Chapter 505 - 493: Touching the Law, Advancing to Morning Star

Chapter 505: Chapter 493: Touching the Law, Advancing to Morning Star

Two years.

He had grown accustomed to life as the hunted.

This vast, steel graveyard had now become Allen’s own familiar backyard.

He could draw a map with his eyes closed, marking which areas had the strongest radiation, which canyons had the least frequent patrols, and which wrecks had structures suitable for hiding.

Over the past two years, he had inscribed perception-blocking Rune Arrays inside hundreds of hidden wrecks.

The broken engine nozzle of a giant warship, the hollowed-out chest cavity of a Golem, the nodes of energy pipelines buried deep underground... even the saying "a sly rabbit has three burrows" was no longer enough to describe his current caution.

Seizing every available moment to cultivate had become his entire life.

He could have finished constructing the eighth Core Matrix within a year, but the ever-present pursuers and his constantly frayed nerves had more than doubled the time it took.

Without Cybertron’s exclusive Meditation Room, without the aid of items like the Astral Spring, he had relied solely on the natural recovery of his Spiritual Power and a few portable auxiliary tools to painstakingly grind out the final Core Matrix.

The efficiency was suffocatingly low, but the result was good.

All prerequisites had been met.

At this moment, Allen sat cross-legged inside a thoroughly modified, giant engine nozzle.

This engine belonged to an ancient warship over three kilometers long. The nozzle’s diameter was a full forty meters, and he had covered its inner walls with three entire layers of perception-blocking Runes.

On the outside, he had also set up five Magic Power interference arrays on different frequencies—specifically designed to counter the detection frequencies of his own creations.

When the Spider Slayers and Demon Eyes flew overhead, their scans would pick up nothing.

Using the technical parameters he knew best to counter his own creations.

—This was probably the only thing that could be considered an "advantage" in the last two years.

’The final step.’

The eighth Core Matrix shone brilliantly in his Sea of Spirit, echoing the seven that came before it.

He felt no particular emotion. More than two years on the run had honed him into a silent blade.

Every bit of Spiritual Power was precious, every second of clarity had value. Wasting them on sentimentality was pure extravagance.

He drew his Spiritual Power inward and let his consciousness sink.

The Witchcraft model for [Consciousness Upload] unfolded deep within his soul.

He had simulated this Skill countless times, having already completed its theoretical framework back on the Aiselan Plane. After arriving in these ruins, he had spent another two years repeatedly verifying every node.

Now, it was like a precision chip with its blueprint already drawn, lacking only the final etching.

His Spiritual Power became the etching knife.

The first stroke landed, steady as a rock.

All sixteen sub-thought threads entered an auxiliary state, while his main consciousness, completely unwavering, precisely branded one Rune node after another into his soul.

Time passed.

Outside, two "Peacekeeper" patrol teams passed over the engine nozzle one after another.

The shielding Runes faithfully performed their duty; the red light of the scans swept past without stopping.

Allen was completely unaware of this.

His consciousness was completely immersed in the vast domain of his soul, utterly focused.

The hundredth node, complete.

The three hundredth node, complete.

The seven hundredth—

The final circuit closed.

WHOOSH!

The [Consciousness Upload] Skill model leaped from a two-dimensional plane into a three-dimensional form, finally stabilizing at his Soul Core and emitting a soft, profound radiance.

And in that same instant, the promotion began spontaneously!

The eight Core Matrices lit up simultaneously, and all sixteen sub-thought threads resonated in unison.

An irresistible force rose from the deepest part of his soul, lifting him up.

Allen felt as if his soul was being drawn from his physical body by a gentle, formless power and cast into a boundless ocean of Magic Power.

He arrived at a dimension he had never touched before, "surfacing" from the water.

Just as his mentor Augustus had once described, he saw it.

A brilliant and ancient river of stars, indescribable by words, stretched out above the universe.

Every star emanated a different light. Some blazed like a furnace, some were as steady as the earth, some flowed like living water, and some were as sharp as metal.

Those lights intertwined, overlapped, and influenced one another, weaving the underlying code that governed the operation of the entire world.

The Laws.

This was the sight only an Advanced Wizard could behold.

Countless Laws hung from the dome of the universe like eternal, unchanging coordinates.

What every Morning Star Wizard pursued throughout their entire lives was merely to pluck their own star from this river.

For a normal Wizard to advance to the Morning Star realm, they needed to spend decades, even centuries, studying, sensing, and honing their skills. Only then could they barely "see" the star that aligned with their path in this river of stars, and then attempt to "touch" it.

But now...

Allen hadn’t even had a chance to search for his preconceived "Metal Law" before a star was already there.

Right above his head.

A star so bright it even outshone all the others around it.

It was as if it had been waiting there for him from the very moment he began his promotion, radiating a kind of... ineffable familiarity and favor.

’The favor of fate?’

The moment this thought appeared in Allen’s mind, the brilliant star trembled slightly, as if it had been summoned, and began to wobble precariously.

Finally, it detached from the vast river of stars and drifted slowly down toward him.

Allen subconsciously reached out his hand.

The instant his fingertips touched the star—

BOOM!

The grand illusion he had expected, one composed of countless metals, gears, and precision components, did not appear.

In its place was light.

Countless points of light, like fireflies, like stardust, converged, circled, and danced around him.

Allen recognized them.

It was the data he had extracted from fifty-three million soul samples while researching "artificial souls" back on the Aiselan Plane.

The foundation from which "Zero" and "One" were born!

Each point of light represented a memory, an emotion, a fragment of a personality.

Joy, sorrow, anger, love, jealousy, greed...

This raw, pure emotional data formed the most fundamental particles of this sea of light.

In an instant, Allen understood everything.

He had thought his greatest strength was "creation," that it lay in metal and machinery, in logic and programs.

But the path he had actually traveled the farthest on was never any of those.

It was the essence of the "soul"!

From the [Mechanical Mind Modification Skill], to the later [Soul Processing Skill], to the birth of Jarvis, the emergence of "Zero" and "One," and even today’s [Consciousness Upload] built in the pursuit of "immortality"...

He had long ago, unknowingly, set foot upon another, deeper, more mysterious path. 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

"So that’s how it is..."

Allen let out a long sigh of understanding and hesitated no more.

He opened his arms and actively embraced the sea of light composed of countless pieces of soul information.

In that instant, a power far more fundamental, ancient, and potent than Magic Power surged through his soul and into every inch of his consciousness.

He had touched a Law—the [Soul Law]!

...

An unknown amount of time passed.

When Allen opened his eyes again, the entire world was completely different in his perception.

There was no brilliant flash of light, no overflowing storm of Magic Power.

The entire promotion process had occurred within his soul, as quiet as a seed breaking through the soil in the darkness.

But he knew everything was different.

He was still sitting in the cramped engine nozzle, but his "vision" had already pierced through the metal barrier, covering every corner of the steel graveyard.

The qualitative change in his Spiritual Power had brought about an exponential surge in its total volume.

His total Magic Power had increased by more than tenfold!

The [Allen Network] expanded with his thoughts: ten kilometers, one hundred kilometers, five hundred kilometers, one thousand kilometers...

An area with a radius of fifteen hundred kilometers.

It descended like a domain; he no longer needed to use Golems as nodes and could easily envelop the vast area.

He "saw" it all.

He saw every treacherous Golem. He saw the "pseudo-souls" within their bodies, forcibly twisted and altered by the "Mechanical Realm’s" logic virus. Before, this had been a domain of rules he could neither analyze nor touch.

But now, those complex logical structures were laid out clearly before him.

He could even faintly "see" the source of the logic virus—the "Logical Beacon" originating from the Mechanical Realm.

He cast his gaze into the distance.

He saw the Teleportation Star Gate, heavily surrounded by countless Golems, and standing beside the Star Gate like a loyal guardian, "Gabriel."

Its scarlet eyes were still cold, still filled with the will to destroy.

But in Allen’s new vision, it was no longer an indestructible bastion.