Chapter 193: Chapter 193

"There is a popular story of a man who’d offended a GrandMaster who was eventually able to progress to Tier 7. This Lawbearer later went on to grasp the essence of time to an extent, embedding it into his render," Lytheron narrated, just for Zephyr to get more understanding of the vast realm difference between Lawbearers and lower tier mages.

"The man, who was only a Tier 4 mage, escaped to a different country after he heard the news of his enemy’s advancement. He lived his full life there, got married, bore and raised children, who also went on to give him grandchildren... He even managed to regain a great deal of his wealth over the decades."

​"It was a seemingly blissful and fulfilled life up until that point, because right after, everything tumbled downhill. First he lost his wife to a strange, sudden illness. Then, his children and grandchildren all perished in a catastrophic accident. The man was devastated, losing the entire bloodline he had built."

​Zephyr could see where this was headed, and his stomach churned at the sheer malice of it.

​"He tried to take his own life, convinced he was cursed, but found someone — a good Samaritan, as the tale says — who helped stabilize his mind... The price for this sanity, however, was his dignity. The previously wealthy and successful family man had lost all his wealth and was now reduced to working as a gardener for this medium-sized family that helped him."

​"He felt it was retribution for some unknown sin, but he accepted it and started to move on with his life. He even began to find a small measure of hope in his new, quiet existence. But just as his spirit began to heal, he was framed for a serious crime he didn’t commit, shamed publicly, and lost all remaining dignity..."

​Lytheron paused, letting the weight of the man’s misery sink in. "He was disgraced and had nothing left. He went to the highest point in the city, ready to take his life the second time, when his enemy finally appeared." Updates are released by novèlfire.net

​Lytheron smiled, ​"The Lawbearer."

"He simply appeared out of nowhere, tearing through reality like it was a jigsaw puzzle. The Lawbearer, whose rank dwarfed the desperate man’s low Tier 4 status, simply looked at him with an expression of mild curiosity, as if he were looking at a disappointing, old pet."

​"Turns out there was never any family. There was never any wife. He had never married. Never fathered children. Never made any friends, nor regained any wealth. He had been a dog. A simple, whimpering mutt, trapped right from the start in a Render of some obtuse reality the Lawbearer had impressed upon him."

​The cavern went nearly quiet as Lytheron leaned in for emphasis. "The man had lived his entire, miserable life in the span of perhaps a few years of real time, standing in the corner of his enemy’s abode like a dog, while the Lawbearer went about his life. The enemy, who had long since forgotten about the offense, simply wanted to demonstrate the scope of his power by twisting one man’s consciousness into a masterpiece of cruelty."

​Lytheron looked at Zephyr. "That is what a Lawbearer can do if they choose to be utterly wicked. They don’t have to kill you... they can simply rewrite your entire reality."

Zephyr swallowed subconsciously. Even though he would never admit it, there was a part of him that, because of his encounter with Grand Commander Regina, felt like he would always be able to find a glitch in a Lawbearer’s render if he was ever caught in one.

But hearing this story now... A Tier 4 awakened, trapped in a render for years, and believing he’d lived a full life, all without ever suspecting in the slightest that the reality he lived in wasn’t real...

On another hand, it also made Zephyr want to spiral down the thought of: What was even real? Could he be in a render now and he didn’t even know? Was his reality, or the reality of anyone at all truly even... real?

He stopped himself from going down that unending route though.

I think, therefore I am. Aegis inputted. Though that did not address Zephyr’s fears, it still brought him a semblance of stability.

So what if his reality wasn’t real? He would always wonder that, but so long as he could think, feel, be... in the moment, this was his reality.

For the man in that story, that life he lived was as real as the one which he woke up to realize.

It only went to show how truly powerful Lawbearers were, elevating their status in Zephyr’s mind.

’And yet Lytheron was a Tier 8 Paragon at his peak...’ he looked at the elf in a new light, one filled a new respect.

Lytheron noticed the change in Zephyr’s demeanor and chuckled. "It seems you understand the depth of it now?"

"Well, that will make you appreciate the advancements in the path of spell logic better," he nodded. "You can visualize the power of a Lawbearer now, so what do you think can top this?"

Zephyr shook his head subtly. He couldn’t think of what could be the next step in power for someone already so powerful that they can shape reality. ’Well, except making their renders better...?’

Lytheron had continued without waiting, meaning it as a rhetorical question.

"The people in my age, I included, felt that same way. What could be the next step? Mother Aurelis had paved the way to Tier 7, and others had followed in her footsteps. She had lived a long, full life, and her time passed. She was no longer, and only her legacy lived on. It was up to us, the new generation, to further the path..."

He sighed. "But none revealed itself... No matter what was thought of, it seemed we had reached the peak of what more nodes with the next evolution would bring. The gains were no longer decided by just one evolution any longer..."

"But you were still able to reach Tier 8, weren’t you?" Zephyr scrunched his eyebrows. "How?"

Lytheron watched Zephyr for a second, before staring up at the ceiling, pursing his lips like even he was not proud of his actions.

He sucked in a breath through his teeth in a grimace before looking back down, continuing.

"The path revealed itself through sheer human audacity..." he conceded. "We elves had reached a hard limit but the human mind, with its penchant for creativity and its history of finding loopholes, was the one that broke the wall..."

​He continued with clear distaste in his tone. "We, the elves, believed the mana core was a singular, sacred part of any elf... that the pinnacle of power lay in perfecting your own logic. But humans asked a different, dirty question: If one core, even fully optimized with a Unified Logic Circuit and a Reality Engine, still isn’t enough power to progress, why must they limit themselves to just one?"

​Lytheron let the implication hang in the air. "They found a way to link to others... and they called this: Core Aggregation.

Hmm.. Distributed Processing... Aegis inputted. That will actually remedy the processing cap...

’You mean like spreading spell processing among different people...?’ Zephyr was frankly astonished. That seemed like a perfectly easy solution, but it was only so because someone had thought of it. For those in that time, their minds reaching this far was remarkable to say the least.

It seems they found a way to network different, weaker mana cores to augment the spell processing power of a single host. Like a massive aggregation of mana cores... A server farm if you will...

​"—They devised a path that got acknowledgement from origin to establish a consensual, permanent link to another person’s mana core," Lytheron explained.

"But the origin dictate of this path made it so that it had to be consensual. If it wasn’t, Lawbearers would have simply enslaved entire worlds for power... at least that was a small mercy..." he scoffed.

​"At first, no one was willing. Why would a lower-tier mage allow a stronger mage to siphon their already meagre processing power? It seemed ridiculous. But in every world, there would always be those that were desperate enough to try anything," he shook his head.

"A desperate individual tried it — A mage of extremely mediocre talent, one who had stalled completely at Tier 3."

​Lytheron leaned in. "When the powerful Lawbearer established the Core Link,the result was shocking. The lower-tier mage’s speed of progression became extremely fast. The Lawbearer’s deep comprehension of spell logic flowed through the link, bypassing the innate talent limitations of the mediocre mage and giving them the boost to advance further."

He let out a breath, shifting to make himself more comfortable in his lotus position.

​"Lile you might guess, it became a hot new thing almost immediately. Low-tier mages, realizing they would never reach the heights of Lawbearers on their own, found a path to guaranteed, rapid power. And in return, the Lawbearer, who was the host of the spell processing link, gained a significant increase in their spell computation and rendering power. For them, every new link was like adding a couple to even hundreds of extra mana nodes to their capacity. It was a win-win for everyone..."

​Lytheron rubbed his temple. "We elves found the idea dirty and blasphemous, sacrificing the purity of the individual core for aggregated power. But as Tier 8 Paragons began to appear in the human, dragonkin, demon and other two races, we had no choice but to adapt. I too, had to give in to this method in my age. I am not proud of it, but at the time I saw the necessity in it..."

​"This practice of linking, which became known as Sub-Coring, soon reached a point of obsession. Eventually, there weren’t enough fresh low-tiers to go around. Lawbearers, and those already Paragons, would place bids and negotiate contracts with fresh awakeneds before they even started any training."

​Lytheron looked at Zephyr with a significant, pointed gaze. "This continued, until one man... a human, suddenly rose rapidly through the ranks, accumulating an obscene amount of linked power and ushering in the next great, final stage of history."