Chapter 226: Enlightenment

The days passed one after another, and everyone continued carrying out their duties. The construction of the ten bank branches was finally completed, but they weren't put into operation... everyone was waiting for King Vaelor to emerge from his seclusion.

At this very moment, in a world other than the world... in a reality other than reality... Vaelor's consciousness drifted in a place beyond fathoming... or a non-place!

There was no sense of location, no sense of time, no sense of laws, not even a sense of self!

This state was akin to nothingness, yet it wasn't quite nothingness, because Vaelor could faintly sense his own existence. And he couldn't say this place was an existing world either, by ordinary conceptual standards, because there was no location, no time, not even any presence of laws — and his sense of self was nothing more than something exceedingly faint, one he could barely perceive.

In this state, Vaelor's consciousness was fused together with every law he had come to understand, and at its very center lay the Law of Derivation!

This was... the Veil World!

After Vaelor had obtained the Golden Scroll, he had wondered many times why Director Lance had given it up so easily, handing it to him as a mere gift, when it contained all these secrets within it.

But after numerous experiments with it, Vaelor decided to take a risk and try something new... he brought Imris in and had him swear an exceptionally powerful soul oath, prepared specifically for this purpose, that he would never leak a single thing.

After that, Vaelor taught him three laws beyond the Cosmic Law of Formation... namely, the Law of Darkness, the Law of Lightning, and the Law of Wood.

And once he had learned them, the moment finally came for Imris to try the Golden Scroll for himself... but after the success of his first attempt using the Cosmic Law of Formation — gaining enlightenment regarding that law and deepening his understanding of it several times over what he had known before — Imris failed to enter the Veil World again, even after using the other laws he understood.

After thinking about it for a long time and quite deeply, Vaelor traced his ability to enter the Veil World, and his ability to gain enlightenment from it multiple times, back to two things.

First, he traced his ability to enter the Veil World back to his possession of the Colorless Symbols.

Those symbols, every single time Vaelor entered the Veil World, activated automatically, without Vaelor having any control over them, and they were also the only difference between him and everyone else. Imris had tried and had only managed to enter the Veil World a single time, and the scroll had remained with the Cosmic Red Lotus Empire before that, and even they hadn't managed to obtain anything important from it besides a single instance of enlightenment — otherwise, they never would have parted with it, no matter what.

The second thing he noticed was his ability to gain enlightenment multiple times.

This ability wasn't specific to the Veil World in particular, as Vaelor had assumed — or rather, that wasn't entirely accurate!

Vaelor's ability to gain enlightenment from the Veil World was split into two parts. The first was entering it through the use of a single law — this was the ordinary method everyone used, and each law only granted a single entry into the Veil World.

The second method was by channeling the energy of every law he understood into the Golden Scroll, which allowed him to enter it once again. And there, inside the Veil World, he would obtain a comprehensive enlightenment covering all of those laws at once.

But what he truly discovered was that this comprehensive enlightenment covering all those laws wasn't a special feature of the Veil World itself.

What the Veil World actually granted him was becoming fused, unified as a single entity, with all the laws he understood — but it wasn't the thing granting him the enlightenment in that case... he had always assumed the Veil World was the cause, but it turned out later to be something else entirely!

When Vaelor had been in the Eternal Night Heaven the last time, specifically at the Red Lotus Palace, and when he'd been striking his deal with Director Lance, he had been thinking at the time about the abilities the Tree of Abyss possessed that made it comparable to the abilities of the Tree of Life. Because when you looked at the abilities of the Tree of Abyss compared to those of the Tree of Life, the Tree of Abyss's abilities were slightly duller than the Tree of Life's.

To understand just how strange this was — the Law of Derivation had been classified among the very pinnacle of cosmic laws, ranked several tiers above the Law of Life — yet it wasn't a top-tier combat law like the Law of Destruction, the Law of Death, or the Law of Stars. Even so, its combat power came extremely close to theirs. But its true nature wasn't fundamentally about combat at all!

One might wonder, upon hearing this, why then the Trees of Abyss were classified as among the strongest of the Immortal Trees in terms of combat power, if the power of the Law of Derivation wasn't fundamentally about combat — and this was exactly the question Vaelor had asked himself as well.

After returning from the Eternal Night Heaven that day, Vaelor paid an enormous sum of money — one million Prime — to the Court of Secrets in order to obtain the greatest possible amount of information about the Trees of Abyss and the Law of Derivation, in addition to other information he managed to obtain for free from his dream assistant — Dalia.

After sorting through and reviewing that information, Vaelor obtained three pieces of important information!

The first piece of information was something he had already deduced before — that the Law of Derivation grows stronger the more laws one understands. But the sheer amount of information and evidence contained within that single statement was far greater and far more significant than Vaelor had ever imagined!

The Law of Derivation didn't just grow stronger the more laws you understood — it also grew stronger the more things you possessed, the more complex your body was, the more thoughts you had.

The Law of Derivation functioned like a distillation apparatus, but in a far deeper form.

A distillation apparatus takes in a substance and extracts from it numerous new substances that make up the original material. But the Law of Derivation went deeper than this — it wasn't merely about breaking things down or separating them from one another...