The city was still buzzing with the aftermath of the Void Cavity incident. News feeds updated every few minutes with fresh reports — another wave of Abyssal Spawn had breached containment at the outer perimeter defenses, and the garrison was still cleaning up. Nova read through the updates on his watch while the Skyrail carried him toward the library district and felt a cold coil of worry settle in his chest.
He opened a message to his father.
Nova: Dad, are you alright? I saw the reports about the breach.
He watched the screen for several minutes. The read receipt appeared immediately, which meant his father had seen it. The reply took longer than it should have.
Thorne Stern: I'm fine, son.
Thorne Stern: Just cleaning up the battlefield with my unit now. Don't worry about your old man.
Nova stared at those two messages for a long moment, then put his watch away.
His father was a Tier 2 warrior. The beast tide that had hit the outer walls during the Void Cavity incident was not a Tier 2 situation. The garrison had held, but holding came with a cost, and the cost was always paid by the people standing at the front. His father's message was deliberately casual in the specific way of someone choosing their words carefully so the person reading them wouldn't worry.
He was definitely hurt. Just hiding it.
Nova looked out the Skyrail window at the city passing below and thought about the only thing he could actually do about that — get to Tier 1 as fast as possible, get into the rifts legally, start generating real resources. He couldn't change what had already happened on the outer walls today. He could change what happened the next time.
At the outer walls, Thorne Stern put his communication device down with hands that were still trembling slightly from exhaustion. The blood on them had dried to a dark brown. He had wiped most of it off on his uniform already but the creases of his knuckles still showed it.
The man lying beside him — bald, built like a small building, currently bandaged so thoroughly that only his face was visible above the wrapping — let out a weak laugh that clearly cost him something.
"Old Thorne. Which secret lover is messaging you now?"
"Shut up, Brick. It's my son."
"Must be nice." Brick's voice lost some of its humor. "Having a kid who actually checks whether you're still breathing."
"Get yourself one then."
"Nah." Brick was quiet for a moment, looking up at the smoke-stained sky. "With our heads hanging by a thread every day? I don't want to leave some kid without a father the moment he learns to walk. Your boy's taking the Martial Aptitude Exam soon, right? Think he'll get into a Combat University?"
The exhaustion in Thorne's face softened into something warmer. "My son will definitely make it. He's far better than I ever was."
He fumbled with a cigarette for longer than he would have liked, his hands not cooperating the way they usually did. When he finally got it lit he took a long drag and looked up at the sky and let the smoke out slowly.
"Damn," he said quietly, to nobody in particular. "Survived another day."
The library was three districts from the Skyrail station, a large public building with free terminal access for all Federation citizens. Nova's spirit power had been climbing steadily throughout the journey as the Basic Mind Refining Technique ran its slow reliable process in the background, and by the time he walked through the library's entrance his reserves were fully restored.
He found a private holographic room in the back section, closed the door, and sat down in front of the room's AI terminal.
"WELCOME, HOW CAN I ASSIST YOU." The Library AI greeted.
"I want you to flip through every free technique in the database," he said. "Common, uncommon, and any incomplete epic or rare fragments available at no charge. Two seconds per page."
The AI paused.
It was a brief pause — less than half a second — but it was there, the kind of hesitation that even a well-designed AI produced when a request landed outside its expected range of inputs. Then it responded with professional neutrality and began executing the command.
It had probably flagged him internally as a user with some form of photographic or eidetic memory talent.
Well that was close enough to the truth.
Nova activated Absolute Insight and leaned back.
The pages began flowing across the holographic display in front of him — technique diagrams, energy circulation charts, movement principles, attack patterns, utility applications. Two seconds each, one after another, an unbroken stream of cultivation knowledge that would have taken an ordinary person years to read through properly. He absorbed all of it in real time. Common techniques clicked into place immediately, their principles clear and their applications straightforward. Uncommon techniques required slightly more processing but nothing that slowed him down. The incomplete epic and rare fragments were the most interesting — partial techniques with missing components, abandoned research uploaded to the public database by generous practitioners or estates clearing out archives. Most people found them useless because the missing sections made them impractical. Nova's mind filled every gap automatically, Absolute Insight identifying the underlying principles and reconstructing what wasn't there.
He ran the Basic Spirit Refining Technique simultaneously to keep his spirit power stable as Absolute Insight drained it. One process consuming spirit power, one restoring it, the two running in parallel and keeping him in a sustainable balance that let him maintain the session indefinitely.
After two hours he had a complete map of everything freely available in the Federation's public cultivation database. He had digested all that basic knowledge.
Then he opened the sealed memories.
He was careful about it — lowering the wall just enough to let the relevant material through without opening the flood. Law fragments arrived first, principles from past lives that had comprehended these concepts fully in bodies and contexts he couldn't currently access. Technique knowledge followed, movements and applications from lives that had operated at levels far above anything the public database contained. And woven through all of it were the fresh impressions still burning in his Absolute Insight from the void cavity battle — the meridian circuits of Aldous's thunder blade, the spatial fault-line cutting of Lucian's sword technique, Morgana's weaponized consciousness projection, the archmage's elemental fusion detonation. That single overloaded second had given him a live demonstration of laws being applied by Tier 7, 8, and 9 warriors at fractions of light speed, and his mind had captured all of it.
With that combined foundation, Nova started building.
He began with rare tier — B-rank techniques, the level where serious warriors started spending real money on upgrades. A movement technique first, built around his speed and motion intents with spatial displacement principles drawn from watching Lucian's footwork during the battle woven into the foundation. He named it Phantom Current Step. Then an attack technique — Resonance Collapse Fist, which used the Law of Resonance to generate internal structural failure in whatever it struck rather than relying on surface impact force. A defense technique called Pressure Inversion Barrier, built on air compression principles drawn from Gareth's white sphere technique but refined with atmospheric intent to create a reactive shield that strengthened under incoming force. A utility technique for Qi circulation efficiency — Flowing Void Circulation, designed to reduce the energy cost of any movement technique by thirty percent through optimized meridian routing.
He wrote each one the same way — powerful enough to be genuinely superior to anything else at its tier, explained with such exhaustive clarity that every step of every principle was laid out in language a beginning warrior could follow without gaps. Most techniques on the market were written by people who understood the principle but communicated it poorly, leaving practitioners to figure out the gaps through years of trial and error. Nova closed every gap before it opened.
After the rare tier techniques he moved to epic — A-rank, the level used by Tier 6, 7, and 8 warriors. Epic tier required integrating actual laws into the technique's structure, and this was where most technique creators hit a wall permanently.
For Nova, it was where things got interesting.
Building each epic tier technique forced him to push his comprehended intents to their limits, and under that sustained pressure several of them broke through entirely. Fire intent crossed into the Fire Law — he felt the shift as a sudden clarity, the difference between understanding that fire consumed and actually perceiving the fundamental principle that transformation through energy release was a universal constant woven into the fabric of existence. Oscillation and vibration intents merged and resolved together into the Law of Resonance, the two so closely related that their combination produced something deeper than either alone. Speed intent pushed through into the Law of Velocity.