Far away from the expanse of the Providence Hub, the fabric of space folded and tore open with a faint, violet-threaded shimmer. Adrian emerged into the cold, dead silence of the intergalactic void, firmly holding the bloodied forms of the two Elyrians.
He did not stop after a single jump. His eyes narrowed in concentration as he blinked and teleported again and again, stitching together massive leaps across the void to put as much distance as possible between himself and the hub.
To extract himself and the two captives from the hub, he had deliberately chosen not to use a direct command to reality, relying instead purely on his comprehension of spatial concepts. Due to this choice, his trajectory was not completely masked. If Navira expanded her domain and truly wished to search for them, she could quickly catch up to them.
There were deeply calculated reasons behind this action. If he had used a direct command to force reality to teleport them safely without any detection, it undeniably would have been the safest route. But just in Andromeda, a region widely considered by the broader universe as a lesser galaxy containing only minor sects, the density of scrying arrays and the gazes of powerful entities keeping tabs on the borders had caused an undetected teleportation command to cost him a staggering 50 million mana units.
Now, he had just assaulted the heart of a Major Sect's intergalactic hub. Adrian was certain that there would be exponentially more entities and far more sophisticated arrays keeping eyes on this territory. Using that kind of direct command here ran the risk of completely draining his entire Mana Sea in a single instance. This was the one major, unpredictable flaw with issuing direct commands: no cultivator could definitively know how much mana the universe would extract for a command until they actually tried it, and a miscalculation here meant death.
So, to not risk leaving himself entirely depleted and vulnerable in deep space, Adrian simply utilized his own mastery of the Space concept, putting a vast distance between himself and the hub.
He fully expected Navira to chase him. He had humiliated her son, shattered her elders, and openly challenged her authority within her own hub. Yet, as he finally ceased his rapid teleportation sequence and allowed his senses to expand outward, the void remained perfectly still. For some reason, he did not see anyone from the hub chasing them. The golden, oppressive domain of the Yiphraen sect leader did not tear through the dark.
After ensuring that a sufficient distance had been established, he stopped completely, releasing his hold on the Elyrians and letting Mariska and Xeolze float gently in the empty void.
The two winged beings were in terrible condition. Xeolze's armor was fractured and ruined from the crushing impacts of Tenyz's attacks, while Mariska's wings were battered, her life force having been perilously close to self-destruction.
Adrian looked at their deeply wounded bodies and slowly raised his hands, preparing to use his Breath of Life to mend their broken flesh.
But at that exact instant, without any conscious command or intent on his part, an overwhelming golden essence erupted from deep within his Source Seed. It flared with autonomous, blinding intensity, covering his entire body in a luminous layer of conceptual energy.
Adrian immediately recognized this feeling. This was the exact same phenomenon that had occurred back in his rented estate when an unknown entity had tried to peek at his fate.
Before Adrian could do anything, his Source Seed pulsed with a heavy, ancient resonance. His white-grey essence flooded his veins, rippling across the unseen fabric of fate that surrounded him. The presence of the Will of the Source rose up from the depths of his being, standing as an impenetrable wall against the probing gaze of the distant diviner.
"So, is that sect leader the one who tried to look at my fate back then?" Adrian thought, his mind racing to connect the pieces as the essences clashed around him. The feeling was undeniably similar, but he couldn't be entirely sure.
Anyone in this vast universe could have attempted to peek at his fate, and the last time this happened, Adrian hadn't had anything to do with the Providence Hub or its rulers. He had just been roaming the Outer Commercial Continents, quietly cultivating in his rented place. There was literally no logical reason for Navira, the sect leader of the Ethereal Providence Sect, to look upon his fate at that specific time.
"That should be someone else..." Adrian concluded internally, dismissing Navira as the original scryer for the past one.
The clash lasted for only a few tense seconds before the invisible pressure abruptly vanished, and the tension returned to normal. The white-grey Source essence and the golden light of Fate smoothly retreated, sinking back into the depths of his body.
Adrian floated silently in the void, a frown creasing his features. He turned his focus inward, sinking his awareness into his Source Seed, and expressed his will.
"You both don't act by yourselves next time something like this happens," Adrian projected mentally into the vast chambers, "I want to know who it is, and I will try to deal with it myself."
In response to his reprimand, the specific chamber containing the arcane concept of Fate glowed brightly, pulsing with a warm, golden light that clearly expressed its agreement and submission to Adrian's words.
But Adrian didn't feel anything from the will of his Source. As usual, it kept completely silent.
Adrian's frown deepened. He continued expressing his will directly to the core of his power. "Especially you. You cannot act on your own. By acting like this, you are revealing yourself and putting me at risk."
As Adrian experienced this clash, he began to understand the precariousness of his situation much better now. Every concept in the universe possessed its own will, and from day one, Adrian had known the Source had its own will. Even though this presence was not intimidating to him for some reason, perhaps because it was intrinsically tied to his very existence, he could easily imagine how utterly terrifying it must be for others to feel its presence.
He cast his memories back to the supremacy war in the Andromeda Galaxy. Back then, when he had dismantled his divine concepts and unleashed all of his raw arcane concepts together, utilizing the raw, untamed wills of those concepts alongside his own, he had clearly seen how ancient, furious, and overwhelmingly powerful those wills were. He had witnessed firsthand how the enemy Peak Rule Stage beings had reacted to that raw, foundational fury with terror.
So, if arcane concepts could instill such primal dread, for someone to directly feel the Will of the Source itself, the origin of all concepts, was something that could be too much for anyone in the universe to bear.
Yet, as Adrian expressed his firm will, the Will of the Source still didn't react with a single thing.
Adrian let out a long exhale and shook his head. The Will of the Source had always been like this. It reacted whenever it wanted, it did whatever it wanted, and even Adrian himself, despite using the Source all these days, had not understood it fully.
Pushing the internal dilemma aside, Adrian refocused his attention on the physical world. He drifted closer to where Mariska and Xeolze floated in the zero-gravity vacuum.
Raising his hands once more, a serene, green-gold light bloomed from his palms. Adrian directed the soothing essence over their broken bodies. The deep lacerations across Xeolze's torso began to knit together rapidly, the shattered pieces of his dark armor falling away as fresh skin formed beneath.
Mariska's wings, which had been bent and bloodied from her clash with Tenyz, straightened and regained their brilliant luminescence as the healing spell washed away her exhaustion and mended her torn life force.
Within moments, the two Elyrians were completely stabilized.
Xeolze was the first to fully recover his bearings. The shadow guard opened his eyes, the shock of their sudden extraction and miraculous healing still evident in his gaze. He looked at the man in the white-grey robes, the man who had saved them, and stood entirely unbothered before the wrath of Navira.
Without a single moment of hesitation, Xeolze righted his posture in the void. He crossed his arms over his mended chest and bowed deeply, bending perfectly at the waist to express his reverence.
"I do not know how to repay the debt of our lives," Xeolze said, his whisper-quiet voice filled with gratitude and respect. "You stepped into the heart of the Ethereal Providence Sect to pull us from the jaws of certain death. Thank you, Senior, for helping us back in the hub."
Mariska floated beside her guard, her eyes wide as she stared at the stranger's face. Her heart hammered against her ribs as she voiced the question that had been burning in her mind since the moment he lifted her from the ruined ground.
"Who are you?" Mariska asked, her voice trembling slightly, caught between overwhelming awe and lingering fear. "Why would an existence like you risk the wrath of a Major Sect for us?"
Adrian looked at the Elyrian princess. He had no intention of revealing his true identity. To them, and to the wider universe, he was currently Aeon from the Origin Sect.
"I am Aeon, just a lonely wanderer," Adrian replied calmly, his voice smooth and untroubled as it carried across the empty void.