Zephyr Blade Art... Seven-Star Void Step... Phantom-Weaver Needle Art... I've pushed them all to the absolute peak of Perfection.
Slouched in his rolling chair behind the archive desk, Kaelen slowly opened his eyes from a feigned nap, a faint, highly satisfied smirk playing on his lips.
Three days had passed since he broke through to the Awakened Tier in the park.
In just those three days, Kaelen had spent his shift utilizing his Aetheric Mindscape to ruthlessly optimize the three combat arts he knew, grinding them all to the 'Perfection' realm.
In this world, the mastery of a combat art was universally divided into four stages: Entry Level, Minor Success, Great Success, and Perfection.
Kaelen had essentially maxed out the skill trees for all his current abilities.
It's just a damn shame that the entire ground floor is stocked exclusively with basic, Mortal Tier manuals.
Foundational arts were fine for bullying thugs, but above them were the true Awakened Arts and Ascendant Secret Techniques.
Kaelen was officially an Awakened Tier Grandmaster, yet he didn't possess a single Awakened-level combat technique to channel his massive power. If he were forced into a fight against a veteran Awakened expert, he would be at a severe tactical disadvantage, forced to rely purely on brute force and his immortal body.
As the largest repository in Neo-Veridia, the Astral Library undoubtedly housed powerful Awakened Arts on its heavily guarded upper floors.
But with Kaelen's current security clearance as a junior archivist, trying to walk upstairs would trigger the automated plasma turrets unless he publicly revealed his true cultivation level.
Wait a second...
I have the Mindscape cheat code. Could I just... invent my own Awakened Arts?
Kaelen's eyes suddenly lit up.
All legendary Awakened and Ascendant techniques weren't handed down by gods; they were painstakingly created by visionary pioneers of the past.
If those ancient masters could do it through decades of trial and error, why couldn't I do it in an afternoon with a quantum-supercomputer brain?
However, to invent a new combat art, those ancient masters possessed decades of foundational knowledge. Kaelen only knew three basic arts. His database was too small.
If my foundation isn't deep enough... I'll just absorb the entire library!
This was the one problem Kaelen could easily solve. The ground floor had thousands of basic manuals. It was the perfect data mine to build a massive foundation.
I'll start with a small, reasonable goal: Invent an Ascendant-level Sword Art!
Kaelen considered himself a man of focus and commitment. Even after becoming an Awakened Grandmaster, his obsession with becoming an aesthetic blademaster hadn't wavered in the slightest.
Without wasting a second, Kaelen stood up and began sweeping the shelves, pulling down every sword manual he could find.
Ethereal River Sword Art...
Kaelen opened a thick manual and began flipping the pages at a blinding speed, almost blurring the paper.
Having reached the Awakened Tier, his soul power and cognitive processing were vastly enhanced. Paired with the Mindscape, he essentially possessed a photographic memory on steroids. He only needed to glance at a page for a fraction of a second to perfectly imprint its contents and Aetheric pathways into his brain.
"Hey, you're not sleeping anymore? We're actually reading now?"
Just as Kaelen was violently flipping pages like a madman, Xander strolled up behind him.
For the past three days, Kaelen had spent his entire shift sitting with his eyes closed, running simulations in his Mindscape. Xander had assumed Kaelen was finally embracing the slacker lifestyle and felt a deep sense of comradery.
The kid finally saw the light, Xander had thought happily. Everyone else is slacking off. It's unpatriotic to work hard.
But now, seeing Kaelen aggressively speed-reading, Xander felt a sharp pang of betrayal.
You're secretly grinding again, aren't you?!
What's so great about these dusty old books anyway?! We're genetically hard-locked as failures! Isn't it better to just accept our fate and chill?!
Kaelen entirely ignored Xander's existential crisis. After fully uploading the Ethereal River Sword Art to his brain, he tossed the manual back onto the cart, leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and instantly dived back into his Mindscape.
"Yeah, exactly. Just like that. Go to sleep, brother. Reject the grind," Xander said, nodding in deep approval at Kaelen's sudden nap.
Comforted by his friend's laziness, Xander returned to Sector 2 to resume his own drooling slumber.
In Kaelen's view, the most efficient method to invent a high-tier combat art wasn't to start from scratch, but to ruthlessly cannibalize existing basic arts—stripping away their flaws, isolating their core strengths, and violently fusing their essences together into a perfect, flawless whole.
Under the terrifying processing power of the Mindscape, Kaelen's comprehension was truly god-like.
As the newly uploaded Ethereal River Sword Art projected into his mental void, millions of combat simulations ran simultaneously. He greedily absorbed the resulting insights, and his mastery skyrocketed in real-time.
Entry Level.
Minor Success.
Great Success.
Perfection!
In less than three hours, Kaelen had completely mastered a brand-new combat art.
However, this was just data collection. It wasn't enough to forge his ultimate weapon.
Kaelen's ambition was simple: if he was going to invent a sword strike, it needed to be a strike capable of annihilating anything in his path with absolute, overwhelming prejudice.
He planned to upload every single sword manual on the entire ground floor before initiating the fusion sequence.
And so, over the next two weeks, Kaelen became the ultimate model employee—at least in Xander's eyes. He spent every single day 'napping' at his desk, but in reality, his brain was running a hyper-advanced combat crucible.
He didn't just strip his own Sector 1 clean; he constantly made excuses to "help" the other archivists, using the opportunity to scan and upload every sword manual from Sectors 2 through 8.
In just fourteen days, Kaelen had downloaded over thirty different variations of foundational sword arts and violently optimized every single one to the Perfection realm.
His brain was now a peerless repository of Sword Dao.
...
[Late at night, in the desolate mountain ranges outside Neo-Veridia's city shields.]
"It's time."
Standing on a rocky cliff face, Kaelen finally halted his data collection.
Now, he just had to execute the final step: utilizing his God-Tier Comprehension to throw all thirty perfected sword arts into a mental blender, discard the useless flash, and forge a single, apocalyptic Ascendant-level strike.
Inventing a combat art of that magnitude would inevitably trigger a massive Aetheric phenomenon. To avoid drawing the Enforcers or exposing his identity, he had sneaked miles outside the city walls.
Gazing at the silent, moonlit mountain range around him, Kaelen closed his eyes. The thirty optimized sword techniques began flashing through his mind at lightspeed.
His brain operated like a super-cooled quantum engine.
As the fusion process reached its climax, a terrifying, hyper-dense pale blue light began to radiate from Kaelen's physical body.
A swarm of mutated, blood-sucking mosquitoes, drawn by his life force, swarmed toward him in the dark. But the instant they crossed a ten-meter threshold around his body, they were silently, instantaneously reduced to atomic dust by an invisible, omnidirectional field of Sword Aura.
If a high-level Adept had been present, they would have been paralyzed with terror to witness a physical "Domain of Blades" manifesting around a teenager. The air itself vibrated with the deafening, high-pitched hum of millions of invisible swords.
Kaelen stood absolutely motionless, suspended in the eye of this Aetheric hurricane.
He remained frozen like a statue until the very first rays of dawn cracked over the horizon. Suddenly, his eyes snapped open, a blinding flash of azure sword-light erupting from his pupils.
"The compilation... is complete!"
With a mere thought, the vast ocean of Aetherial Energy in his core surged into his right hand. A physical, crackling blade of pure, concentrated azure Sword Aura manifested in his grip.
As Kaelen aggressively pumped more Aether into the construct, the blade rapidly expanded, extending into a terrifying, thirty-foot-long pillar of blinding, condensed plasma.
Feeling the world-ending destructive power humming within the blade, Kaelen's face twisted into a wild, excited grin as he locked eyes on the massive, towering mountain peak directly in front of him.
"I'll call this little trick... the Heavens-Severing Zenith Blade!"
The instant the words left his lips, Kaelen swung his arm in a violent, horizontal arc. The thirty-foot plasma blade detached from his hand, instantly expanding into a three-hundred-foot-wide crescent tsunami of pure, annihilating Sword Aura, accelerating straight toward the mountain.