Adrian sat cross-legged in a private chamber within the Origin Construct. Before him floated many books, a compilation of concept archives sent by Lexaria, hundreds of basic galactic concepts and twenty-seven advanced ones, each meticulously recorded in the language of mana and preserved through generations of scholars.
Lysandra had delivered them as Lexaria's contribution.
Most of what lay before him were truths he had already understood. But a handful remained untouched, concepts he had glimpsed in passing but never pursued. He began with the one he valued most.
Fate.
The archive unfurled itself, pages flipping like a living manuscript, symbols glowing faintly as they presented themselves. Adrian activated his Source Eyes, and the world shifted.
The symbols of the Language of Mana presented themselves. He saw causality chains binding events together, probability threads branching into infinite futures, and anchors that locked certain outcomes in place.
He did not read the archive.
He comprehended it.
The sensation was familiar now, like remembering truths he had somehow forgotten, truths that felt like they had always been waiting inside him.
Minutes passed.
The chamber around him faded into irrelevance as his consciousness drifted deeper into the Language of Mana, tracing connections between Fate and Time, between Fate and Space, between Fate and every other concept he had already mastered.
Adrian opened his eyes and reached for the next archive. One by one, he pulled them forward, his Source Eyes devouring the knowledge within. Each concept fed into the next, layering understanding upon understanding until the boundaries between them blurred.
His Source Seed pulsed again, its density tightening, compressing. New sections formed within it, each representing a newly comprehended concept. The seed had long since ceased to resemble a simple sphere; it was a labyrinth now, chambers upon chambers, each one housing a different truth.
His Source Seed pulsed sharply again.
A wave of white-grey light expanded from his body, forming a translucent field around him. The chamber trembled. The walls groaned as the domain pressed against them, and for a moment, Adrian thought the entire construct might collapse.
But it held.
The domain stabilized, settling into a sphere roughly thirty meters in diameter. It was not vast, nowhere near the scale of Arcton's divine domain or his other domains, but the moment it formed, Adrian felt the difference.
He saw the rules inside the domain bend, not reluctantly, but reverently, like servants recognizing their rightful master. When Arcton had unleashed his divine domain, the rules of reality had permitted his higher-tier authority to override them, but those same rules had resisted, clashing against his will even as they obeyed.
But within this domain, they yielded willingly.
Time slowed where Adrian willed it. Space compressed at his command. Every element he had mastered existed within the domain, not as separate forces fighting for dominance, but as facets of a single unified whole.
He murmured, "Source Domain… finally."
The words felt inadequate.
With Lexaria's archives, he had deepened and expanded his understanding on nine new advanced galactic concepts, raising his total to twenty-nine. His mastery of basic galactic concepts had grown even broader, encompassing nearly every fundamental force the galaxy had ever catalogued. And together they finally formed the Source Domain.
And the Source Domain was different. His other domains, though numerous, had always overlapped, negated, and weakened each other. Twenty-nine domains clashing was still twenty-nine domains fighting for priority, each one demanding space, each one contradicting the next.
But this, this was a single domain forged from the origin of all concepts, a higher concept than the natural concepts.
Adrian rose to his feet, extending one hand. A flame appeared in his palm, white-grey and flickering. Then ice formed beside it, then shadow wrapped around both, and gravity compressed them into a sphere no larger than a marble.
He released it.
The sphere hovered in place, stable, contained. None of the elements fought each other; it was like inside the source domain, they followed his will fully.
But still, they were only coexisting, not fully united, fused, and merged like how Arcton's divine concept worked. So Adrian has to research and find out how Arcton did it.
And he still did not know the source domain's full strength. Only a proper battle would reveal that, and he suspected the Demon Emperor would provide exactly such a test.
But for the first time since ascending to Stellar rank, Adrian felt like a true Stellar being.
A true Stellar being, with a domain that reflected the first true affinity he awoke.
With this, he grew more confident that he could deal with the Demon Emperor.
...
Far beyond the Origin Capital, even beyond the Milky Way galaxy itself, across billions of galaxies that spanned an unimaginable ocean of the universe, a distant tremor echoed into a realm no ordinary being could ever reach.
A celestial palace floated silently in the heart of a remote galaxy, the Heaven-Weaving Pavilion. It was a sect where divine cultivators studied causality, destiny, fate, and the fabric of timelines.
Inside its innermost chamber, a young humanoid man hovered cross-legged on a disc of divine inscriptions. Before him, hundreds of golden threads shimmered, each thread represented a timeline, a fate, a possibility, a path of causality, diverging and converging to shape the future of the entire universe. The threads danced and wove themselves into patterns, splitting and rejoining in endless combinations.
He reached toward one of the glowing threads, intending to examine a recurring conflict on a distant galaxy. The moment his finger brushed the strand, images burst into motion: intergalactic war between galaxies, wars between sects, the rise and fall of empires. Each strand diverged, split, multiplied, just as fate always did.
"Another shift in the Ever-Shadow Sect…" he murmured.
He was doing Pavilion's sacred duty: to interpret fate, calculate possibility by comparing the threads, and read the shifting tapestry of the universe.
"Probability of conflict rising. I should recor—"
He never finished.
A tremor rippled across the chamber, so faint he almost mistook it for his imagination. The disc beneath him shuddered, and then the threads reacted.
One golden thread trembled, then another, then all hundreds.
Before he could react, all hundreds of threads trembled violently, collapsing inward as if pulled by an unseen force. They twisted together, merging, tearing through their individuality, fusing at speeds beyond comprehension. The chamber filled with light so bright it burned his eyes even through closed lids.
"What—what's happening?!"
His astral core roared to life instinctively, shields forming around him with his divine essence. But the threads ignored his defences entirely, continuing their impossible convergence.
His eyes widened as the hundreds of fate strands compressed into ten, then into three, and finally—
Into one.
A single golden thread remained, blinding in its density.
"That's impossible," he whispered, "Thread of Fates never merges all paths. There are always divergences, always possibilities…"
Never in the Pavilion's entire history had the Thread of Fates collapsed into one. Divergence was the fundamental truth of existence. Even when primal beings died, even when galaxies burned, the threads merely shifted and reformed. They never became singular.