Norlan frowned the moment he saw the commotion caused by Titus's evolution. The swirling purple light that had shot skyward like a rocket, the trembling peak, the raw energy bleeding into the atmosphere.
it was far too conspicuous. Like a beacon lit in the dead of night, it would definitely attract a swarm of unwanted attention. Predators, rival factions and families, or worse,things that lurked in the artificial dungeons of this stasis world.
He didn't waste a second. He looked at the array discs that Titus had set up before his breakthrough and sighed. They couldn't contain this commotion. He looked at Titus who had already started his evolution session,finding it impossible to be distracted with anything and just accepted what is to happen.
Consequences will be delt with later.
Activating his passive observation technique at maximum power, Norlan's eyes took on a deep, glacial blue glow. He paired it seamlessly with the second technique of his divine skill Energy Contradiction: Filter.
The combination allowed him to peel back the layers of visible reality, peering directly into the energy flows and biological processes coursing through Titus's body.
Then an ecstatic expression overtook his face. The evidence was unmistakable. He voiced his deduction directly.
"You're about to evolve into a high human?"
Titus merely nodded, his full attention locked on the cataclysmic changes erupting inside his own body. To him, these transformations were priceless. Experiencing them firsthand gave him a level of understanding that no secondhand teaching or ancient text could ever provide.
He was trying desperately to grasp something,anything that he could later implement to upgrade his nascent domain expression into a genuine domain expression.
If he succeeded, he would break through to the Awakened Master realm without any bottleneck. He would then become a genuine powerhouse,someone who could trample all and sundry in this stasis world.
Ahhhh!
Another pained shriek tore from his throat, raw and guttural, echoing off the rocks around them.
Norlan continued to observe, his glowing blue eyes never blinking. From his experience with the Resonance Evolution skill,now already having applied it five times in total,he had learned a crucial pattern: every time a major biological change occurred, the pain would spike dramatically.
Evolution was not a gentle hand guiding you upward; it was a crucible that burned away the old to make room for the new. This is what he concluded.
He cursed himself inwardly. Why didn't I observe my own evolution like this? But that moment had passed. All he could do now was watch Titus and learn.
And what he saw shocked him to his core.
Although he could physically witness the changes happening at a macro level,cells splitting, energy flowing, tissues restructuring,he found himself utterly incapable of comprehending, let alone fathoming the scale of infinite changes unfolding simultaneously.
It was like trying to count every grain of sand on a beach during a storm.
He decided to concentrate on a single cell.
Zooming in with his technique, he witnessed cellular rearrangement and enhancement taking place, fueled by an infinite cascade of subsidiary changes. But to his dismay, even tracking one evolving cell proved impossible.
His perception could only latch onto three or four runes,the fundamental symbols of energy manipulation,that he had encountered so far in his training.
One such rune was the one representing Containment. He knew this rune. He had used it earlier to contain compressed Fire and Wood elemental molecules.
But even this familiar symbol was now evolving, shifting, becoming fluid and vague before his eyes. Its edges blurred. Its meaning deepened beyond his current grasp.
Just how many runes are hidden within the human body? he couldn't help but wonder.
His eyes continued to glow a deep, unwavering blue as he kept observing.
Unknown runes,alien, beautiful, terrifying runes danced and evolved from each blood cell. They siphoned power relentlessly, draining the cell's vitality until it shriveled and withered like a leaf in a drought. The moment that happened, Titus would let out another shriek. And when one considered how many cells,billions,were undergoing this same death-throe simultaneously… well, those screams were more than deserved.
But then, just when the cell teetered on the brink of complete death, a pulse of mysterious energy erupted from its core.
This was not the destructive force from before. This was something else entirely,a spark of qualitative change. Fueled by that pulse, the cell did not die. It transformed. Withering into blooming. Death into rebirth.
This was the same energy that Titus had received from Norlan,the Resonance Evolution energy.
Norlan made a careful mental note, filing away the observation. He concluded that during the first four applications of Resonance Evolution, Titus's cells had merely absorbed the energy without using it. They had been stockpiling it, accumulating it like a reservoir filling with water. Only now,during the fifth session,did that stored energy trigger the long-awaited qualitative change.
Fascinating, he thought, even as exhaustion began to creep up on him.
Suddenly, a wave of fatigue hit him like a collapsing mountain. He felt like a farm bull that had been ploughing rocky fields from dawn to dusk without rest. His muscles were screaming,his lungs burning and his spirit fraying.
This had never happened during the previous four times he had applied the Resonance Evolution divine skill.
Why now? Was it because he had pushed his observation technique to its limit? Or because the scale of this evolution was greater than before?
Then he understood,the energy stored with the yin energy storage skill was depleted.
Fortunately, at that exact moment, the siphoning pull of the evolution energy ceased. It seemed that Titus's body had absorbed just enough energy to complete its evolution into a High Human.
Thud.
Norlan collapsed the moment the Resonance Evolution divine skill came to a halt. His knees buckled.
His body hit the rocky ground, stirring up a small cloud of dust. He was too exhausted,drained in every conceivable way: His glowing blue eyes flickered and died, returning to their natural color as unconsciousness pulled at the edges of his vision.
But even as he fell, a small smile ghosted across his lips.
****
Deep, deep inside a third-order dungeon,in a labyrinth of twisted stone veins and pulsing, organic walls,a scholar clutching an enormous ruler coughed up a spray of blood and collapsed to his knees.
The ruler, once smooth and gleaming with sacred inscriptions,was now spiderwebbed with fresh cracks. His breath came in ragged gasps. He was utterly stunned by the caliber of resistance he had encountered during his divination.
Gritting his teeth, he grabbed the edge of his oversized white robe and crawled, inch by inch, toward a set of stairs that extended upward like frozen lightning bolts.
At the top, bathed in a soft, ethereal glow, sat a magnificent throne,carved not from stone or metal, but from the solidified essence of deep earth and ancient root.
Seated there was a little girl, no older than seven in appearance, with hair the color of green,like that of moss after rain and eyes that held the weight of buried continents.
She looked at the scholar with a faint hint of admonishment in her gaze.
"I can't believe it," the scholar wheezed, holding up the cracked sacred divination ruler for her to see. "Even this artifact is full of fractures! Just… what kind of background does that kid have?" He paused to catch his breath, wiping blood from his lips with the back of his trembling hand.
The little girl puffed out her cheeks and pouted. "Did you really think that what I cannot see through, you could?" Her poofy face then shifted, her expression morphing into that of a stern lecturer, her eyebrows raised and lips pressed thin. Though she looked like a child, her voice carried a contrasting authority that made this situation quite comical.
"Do you know the circumstances involved in the early awakening of a Land spirit?" she asked, tilting her head. "Let me educate you. Answer me this: a planet cannot give birth to a Land spirit by itself. Why is this?"
The scholar, now somewhat steadier, stared at her incredulously. Isn't that common knowledge? He sighed deeply, recognizing the girl's stubborn nature. She would not answer him unless he followed her script. So he played along.
"An early awakening," he recited, "can only be triggered by the accumulated destiny of a civilization that has made contact with Albera,or when the planet births a being with overwhelming, heaven-defying destiny."
As the words left his mouth, his eyes popped wide with sudden, jarring realization. His breath hitched. He looked at the little girl, searching her face for confirmation, his voice dropping to a trembling whisper.
"H-he… he is a favored one?"
Excitement flooded his face,his cheeks flushing, his wrinkles smoothing, eyes blazing with manic hope. The crushing backlash from probing Norlan, after sensing that resonance evolution energy, faded entirely from his mind. All that remained was this electric revelation.
The little girl nodded. And even she,ancient yet young, wise yet naive,felt the contagious excitement pervade her entire being. It fizzed through her body, through the karmic threads that bound her to the surface. Especially because she was the Land spirit born from Earth.
Born not from a civilization's accumulated destiny, but from the accumulated destiny of a single individual.
"Heaven has eyes!"
The scholar's voice cracked as he shouted.
"Heaven has eyes!"
He threw his head back, arms spreading wide.
"Fate does not allow my human race to perish from Albera! Resurgence is possible! Our rise is probable! Eternal glory is achievable! Ha! Ha! Ha!"
He laughed like a maniac,a raw, guttural sound that bounced off the dungeon's dripping walls and echoed through its deepest corridors.
His rumblings spread like seismic tremors through the third-order dungeon as he spun around to face the girl,his eyes wild.
That made Earth's Land spirit take a cautious step back. She looked at him with narrow, suspicious eyes. Naive as she was,having spent most of her short existence observing humans from unseen corners,she could only attribute such frantic, gleeful intensity to one thing: the behavior of child predators.
Yes, the time she had spent watching humans on Earth had definitely left its mark on her personality. After all, she was as old as Norlan—barely a teenager in spiritual terms. And she shared a karmic bond with him, a tether of fate that connected their very souls.
It was precisely because of that bond that she had gone out of her way to ask this scholar for help. In her mind, the stronger Norlan became, the better for both of them.
"Fate has not forsaken humans!" the scholar continued, pacing now, his torn robe dragging across the stone floor. "And to think that such a person is in the same stasis world as my dungeon! It seems the Crown Prince has rendered another merit. It was right to act conservatively all this time."
He stopped mid-step, a new thought striking him like a thunderbolt. "Maybe,maybe,with a favored one, the Spirit Lord of Black and Yellow would finally take notice."
He spun back toward the little girl, clasping his hands together as if in prayer,or desperate pleading.
"Come, come! Tell me everything about Norlan. What kind of person is he? Does he have the disposition of a ruler? Who is his backer? That skill,that skill is from an expressed dominion! Truly a favored one. Even at our peak, wce couldn't get our hands on such a thing. Yet here it is! "
He took a step closer, eyes shining.
"Come, come,tell me everything!"