Noticing that the chamber’s ambient Spiritual Energy was already beginning to thin under Lucian’s bottomless absorption, Magnus did not hesitate for even a second.
With a flick of his broad sleeve, three fist-sized, top-grade Spirit Stones shot through the air and embedded themselves directly into the primary nodes of the chamber’s gathering formation.
"Since you have the stomach to swallow it all," Magnus muttered under his breath, "let’s see just how much you can digest!"
The formation immediately blazed to life with renewed force, pouring an ocean of pure, condensed Spiritual Energy into the vortex to sustain Lucian’s breakthrough.
Inside his Soul Sea, Lucian was completely oblivious to the outside world.
He could not see Evelyn’s anxious expression, nor did he sense Magnus’s arrival.
His consciousness had narrowed into a single, razor-sharp point hovering above the vast emptiness of his dantian.
Below it, his sea of vitality was boiling.
Under the coordinated, military-like precision of his Shadow Soldiers, the three powerful Cultivation Techniques operated in flawless synchrony.
The Eternal Night Demon Codex provided the primordial darkness that swallowed the incoming Spiritual Energy. The Shadow Kill Secret Canon compressed the wild energy into lethal, needle-thin threads, while the Floating Pagoda Mysterious Skill layered immense gravitational pressure upon the center of his Soul Sea.
The endless mist of dark-attribute Spiritual Energy was compressed from vast clouds into dense droplets of liquid, then squeezed further and further until a microscopic black speck appeared at the heart of the vortex.
That speck was the seed.
Thousands upon thousands of threads of dark energy wrapped around it, fusing, crystallizing, and hardening.
The speck gradually grew into a pebble, then transformed into a perfectly spherical obsidian seed that slowly rotated within Lucian’s Soul Sea, radiating an aura that was deep, silent, and as bottomless as the abyss.
Then, the final barrier gave way.
Clang.
A sound like an ancient bronze bell striking against the void rang out within Lucian’s soul.
At that exact instant, the dark-attribute Spiritual Seed completely solidified.
The Martial Warrior realm achieved.
...
Yet neither Lucian, nor Magnus, nor any living mortal across the Earth Federation had the slightest idea what had truly just occurred.
The moment the obsidian seed settled into its final, perfect form, an imperceptible shockwave erupted from Lucian’s dantian.
It did not destroy the Cultivation Room.
It did not shatter the furniture.
It simply bypassed the physical matter of the walls, passing through stone, through the planet’s very crust, through the atmosphere, and finally erupting into the cold, silent depths of the cosmos.
And then...
The entire universe trembled.
Across billions of light-years, celestial bodies shuddered along their cosmic paths.
Distant stars wobbled violently, their solar flares erupting in irregular bursts of blazing plasma. In the deepest voids between galaxies, ancient arrays carved into the husks of dead worlds hundreds of millions of years ago suddenly flickered to life, blazing with brilliant light as they reacted to a frequency that had not existed since the dawn of creation.
Space itself groaned beneath an unimaginable metaphysical weight.
Before the cosmic vibration could subside, the fabric of reality at the farthest edge of the universe suddenly began to fracture.
Krr-chk!
A tear spanning millions of parsecs ripped open across the cosmic boundary.
Beyond that veil of absolute nothingness lay another vast universe, alien, and governed by an entirely different set of primordial laws.
And then, without warning, it crashed into reality.
Drawn together by the unfathomable gravitational pull of the anomaly that had just awakened, the two distinct universes began to collide and merge.
Their Heavenly Laws clashed violently. In the collision zones, space folded into jagged geometric mirrors. Strange foreign Spiritual Energy collided with the native cosmic Energy, creating swirling nebulas of volatile, incandescent fire.
Dimensional rifts opened by the millions, slicing across entire solar systems like invisible guillotines.
Deep within both universes, ancient entities that had slumbered since the birth of time suddenly opened their eyes.
In the native universe, supreme masters residing in their factions gazed toward the burning border with absolute fury.
In the foreign, encroaching universe, primordial sovereigns seated upon thrones forged from crushed stars looked back with equal hostility.
Neither side understood what had forced their cosmic boundaries together.
To both sides, there was only one obvious conclusion:
The other universe had invaded.
An invasion.
"A foreign universe dares to swallow our realm?!" A native Emperor’s voice echoed across an entire star cluster, carrying the wrath of an existence capable of extinguishing galaxies with a single thought.
"Wipe out the intruders! Secure the dimensional bridge!" an ancient sovereign from the alien universe roared, wielding laws capable of twisting the very flow of time.
There was no room for negotiation.
Within mere heartbeats, the confrontation escalated into an all-out, cataclysmic cosmic war.
Ancient Emperors clashed across the void, their weapons cleaving through entire solar systems. Planets were reduced to dust, while the shockwaves from their battles extinguished distant stars like candles.
Dimensional passages collapsed and reopened in an endless dance of blood and divine fury. The very fabric of reality began to tear apart at the seams.
Then, without warning...
The two merged universes trembled a second time.
This vibration was entirely different from the first.
It carried neither the heat of battle nor the kinetic force of a shockwave. Instead, it carried the cold, absolute, and suffocating weight of the Great Dao itself.
The moment this resonance spread across the two universes...
The battle stopped.
Emperors wielding weapons capable of tearing space itself froze mid-swing.
Ancient sovereigns who had been prepared to detonate entire star clusters found their divine bodies completely paralyzed beneath an overwhelming, omnipotent suppression.
The colliding Heavenly Laws of both universes fell utterly silent, as though kneeling before an absolute sovereign.
At the same moment, a voice neither male nor female, devoid of emotion, and echoing from the very foundation of existence, manifested directly within the consciousness of every living being across both universes.
From the lowest ant crawling upon a leaf to the supreme beings reigning above the cosmic heavens, every creature heard the voice with absolute clarity.
[Anomaly Detected.]
[The Anomaly has manifested in this Era.]
[The Anomaly possesses the singular potential to avert the Great Catastrophe.]
[Identity: Concealed.]
[Current Realm: Martial Warrior.]
[Location: Undetermined.]
[ Fate: Unfathomable.]