A full month passed.
The five Empty Vessels remained subrged within the Abyssal Pool the entire ti.
At the edge of that black sea, Lucien and the four won sat in ditation, motionless as statues.
Their true bodies never entered the Pool during that first stage. Only their awareness did. Each of them controlled their corresponding Vessel below.
And through the synchronized constitution, whatever happened to the vessel was reflected back into the original body.
The process was difficult from the very beginning.
None of them were used to inhabiting bodies without mana vessels.
That alone was disorienting.
An ordinary practitioner perceived the world through mana circulation almost without thinking. It was like breathing, or feeling one’s own heartbeat. Remove that, and the body no longer behaved the way instinct expected.
The Empty Vessels had no internal energy.
They were alive only through soul-authority and the strange mirrored constitution Lucien had woven into them.
Controlling such a body felt, at first, like trying to write with a hand that belonged to soone else.
Then ca the Abyssal Pool.
The good thing was that the Pool accepted the vessels exactly as Alanthuriel had predicted.
There was no rejection.
The Empty Vessels entered the blackness as inert structures, and the Abyss treated them not as intruders with energy to erase, but as matter still waiting to be judged.
That was when the true work began.
Slowly, carefully, the five guided the Abyssal Pool into those bodies.
Not in great quantities. Not recklessly.
Only in the thinnest possible strands at first, as if they were coaxing drops of night into dead flesh.
The mont that blackness began circulating inside the Empty Vessels, the synchronized reflection activated.
And the pain appeared.
It was a strange pain.
Not because the Abyssal Pool had physically reached their true bodies. It had not.
That was the crucial difference.
Their real bodies, seated at the edge of the Pool, were never directly touched by it in that first stage. If they had been, their mana, their spiritual force, and all the energy within them would have been stripped away instantly.
Instead, what reached them was the result.
The synchronized constitution did not transmit the Abyssal Pool itself.
It transmitted the state of the body undergoing change.
In simpler terms, the Empty Vessel was the forge, and the true body was the mirror.
When the Vessel was tempered, the mirror reproduced the tempering.
When the Vessel’s structure changed, the true body imitated the change.
When the Vessel suffered pain from restructuring, the true body felt that restructuring as pain as well.
Lucien understood it best after the first week.
It was like controlling a puppet placed inside a furnace while standing outside the flas yourself. He was not burning directly. Yet because the puppet and the puppeteer were linked through perfect reflection, every structural correction, every reshaping, every collapse and rebuild that happened to the puppet echoed into his own flesh.
That was why the process hurt.
It’s not because the Abyssal Pool was erasing them.
But because their bodies were trying to keep pace with what the Abyss was doing to their mirrored selves.
And the mont the Vessel benefited, they benefited too.
The paradox was dangerous, but stable.
The Empty Vessel received the Abyss directly because it had no energy for the Pool to devour.
The true body received the adaptation indirectly because the synchronized constitution translated the Vessel’s gains into mirrored physical change rather than direct Abyssal contact.
That difference was everything.
It was the razor-thin line between refinent and erasure.
By the second week, the process had beco more controlled.
By the third, each of them could guide small streams of abyssal blackness through their Vessel’s internal structure with growing precision.
By the fourth, the circulation had changed them all.
Their bodies began shedding.
Old structural weakness. Old mortal assumptions. Old limitations written into flesh and bone.
Lucien felt it most clearly.
His Empty Vessel moved through the Abyssal Pool with a strange ease that the others did not possess. It did not rely endure the blackness.
It imposed order on it. Almost as if the Vessel was not only surviving the Abyss, but compelling it into structure.
Sothing of his sovereign disposition remained on the empty vessel.
His control was firr. His circulation cleaner. The Abyssal Pool did not beco obedient, but it grew less resistant in his hands.
The blackness entered the Vessel’s limbs, organs, marrow, and inner frawork in slow asured loops.
Each completed cycle refined the shell.
And every completed cycle reflected into Lucien’s true body.
His bones grew heavier, denser, and sohow cleaner.
His flesh lost old fragility.
His organs were remade.
Even his internal structure felt like it was being rewritten according to a harsher law of existence.
The process was painful, but not chaotic.
By the end of that month, Lucien suddenly felt the final threshold arrive.
His body settled.
The remaking completed.
His eyes opened.
And just like that—
He had entered the Celestial Realm.
Lucien sat still for several breaths, quietly feeling the difference.
He was stronger. Far stronger.
His body had beco stable enough to survive the void.
It had crossed the boundary.
But there was sohting off.
His eyes shifted toward the Abyssal Pool.
And he imdiately understood what was missing.
Alanthuriel had been right.
This first breakthrough had only made him capable of enduring the Abyss.
It had not yet made him recognized by it.
His body carried the strength of the Celestial Realm.
But not the profound, inscrutable heaviness that belonged to things truly accepted by the Abyss.
Lucien stood.
Without hesitation, he prepared himself for the second stage.
He approached the edge of the Pool again.
Slowly, he lowered one foot into the blackness.
Pain shot through him at once—
but only a little.
His body did not collapse.
His energy did not imdiately disintegrate.
The Abyssal Pool still resisted him, but it no longer rejected him outright.
That alone confird it.
The Empty Vessel stage had worked.
His body had been taught enough to survive contact.
Now it was ti to finish the lesson.
Lucien looked once at the Pool.
Then he dove.
The blackness swallowed him whole.
Imdiately, pain erupted through every part of his body.
But this ti, it was different from before.
It was not annihilation.
It was judgnt.
The Abyss accepted his presence enough not to erase him, but not enough to embrace him without resistance.
So Lucien began at once.
He circulated the Abyssal Pool through his true body.
The pain intensified.
His divine energy trembled.
His flesh scread.
Yet he endured it.
At the sa ti, he split his mind and continued controlling the Empty Vessel as well.
That was when he realized how effective the thod truly was.
The Vessel and the true body were refining in parallel now.
The Vessel, already adapted, softened the burden through reflection.
The true body, newly subrged, deepened the adaptation through direct contact.
Each improvent flowed both ways.
Each success reinforced the other.
The pain beca more bearable.
The benefit grew faster.
Lucien closed his eyes and sank into deep concentration.
He had only one goal now.
To remain.
To endure.
To continue until the Abyss itself no longer treated him as an outsider.
•••
Days passed.
Lucien did not notice.
He was too deep within the work of surviving.
So he did not feel the mont the other four finally rose from their ditations, opened their eyes, saw what he had done—
and followed.
One after another, four figures entered the Abyssal Pool behind him.
The five of them continued refining within the blackness.
They endured the pain.
They endured the remaking.
And little by little, as if a law older than stars had begun to acknowledge them, the Abyss stopped resisting so fiercely.
It did not welco them.
Not yet.
But it was beginning to accept their existence.
And when that acceptance fully arrived—
the reward would be greater than any Celestial breakthrough achieved by ordinary ans.
•••
Months passed.
Lucien’s eyes opened.
He was still subrged within the Abyssal Pool.
Blackness surrounded him from every direction, yet the darkness no longer felt hostile.
It did not claw at his energy. It did not attempt to erase his existence.
Lucien slowly moved his body within the water.
The blackness parted smoothly around him.
He exhaled softly.
He had been accepted.
The Abyss no longer treated him as an intruder.
It recognized him as sothing that could exist within its law.
Lucien flexed his fingers and watched the dark current slide through them like obedient ink.
For a strange mont, a thought crossed his mind.
He felt like he could scoop the Abyssal Pool with his hands and drink it.
Of course, he did not attempt sothing so absurd.
So instincts were better left untested.
Instead, Lucien pushed upward.
His body rose through the black sea, and monts later he broke the surface.
He stepped onto the stone edge of the Pool once again.
Water, or what resembled water, dripped from him in threads of darkness that dissolved into nothing before touching the ground.
Behind him, the Empty Vessel also rose from the Pool.
Lucien brought it out with a thought and stood it beside him.
Then he paused.
The difference was... almost nonexistent.
The vessel had changed during the months of refinent.
Its body had endured the Abyssal Pool just as long as he had.
Its bones, flesh, and internal structure had all been tempered by the sa absolute law.
Lucien examined it carefully.
The result was ridiculous.
The Empty Vessel had beco as strong as his own body.
If Lucien moved his spirit and divine energy core into it right now, he doubted he would notice any aningful difference.
He had created sothing absurd.
Lucien stared at it for a mont longer.
Then he sighed softly.
"This thing is dangerous."
Its existence alone was too valuable.
Lucien placed his palm against the vessel’s chest.
With a quiet pulse of will, he sealed the Empty Vessel away inside his divine energy core.
It would remain there.
For now.
Only then did Lucien glance back toward the Abyssal Pool.
And pause.
The four won were gone.
For a brief instant his heart tightened.
But then he realized the truth.
They had not disappeared.
They had... changed.
The Abyssal Pool was no longer calm.
The black sea had begun responding to sothing within it.
Lucien narrowed his eyes.
Marie was the first he recognized.
Or rather, the presence that was Marie.
The water around a vast section of the Pool had thickened and hardened, turning dense and immovable like living stone beneath the surface. Everything that drifted into that region slowed and settled as though gravity itself had deepened there.
Marie had beco stillness and foundation.
Like earth beneath an ocean.
The Abyssal Pool did not push her away.
It rested on her.
Lucien’s gaze shifted.
Kaia was far less subtle.
A violent heat radiated through another portion of the Pool. The black liquid churned violently as waves of scarlet pressure moved through it.
But the Abyss did not extinguish that fla.
Instead, it fed it.
Kaia had beco a burning core within the darkness, her presence forcing the Pool to harden and temper around her.
Where Marie grounded the Abyss, Kaia challenged it.
Lucien followed the currents further.
Sylra was... difficult to see.
The surface of the Pool twisted where she was.
Black currents spun into spirals and narrow vortexes, rising and falling in long spiraling paths that moved faster than the surrounding water.
Sylra had beco motion itself.
Wind without air.
A will that forced the Abyss to flow.
And then—
Lucien’s eyes softened.
Marina.
Where she was, the Abyss had grown calm again.
The black water moved gently in wide circular tides, rging with her presence rather than resisting it.
Marina had not tried to dominate the Pool.
She had joined it.
Her existence flowed through the blackness like a quiet current, neither opposing nor controlling it.
Lucien watched all four phenona unfold and shook his head slowly.
"Absurd," he muttered.
Each of them had adapted differently.
Each of them had found their own answer to the Abyss.
Their constitutions had carried them the rest of the way.
It did not take much longer.
One by one, the presences within the Pool condensed.
The elental transformations folded inward.
And four figures rose from the Abyss.
They lifted into the air above the black surface.
Lucien looked up.
And froze.
For a brief mont, his thoughts went completely blank.
Everything unnecessary had stripped away during their transformation.
Including their clothing.
The four won hovered in the air above the black water, their bodies newly reforged by the Abyss itself.
Their skin carried faint traces of elental aura.
Lucien stared.
Then his gaze shifted to the Empty Vessels he had summoned back from the Pool.
Those bodies had also lost their clothing.
Lucien nodded slowly.
"Yes," he said to himself.
"Perfect."
He examined the vessels first.
Lucien smiled proudly.
A creator should never doubt his work.
If a craftsman hesitated about his own creation, that hesitation would beco its flaw.
So he continued examining them.
Then he looked back up at the four won.
Then back at the vessels.
Then up again.
Comparing.
Judging the success of his design.
It took several seconds before the won realized what he was doing.
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