The descent from the spiritual void to the physical plane was not a gentle awakening.
It was a violent, high-velocity plunge through the cosmic layers separating thought from matter.
Gravity ceased to be a mere concept and became a crushing, physical weight attempting to flatten his consciousness.
The air shifted from pure spiritual essence into a choking, viscous slurry of toxic Wood Qi, vaporized obsidian, and the cloying metallic tang of his own dried blood.
Soren was falling, his soul plummeting back into the earthly realm.
When his consciousness finally slammed into his physical shell, the agony was absolute.
He lay at the bottom of a glassed-over crater deep within the ruined Sword Graveyard.
Inhabiting his physical body, which in its current state was akin to someone willingly stepping into a torture chamber.
His veins and arteries had been completely shredded by the kinetic detonation of the Emerald Core.
His physical bones cracked, fissured, broken, and even pulverized in certain parts of his body
His flesh had been heavily charred, clinging weakly to his carbonized muscular structure.
A lesser cultivator would have instantly suffered soul-dissipation, their spirit fleeing the hellish husk.
But Soren knew he would have to anchor his will within his broken vessel, otherwise he might have to do the same.
As such, he mentally prompted the infinite library of truths now inscribed within his mind, and the Origin Codex responded swiftly, its response coming in form of a profound, undeniable intuition that rose from the depths of his spiritual sea.
It almost felt like the Master Builder Gene to Soren's senses, just that while Gene had been anchored within the body, the Codex had come to establish the influence of his Soul World onto his physical vessel.
Its verdict showed its absolute understanding of Soren's current ruination, coupled with the exact, unyielding steps required to reforge it.
'The mortal vessel is a shattered husk; the silent truth resonated within him. But the Paradox Dao requires a furnace to burn. The Quaternary Alignment must be made flesh.'
Soren muttered the Codex's inferences to himself, and with further ado, began the brutal process of binding his supreme spiritual blueprints to his broken earthly vessel.
'First, the Origin Codex.' He muttered as he mentally nudged the Codex with his intent.
The Codex responded promptly, as its boundless library of universal laws began to forcefully expand his physical neural pathways.
Gradually, as Soren's mortal brain and cognition began to recognise, decipher and comprehend the inherent characteristics of the spinning, esoteric glyphs of the Codex, every single limiter that had anchored it by reason of its mortal nature began to shatter one after the other
At first, the pain left Soren feeling like his skull was expanding on a microscopic level and was truly overwhelming; but the stronger it grew, the swifter he compartmentalized them, burying them beneath the cold, survivalist discipline he had honed over seven years of torment.
'Second, the Origin Pupils.' He muttered as he channeled his intent toward his ruined optic nerves.
Beneath his closed, blood-crusted eyelids, the Origin Pupils also began to establish its foundations.
Soren felt a brief bout of anxiety wash over him as the process began, because he wasn't sure if the Origin Pupils will strip him off his 3D Energy Vision or not.
However, he understood that since the process was beyond his control, he could only wait for it to end and see if it results in a mutation or complete replacement.
But mere moments later, his answers came as two rims of energy surface around his pupils: one a Flaming Chaotic Gold, and the other a Phasing Mystic Blue.
These rims spun and rotated with a level of momentum that began gorge Soren's pupils inwardly, like the deepening depths of a vortex rapidly increasing in momentum.
Then it happened.
Soren felt a veil rip asunder in his ocular senses as the deepening depths of his pupils connected to his mind, creating a window into his Soul World with which it connected to Moon orbiting around the world of lava and glittering sand within it.
In response, the Moon pulsed, sending a stream of energy back through the connection, and upon reaching Soren's eyeballs, the abyssal black of his pupils seemed to supernova, dotting itself with innumerable nigh-imperceptible starry dusts.
Following immediately after, was the Origin Halos physically locking into place, as they seemed to overwrite some, and even burn away various parts of his biological sight.
Even with his eyes shut tight, Soren began to perceive the physical world, his sight peering past his eyelids to create a 360-degree, 3D schematics of his immediate ten-yard radius.
In an instant moment of truth, Soren began to see the true depths of his physical catastrophic structural failure.
He saw what was left of his own ribcage, and the chaotic, lingering toxicity of the Emerald Core's Wood Qi hanging like a sickly green fog in the air above him.
To say he was flabbergasted would be a severe understatement. After all, before, he could only see things within his vision span in 3D.
But now, despite having shrunk in span, his ocular perception had not only become omnidirectional but also bordered upon the greatest of OLEDs in terms of quality, and that strongly floored Soren.
And all of this was with his eyes still sealed shut; what would he then be capable of when he eventually opened them.
Nonetheless, Soren knew he was nowhere near being done, and as such, pressed on with his tasks.
'Now, the Origin Cube.' Soren muttered the part he was most interested to witness.
He could tell that the Origin Cube was way much more than the Vagrant had explained to him, and as such, he had zeroed his mind on discovering and exploring every possibility within it in the future.
The Cube responded promptly, generating an immense, pervasive weight that suddenly descended and established itself all around Soren, manifesting in the form of a suffocating spike in gravity within the ten-yard radius of his new ocular sensitivity span.
However, while it remained invisible to the naked eye in this dormant state, the sheer metaphysical density of the Origin Cube merged seamlessly with the ruined aura of Soren's physical presence.
It established a localized domain of absolute order all around him, creating a heavy anchor that rooted his Soul to his flesh never to be separable by the impending ambient chaos of his awakening.
'Lastly, the Bloodline Core.'
Finally, Soren shifted his focus towards his abdomen, to the spot just behind his navel, and there he found his Bloodline Core—a marvel of epic proportions.
It was tripartite in nature: a spinning, Prismatic Transparent Sphere, within which a fluid resembling the opaqueness of the void—dotted with multicolored stars—roiled and thrashed.
However, when he peered even deeper, he found an inky black, abyss-looking spherical fluid spinning in the opposite direction of the outermost Prismatic sphere.
Initially, the violent harmony of the Prismatic Eden, Opaque Ryujin, and Inky Mimic Drakon lineages sat perfectly aligned, however, the moment they felt Soren's intent lock onto them, the Core violently pulsed.
A massive ripple of mixed ancestral energy that raced through Soren's shredded circulatory system, scanning through his body, and not only healing everything in its path, but also forcibly transforming them.
The energy pulse X-rayed through Soren's bone marrow and blood vessels, supercharging the dead, carbonized cells, and imbuing them with aggressive new life.
Then the Master Builder Gene—the sentient architect of Soren's biological blueprint—slowly began to stir from its slumber.
In mere moments, it was already functional enough to begin It nudging the vital contents of Soren's marrows and vessels to flow alongside the energy pulse, directing their chaotic torrent toward a single destination: his ruined heart.
Then upon reaching his heart, Soren witnessed a familiar yet dramatic scenario playout before him in real-time.
As the mixed energies pooled in his chest, they swirled around a dormant, highly lethal mass—the dead Tranquil Poison Essence, a remnant of Soren's past suffering.
The energies intended to simply flow around it and continue their reconstructive journey.
However, the fully energized Master Builder Gene had a different vision in mind.
It sought to use a fraction of the newly refined energy pulsed to forcibly resuscitate the Tranquil Poison Essence, intending to integrate its lethal, dissolving, newly parasitic properties into Soren's permanent biological foundation.
And that, was when the rebellion occurred.
It wasn't the Prismatic Eden Gene that resisted; it was pure, adaptive, and accommodating by nature.
It wasn't the Opaque Ryujin Gene either; the Master Builder Gene was fundamentally tied to its sentience.
As expected, the haughty resistance came from the Mimic Drakon Gene.
Naturally, the Mimic Drakon was an impossible blend of natural enemies, marshalled into obedience by the Qilin and Dragon parts, and eased by the Nymph and Sylph aspects.
While terrified of those overarching quartet, the Mimic Drakon held absolutely no respect for the Master Builder Gene.
Furthermore, while the Eden Gene might have resuscitated the body, and the Ryujin acknowledged its architectural intent, the Mimic Drakon was only tagging along to observe and assimilate.
To the Mimic Drakon, the idea of mingling with the "filthy," dead essence of a mortal poison was an extreme insult to its predatory pride.
Soren felt their interaction feedback to him in waves of profound intent and raw, ancestral instincts.
He had considered interfering several times in this short span, thinking of suppressing them with the absolute authority of his Origin Codex. But his newly paradoxical inclinations halted his intent.
There was no better moment to truly understand the inherent, violent nature of his lineages than by watching them establish their own hierarchy.
As such, He left them to their devices, a decision that was swiftly validated in the most awe-inspiring and catastrophic way.
Realizing it could not casually force the Mimic Drakon Lineage into submission, the Master Builder Gene rapidly scanned through the available internal countermeasures accessible, and soon enough, if found what it was searching for.
Resting below the chaotic gathering, suspended in the lower chamber of his ruined heart, was the single, blinding drop of Origin Essence gifted by the Vagrant.
Because it possessed no sentience of its own—only absolute, fundamental law—it became the perfect, ultimate weapon for the Master Builder Gene.
Sensing the Gene's intention, Soren actively fed the entire experience of his trials with the Cauldron of Primal Harmony to the Master Builder Gene, and the architect voraciously devoured the knowledge.
Instantly, the Ryu-Gene (Master Builder Gene) seized control of the volatile Ryujin Gene, flooding it through the lower chamber, to deliberately shave off a microscopic fraction of the Origin Essence.
In a fell swoop, the Ryujin Gene passively gained an unknown primordial law from the Origin Essence upon its return cycle toward Soren's heart, swooshing over with unconcealed, apocalyptic malice.
Supercharged by the Origin Essence, the Ryu-Gene took control of the barrelling Ryujin Gene, orchestrating its advent towards the Mimic Drakon Gene which stood its ground in condescending defiance.
It was the ultimate paradox: the Unstoppable Force colliding with an Immovable Body the Cosmic Vagrant had tested Soren with, only on an infinitely weaker scale, rendered in the flesh.
~ BOOM! ~
The two sovereign energies collided with unrestrained cataclysm.
They roiled into one another, sending violent, flesh-tearing shockwaves of kinetic destruction rippling through the walls of Soren's dead heart.
~ BA-DUMP! ~
The first ripple thumped against his cardiac walls with such terrifying force that Soren's physical heart swelled to almost twice its natural size, before violently shrinking back down.
Then came the second ripple, amplified by the friction of their profound laws.
~ BA-DUMP! ~
This time, the physical tissue could not hold, and Soren's heart actually tore at the seams, the extreme pressure ripping the atria and ventricles away from his major arteries.
Then in that moment, just before the final, devastating ripple surfaced, a cold realization struck Soren.
The sensory feedback perfectly mirrored the memory of the Emerald Core's detonation, and He knew he was about to experience a similar internal explosion of epic proportions.
He swiftly tried to take absolute control of the clash, but his calculated curiosity had left his response time a fraction of a microsecond too slow.
~ BRRAAATT! ~
Soren's heart violently detonated.