Adrian's eyes narrowed as he heard the Void Emperor's words, and for a moment, the damp grassland, the fog, the wooden table, and even the faint warmth of the cup resting near his hand seemed to fade into the background. The implications were impossible to ignore. Yes, it made perfect sense. Adrian was essentially challenging the very heavens the Void Emperor was seated upon.
By declaring that his own foundation would one day stand equal to, or even surpass, Great Sects like the UNI-Sect and the Void Sect, he was walking a path that inherently threatened the hierarchy these cosmic titans had maintained for billions of years.
In the eyes of a supreme existence who governed countless galaxies, a stray element that openly intended to rewrite the universal order was usually something to be eradicated before it could fully blossom.
The Void Emperor noticed the subtle shift in Adrian's posture, the tightening of his muscles beneath his crimson robes, and the guarded, calculating gleam returning to his eyes.
"Don't overthink," the Void Emperor said as he lifted his small cup, the nearly transparent hot liquid within it shimmering with a faint iridescent glow. "I am not petty enough to squash little kids. Especially not you, someone who carries the key the entire universe is searching for."
Adrian froze.
The statement shattered his immediate train of thought. He had braced himself for a philosophical debate, a test of wills, or perhaps a veiled threat disguised as advice. He had not expected to be labeled as something as a key that the entire universe was searching for.
"Key? What do you mean?" Adrian asked, his voice steady despite the rapid cascade of questions flooding his mind.
The Void Emperor took a slow, deliberate sip from his cup, savoring the warmth. He set the cup gently back onto the wooden table, and the faint sound echoed strangely in the dense, impenetrable fog that surrounded them.
"Let us discuss history first," the Void Emperor said, his violet eyes, swirling like twin galaxies collapsing inward, fixing upon Adrian with a heavy and ancient gaze. "Then you will understand what I mean by the key."
Adrian nodded and kept silent.
He lowered his hands, resting them upon his knees as his posture became calmer. If an existence like the Void Emperor was willing to share the history of the universe, it was an opportunity Adrian could not afford to miss. Such knowledge could not be found in a premium intelligence network, nor bought with any amount of UNI-Coins.
The Void Emperor leaned back slightly, his long white hair drifting gently. "Cultivators like us always wanted to understand the mysteries of existence, did we not?" he began, his tone taking on a distant, reflective quality. "We want to know everything, become powerful enough to rule everything, and live as immortals beyond the reach of time. It is an inborn desire of every sentient being in the universe, no matter what race they belong to. From the lowest mortal struggling in the mud to the highest ruler seated upon a throne, the hunger to grasp the unknown is universal."
"Right now, in a way, that path is much simpler, isn't it? You have sects and elders to guide the younger generations. You have pre-constructed divine spells, established cultivation realms like the Stellar Stage, the Rule Stage, and the Astral Stage. You have the Language of Mana carved into history, waiting to be learned, refined, and inherited. Young cultivators complain about hardship, but they walk on roads paved by the blood and madness of those who came before them. But what about the past?"
The Void Emperor's eyes darkened, the swirling nebulae within them churning with memories of a long-dead era. "What about the era when there were no sects? When there were not even realms that had been discovered? When no one knew how far cultivation could go, what the next threshold was, or whether the next step forward would elevate them or destroy them? When there was no one to teach or guide the path toward higher stages, no manuals, no established theories, no universal standard, and no elders waiting at the peak to explain what came next?"
Adrian listened intently, his own mind attempting to visualize such a chaotic time. He remembered his early days on Earth, before the knowledge spheres, before the Origin Ink. He remembered the blind, desperate scramble to understand his own powers, the lethal trial-and-error of clashing against monstrous beasts without knowing the rules of the energy he wielded. To scale that blindness up to a universal level, an entire universe of beings stumbling in the dark, grasping at raw, untamed rules of reality, painted a terrifying picture.
"That was actually the most prominent era of this universe, Adrian," the Void Emperor said, his voice carrying unmistakable reverence. "Back then, cultivators pushed themselves every single day. They had no paths to follow, so they blindly chased everything. They bled, mutated, shattered their bodies, and burned through civilizations just to see what lay beyond the next threshold. It was an age of madness and brilliance. Every step forward was carved through corpses, but every corpse taught the survivors something that had never been known before."
The Void Emperor paused, picking up his cup again and letting the warmth seep into his palms. "And among that chaos, some beings rose above the rest. They were not merely powerful. They were knowledgeable, terrifyingly curious, and determined enough to force order upon the chaos. They created the stages that we all cultivate today. We respectfully call them Primal Beings because they were the ones who guided all cultivators after them. They were the architects of the Heavenly Order as we understand it."
"They forged the concept of combining essence seeds into a Rule Core. They discovered the delicate process of merging those cores into an Astral Core. They dragged civilization out of the darkness and gave the universe a ladder to climb."
Adrian felt a deep sense of awe. He had experienced firsthand the extreme difficulty of creating a single divine concept from scratch. He had struggled, failed, and strained his willforce merely to arrange existing arcane concepts into a cohesive whole like the Crimson Vital Dominion. To imagine the beings who had originated the very idea of these stages, who had written the first blueprints of reality manipulation, was humbling.
"But even they met their limits," the Void Emperor continued, "They pushed themselves to the Astral Stage. They explored the depths of authority, the structure of divine concepts, the nature of Prime Arcane Concepts, and the boundaries of reality itself. And they believed that if they could push their authority to one hundred percent, they could transcend this universe."
"They believed that achieving absolute authority would finally answer their questions about the Heavenly Order, about existence itself, and about the mysteries of the rules we use. Because, as you know, reality always jealously hoards a portion of authority. The Primal beings saw this guarded portion of authority as the final step to transcendence."
The Emperor sighed, "But in the end, they could not push their authority to one hundred percent, no matter what they did. They scoured the universe and uncovered foundational concepts that we now call Prime Arcane Concepts, the very pillars of reality. They tried to comprehend everything they could, believing those concepts were what they were missing."
"But even then," the Void Emperor said, shaking his head slowly, "they could not simply comprehend everything there was to comprehend. Even if we call them Primal Beings, in the end, they were still sentient beings with limited talents, emotions, perspectives, and minds. The universe was too vast, too infinitely complex, too layered in truths for a single mind, no matter how profound, to hold all of them simultaneously without shattering. Prime Arcane Concepts did not become simple just because someone was ancient enough to touch them."
The Emperor looked down at the grass beneath his feet, his violet gaze distant. "When the Primal Beings realized this, when they struck that absolute, unbreakable ceiling, despair took root. From that time onward, most cultivators in the universe gradually lost the will to truly pursue a higher stage. The path to the future cultivation realms stopped there. Instead, they started fighting petty wars for supremacy, ruling galaxies, building sects, destroying enemies, and expanding influence, but never truly moving forward. For billions of years, they were stagnant."
Adrian processed the monumental weight of the Emperor's words. The grand hierarchy, the Great Sects, the Major Sects, the endless battles for supremacy, the pride of ancient beings, and the obsession with territory and resources were all symptoms of a universe that had reached a dead end. With no higher peak to climb, the strong had built wider thrones instead. They had turned their eyes sideways rather than upward, competing over who ruled more galaxies because none of them knew how to step beyond the ceiling above them.
But as Adrian connected the Emperor's history to his own existence, a realization clicked into place.
He looked at his hands, thinking of the white-grey essence that obeyed his command, the power that had allowed him to strip authority from Hestia, erase the Demon Emperor, break the fundamental laws of domain clashes, and stand above the normal structure of divine concepts. The Source granted him exactly what the Primal Beings had failed to achieve.
"So by the 'key', you meant my Prime Arcane Concept?" Adrian asked, "These Primal Beings believed one hundred percent authority could lead to transcendence, and I have it. So I am the key they were searching for."
The Void Emperor did not validate Adrian's deduction with a nod or a smile. Instead, his expression grew serious, "It is not that simple, Adrian," he replied, his voice dropping to a low, commanding resonance that seemed to vibrate against Adrian's very bones.
"You have one hundred percent authority, yes. Through whatever mysterious anomaly you harbor, you can command reality completely within the scope of your power. But… do you know everything there is to know?"
Adrian blinked, momentarily taken aback by the intensity of the question.
"Do you know who created these rules and concepts?" the Void Emperor demanded, his questions coming in a relentless and overwhelming barrage. "Do you know whether the Heavenly Order truly exists or if it is merely the name cultivators gave to patterns they failed to understand? Do you know whether this universe is truly infinite, or whether there is an end to it? Are there more universes beyond this one? What is existence itself? Is it a structure containing infinite universes, or is it something so alien that our fragile minds cannot even frame the correct question?"
The questions struck Adrian. They were the same kinds of questions that had haunted him when he pondered the nature of storage runes back in his suite, the invisible directives that dictated why some runes functioned on pure mana while others demanded specific conceptual essence.
He had wondered if the Source was the foundation of the Heavenly Order, or if it was merely a byproduct of something even deeper. He had touched rules, bent them, and sometimes broken them, but touching a rule was not the same as understanding the origin of the rule itself.
"Tell me, Adrian," the Void Emperor pressed, his voice softening into a sharp, demanding whisper. "You have one hundred percent authority, so do you have the answers?"
Adrian sat in the damp grass, the mist swirling gently around the edges of his vision. Did he know why the universe existed? Did he know what lay beyond it?
Did he understand the absolute, fundamental truth of creation?
Adrian shook his head. "No. I do not know."
The Void Emperor watched him for a long moment, the heavy, suffocating intensity of his gaze slowly dissolving. Then, the ancient ruler leaned back in his chair and laughed slightly. It was a rich, warm sound, completely devoid of mockery.
"As I said, the Primal Beings are just ancient ones, and even they are still trying to find a way to transcendence. Whatever they say is their assumption. They assumed absolute authority equated to omniscience. They assumed grasping the final percent of reality's control would automatically pull back the curtain of the universe and reveal the face of the creator."
"And do you know what intrigues me now?" The Emperor's eyes sparkled with a renewed, almost youthful fascination. "While they all believe one hundred percent authority is the key to transcendence, I am watching you sit in front of me with that one hundred percent authority, and you are clearly not a transcendent being who knows everything."
Adrian felt a strange mixture of relief and vulnerability. The Void Emperor had effortlessly stripped away the mystique of his absolute authority, reducing it from godhood to merely another tool. An exceptionally powerful tool, an impossible anomaly, perhaps even the most coveted power in the universe, but still just a tool wielded by a human who was searching for answers in the dark like everyone else.
"But after seeing all of this, I now have my own theory and assumption," the Void Emperor said, "And I still believe you have the key to transcendence."
Adrian truly could not understand what the Void Emperor's theory could be. With his limited knowledge, he could not even begin to figure it out. If one hundred percent authority was not the answer in and of itself, then what made him the key? How could someone who admittedly knew nothing of the universe's ultimate truths become the catalyst for the greatest breakthrough in billions of years?
Since it was like this, Adrian decided not to waste time on fruitless speculation. He looked at the ancient being across from him and asked directly, "Why? Why do you still believe I carry the key?"
The Void Emperor took a slow sip and replied, "To know that, you need to hear the rest of the history..."