Nova returned to his small cabin as evening shadows stretched across the sect grounds. The full-face mask Seraphine had created remained on his face—its formations were too useful to remove, blocking divine sense probes and concealing his identity perfectly.
Inside his modest quarters, Nova sat cross-legged on his meditation mat and began the process of consolidating everything he'd learned from Luna during their dao discussion.
Twenty-four Laws. He'd touched twenty-four different Laws, all at early comprehension level. Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, Lightning, Ice, Metal, Wood, Light, Darkness, Space, Time, Gravity, Sound, Illusion, Life, Death, Soul, Sword, Spear, Fist, Blood, Poison, and Yang.
Each one was a fundamental principle of reality. Each one could, at peak comprehension, devastate entire solar systems. And he'd gained introductory understanding of all of them in a single day.
But introductory was still just that—introductory. The knowledge was there, stored perfectly in his enhanced memory. But true comprehension required time, meditation, integration into his fundamental understanding.
Nova could have activated his Infinite Comprehension ability. The 10,000x multiplier would have allowed him to master all twenty-four Laws to early peak in minutes. But that came at a cost—spiritual power consumption that would drain his spiritual essence reserves significantly.
More importantly, he wanted to train his natural comprehension ability. The "software" that had been upgraded during his awakening. If he relied entirely on Infinite Comprehension, he'd never develop his base processing power. It would be like using a calculator for every simple math problem—convenient, but ultimately limiting.
So he did it the slow way. The steady way.
Nova's consciousness dove into the Fire Law first, examining its principles from every angle. Not just how to create flames, but why flames existed at all. The rapid oxidation of matter. The release of energy stored in molecular bonds. The conversion of potential to kinetic, chemical to thermal.
At early Law comprehension, he could manipulate these principles on a continent-level scale. Create firestorms that would consume nations. Superheat the very air until stone melted and metal vaporized.
Hours passed as Nova worked through each Law in turn, deepening his understanding incrementally. His natural comprehension, while no longer trash-tier, was still working through concepts that would have taken normal cultivators centuries to grasp.
But he made progress. Slow, steady, genuine progress that was entirely his own.
Night fell. The moon rose, casting silver light through his window.
Nova was deep in contemplation of Space Law—the nature of distance, of dimension, of how reality folded and unfolded according to geometric principles—when his enhanced senses detected something.
A presence. Hidden. Approaching his courtyard with careful stealth.
Nova's eyes didn't open. His breathing remained steady. But he channeled a thread of qi into his eyes, activating a technique he'd learned from the Heaven tier methods in Luna's library.
His vision pierced through the walls of his cabin as if they were transparent. More than that—it cut through the folds of darkness and distorted space where the intruder was concealing themselves.
A hooded figure moved through his courtyard, their movements fluid and practiced. Assassin-level stealth. They wore a mask and dark robes that seemed to drink in light, creating a visual blind spot that would confuse normal perception.
But Nova's qi-enhanced sight saw everything clearly.
The figure approached his door, paused to scan for formations or alarms, then simply phased through the wooden wall. Not breaking it or opening it—actually passing through solid matter as if it weren't there.
Interesting technique, Nova thought clinically, maintaining his meditative posture. Probably Heaven tier or above. Allows temporary intangibility.
The assassin moved through his outer room, then phased through the inner wall into Nova's bedroom where he sat cultivating.
From the assassin's perspective, Nova appeared completely vulnerable. Eyes closed, spiritual energy circulating in steady patterns, no defensive formations active. An easy target.
The intruder's hand moved slowly into their robes, withdrawing two objects. A jade disc that pulsed with strange energy, its surface covered in blood-red ancient runes. And a knife—curved, wickedly sharp, radiating killing intent.
The assassin positioned themselves in front of Nova. The jade disc moved toward Nova's head while the knife angled toward his throat. A dual attack—one mystical, one physical. Professional execution.
The disc was inches from contact when the assassin discovered they couldn't move forward.
Not even a single atom.
Their arm was frozen mid-motion. Their body locked in place. Even their spiritual energy had stopped circulating, trapped in their meridians like water flash-frozen in pipes.
What—
The assassin tried to speak. Their mouth wouldn't open. Their tongue wouldn't move. Even their thoughts felt sluggish, as if the very consciousness within their mind was being compressed by impossible weight.
Fuck. I've been discovered. Elder, what do I do? Elder?
No response came from the spatial ring on the assassin's finger.
Could the Elder have been frozen too? But that's impossible! He said he was a former Mahayana cultivator who failed his Immortal Ascension breakthrough. How could a mere Qi Refining cultivator freeze a Mahayana realm expert?
That's when Nova's eyes opened.
The assassin felt those eyes on them—calm, analytical, utterly without fear or surprise. Like someone examining an insect that had wandered into their home.
"Well, well," Nova said, standing smoothly from his meditation posture. "Who do we have here?"
Space-Time Law. Nova had used Space-Time Law to create a perfect stasis field, locking the assassin's position in spatial coordinates that couldn't be altered. The assassin wasn't just frozen in time—they were locked in space itself, unable to move forward, backward, or even vibrate at the molecular level.
Nova walked around the frozen intruder, examining them from multiple angles. Then he reached up and removed their mask.
Supervisor Rowan Valen's face stared back at him, eyes wide with terror, unable even to blink.
"Ah," Nova said. "The man who came to collect my corpse this morning. How... coincidental."
Rowan made a strangled sound in his throat—the only movement the spatial lock allowed.
Nova didn't bother interrogating him. Didn't ask questions or demand explanations. He'd learned everything he needed to know from current situation and the murderous intent radiating from the man.
Instead, Nova simply raised two fingers, channeling qi through them in a specific pattern.
The modified Soul-Sword technique he'd created earlier activated. His fingers became blades of pure soul energy, invisible to normal sight but devastating to both body and spirit.
Nova slashed downward.
Rowan's body divided cleanly in two, separated at the torso as if cut by an infinitely sharp edge. But before the pieces could fall, his soul was extracted—pulled from the bisected corpse by the technique's refinement function.
The soul manifested as a translucent ghost of Rowan's form, still frozen by the spatial lock, terror frozen on its ethereal face.
But Nova wasn't ready to refine it yet. First, he needed information.
His consciousness reached into the soul's structure, grasping the memories stored within. Souls held everything—every experience, every thought, every secret. And Nova's technique allowed him to extract it all.
Rowan's recent history played out in Nova's mind like a projection:
Three weeks ago. Rowan on a mission outside the sect. Stumbling into an ancient cave while fleeing from spirit beasts. Finding a spatial ring on the skeletal hand of a long-dead cultivator.
The moment he touched the ring, a soul emerged—ancient, powerful, desperate. A former Mahayana cultivator named Aldric Mournshadow who'd failed his Immortal Ascension breakthrough. His body destroyed, his soul barely clinging to existence inside the ring for centuries.
The classic "elder in a ring" scenario.
Aldric offered Rowan everything. Knowledge. Techniques. Power beyond imagination. All in exchange for helping him find a new body, a way to live again.
Rowan agreed immediately. What cultivator wouldn't?
Over the next three weeks, with Aldric's guidance, Rowan advanced rapidly. From ninth stage of Qi Refining and then directly to the lost realm between Qi Refining and Foundation Building—The True Qi Condensation Realm.
Nova paused, examining this memory more carefully.
The True Qi Condensation Realm. A cultivation stage that had been lost to time, causing nearly all modern cultivators to skip it entirely and suffer from weaker foundations as a result.
The realm existed between Qi Refining and Foundation Building. After reaching peak Qi Refining, before beginning body tempering, cultivators were supposed to compress their qi to an extreme degree within the dantian. This created what was called "true qi"—spiritual energy condensed to liquid form, far purer and more potent than normal gaseous qi.
The process was excruciating. It required compressing qi to the point where it wanted to violently explode outward, then holding that compression through sheer will and technique until it stabilized. Most cultivators who attempted it risked qi deviation or dantian rupture.
That's why the method had been lost. Some ancient catastrophe had destroyed the texts describing the safe approach. Without guidance, attempting True Qi Condensation was suicide. So cultivators simply skipped to Foundation Building, accepting the weaker foundation that came with uncompressed qi.
But Aldric knew the lost method. And he'd taught it to Rowan, whose foundation was now far superior to any normal Foundation Building cultivator.
The memories continued: