Chapter 206: Absolute Realm [BONUS]

He had thought that Grandmaster was the top of it.

It was the highest realm he had ever seen with his own eyes. It was the highest realm most people in the Empire ever heard about. Ysolde was a Grandmaster. Garrick Dane had been a Grandmaster. When people on the Wall wanted to describe someone impossibly strong, they said he fought like a Grandmaster.

But Encrid had read the original novel. He knew there were other realms above it. He knew their names.

But they had always been words. Words in the novel. Words drunk mercenaries used in taverns to describe heroes nobody had ever met.

The token did not care about any of that.

For one minute, you can break through a single Star into the highest realm possible.

The highest realm possible.

The Azure Star kept going.

[ Realm: Grandmaster → Sovereign ]

The world went quiet.

Not silent. The horde was still screaming. The river was still roaring at the bottom of the gorge. The Grand Magus was still speaking his long, low words on the far side of the Span.

But all of it had moved very far away.

Encrid stood at the northern end of the Darwen Span and felt his body grow still. Not stiff. Still. The way the surface of a lake grows still on a windless morning, so smooth that it reflects the whole sky.

He was not only standing on the Span anymore.

He was the Span.

He could feel it. Every stone of it. The old bindings the deep-folk had woven through it, humming quietly. The weight of the arch pressing down on its two ends. The half-mile of empty air beneath it.

And the water.

Three hundred feet below, the river ran white over black rocks. Encrid had felt water through Attunement from the first day his Star opened. He had felt it farther than he felt people. He had never understood why.

Now he understood.

The Azure Star was the Star of flow. Of water. And the river at the bottom of the Riven was the biggest body of moving water he had ever stood beside.

It knew he was there.

He did not know how else to describe it. The river knew he was there, and it was listening.

The Reevers were almost on him. The second wave, and the third. A solid grey wall of them, leaping and running, filling the northern end of the Span from edge to edge.

Encrid looked at them.

They seemed to be standing still.

[ Realm: Sovereign → Transcendent ]

His breath went out of him.

It went out and did not stop. It went on and on, and as it left him, it turned white. It turned to frost in the air in front of his face. Then it kept going, spreading outward from him in every direction, a thin pale cloud that rolled across the stone of the Span like fog over a field.

Where it touched the Reevers, they stopped.

Where it touched the stone, the stone turned white.

Encrid did not do anything.

He only breathed.

And the air around him, the ordinary evening air of the Riven, cold and damp from the river below, began to move. It began to turn. Slowly, then faster. It turned around him the way water turns around a stone in a stream, and wherever it passed, it grew colder.

He could feel it.

Not the air. What was in the air.

It was the same thing he had felt at the bottom of himself when he became a Grandmaster. The thing that ran through everything. Through the air and the stone and the water and the dying light of the sun.

Energy.

The world’s energy. Not the energy inside a person’s Star. Not the energy a cultivator gathered, grain by grain, over years of sitting still.

The energy that was simply there. In everything. Everywhere.

And it was listening to him.

"This is what they are," Encrid whispered. "This is what the Eight Stars are."

No one heard him.

[ Realm: Transcendent → Absolute ]

[ Star Level: One Star → Azure Star (Absolute) ]

[ Duration: 00:56 ]

There was no sound.

There was no light.

There was only a feeling. A feeling so large that Encrid could not hold all of it in his head at once. He tried. It was like trying to hold the sea in a cupped hand.

He was a one-Star cultivator. That had not changed. He still had only the Azure Star. He still had only his own small body, standing on a bridge.

But the Star was Absolute now.

And an Absolute Star did not gather energy from the world.

It commanded it.

Encrid looked at the horde.

He could see all of it. Not with his eyes. With the Star. Every Roamer on the road and the hills and the horizon. Tens of thousands of them. He could feel their weight on the earth and the heat of their bodies and the thin, cold thread that ran through every one of them, back into the heart of the horde, to something he could not see.

Compelled.

He could feel the Elder, pressing forward at the front of the mass. He could feel its size. Its age. Its terrible slowness. Its pain.

And for the first time, he was not afraid of it.

It was not that the Elder had become small.

It was that Encrid had become large enough to look at it.

He understood now why an Ascendant with a sword could not fight a thing like this. It was not a matter of strength. It was a matter of size. The Elder was bigger than a man in every way that mattered. It was bigger in weight and bigger in age and bigger in the amount of the world it took up.

For fifty-six seconds, Encrid was bigger too.

He took a breath.

The frost around him spread. It raced outward across the northern end of the Span, across the road, across the rock, fifty paces in every direction. The Reevers caught in it did not scream. They simply stopped where they stood, their legs frozen to the ground, their jaws frozen open.

Behind them, the horde kept coming. Climbing over the frozen ones. Pushing forward.

Encrid let it come.

He did not have time to kill every Roamer in the horde. He did not need to.

He only needed to hold the Span.

And he had fifty-five seconds left.

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