—
[All-Ti F-Grade Vitality Mastery Leaderboard]
[1. Sylas Grimbalde – 00:00:00]
[2. Fowler Leava – 26:37:33]
...
—
They watched as a raging ocean of churning Aether and countless swimming schools of fish ford of Strokes and Foundations ca together to form a stirring class of dolphins, and then a roaring whale, all before they forged together into a massive blue moon that shone down upon them all.
Seconds.
That was all it had taken for Sylas to complete the Vitality Mastery Secret Realm, a Realm that most Vitality Masters couldn’t even reach the minimum requirent on.
It was an absolute dismantling.
It felt like the entire Sector was silent.
**
Fowler Leava had been in a bad state since losing his Dominus Paragon Title. He had felt like he was re months away from a B-tier breakthrough, the likes of which would shake the entire Sector and raise him and the Leava Clan to a completely new tier of existence.
But before he could succeed, the rug was ripped out from under him.
It was said that those who gained the Dominus Paragon Title, or any Contested Title for that matter, were destined to go down a downward spiral.
The problem was that no one in history managed to keep their Title forever. Just like Fowler lost his, soone had once lost it to him as well.
Every Contested Title holder thought that they would be different from the last, but there was sothing particularly sinister about the Dominus Paragon Title.
It improved your brain function by leaps and bounds, but the issue with it was that you were still stuck in an inferior tier.
A boost of tenfold to one’s ntal stats was usually enough to make one feel like they were on par with those beyond them, but in action, it was a lot of empty stats.
It was almost like getting high on one’s own supply.
For example, right now, Sylas had to stuff himself with rare fruits just to expand his Aether Pathways enough to utilize his outrageous Intelligence. And he was just an F-tier.
Once he was an E-tier and he got another enormous boost, how much more difficult would it be to find resources to expand his Aether Pathways properly?
What about D-tier?
Beyond that?
The issue with Intelligence was just the most obvious. When it ca to Charisma and Wisdom, the issue was more subtle, and yet also more devastating as well.
With Charisma, having a stat that surpassed your Will by too large a margin would be like trying to pass a droplet of water—that being your Will—through a spout as wide as a nation.
Where that droplet went, how focused it was, or where it could be directed was far too variable.
One had to rember that Charisma was what dictated how well one’s Will could influence the world around you. When the imbalance was too great in either direction, there would always be problems.
But with Wisdom... it was even more subtle than that, and sohow even worse. After all, for Sylas, whose Charisma was now bound to his Will, he didn’t have to worry about it in the first place.
With Wisdom, however, it was like having a ton of RAM, but none of the processing power necessary to take advantage of it.
If you were a fool, then you would go from having a single fool feeding you ideas, to dozens of fools feeding you ideas.
What Wisdom did best wasn’t making you smarter—it made the intelligence you already had run through its reasoning faster than before.
The issue with Dominus Paragon was that it gave you the illusion that you had grown smarter, when in reality, you were the sa fool, just with faster thinking speed.
Fowler had thought himself to be just "months away" from a great breakthrough for over a century now. So obsessed with this problem he was convinced he could fix, he had neglected everything else when ironically, he could have grown far more powerful down other paths already.
It was like the sin of Pride... but without the Pride Seed to take advantage of at all.
And now he was sitting in a ss of his own creation, demanding that the Leava Clan go off and find whoever took his Contested Title so that they could be slain. Only this way could he get it back, only this way could he regain what was rightfully his.
That was when the news of what was happening finally reached him.
"... Sylas... Grimblade..." Fowler’s breathing hitched as he reached weakly toward the screen only for his hands to pass right through.
This was unfortunately the problem with losing the Dominus Paragon Title. So used to having such fast processing speeds, everything felt slow and lethargic now. His body might never recover, even in a lifeti.
He had so many abilities that relied on the 10x ntal stats he had had that now he was orders of magnitude weaker.
"It’s... you... it’s... definitely... you..."
His breathing hitched again, he hiccuped and gasped, shifting in his filth as he lowered his dirt-caked nails.
All those years ago, this was exactly how Fowler had gained his Dominus Paragon Title. Every step of the way, he firmly gained first place from F-tier all the way up to C-tier without fail.
His mind was too foggy to consider that Sylas was just an F-tier doing the tower run for the first ti. How could he be the one? What could he have done that the system would deem more impressive than that?
All he knew was that he wanted Sylas dead. Even if it wasn’t him, he was taking what belonged to him, taking what belonged to the true Dominus Paragon, the man who stood as the smartest man in the whole Sector.
It was his Contested Title. His. No one could have it. No one.
Fowler tried to stand and then stumbled over.
"The... Spark Secret Realm will now be opened."
Fowler didn’t hear it, his body falling into a deep sleep.
The mont he thought he had found who he was looking for, the waves of fatigue he had put his mind through—fatigue he could have easily brushed off with Dominus Paragon in the past—hit him with its full force.
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