Adrian studied the golden presence hovering before him while the others waited behind him. White-grey essence still covered his body, and beyond his shoulder, Lara was supporting the unconscious disciple beside the cultivation platform. The Will of Time had stopped at his command, but now that it was waiting for him to continue, Adrian realized that he possessed no clear idea of how he was supposed to achieve what he wanted.
He still did not know why the Will of Time demanded the Crucible. Was it testing whether their comprehension was sufficient, or did it require the trial for some other reason?
That uncertainty drew his thoughts toward the other conceptual Wills he had encountered throughout his cultivation. What exactly was a Will in the first place? Arcane Concepts possessed them, and Prime Arcane Concepts possessed them as well. Adrian had called upon those powers, communicated with them, watched them respond to circumstances around him, and even relied upon their decisions, yet he had never seriously investigated what allowed an abstract concept to possess something resembling awareness.
Were those Wills actually living existences? Did awareness emerge naturally once a concept reached some sufficiently fundamental level of reality, or did another structure behind those concepts create the intelligence Adrian perceived as their Will?
Even the Will residing within his own Source Seed remained filled with questions he had never answered. It could correct divine concepts and spells far beyond Adrian's own mastery, act independently whenever circumstances required it, and respond to powers that Adrian himself barely understood. Yet Adrian still knew almost nothing about how that Will had come into existence, what its true nature was, or whether it possessed desires of its own beyond the actions he had observed.
Adrian shook his head before the questions could carry his attention too far from the problem standing directly in front of him. "For now, I need to find a solution," he murmured.
The Will of Time remained motionless.
As Adrian looked at the condensed golden radiance, he remembered another occasion when he had spoken to conceptual powers without understanding what their response would eventually produce. Fate and Causality had obeyed when he asked them to guide him. Their threads had led him through the Elyrians to Aelion's ring, then onward to the Door to Kaalatva and the Time inheritance he needed. All of those events had followed from an instruction that had been almost absurdly simple compared with the chain of consequences it produced.
The golden presence before him had already allowed his intervention and obeyed when he told it to wait. If it could understand those instructions, perhaps he was making the next one unnecessarily complicated. He needed his people to cultivate the inheritance safely even when he was elsewhere, and the Will responsible for the danger was right in front of him.
Adrian let out a quiet breath. "From this day onward, you will not subject any of my people to the Epoch Crucible, or to any other trial you impose."
Lara stared at him over the disciple's shoulder. She had watched the golden presence descend at his word, but hearing him issue this instruction still made her shaken. Adrian was literally telling the Will of Time to change what happened when his people comprehended its concept, as though he could establish an exception simply by asking for one.
She glanced toward Hestia, whose attention remained fixed on the golden light. Selena and Lysandra were equally silent. Before anyone could speak, a meaning entered their consciousness.
Modification process initiated.
Lara's fingers tightened against the disciple's robe. Nothing had been spoken aloud, and the meaning had arrived without words in any language she knew. She understood it as clearly as if someone had addressed her directly, and she knew with the same certainty that the response had come from the golden presence before Adrian.
HUMMM!
Golden radiance spread from the Will of Time, passing over the platform and filling the chamber. The presence within it grew more distinct with every moment, drawing the attention of everyone inside toward its center. Adrian watched the spreading currents, waiting to see how Time would carry out his instruction. As he followed their movement, the space above the golden presence began to change.
For a moment, Hestia could not feel her own heartbeat. A tremor passed through the essence within her foundation and reached into her consciousness, interrupting the thought she had been forming. Beside her, Lara's breath caught, and Hestia immediately placed a hand beneath the unconscious disciple's shoulder as Lara's grip faltered.
Selena's knees bent slightly before she steadied herself against the platform. Lysandra remained standing, but the mana she had instinctively gathered trembled so violently that she stopped trying to move it. All four women looked toward the presence taking shape above the Will of Time, unable to understand what had entered the chamber.
Adrian stood where he had been, looking upward. His expression had changed, yet he showed none of the strain passing through the others. The white-grey essence remained undisturbed across his skin as a book materialized above the golden radiance.
Its cover held the depth of open space. Distant stars burned within stretches of darkness, their light extending into a void that seemed to continue far beyond the object's edges. When the cover lifted, the pages beneath it possessed the same impossible substance, each thin surface carrying space and stars within its own depths.
The pages began turning without a hand to move them. Across them, inscriptions in the Language of Mana extended through the darkness, their lines passing between points of starlight before disappearing beneath the next page. Adrian recognized the script immediately, but he had never seen it inscribed upon anything resembling this.
His gaze moved toward the Will of Time below it. The golden radiance still filled the chamber, yet the presence he had addressed had become difficult to distinguish beneath the Will emanating from the book. Time remained silent while the pages continued turning overhead.
Adrian had expected the golden presence to accept his instruction and withdraw. He followed the shifting inscriptions for another moment, trying to understand why a book had appeared in response to an order directed at Time. Before he could examine a complete page, the turning stopped, and he felt its attention settle upon him.
Behind Adrian, Hestia felt that same attention pass across her. It reached Lara, Selena, and Lysandra as well, leaving each of them with the impossible sensation that the universe itself had noticed where they stood.
Hestia kept her hand beneath the disciple's shoulder, but for several moments she could barely feel the weight resting against it. Everything she possessed seemed exposed beneath the attention descending from the star-filled pages, as though her body, cultivation, memories, and consciousness could all be read without distinction.
External root authority recognized.
The meaning reached everyone at once. Adrian's brows drew together as his attention returned to the open pages, but a second communication followed before he could decide what the first one meant.
Full administrative permission required.
HUMMM!
The white-grey essence covering Adrian's body brightened, and Hestia felt another presence emerge through it. The hand she had kept beneath the disciple went rigid as she recognized it, even before the pale light spread beyond Adrian's shoulders. The Will she remembered from his energy form was reaching outward through the essence surrounding his physical body.
The open book shifted backward. Its pages drew closer together, and the inscriptions that had been moving across them became still. The presence bearing down upon the chamber contracted toward the book, suppressed by what had emerged from Adrian. Below it, the golden radiance of Time gathered inward as well.
Lara could see the retreat clearly, but the meaning of it slipped beyond anything she could explain. A moment earlier, she had felt as though the entire universe was looking at her. Now the white-grey light around Adrian drew her attention, and she could no longer find a comparison large enough to contain what she felt within it.
She felt as though everything was contained within that presence. Her own body existed within it. The divine concept she had spent ages cultivating existed within it. The space around the training chamber, the golden Will of Time, and even the consciousness through which she perceived all of those things somehow felt like parts of the same greater existence.
Lara could only stare at Adrian while the book remained suspended before him, its own Will suppressed by the presence emerging from his body.
Selena's hand pressed flat against the platform. She tried to turn her attention toward Lysandra, but even that small movement came slowly. The white-grey essence had been familiar to her for years, and she had watched Adrian accomplish things that she could neither reproduce nor explain. But nothing she knew about that power had prepared her for the presence now emerging through it. While she watched, another meaning entered their consciousness from the open book.
Full administrative permission granted.
Altering existential records.
The inscriptions moved again. Several lines on the exposed page separated, shifted their arrangement, and joined into a different structure while the stars within its depths continued burning. Adrian followed the change with his eyes, but the altered page turned before he could examine how it connected to those beneath it.
Designated existences exempted from epoch verification.
Modification successful.
The book closed. Its star-filled cover thinned into the surrounding space and disappeared, taking the presence within it away. The Will of Time followed, its gathered radiance dissolving until the ordinary light of the training chamber reached the platform again.
The greater presence withdrew into the white-grey essence around Adrian. Hestia became aware of the disciple's weight against her hand, and Lara adjusted her hold before helping lower him onto the platform. His breathing remained steady, but neither woman looked away from the place where the book had vanished for more than a moment.
Adrian stared at the empty air in front of him. His order had apparently been carried out, yet he had understood almost nothing of what happened after he gave it. "What just happened?" he thought, recalling the meanings that had entered his consciousness. "Existential records? What are those?"
He had asked Time to stop testing his people. But something else had appeared, recognized an authority, required permission, and changed a record before declaring the exemption successful. The sequence made him think of an idea he had encountered long before entering this chamber.
Many in the universe called it the Heavenly Order. Fire burned according to particular rules, water behaved according to others, and every concept followed relationships that remained consistent enough to be comprehended and used. As cultivators learned to perceive those relationships, they also began asking what had established these rules.
Some believed a sufficiently powerful existence had created the rules. Others believed the universe possessed a will of its own. The name encompassed those possibilities without explaining which was true, and Adrian had never found an answer that settled the question. Even his discoveries about universal runes had only led him to suspect a deeper structure beneath the rules he could perceive.
He had once wondered whether the Source itself came from that structure. The existence of records governing a trial would give him a reason to investigate that possibility, but the book's submission complicated the thought. Whatever had answered his instruction had deferred to the Will of Source within him.
"Was that book connected to the Heavenly Order?" Adrian wondered. He looked down at the white-grey essence still covering his hand, remembering how the book had moved backward when the Will within him emerged. If the book was connected to the Order, what did its reaction mean for the power he was using? Is the Source even above this Heavenly Order?
Behind him, Lara's lips moved as she stared at the empty space above the platform. "The Heavenly Order…" she murmured, and the quiet words carried clearly through the chamber.
Hestia turned toward her. She had been considering the same possibility, and she found no confusion in the expressions of the others.
Throughout her life, she had cultivated within rules accepted by generations of sects and watched countless cultivators struggle against the limits those rules imposed. Lara had grown up in the same surroundings, with far more years to absorb its teachings than Adrian, Selena, or Lysandra. Even the greatest ambitions were measured against the Heavenly Order, yet something that might belong to it had just appeared inside their training chamber.
Hestia's attention returned to Adrian. The book had carried a presence that made Time seem faint, but the Will emerging from him had forced that book to yield.
If the book truly belonged to the Heavenly Order, what kind of power had she watched emerge from Adrian that even suppressed the book?
Breaking the silence, Selena finally spoke, "Is this why you kept the true nature of your power hidden from us?"