While Ankit was earnestly cultivating, the outside world settled into a brittle, watchful peace.
After the terrorists vanished, India's politicians, generals, and influential figures stayed on high alert. They did not know why had terrorist suddenly disappeared, only that the disappearance had been too fast and too complete to be normal.
Across the ocean, the Freedom Union's leaders were just as tense.
India could only guess which hands had been behind the terror wave.
Freedom Union and the Great Dulu Federation knew the truth.
They had supplied resources and guidance to the Karakoram Federation and Jamuna Federation, pushing them to unleash chaos inside India.
The plan was simple: pressure India into sharing blueprints and access by bleeding it with "deniable" attacks. But when the terror networks went silent, their own investigations uncovered something terrifying.
Every active cell on Indian soil had disappeared in the same forty‑eight‑hour window.
Not gone to ground. Not retreated.
Gone.
No bodies. No prisoners. No chatter. Only abandoned hideouts and cold weapons. For the Freedom Union and Great Dulu Federation, there was only one reasonable conclusion: something inside India had used Magic Energy to remove their pieces from the board.
It fit an uncomfortable pattern.
India had been the first to discover Essence Flow.
India had been where the anomaly first erupted.
India had been the first to field functioning weapons powered by Magic Energy.
Now, it looked like India might also be the first to develop a technology that could selectively wipe out terrorist organisations scattered across a vast country in just two days while leaving civilians and infrastructure intact.
They doubted. They argued. Some insisted it had to be internal purges or secret special forces.
But every scenario they built collapsed against the same problem: ordinary humans could not move, locate, and erase so many underground networks that quickly.
In the end, their doubt changed nothing.
They quietly shelved plans for further probing. No more proxy attacks, no more overt pressure. For now, India became a country to watch from a distance, not to poke directly.
Inside India, the leaders saw only the surface result: terrorism had stopped.
After weeks of monitoring and finding no new attacks, they finally lifted the lockdown.
Slowly, the streets refilled. Trains ran on time. Offices and schools reopened. To ordinary people, the nightmare faded into memory. To those in power, the mystery remained, but peace—however fragile—returned.
***
Meanwhile, in Tarkan State's mountain range, deep inside Dark Haven Fortress, work did not stop.
With Ankit back in seclusion, his three clones divided their focus with practiced efficiency.
- Sacral Clone immersed himself in Vyuha puppet‑crafting, Rasa‑making (pills, elixirs), and looking after the family's daily needs.
- Solar Clone concentrated on Vyuha architecture, Astra forging, and the early foundations of sacred beast taming.
- Root Clone devoted his time to developing elemental control techniques and "normal" techniques.
Sacral Clone had already tried many times to touch the space element, reaching out through his mastery of flow and control, but the breakthrough remained elusive.
Then he overheard Root Clone describing his unique gravity field—the invisible domain around Ankit that could lighten his body, erase weight, and even allow natural flight.
A thought clicked.
"If you can already twist gravity," Sacral said one day, "then you're closer to a new element than I am. Why not start from gravity instead of space?"
Root Clone did not have many spare paths to explore; he accepted.
By this point he was already completely familiar with Ankit's gravity field. He could extend it, shrink it, make himself heavier or lighter, and negate external pulls inside a small radius.
But what he had been using instinctively, he now examined as if it were a foreign element.
Days passed.
He meditated in underground caverns, alternately increasing and erasing his weight, watching how stone cracked differently depending on the pressure.
He dropped metal balls with different gravity fields around them and measured how they fell. He stood perfectly still, feeling how the planet's pull interacted with his Root Core's own generated gravity.
The key insight came when he stopped trying to overpower the planet and instead listened.
Instead of treating gravity as "weight," he began to see it as curved paths—the way all things wanted to move when left alone. When he strengthened his field, paths bent more sharply toward him; when he weakened it, paths flattened out or even curved away.
Once he understood that, the element answered.
He condensed his Root Essence into thin, invisible "veins" that traced those curves, then tightened them. The moment his will locked onto the pattern, a new sensation bloomed in his chest—not earth, not stone, not simple force. It was a quiet, relentless pull that ignored distance and shape.
Gravity element.