A few hours passed as the unconscious Hestia and Adrian floated in the empty Virelith galactic void.
There were not even any starships crossing within the area they were in, so no one detected that the two highest authorities of the sect were suspended in such a vulnerable state.
The first one to get his consciousness back was Adrian.
He opened his eyes slowly. The very first striking thing in his head was a throbbing pain and a heavily clouded mind. It felt as though an invisible weight was actively crushing his mind from the inside out. His vision blurred and doubled, the distant starlight smearing across his sight before he forced himself to blink the haziness away.
This was the feeling of willforce depletion. Ever since he had stepped into the Anchor stage of consciousness mastery, it had been so long since he had felt even a fraction of mental fatigue that he had almost forgotten the sensation. But now, it was as if that entire ocean had been violently drained, leaving behind nothing.
Even through the blinding pain, he shook his head, forcing his scattered thoughts to align, and looked at Hestia floating unconscious near him.
"What just happened?" he muttered. His voice was hoarse, barely carrying through the thin layer of mana he managed to project into the void.
He floated towards Hestia, his movements sluggish and uncoordinated, and gently grabbed her body. As his hands held her shoulders, his clouded mind registered something new. Looking at her now, he could feel a much deeper connection to her somehow than ever before. It was not the standard, minuscule thread of connection established by the [Crown of the Source]. This was something far more profound, a resonant tether that linked the very foundations of their existences.
Through that strange connection, he even felt a wave of relief wash over his panic. She was still alive. Her life force was stable, and she was just unconscious.
But that relief was immediately swallowed by a cold fury.
"What did you do?!" Adrian focused inward, his consciousness trying to talk with the Will of the Source.
The Source had always helped him. At least, that was what had been going on from the early stages of his life. It had shielded him from fatal backlashes, provided him with the infinite adaptability of his Source Seed, and granted him the one hundred percent authority that allowed him to stand against the titans of the universe. He trusted it. He had merged his will with it. But what it did today, forcibly taking control of his physical body, overriding his own will, and hurting Hestia, was not something Adrian could ever accept.
The vast chambers within his Source Seed remained silent.
"Hey, I am speaking to you! What the hell did you just do?" Adrian asked again, his internal projection echoing with unrestrained anger. He had never felt such a loss of control, and the realization that the entity residing within his core could hijack his existence at will was terrifying.
In the next instant, his Source Seed pulsed. And then, he heard the emerging voice within himself, "First General..."
Adrian's thoughts stalled. The fury in his mind was momentarily overshadowed by confusion.
"First general?? What is that?" Adrian asked, his mental projection narrowing as he demanded clarity. "Explain it to me."
He waited, his consciousness focused on the core of his being. The silence stretched for a second, then ten, then a minute. He didn't get any reply from the Will of the Source after this, no matter what he tried. He sent waves of intent, demands, and questions into the white-grey expanse, but the ancient presence had already retreated, returning to its usual muteness.
"You bastard! Just you wait..." Adrian gritted his teeth, severing his internal focus and turning his awareness outward, looking down at Hestia.
The Source's cryptic answer didn't clear anything up, and Adrian still had no understanding of why Hestia was even unconscious, or what the white-grey hand plunging into her chest had actually accomplished. Worse still, his mind was still incredibly foggy. He tried to summon a thread of golden essence to cast his Willforce Recovery spell, but the spell's runic structure shattered in his mind before it could even form. He couldn't cast any spell, and he couldn't even think properly to begin with.
Without his willforce, he could not wield authority, he could not utilize his arcane concepts, and he was effectively stripped of his power.
"I need to recover my willforce first..." Adrian thought, recognizing the harsh reality of his situation.
Keeping a firm grip on Hestia's arm to ensure they did not drift apart in the zero-gravity vacuum, Adrian closed his eyes and meditated as he floated in the void.
Without the aid of his passive recovery spell, he had to rely entirely on the natural resilience of his Anchor-stage mind. He methodically gathered the scattered fragments of his intent, weaving them back together piece by piece.
Some time passed. In the vastness of the Virelith Galaxy, time was difficult to measure without the rotation of a sun, but several hours drifted by as Adrian painstakingly rebuilt the foundation of his consciousness. The throbbing pain behind his eyes finally began to dull into a manageable ache, and the fog clouding his logic slowly receded.
Suddenly, a frantic shift in the space beside him broke his concentration.
Hestia's voice disturbed him, laced with a panic that Adrian had never heard from her before. "What? No, no…"
Her hands clutched at her chest, her pale golden eyes snapping open and darting wildly around the empty void.
"What happened?" Adrian opened his eyes immediately, his grip on her arm tightening in concern as he asked Hestia.
Hestia turned her head toward him, her face completely drained of color. Her eyes were wide with a terror that surpassed the fear of death itself. For a cultivator who had lived for millions of years, shedding blood and sacrificing everything to reach the apex, there was only one thing more horrifying than dying.
"My astral core... It's gone!" She continued frantically, her hands pressing against her sternum as if trying to physically feel the core that had defined her existence. "Even my individual arcane essence seeds are gone.. My Crimson Vital Dominion, my Verdant Genesis... everything! It's all gone!"
Hearing it, Adrian was genuinely shocked. How could something like this even be possible? When a cultivator's Rule Core or Astral Core was shattered, the resulting backlash would instantly destroy their mana sea and severely damage their physical body. Yet Hestia's physical body was perfectly fine. There was no internal bleeding, collapsed mana channels, or any sign of a backlash that should accompany the erasure of an Astral Core.
"Calm down, Hestia. Look deeper," Adrian urged, his voice steady, trying to anchor her spiraling panic. "Your body is completely unharmed. If your core was destroyed, you would be bleeding out right now or even dead. Check your internal foundation again, carefully."
Hestia swallowed hard, trying to force herself to calm. The logic in Adrian's words pierced through her terror. She closed her eyes, forcing her trembling consciousness to dive deep into the very center of her being, searching the space where her magnificent, green-and-crimson Astral Core had always resided.
For a long moment, the void was silent. Adrian watched her face intently, waiting for any sign of change.
Slowly, the stark terror on her features began to morph. The tension in her brow eased, replaced first by confusion and then by an overwhelming awe. She opened her eyes again, staring at Adrian as though the universe itself had just been turned inside out.
"It's still there, but..." Hestia murmured, her voice barely a whisper. "...it's all inside a single essence seed. It's like an infinite space has been created within this seed, and there are individual chambers within it."
Adrian's eyes narrowed as he recognized the exact description.
"I can see the merged Crimson Vital Dominion and Verdant Genesis divine concept resting in one chamber," Hestia continued, her tone shifting into pure disbelief. "And my arcane concepts are sitting separately in their own chambers... I can actually move the rules within them. I can separate the rule fragments and shift them around without the side effects of my core burning or shattering... what is going on here?"
She looked at Adrian, her pale golden eyes searching his face for an explanation. To her, she had no idea of the Will of the Source acting independently. To her, it was just Adrian reaching out, touching her chest, and fundamentally rewriting the laws of cultivation within her body.
"What did you do?" Hestia asked, her voice a mixture of awe, reverence, and lingering shock.
"I didn't do anything..." Adrian replied honestly, shaking his head. He had no intention of taking credit for something that had hijacked his autonomy. "When I went into the energy form, the will of my concept took control over, and it was responsible for this..."
He paused, letting out a slow exhale as the reality of what the Source had done finally settled into his mind. "But, I get what you are experiencing... since I too don't have an Astral Core either. I only have a single Essence Seed, and it contains the same kind of internal space and chambers you just described. I can move rule fragments between them, dismantle concepts, and reconstruct them without destroying my foundation."
Hestia froze. She stared at him, her mind struggling to process the magnitude of his words.
"What? You don't have an Astral Core?" Hestia asked, her voice elevating slightly. "So this... this infinite space, these chambers, the ability to dismantle and reconstruct divine concepts without destroying your foundation... this is a property of your concept?"
Adrian replied, "Yes, it's just too complicated..."
Hearing it, Hestia slowly began to understand how truly terrifying Adrian's concept was. For her entire life, for millions of years, the fundamental law of the universe had been absolute: you form an essence seed through comprehension. You fuse those seeds into a Rule Core, and then you fuse Rule Cores into an Astral Core. That structure was rigid, crystallized, and permanent. To remove even a single rule fragment from a stabilized core meant shattering the core entirely, crippling the cultivator and erasing their power.
Yet, Adrian's foundation ignored that universal law entirely. His foundation was a single, infinitely adaptable seed with boundless chambers. He could build a divine concept, dismantle it, extract the rules, and rebuild something else entirely, all without suffering the slightest backlash.
This showed why Adrian was so relentlessly hiding his power and even the true name of his concept. It wasn't just a powerful Prime Arcane Concept. It was an existence that defied all the logic and established architecture of the universe itself. If the Great Sects ever discovered that such a foundation existed, they would tear the universe apart to dissect him.
In contrast to Hestia's existential shock, Adrian's mind was having entirely different thoughts.
He didn't know how Hestia was able to share this particular property of the Source. He didn't know the mechanics behind how the will of the source had rewritten her Astral Core into a replica of his own Source Seed. But as he thought about it, the term the Source had used, the First General, started to make sense more and more...
"So the generals get more of my power shared with them..." Adrian thought, his eyes narrowing as a cascade of strategic implications flooded his mind.
This sudden revelation unlocked too many things for his future plans. For the Origin Sect, he had wanted to create a unique, overarching divine concept. He wanted a concept that merged many contradictory arcane concepts: Space, Time, Life, Destruction, Shadow, Light, and many more, which would be extremely powerful, granting his people the ability to heal, teleport, and destroy simultaneously.
But even if one day Adrian successfully created it within his own Source Seed, the glaring issue with that plan was that not everybody could cultivate it.
He had doubted even Hestia would be able to use it. Since she had the arcane concept of Life used upon her Verdant Genesis concept, and those rules were permanently crystallized and locked within her Astral Core, she couldn't just take the Life rules out from there and move them to the new Origin concept he created. For general cultivators in the universe, this was a physical impossibility. To learn a new divine concept that required rules they had already used, they would have to completely shatter their existing cores, crippling themselves, just to start over from scratch.
But now... everything had changed.
Because Hestia had a foundation like him, she could now do the impossible. She had the chamber system. She could be able to take the Life rules from her astral stage concept, separate them within her internal space, and use them for the Origin Sect concept he would create in the future, all without suffering the slightest backlash.
"If she can do it..." Adrian's mind raced, looking at Hestia with a burning realization. "Then the others can too."
If he could designate others as 'Generals', if he could elevate others to this same status, they would all gain this infinitely adaptable foundation. They would no longer be bound by the rigid, fragile cores of the universe. They could dismantle their old techniques, absorb the supreme Origin concept he forged, and adapt instantly.
The 'First General' wasn't just a title. It was the evolutionary bridge that would allow his closest allies to walk the same impossible path as him.
Adrian looked at Hestia, a slow, brilliant smile spreading across his face despite the lingering ache in his mind. The universe had built a cage of rigid rules to keep cultivators contained, but the Source had just handed him the master key to unlock his people's chains.