Chapter 412 - 67: The First Emperor’s Legacy and the Origin Wall

Chapter 412: Chapter 67: The First Emperor’s Legacy and the Origin Wall

The villa was completely silent, save for the soft hum of the energy arrays beneath the floor and the occasional clink of porcelain.

Ash sat in a highly comfortable, plush armchair by the floor-to-ceiling window of his study. The sun had long since set over the mountain peaks, and the room was lit only by the pale, secure silver glow of his new Sovereign-level terminal. He took a slow sip of his tea. It was still warm, carrying the rich, earthy aroma of dried spirit-leaves.

He set the cup down and scrolled to the next file.

He had been reading for hours, devouring the classified archives of humanity’s true history and geopolitical reality. The sheer scale of the war they were fighting was staggering.

He learned the layout of the human empire: the heavily fortified Core Worlds, the buffer zones of the Frontier, and the bleeding edges of the Contested Zones. Humanity wasn’t just surviving; it was an expanding, aggressive cosmic empire, but one stretched incredibly thin across thousands of star systems.

Then, he opened the threat assessment for the Abyssal Devil Race.

Ash’s eyes narrowed as he read. The Abyssal Devils didn’t just use cosmic energy. They used "Abyssal Energy," which was fundamentally anti-physics. It didn’t just destroy matter; it actively corrupted and unraveled the fundamental laws of reality. It was conceptual rot. If a Fire Law cultivator fought an Abyssal Devil, the Devil’s energy wouldn’t just block the fire—it would rewrite the local rules so that fire no longer produced heat, or so that the concept of combustion simply ceased to exist.

They weren’t just invading. They were trying to unmake the universe’s source code.

Ash read the after-action reports from the far front, and a profound, quiet respect settled in his chest. The current Martial Saint wasn’t just "holding a line." He was literally standing alone in a spatial tear the size of a solar system, using his Sword Law to stitch the fabric of reality back together every time the Devils tried to rip it open.

He’s not just fighting a war, Ash thought, looking at the casualty reports that numbered in the billions. He’s holding the door shut with his bare hands.

Ash closed the territorial registry and opened the file he had started earlier: ON THE FIRST EMPEROR: THE DISCOVERY BENEATH THE CRUST.

The file detailed the dawn of human cultivation. The first human to reach the Martial Emperor Realm had expanded his spiritual sense to cover the globe and felt the Planetary Cultivation Seed deep in the Earth’s crust.

The First Emperor had studied the Seed but quickly realized he couldn’t directly manipulate its Origin Laws. Instead of trying to force it, he turned the underground base into a highly classified epiphany ground. High-level cultivators would go there to study the faint principles of the Origin Laws radiating from the Seed, using those minuscule understandings to deduce True Cosmic Laws.

But the First Emperor was a transcendent genius. Over a few years of studying the Seed, he managed to deduce a Theoretical Framework on the Origin Law of Spatial Dimensions. It was a masterpiece of conceptual deduction, a bridge between True Cosmic Laws and Origin Laws.

Then, Ash read the next section, and his expression darkened.

The First Emperor never got to complete his life’s work. That Framework would have easily given him the insight needed to break through to the Martial God Realm, which was the realm above the Martial Saint realm.

But he was ambushed on the battlefield by a coalition of alien forces while he was in the middle of breaking through from the Martial Sovereign realm to the Martial Saint realm.

The file explained why they ambushed him. When the First Emperor was still at the Martial Emperor Realm, he could already battle early martial Saint powerhouses on equal footing, and when he had reached the Martial Sovereign realm, his combat power was already on par with the aliens’ Peak Martial Saint-level powerhouses.

The alien coalition was terrified. They couldn’t even imagine how monstrous his combat power would be once he actually broke through to the Martial Saint realm - would he have the combat power of a Martial God, or at the very least a Pseudo Martial God. To prevent humanity from gaining a true God, they launched a desperate, massive ambush to eliminate him during his vulnerable breakthrough.

But the First Emperor was that strong.

Even while his breakthrough was interrupted and his body was tearing apart, he fought back. The after-action reports, pieced together from residual spatial echoes and alien intelligence, painted a picture of absolute, terrifying glory. He took down five alien Martial Saint-level powerhouses with his life as collateral, and severely injured two others before they barely managed to escape.

His death deeply affected humanity, but his sacrifice gave them a massive opening. The alien coalition was crippled. Humanity, enraged by the loss of their greatest genius, launched a furious, unified offensive that completely wiped out all alien civilizations responsible.

Ash leaned back in his chair, letting the weight of the history settle over him. It was a bloody, glorious, and tragic foundation.

He looked back at the terminal. The First Emperor had recorded his Theoretical Framework on the Origin Law of Spatial Dimensions in humanity’s central database, hoping future Sovereigns would comprehend and perfect it.

Unfortunately, none of the subsequent Sovereigns could understand it. The conceptual gap was simply too vast.

Even the current Martial Saint—the one holding the Abyssal front—couldn’t make sense of the Framework. The Saint was far more attuned to his own Sword Law, so he abandoned the Spatial Framework and stuck to his own path.

The file explicitly detailed the terrifying reality of the higher realms. To break through from the Martial Saint Realm to the Martial God Realm, a cultivator must comprehend a specific Origin Law. In the current Saint’s case, the Sword Origin Law.

And the gap? The conceptual and energetic gap between the Martial Saint realm and the Martial God realm was one hundred times larger than the combined gap of all the realms from Body Refining all the way up to the Martial Saint realm. It was a chasm that had kept humanity without a single God for millennia.

Ash finished reading the summary and set his tea down.

He didn’t need to hack anything. He was a peer of the Sovereign Circle now. He had unrestricted, absolute clearance.

He reached out and tapped the file name on the terminal.

Theoretical Framework on the Origin Law of Spatial Dimensions.

The terminal chimed softly. The pale silver interface vanished, replaced by a prompt asking if he wanted to initialize the holographic projection.

Ash tapped Yes.

The terminal whirred, a sound so quiet it was barely audible. Then, the air in the center of the study began to shimmer.

It didn’t just display text. It didn’t just show a flat, two-dimensional diagram of runic arrays. The terminal’s high-end holographic projector activated, and a massive, complex, glowing three-dimensional structure filled the room.

Ash stood up and walked into the projection.

The light washed over him, casting sharp, geometric shadows across the walls of the study. It was beautiful, terrifying, and completely alien to standard cultivation. Thousands of glowing golden runes hung in the air, interconnected by thin, pulsing lines of conceptual force.

Ash’s 100% Space Law and his heaven-defying comprehension talent instantly kicked into overdrive. He didn’t just look at the hologram; he analyzed it. He traced the flow of energy, the structural logic of the runes, and the underlying principles the First Emperor had tried to encode.

At first glance, it looked like a standard, albeit incredibly complex, spatial array.

But as Ash’s perception deepened, his brow furrowed.

Something was wrong. Or rather, something was off.

The runes weren’t just sitting in three-dimensional space. When he focused his spiritual sense on a single, central rune, he realized it was folding in on itself. It had depth that shouldn’t exist in a standard physical projection. It was a tesseract, a shape that extended into a fourth spatial axis, casting a three-dimensional shadow into the physical world.

Ash’s eyes widened slightly. He looked at the next rune, and the next.

They were all multidimensional.

The entire framework wasn’t just a complex 3D array. It was a multidimensional construct. The First Emperor hadn’t just written a technique; he had written a technique that operated on four, five, maybe six dimensions simultaneously. The "lines" connecting the runes weren’t just connecting point A to point B in physical space; they were connecting point A to point B across higher dimensional axes.

Suddenly, it all clicked.

Ash instantly understood why the other Sovereigns hadn’t been able to comprehend it. He understood why the current Martial Saint, for all his genius and power, had looked at this framework and failed to make sense of it.

They were looking at a three-dimensional shadow of a multidimensional object.

They were trying to read a book where the words were stacked on top of each other in the Z-axis, but they only had eyes for the X and Y axes. When the previous Sovereigns tried to circulate their energy according to this framework, it failed because they were only following the 3D projection. They were missing the higher-dimensional instructions that actually made the array function.

A slow, faint smile touched Ash’s lips.

He looked at the glowing, folding runes, remembering the late nights he had spent in the orbital fortress with Sovereign Orrin. He remembered the moment he had realized the alien Seed’s language wasn’t linear. He remembered drawing the multidimensional syntax in the air with his cosmic energy, explaining to a stunned Orrin that they needed to invert the third rune sequence into the fourth dimension to make the decoding algorithm work.

He had been the one to introduce the concept of multidimensional runes and principles to the Sovereigns just days ago.

So I guess I wasn’t the first person in humanity to think of multidimensional runes, Ash thought, a deep sense of kinship and respect washing over him.

The First Emperor, centuries ago, had looked at the Planetary Cultivation Seed, seen the multidimensional source code of reality, and managed to deduce and write down a framework based on that exact same concept. The man was a true pioneer. He had seen the shape of the universe long before anyone else even knew there were more dimensions to look at.

But seeing it and comprehending it were two very different things.

Ash let out a long, slow sigh. The smile faded, replaced by a grounded, realistic assessment of the task ahead of him.

He realized the true situation of Earth and the sheer weight of what he was about to attempt. Comprehending a Cosmic Origin Law wasn’t just going to be a quick study session. It wasn’t going to be like comprehending the True Cosmic Laws, where he could just sit down, understand the physics, and push his comprehension to 100% in a few hours.

This was the life’s work of a transcendent genius who was on the verge of Godhood. The First Emperor had spent years just deducing this framework, and he still died before he could perfect it.

Even with his heaven-defying comprehension talent, even with his 100% True Cosmic Laws, even with his Mental Universe, this was going to be hard. Really, really hard. He was going to have to learn how to perceive reality in more than three dimensions, how to fold his consciousness along higher axes, and how to rewrite his own conceptual understanding of space.

It was going to be a grueling, mind-bending marathon.

Ash walked back to his chair and sat down. He picked up his teacup. The tea was cold now, but he drank it anyway, letting the bitter, earthy taste ground him.

He looked at the massive, glowing, multidimensional hologram filling his study. It was beautiful. It was a map to Godhood.

He reached out and tapped the terminal, expanding the projection, pulling the dense, folding runes to the very center of the room until they surrounded him completely. The golden light reflected in his silver, starlit eyes.

He settled into his chair, resting his hands on his knees, and closed his eyes.

The longest study session of his life was about to begin.