
Still, he prepared for it.
More demonic beasts at disposal: more skills.
Perhaps a feature to use more than one demonic beast's skills?
Days passed.
Quietly, steadily.
Then one night.
Hero sat in his room, attempting to meditate.
His posture was steady, cross legged on the floor, the air was cold.
But something was off.
His brows slowly tightened.
A faint tension crept across his face, subtle at first
Then more obvious.
His expression began to shift, tightening here and there, as if something inside him was pushing.
"Hm…"
The old man felt it the moment the disturbance deepened.
It wasn't part of Hero's divine mind.
It didn't flow with his breathing, nor did it follow the rhythm of his cultivation. It sat there, foreign, invasive, quietly disrupting everything.
If not attentive enough, even he might've missed it.
Without hesitation, his illusory form slipped inward.
Into Hero's mind.
What greeted him was dense.
Not vast in size, but heavy, compressed thoughts layered over one another, shifting restlessly, as if something was forcing them into a confined space.
The pressure alone was enough to make the air feel thick.
At the center.
Hero's divine consciousness sat cross-legged.
His expression flickered rapidly, changing from one state to another, tension, confusion, strain, cycling endlessly as if he were being pulled apart from within.
The old man's brows tightened as he stepped closer, his gaze sweeping across the chaotic sea of thoughts.
Then he saw it.
A card.
Resting in Hero's palm.
For a brief moment, the old man froze.
"What… is this?"
The words came out slower than usual.
That card.
It wasn't an illusion.
It wasn't a projection.
It existed there.
Physically.
Inside the divine mind.
"Absurd... Absurd!"
His expression stiffened, disbelief settling in.
This alone overturned everything he understood.
Hundreds of years of cultivation, knowledge, experience.
None of it could explain what he was seeing.
Physical things shouldn't be able to exist in a divine mind in it's pure state. Unless it was transformed into a spiritual weapon capable of shifting between physicality and the opposite.
But such a weapon were hard to come by due to the materials in making it scarce in number.
And yet, as his gaze lingered, the connection became clear.
This was the source.
The thing that had been interfering with Hero's meditation these past few days.
The old man exhaled slowly, forcing himself to calm down.
Then, without wasting time, he raised his hand, "It seems I have no choice but to take action"
A steady wave of divine sense flowed out from him, belonging to a Nascent Soul cultivator.
Well, a former Nascent Soul Ancestor since he currently existed in soul state.
It wrapped around the card in Hero's palm.
He closed his eyes.
Darkness.
Not the kind that came with night.
This was absolute.
There was no sense of direction, no up, no down, no distance.
It was as if space itself had lost meaning.
The old man stood still, his expression tightening as he tried to orient himself.
"…Where is this?"
There was no response.
Only silence.
The longer he remained, the more unfamiliar it felt. His instincts told him this wasn't a place meant to be understood easily.
Then.
Something appeared.
Far ahead, barely visible at first.
A fragment of land.
Floating alone in the void.
Small in size, yet it carried a presence that didn't match its scale. Like a space formation but as naturally placed as it was.
The old man moved closer, his attention drawing onto it.
And then.
He saw it.
Images.
Flashing across the surface.
Rapid.
Unstable.
Changing constantly, as if countless moments were being forced together at once.
Within them.
Hero.
But not the one he knew.
A different version.
A different life.
The old man's gaze narrowed.
"…Another world?"
The fragment of land didn't feel like a projection.
It felt complete.
As if it held an entire reality within it.
"An artifact?" he murmured under his breath.
But there were no fluctuations. This card appeared to be extremely ordinary that it terrified him.
Something as weird as this, and yet him, even with his powerful divine mind couldn't sense the slightest clue from it.
"A creation from above?"
That absence made it harder to understand.
He paused, instinctively running through possibilities, weighing what he was seeing.
With a wave of his hand, he pinched a spell that he often used.
Though, the answer he received back startled him.
The result unsettled him.
"…Fortune?"
He frowned deeper.
"This leads to fortune?"
It didn't make sense.
Yet the conclusion held.
"Strange… truly strange…"
His attention returned to the scene.
Hero lived within it.
From infancy.
To youth.
To adulthood.
Everything unfolded naturally.
Too naturally.
The old man watched closely, his eyes narrowing further as he picked up on a detail.
Hero… had no memory of his past.
No trace of who he once was.
He had become someone else entirely.
The scenes continued to shift.
Years passed in moments.
Cultivation advanced.
Strength grew.
Until.
Hero reached the peak of that world.
A realm unfamiliar.
Beyond what the old man had seen before.
Then.
Everything broke.
The sky cracked.
Space itself fractured, lines tearing through the void as if something from the outside had forced its way in.
The old man's expression stiffened.
"…What is this?"
From those cracks.
They came.