Ten long years passed within the first level.
Adrian sat cross-legged in the safe zone, flame essence faintly coiling from his fingers, but his focus was elsewhere.
A decade of ceaseless battle had honed him sharper. His movements were fluid, his control absolute.
Every skill, every thrust, every strike that once required thought now moved with instinct.
His highest record so far was eighty thousand beasts in a single run, each fight longer, cleaner, more refined than the last.
He hadn't broken the record yet, but he could feel it.
He was close.
Yet, what weighed on him now wasn't exhaustion, or even failure.
It was time.
The passage of time…
When he entered this trial, he was barely reaching twenty-three.
Now, by the measure of this place, he was thirty-three.
Ten years wasn't much for most of the galaxy's cultivators, who measured their lives in centuries or millennia.
But for Adrian, ten years was one-third of his life.
A human who had known only decades, ten years was everything.
And though he knew logically that not even a day had passed outside, that sixteen years here equaled a single day out there, yet his soul felt every single second of these years.
A decade of loneliness.
A decade of constant battle.
A decade of silence between screams.
"If this much time is changing me," he thought, "how much have the Celestials endured? Two thousand years? Ten thousand?"
"How strong must their wills be… to still exist?"
Kaelith's words echoed faintly in his memory, "No one who goes there returns unchanged."
He understood it now.
The edge of the galaxy didn't just test one's strength, it reshaped the soul.
He opened his eyes, and his gaze caught something faint, something subtle.
Time essence.
It wasn't just present, it was alive, weaving through the space like invisible rivers.
He focused, narrowing his perception until he could see hints of its truth.
Moments stretched and contracted, the flow of seconds looping back on themselves, the faint rhythm of cause and effect tangled in repeating spirals.
For the first time, he felt a faint understanding of the Basic Galactic Time Concept, not in books or runes, but as a sensation.
Time was not a straight line.
It was a current.
And everything living was adrift upon it.
But the moment that realization formed—
The world vanished.
His consciousness was pulled violently from his body, sucked into an endless void of nothingness.
...
Outside, in the real space of the Trial, the golden sphere that watched over all trials blinked.
› Time Burn Detected in Candidate.
› Survival Chance: 0.5%.
...
Time Burn.
A phenomenon feared even among the greatest of time cultivators.
When one glimpsed the truth of the galactic time concept too early, the essence of time itself retaliated.
It forced the victim to experience endless centuries in an instant, until their mind shattered, until their will dissolved, until they ceased to exist.
...
In the void, Adrian floated alone.
He couldn't see, he couldn't move, but he could feel.
Time passed, each second carrying hundreds of years.
A thousand years…
He didn't understand what was happening, only that his thoughts began to slow, unravel, fade.
He tried to anchor himself, to remember his clan, his parents, his people, his world.
Earth.
That single word became his heartbeat, echoing in the void. "I can't leave them. They need me. I need them."
But time did not care.
Thousands became tens of thousands.
His will began to erode, layers of thought peeling away until only the instinct to exist remained.
And then—
Something deep inside him pulsed.
The Source.
A single beat of light, white and grey, rippled through his consciousness.
And the void… froze.
...
Outside, the golden sphere recorded the rising readings.
Time essence, once flowing freely through the level, scattered in panic, fleeing from the human seated in the center of the safe zone.
Even the golden sphere felt its golden glow tremble.
For the first time in countless millennia, it felt something strange, fear.
This essence was not in its records, and yet it pressed upon it like a higher order of being.
› Unidentified Essence detected.
› Energy type exceeds galactic classification.
› Influence strong enough to affect an energy-based life form…
Energy life form!
It was not a simple AI, like the ones that existed in Adrian's galaxy, it was actually a type of life form, and that is why it called itself a spirit. It's not just a name.
And now, it felt fear…
Because whatever that essence was, it stood above it.
...
Inside the void, Adrian opened his eyes.
They burned white-grey.
Time bent around him, then shattered, and he fell back into his body.
For a moment, he felt as though he had lived through thousands of years in a single second.
He looked around the safe zone, trembling slightly. "What… was that?"
Without the Source, he would have been erased.
And then he realized something deeper, something terrifying.
"Time itself has a will… just like the Source."
It terrified him, the idea that the concepts they studied weren't inert, but alive. Watching, testing, and choosing. As if they had wills of their own.
He realized that there were forces in this universe, and beyond it, that he could not yet comprehend.
Barely touching the truth of the basic galactic concept of Time had nearly destroyed him.
He rose to his feet, his movements slow, like someone walking after centuries of stillness.
The recent event made him realize the struggles the Celestials would have gone through, the Celestials who endured millennia inside this place. Now he understood.
He looked toward the archway that led into the level. "You've waited long enough."
...
The moment he stepped into the first level again, he activated his Fire Domain.
He used it for the first time here, a power only the Stellar wielded. And he felt it, his domain kept enlarging to the point of covering the entire plane.
It was not like this before. Before, he only had the understanding of the fire concept, but not the practical way of using it. But now, after years of battle, it was different.
Within its reach, every Essence Beast froze mid-motion.
And with a single thought, they shattered.
He killed every essence beast within his fire domain, this was something not even a stellar who had gone through millennia of battle could do, even with all their experience and mastery, they would still not meet the mana pool of Adrian to achieve this.
He did something similar before, destroying tens of thousands of lesser demons, but that was with absolute source order and with source form, which naturally took more mana than he actually needed to perform this.
And now for the first time, Adrian used his large reserves of mana properly and merely used only his fire domain to achieve this.
A golden hologram flickered before him,
› Kill Count: 428,569 / 100,000
› Level One Cleared. Teleporting Candidate to Level Two.
Light enveloped him, and he vanished.
...
Moments later, the golden sphere appeared at the first level.
It replayed his data, watching the records from ten years. It could not believe what it had just seen.
It saw how weak Adrian's fire essence combat mastery was at the start, but now, within just ten years, he had grown too fast.
› Observed Growth Rate: 5,682,000%.