Vikram's wooden greatsword lashed out with furious intensity, as if he was trying to prove something, not to the onlookers, but to the world itself.
Kayala froze mid-step. Her eyes widened in a way that betrayed neither fear nor awe, but a kind of deep-rooted disbelief.Brunus, beside her, stood as though someone had just rewritten the very laws of weapon mastery in front of him. His jaw slackened. Everything he knew, everything he taught, trembled under the weight of what he was witnessing.
But Vikram…Vikram was somewhere else entirely.
His mouth hung open, drool slipping from the corner of his lips. His eyes were wide, unfocused, almost vacant. He looked like an idiot. Like someone who had lost all sense of the world.
Yet each swing of that crude wooden greatsword kicked up gusts of wind that shouldn't have existed.
The wind didn't just stir.It screamed.
Every strike tore through the air with such force that the atmosphere itself seemed to cry in protest. The wooden blade whined like it carried a soul, not splinters. This wasn't a boy wielding a sword. This was something primal, something older.
Kayala flinched as a breeze brushed her face. She steadied herself.This... this was not a technique born from an eighteen-year-old.
This was the hand of a seasoned killer. A veteran who had danced with death, not once or twice, but hundreds of times. She narrowed her eyes, trying to rationalize it.
No, that wasn't quite right.
If it were only skill, even monstrous, inexplicable skill, she could have attributed it to some divine inheritance or freakish natural affinity. But this—this state he was in…
This perfection.
This harmony between man and weapon. Between thought and motion.
It could only mean one thing.
Law.
Kayala's breath hitched.
She felt like she was walking across thin ice, one step away from shattering something fragile and sacred. It wasn't that Vikram was pushing her with his strikes. No. It was that any force she returned, whether too hard or too soft, might break whatever trance-like state he had entered.
She had seen this before.Only once.And never at this level.
She focused, trying to understand. The sword in Vikram's hand...It was coming alive.
No longer a tool. No longer dead wood. It pulsed. It moved with intent. It responded to Vikram's thoughts before his muscles even twitched. It had no edge, and yet she could feel the slice in the air with every arc.
The Law of Life.
Kayala blinked, unable to deny it any longer.
To breathe life into the inanimate.To give form, movement, and spirit to what should be inert.It was one of the rarest insights. Something not even the universal geniuses could always grasp.
This… this was Enlightenment.
And Vikram, a teenager barely on the path of cultivation, had stumbled into it in the middle of a training match.
It was unheard of. Absurd.
Those who entered such a state, even once, were destined to leave behind legends that echoed across generations. Some called it luck. Some called it fate. But most called it the overflowing of talent to such an extent that it spilled into the realm of the divine.
Kayala had never believed that Vikram would go far.He was reckless, stubborn, incomplete.
But if he grasped even a fragment of this Law, and managed to shape it into a technique, he could sell it to any Great Sect, or offer it as a legacy, and be given a free path to power. One free of trials, of oppression, of doubt.
In that moment, for the first time, she saw it.
Hope.
Hope that he might actually survive the First Walk.
Because what she was witnessing now, it was not normal. No mortal child should have cultivated prior to receiving resources from the Mother System. And yet, Vikram had done it. He had arrived already changed.
He was not supposed to have an aura like the one he displayed in the hall. But he had.He wasn't supposed to stand here now, channeling the Law of Life with a broken piece of wood. But he did.
Kayala's instincts twitched. She straightened.
Something was wrong.The air stiffened.The pressure shifted.
Despite nullifying her own cultivation to allow Vikram a fair spar, she still retained her instincts, her battle sense, and her spiritual awareness. Her body alone was far beyond what any mortal could threaten.
But now, something faint was stirring in the air. A whisper. A tremor.
The Sword Breathed Life...