Chapter 194: Chapter 194

"What was his name?" Zephyr asked. He needed a name for the historical figure who had broken the universe.

Lytheron sighed deeply. "He was known by many titles, but his true name was Xerxes. His talent was aggressive and absolute. The speed of his advancement was shocking, even with the new path of Sub-Coring available."

Zephyr frowned. "He pioneered a different method?"

"Not particularly," Lytheron shook his head.

"Huh? Then... what did he do?"

Lytheron shifted slightly. It seemed he was about to explain the crux of the matter.

"Do not forget that the practice of Sub-Coring was mostly confined to the territories of the six great races — the Human, Dragonkin, Demon, Orc, Dwarf, and Titan spheres of influence. The pact they had established centuries ago to protect the knowledge of the mana core from any other race still held. The pool of available low-tiers was therefore finite..."

’Ohh...’ Zephyr could see where this was leading.

"Yet, Xerxes bypassed this entirely... He had secretly branched out to other worlds, breaking the pact entirely. He found opened a secret portal to a world that was still using diverse, lesser magic, and he taught them the path of spell logic, the secrets of the mana core. He stayed there for years, cultivating the knowledge, until Origin finally acknowledged and validated the logic core pathway for that new race." Thɪs chapter is updatᴇd by novel·fıre·net

Lytheron’s expression was grim. "When the first generation of awakened appeared on that world, Xerxes simply initiated the Sub-Coring process. He was essentially siphoning the spell processing power from the mana nodes of a whole, uncontested world."

"The speed of his progress was astronomical. When the other great races discovered his treachery, they were furious, but it was too late. Xerxes was already so powerful — perhaps the first to truly master Tier 8. The most powerful Paragon alive — that he impressed his will upon them. No one could contest his decision at all... So they all did the same."

Lytheron sighed with extreme displeasure. "It was a spiral. The floodgates had opened. There were countless worlds using diverse, primitive magic. Why argue and bid over a hundred cores when you could harness the power of a million...? Everyone did as they pleased, without getting in each other’s way because the known universe was simply too vast."

"It was so unregulated and beyond saving that most of us who were against the practice — like us elves, who still held to the original tenants of magic, and surprisingly even some members of the other superior races — had no choice but to also engage in Sub-Coring just to remain relevant... To do otherwise was to choose extinction."

Lytheron leaned back. "Already, the greatest fear of the six races — that our power would be eclipsed by another like Algernon... and Mother Aurelis — was now irrelevant. The seven supreme races — the original six, plus us elves who eventually rejoined the power structure — had already set the universal hierarchy. Any new race that gained the core knowledge was immediately integrated, or if they resisted, swiftly cut down to size."

Lytherlyon’s tone grew reflective. "Towards the end of my life, the universe was effectively conquered. It was just conquest of world upon world upon world..."

He then delivered a chilling statistic. "At my peak, I had two hundred and twenty-three worlds under my full control, all supplying me with processing power equivalent to approximately one hundred and sixty billion

Zephyr’s mind went numb.

One hundred and sixty billion mana nodes... The number was meaningless. His own mana core only had two nodes, one untouched and the other expertly enhanced to the fullest in conjunction with Aegis.

Lytheron, who wasn’t even the strongest, spoke of a processing capacity that belonged in a totally different realm of reality.

He couldn’t even begin to fathom what that entailed.

Host, the scale of that processing power... it is difficult to quantify, Aegis admitted internally, even it was genuinely amazed.

Even in the real world, the highest performing supercomputer ever — The El Capitan — had only eleven million processor cores, CPU and GPU combined. Lytheron’s aggregated power of one hundred and sixty billion mana nodes is many orders of magnitude beyond even that.

Basically, Lytheron’s core count at that point could barely only be compared to a scenario where every single computational core — from every smartphone, every PC, every server, and every dedicated processor in the global internet infrastructure on earth — were somehow combined.

Even at that, it would just barely approach the level of raw, concentrated processing power that a single Paragon like Lytheron, who was mid-level among Paragons, commanded, entirely within his single consciousness... He was basically a god by modern computational standards!

"We were gods already," Lytheron said, looking through Zephyr as if seeing the worlds he once dominated. "I was a god to those worlds I lorded over. But even with that much power, I was nowhere near the peak. There were many that were far stronger, who lived for so long, becoming stronger and stronger, and monopolizing access to entire galactic sectors."

"But all things die. Most Paragons like me lived for more than five millennia, yet death still came..." he sighed, "at the Paragon level, the physical body could be indefinitely modified with mana down to the last cell, but our consciousness itself grew weaker... After five millennia, the mind began to die, even as the body remained immortal."

"And for us who had known no fear for thousands of years, this inevitable end was terrifying... Like a terrible joke that reality impressed upon us..." he chuckled mirthlessly.

"But like always,our desperate struggle to cling on to life... to keep amassing power, paved a way forward. Among us Paragons, some eventually found the next logical path to progress."

Lytheron’s voice dropped to emphasize the magnitude of what he was about to reveal.

"Why was the mind getting weaker? It made no sense. The body was perfectly fine. The brain itself was still perfectly fine... So what was causing the decay of consciousness...?"

"There could only be one answer. If it wasn’t from us, there could only be one thing holding us back... Origin itself."

"Immediately these Paragons realized this, they turned their immense, aggregated processing power onto Origin. They found a means to embed their consciousness, still holding that absurd power, directly into the script of existence itself, creating the next tier... A tier without a name... but we Paragons liked to call it: Tier 9. Virus." Lytheron gave a dry, humorless laugh.

"Origin resisted them, of course. Their fickle processing power, vast as it was, was not enough to fully corrupt the source of all existence. But at the very least they could corrode a minuscule, localized part of it. And with that minuscule part, they began to enforce their own intentions via Origin — onto the source of all. The source that was naturally uncaring, intentionless, and unbiased, began to be influenced by their intentions."

"They became Gods in the truest sense of the word. Their will reached far and wide, unlimited by the physical method of searching for worlds. They could now see all that Origin touched. They were the first to find out the existence of the different Energy Levels of Universes."

"It turned out that all Paragons had only been influencing worlds in the Grade 0 Energy Level Universe. All the worlds we had ever found were within that single band. Imagine the shock when it was revealed that below our universe, there was also a Grade 1 Energy Universe, and below that, another, and below that too..."

Lytheron paused, taking a visible breath. "I was done seeking power by then. It felt unending, and the races were reaching beyond what I felt we as creatures born of the universe were supposed to. I and many others simply waited for our deaths..."

"But Origin itself had other plans for us... Which is where theWill of Origin truly begins."

Zephyr suddenly spoke, cutting through the heavy silence before Lytheron could continue the final reveal.

"Wait. Before you tell me the Will of Origin,you still haven’t told me how this vast empires of conquered worlds ended up as The Supreme Universe... just this one massive world we see today where only the seven supreme races rule..."

Lytheron nodded solemnly. "That’s because I was not alive to see it happen. But based on the current reality, the Tier 9s, now immortal, increased their influence until they forcibly reshaped their universe. They converted the entire Grade 0 Universe into a single, flat plane of existence, where all those worlds were conjoined and stretched out. It is a massive, growing construct — named Astralis, after the original world of the humans, but now referred to with the broad term – The Supreme Universe."

"It is a plane shaped by the will of the supreme races. That is why they are the only ones that exist there. All races of other worlds were relegated to the lower-grade universes. The Tier 9s then started to influence all lower energy universes — the Grade 1, Grade 2, and so on — trying to siphon their processing powers for themselves. But the problem was, those worlds didn’t use mana cores. They all used diverse, primitive magics."

"So, instead of manually teaching each world the pathway, the Tier 9s slowly began to subtly influence these worlds. They changed their magical evolution path to one that would eventually result in them naturally developing mana cores and nodes. The logic being, the higher the energy grade of a universe, the closer they were to the logic core pathway."

Zephyr’s eyes went wide with a sudden, chilling realization. "Is that—Is that why every single champion I’ve seen has some Elven. Human. Demon. Dragonkin. Orc. Dwarf... or Titan features?"

Lytheron met his gaze for a silent few seconds then gave a deliberately slow nod of confirmation.

"It is a side effect. In trying to force an entire universal grade toward a singular, shared evolutionary path, the natural diversity that should have existed is being corroded. Every single race, in every world targeted, is evolving toward one of the seven supreme races, even in their physical features..."

"It is the subtle contamination of the Tier 9s’ will... And this is where you, Zephyrus Sol Ra’Elis, come in..."