The silence following the total erasure of thousands of candidates was unnatural. Ethan stood in a world that was now a blank slate, a perfectly flat horizon of nothingness.
He had sheathed the Sword of Infinity, but the air still thrumd with the aftereffects of a strike that had rewritten the local laws of existence.
He looked around, but there was no one left to fight. The "chosen" ones, the protagonists with their systems and bloodlines, had all been turned into absolute vacuum.
Ethan looked at his hand, before they were turned to ash, he had collected all their bloodlines. Around 1500 new bloodlines were in his hand now.
"Is that the best the Eternal Domain can offer?" Ethan asked the empty sky.
There was no answer, only the cold wind of a dead reality or rather the reality was now empty of any candidates. Ethan did not want to waste ti.
He could feel the threads of other realities nearby, pulsing like ripe fruit. He needed more power, more bloodlines, and more authority. He prepared to tear through the boundary of the next reality.
But as his hand reached out to rip the space in front of him, the universe itself seed to groan.
A trendous pressure landed on his shoulders. It was not like the weight of a mountain or a planet. It was the weight of an entire conceptual law pressing down on his very soul.
The ground beneath his feet, which he had just flattened into a perfect plane, instantly vaporized under the sheer gravity of a new presence.
"Bastard! How dare you kill the heir of the Kizuki family? You will have to pay with your blood!"
The voice did not co from a throat. It was a roar that vibrated through the fabric of the dinsion. Above Ethan, the space did not just tear. It exploded. A massive rift opened, and from within the darkness of that void, a gigantic hand erged.
The hand was the size of a city, covered in ancient, glowing runes that humd with the power of laws.It moved with a slow, inevitable force, pressing down toward Ethan.
Ethan’s eyes widened as he imdiately felt the gap.
"What the... This bastard is above the Axiom Dominion realm!" Ethan hissed, his teeth clenching as he struggled to keep his back straight. "The will of the Eternal Domain just wants to eliminate , doesn’t it? It even allowed such an existence to interfere."
This was not a candidate. This was a supre elder, a protector of an ancient family who had bypassed the rules of the trial to seek revenge. The power radiating from that hand was beyond anything Ethan had faced in the open field. It was an aura that felt capable of crushing the very concept of life itself.
It reminded him of the crushing weight he had once felt in the cave of Edrin Solace, though it was not quite as ancient. Still, at Ethan’s current level, it was more than enough to destroy him utterly. His bones began to creak. His skin started to crack as the air around him solidified into a wall of hostile intent.
He reached for his sword, but his arm felt as if it were trapped in molten lead. The pressure was so overwhelming that even the Sword of Infinity seed to be suppressed by the raw authority of the being above.
"I can’t block this," Ethan realized. "I’m not strong enough yet."
Just as despair began to creep into his mind, sothing shifted deep inside him.
Inside his inner dinsion, the place where his very foundation resided, a chaotic transformation was reaching its peak. The World Tree, which represented the pillars of existence in his inner dinsion and the Creation Lotus, which represented the source of all things, had finally finished their long struggle for dominance.
The World Tree had completely swallowed the Creation Lotus.
The two supre entities rged, and in their place grew sothing that defied description. It was a tree that pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat, its leaves shimring with the colors of both the morning sun and the darkest abyss.
Boom!
A terrifying, destructive light gushed out from Ethan’s inner dinsion. It was a beam of pure, raw energy that ignored the physical world entirely. It shot out from his chest, piercing through the crushing aura of the giant hand like a hot needle through silk.
The beam struck the center of the city sized palm.
"Ah!"
A roar of agony thundered down from the rift. The gigantic hand flinched violently. Gold and black blood sprayed from the wound, each drop falling like a teor and creating massive craters upon impact.
An existence of that level barely felt pain. Only entities of the sa realm or higher could injure a being above the Axiom Dominion realm. Yet the light released by the evolved World Tree was of a higher quality than the power wielded by the Kizuki elder. It was power that brushed against the Source itself.
The giant hand retracted instantly, like a burned child pulling away from an open fla. The space crack began to heal rapidly, the elder too shocked and wounded to continue the assault.
Ethan did not waste a single second. He knew he had been given a rare and fleeting chance. He surged forward and directly entered the Space Cube, his portable sanctuary.
The Space Cube humd softly as he arrived within its tallic halls. While it would not withstand a prolonged assault from a supre being, it existed between folds of reality. It granted him precious monts to breathe, recover, and most importantly, think.
Ethan released a long sigh of relief. His chest still burned from the violent surge of energy that had erupted from him monts earlier.
Right now, he was completely alone. He had no friends to rely on, no family to shield him. He was a lone predator being hunted by an entire forest of monsters. Every step he took was observed, and every victory he claid summoned an even more terrifying enemy.
"I need to finish this damn trial," Ethan muttered, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "But the higher ups... they do not want to succeed. They know I carry the Progenitor blood. They probably already know what I might wish for if I win."
He stared at the ceiling of the Space Cube as his mind raced.
"They are not attacking directly with their full power. There has to be a factor playing in the dark. Sothing is stopping them from simply erasing this entire reality to reach ."
"I need a massive boost," Ethan said quietly. "I need to rge at least ten thousand powerful bloodlines into my Omni Bloodline. That is the only way my physical body can reaxh, the next realm."
He closed his eyes and entered his inner world to inspect the source of the power that had saved his life.
The inner dinsion was no longer a peaceful garden. It had transford into a vast, swirling galaxy of energy. At its center stood the evolved World Tree. It was no longer rely a tree. It was the anchor of his inner dinsion. It felt perfect, balanced, and unfathomable.
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