Defiance of the Fall

Zac was confident he’d get there eventually , but not within the time limit he’d set for himself . If he wanted to use Essence Union] for his Core Formation , he’d probably have to stay inside the Perennial Vastness for another decade or two . For lack of better options , Zac returned to basics .

His theoretical foundations to accomplish Cosmic Extraction] were severely lacking . Just like when he tried to create his two stances . He was putting the cart before the horse , trying to leapfrog the equivalent of the Formation Stage and directly work on the Integration Stage . Highly inefficient .

Zac decided to start from the beginning and learn to infuse three cycles into an E-grade axe before dismantling it . Building the weapon himself would help him understand how the essences and spiritual threads held an item together . This kind of practice would also help with his Core Formation plans .

Their lives had entered a stable routine by that point . Ogras and Catheya often teamed up for missions while snatching the occasional bounty through Perennial Transformations] . Zac joined now and then , but it wasn’t really necessary . Both had pushed their strength to new heights with their latest breakthroughs , so Zac didn’t feel he had to worry about their safety anymore .

The Seven Heavens failed to make a comeback in the Perennial Vastness . As expected , another prince came . The Undead Empire attacked with wild abandon , constantly tracking his movements and crippling his operations before he could set them up . He couldn’t even gather Mana in peace . The previous bloody slaughters also made others leery of lending a helping hand .

The Revenants never attacked him directly , though , as they were obviously not his match . They simply lingered at a safe distance , forming the same intangible threat Zac endured before Valsa struck . The prince stopped visiting even Green Zones , fearful he’d meet the same fate as his sister . Then one day , after just a single year , his storefront was gone .

As such , there was nothing to hamper Zac’s progress , and the Mana was veritably flowing into his accounts . It allowed him to spend extravagantly in the Keys of Ascension and similar unique zones to speed up his progress with Cosmic Forge] and his Core Formation plan . Since he had such an abundance of Mana , he even tried other ways to improve .

Unfortunately , he was fast reaching the same conclusion as Kruta . He’d exhausted his potential in the E-grade . His Soul and Constitution required far-too-much energy to progress . His technique had reached a bottleneck as well . It wasn’t that his stances were refined to perfection but that there were no further insights to infuse . The two techniques were based on his Daos and were just Middle Dao Branches . That level of understanding wasn’t enough to reach the higher stages .

There was only one holdout where he felt there was still room for improvement : Hidden Nodes . He already had an incredible number of nodes , and all of them were the kind that could evolve . Most would be over the moon with such a result , yet Zac would be lying if he said he was satisfied . Was six really the limit?

Certainly , there was also Quantum Gate] , but he didn’t count that as a natural Hidden Node . It more resembled a backdoor his Technocrat mother wanted to use to sneak the Dao of Technology into a cultivator .

Zac was unsure whether there were any more Void Emperor Nodes hiding in some corner of his body . His instincts said no , that the three formed a single system . But there certainly should be more Draugr Nodes . There was just no way three was the limit for a bloodline like Eoz . Even Catheya had opened a fifth Hidden Node inside the Perennial Vastness , four of which were bloodline nodes .

Yet Zac came up empty-handed even after spending 20 , 000 Mana and multiple C-grade Nexus Coins on treasures and opportunities meant to localize Hidden Nodes . Catheya tried to help as best as she could , but nothing worked . Zac arrived at two possible explanations for his failure .

One , his odd constitution made him lose some of his Draugr Nodes . Perhaps the Void Emperor Nodes blocked their appearance . Second , there might be a problem with how he became a descendant of Eoz . Perhaps he didn’t carry the full bloodline .

After all , the bloodline was inherited from samples found in a spatial crack on the frontier . That Draugr corpse definitely wasn’t Eoz himself , but rather some descendant . Even if his Duplicity Core had somehow purified the bloodline to the point he triggered an - Ancestral Descent , ’ it might be incomplete .

Perhaps that issue would be fixed by visiting the Abyssal Shore and reconnecting with the Abyssal Lake . For now , the situation was bleak , and he stopped wasting resources on a fool’s errand . He even gave Ogras Hanamon’s Awakening] , the node-opening treasure he got from Yrial .