"Lokakṣara."
The word hit him like recognition—no, wait. That wasn't quite right. It was more like... remembering something he'd never learned. Sanskrit domain? Han Chen's brow furrowed as fragments of memory stirred.
"This resembles those divine rules I studied from the forbidden realm," he murmured, fingers unconsciously tracing patterns in the air. "The abyssal demonic lands in the upper realm... My Trinity Refinement technique drew inspiration from those fragments, but this—" He paused, something cold settling in his stomach. "This is something more."
A puzzle for another time, he decided. Because right now, the spiritual aura around him was doing things that shouldn't be possible.
It wasn't just responding to him anymore. It was... intimate. Like it knew him. Elemental energies gathered without his call, drawn to the rhythm of his daoyun like moths to flame. They moved with him, for him.
His affinity had surged beyond anything he'd experienced.
Wait. His breath caught. Is this a domain?
No... not yet. But this primitive form, this raw potential—he knew what it meant. True domains awakened only at Nascent Soul stage, marked by deeper law comprehension, absolute spatial control, spiritual dominance over reality itself.
He considered his current state: Deeper law insight? Check. Enhanced soul strength? Definitely. Only his life essence fell short of a full Nascent Soul breakthrough.
Still... I'm close. Closer than I should be.
He let his spirit will descend, and—
Holy shit.
His spiritual sense pierced through barriers like they were tissue paper, expanding in all directions with terrifying ease. Information flooded in—enough to drown a lesser cultivator's mind completely—but his consciousness, tempered by enlightenment and refined through suffering, absorbed it like an ocean taking rain.
What would have once overwhelmed him was now... manageable. Fluid. Where normal cultivators could only glimpse fragments or focus on small areas, Han Chen kept the entire scope active simultaneously.
The growth was staggering. Nearly eleven-fold expansion.
Before his body refinement, he'd capped at twenty-one kilometers. After awakening the Gate of Baihui and stepping into Unity Realm, it had climbed further. But now—fueled by the rapid proliferation of Golden Core essence—his spirit sense ballooned to a staggering 320 kilometers diameter.
Two hundred miles. In every direction.
And with that expansion came power. His telekinetic force surged from a mere 2.3 units to 230. Nearly 2,360 tonnes of pressure, shaped and focused by pure will alone.
The jump was... well, it was insane.
And yet—no chaos. No collapse. No backlash tearing him apart from the inside.
His heaven-defying mind held firm, wielding this growth like he'd been born to it. More strength, more weight, but complete control.
Touching the Quantum Edge
The barrier he'd once felt—that edge of atomic perception—simply dissolved. His awareness deepened past molecular structures, past proteins and atomic clusters, into the realm where molecular bonds shifted like living things.
But as he pushed deeper, reality itself began to blur.
Quantum effects shimmered at the edges of his awareness, forming boundaries where "position" became a suggestion and "existence" flickered like a dying candle. His spirit will lost its anchoring. His telekinetic power, theoretical enough to split subatomic particles, couldn't lock onto fields of pure probability.
Touch meant nothing here. There was no surface, no pressure, no there there.
But in the vast stillness, he felt something else—subtle, ephemeral ripples. Not law energy, he realized with growing excitement. Fluctuations in law itself. Tiny tremors in the fundamental patterns that shaped reality.
This wasn't power. This was architecture.
A Month and a Half Later
Time had become fluid during his consolidation. One month within the tower's sanctum, another for stabilizing his realm and testing his new capabilities under open sky. His law comprehension had surged—most elements now pierced to the 27th layer.
His lifeform level had evolved, and with it, his mutated spiritual consciousness underwent another transformation. Laws of illusion and mind could now project whatever he desired directly onto someone's senses. Beyond that, he could feel the souls of lower beings—spirit animals, their half-formed thoughts flowing through his awareness like whispered conversations.
Compared to Golden Core cultivators just beginning to sense law energies, the difference was... well, calling it staggering was an understatement.
His sword domain had fully formed. Intent to sever, coupled with severing law, could split things below atomic levels. They didn't break or shatter—they simply vanished into nothingness.
Within a hundred-meter radius, elemental transformation responded directly to his will. When channeling the Law of Life, nearby flora surged in growth, reshaping in moments that should have taken seasons. Materials shifted forms under focused intent. His affinity allowed him to use environmental law energy without any expenditure from his own reserves.
Even though his spiritual consciousness had increased manifold, he still felt his soul had vast room to grow.
Energy now diffused naturally throughout his form, so perfectly integrated that weaker attacks simply dissipated on contact. His skin refused to acknowledge them. Healing came without conscious thought—wounds closing before blood could fully surface.
His body and qi cultivation had merged into perfect synergy that no technique alone could have engineered. His reflexes sharpened so drastically that the outside world seemed to crawl—every movement slowed to near-stillness while he moved at normal speed.
"Mmm." He flexed his fingers, watching energy patterns dance beneath his skin. "I barely even try anymore, and the energy moves on its own. Like it finally knows where to go before my thoughts even form."
The efficiency Problem
Most cultivators lived in fragile contradiction—vast souls trapped in small, inadequate bodies. Their physical forms became bottlenecks, narrow conduits unable to withstand the forces they cultivated.
It was like strapping a jet engine to a rusted bicycle frame.
But Han Chen had transcended that limitation. His semi-transcendent form, sculpted through ruthless refinement and unimaginable suffering, had unlocked internal potential gates. Direct pathways now connected his Golden Core to vital energy centers like the Gate of the Lower Sea.
The energy didn't struggle anymore. It flowed. With speed. With purpose.
"Combat power's not just about how hard you hit or how fast you dodge," he murmured, testing the energy circulation. "It's about how long you can keep hitting."
With those internal channels open, his endurance bordered on absurd. His body wasn't a tool anymore—it was a cultivation machine, optimized for perfect efficiency.
The transformation brought quieter changes too. His need for mundane food had dwindled to almost nothing. Hunger still flickered occasionally, but more like a shadow of desire than actual necessity. His Golden Core fed him from within, essence flowing in one direction: outward.
And perhaps most critically, his cultivation was fail-safe in a way few could understand. If his Golden Core were shattered—by fate, mistake, or divine retribution—he wouldn't immediately collapse like higher realm cultivators who lived entirely through their cores.
His physical form, already refined to independence, retained its own internal gates and vitality stores. Even severed from the Core, his body would survive and could eventually reconstruct the pathways.
The only way he could truly die now was to destroy both core and body simultaneously, or to seize his soul directly.
This wasn't mere durability. This was insurance.
He sensed his name being called from soul corridor, but got no response when he reached out. Time to venture back to the world, he supposed. He contacted Hye Won, who urged him to return to the company immediately.
Something in her tone made his newly enhanced senses prickle with warning.
Return to Reality
The moment Han Chen descended back to the mundane world, he felt the difference like a physical weight. No surrounding law energy, no spiritual qi of heaven and earth. Every action now required his own power reserves.
He let out a small, frustrated sigh.
But wait—subtle fluctuations pulsed through the soul corridors linking him to Hye Won and Yue Lan. He could sense them clearly, their exact locations triangulated with mathematical precision. And oddly, he felt as if he could actually teleport to them.
Which should be impossible at his cultivation level.
He was nowhere near Spatial Severance or Void Displacement techniques. Yet the precision of his awareness suggested something else—an emergent property of high-order soul resonance and spatial anchoring. His soul corridors were granting abilities beyond mere communication.
Curious, he extended his spiritual sense upward and rose into the sky. At a hundred miles up, space was thinner, unbuffered by atmospheric interference. But instinct told him he needed more altitude.
He climbed to the edge of his spirit sense range, just above most satellites, near the orbital track of space stations. The Earth curved beneath him in a brilliant blue arc. There was almost no air pressure here, and while his cultivation body didn't suffer vacuum stress, the sensation of lung expansion felt... wrong.
A quick spirit-forged membrane sealed his respiratory pathways, and the discomfort vanished. He'd traveled through void before, so reaching near-space for the first time in this life held little novelty.
With his eyes closed, he pinpointed Hye Won's location—hundreds of kilometers away, barely a sliver on the visual horizon but a sharp resonance pulse in his soul.
Instinct surged. He acted.
Oops
In an instant, his vision tunneled toward the destination. The rest of the world stretched and warped behind him as his domain anchored a bubble of spacetime around his form.
But the universe, it turned out, kept very careful accounting.
Deformation of spacetime dragged ambient fields, caused vacuum polarization, and pulled residual energy from the surrounding thermosphere. When he crossed from vacuum to sparse atmospheric pressure at roughly Mach 100,000, the result was... well, problematic.
The edge of his warped bubble snapped back into place like a cosmic rubber band, releasing energy similar to a low-yield nuclear detonation in his wake.
Shit.
Han Chen's spirit will flared desperately. He wrapped the upper atmosphere in a suppressive mesh field, absorbing shock harmonics, reversing pressure gradients, deflecting radiation cones upward through frantic combination of spirit will and domain manipulation.
The energy drainage for law manipulation was ridiculously high, so he immediately reduced speed to Mach 200, but the damage was done—a mini nuclear explosion had already bloomed behind him.
Through deeper layers of law field manipulation, he separated energy and matter accumulation, damped the expanding field, tightened spacetime curvature, and rebalanced gradients to prevent cascading feedback.
A streak of ionized plasma ten miles long trailed behind him in the upper thermosphere, glowing faint blue to crimson before his normal flight techniques took over and the streak vanished.
He stopped several miles short of Yue Lan's location for safety.
No momentum. No drag. No sound. The air didn't even stir. The entire journey had taken milliseconds, but the calculations and adjustments required were comparable to current quantum computers running at full capacity.
He realized this ability had connections to the void step technique—a movement method for covering miles with each step. And apparently, this was also his strongest potential attack technique. If he pushed near light speed, it would be enough to blow up the atmosphere and destroy a quarter of Earth—assuming his reserves could enable such spacetime folding.
"Well," he muttered, floating in the suddenly peaceful air, "I trusted my instincts and calculations, and it worked out. But, um, maybe it's not a good idea to tell Hye Won that I nearly blew up the planet just now."
His past self would never have imagined establishing three soul corridors this early. This technique was meant for Void Transformation realm, not his current level. The only reason he'd survived—and the planet too—was his law control and computational speed matching the technique's demands.
From the ground, observers would have seen only a red shimmer across the high sky. No explosion. No fallout. The thermal energy had scattered harmlessly into space, leaving only faint auroral patterns.
He'd have to wait a few more cultivation levels before using this ability casually.
He didn't particularly care about the international panic it might cause, but seeing that the red streak was gone and only some aurora remained, he flew normally the rest of the way to his girlfriend.
Bad News
Appearing beside Hye Won, Han Chen opened his mouth to speak—probably to explain or apologize for nearly ending civilization—but before he could say anything, she rushed forward and embraced him.
"It's good that you came," she whispered, her voice tight with anger and worry. "Sophia is nowhere to be found."
Well, shit, Han Chen thought. And here I was worried about accidentally nuking the thermosphere.