Chapter 149: Mortal-Nascent Realm Threshold
"Space," Zara said simply.
"What?"
"My attunement... I’m attuned to the spatial aspect of cosmic essence."
Uhtred stared at Zara for several seconds in absolute silence. There were several layers to what she had just said that left him utterly flabbergasted.
Before even getting into the details of her words, the casual manner in which she had delivered them was completely off-putting. This was the kind of sensitive information an ascender guarded with their life.
Uhtred himself had realized he was stepping out of line the moment the question left his mouth. It had only been because of her uncanny cultivation speed and the weird phenomenon that occurred as she finalized her breakthrough that he had bothered to ask at all.
He had expected a quick, deft redirect, which he would have gladly accepted and moved past. However, Zara hadn’t even bothered to deflect. She had simply laid it out right off the bat.
And then there was the actual content of her reveal.
Space magic... Space magic, for crying out loud! How the hell was her attunement space?! Weren’t the class options presented to an ascender during their integration driven by their life experiences and their understanding of the world?
So far, Uhtred had not met a single human who didn’t conform to either some form of elemental magic or a body enhancement class.
Even the rare exceptions that deviated from standard logic, like those ascenders who possessed array-type classes, were still rooted in elemental manipulation at their core. They still expressed those arrays based on their specific elemental attunements.
The only other example he had seen of someone using an entirely different branch of power was the Homo erectus general with his Esoteric blood magic, but he wasn’t a modern human, he was an ancient variant.
Zara was the very first human he had met who wielded something completely inaccessible before the integration, or at least something that shouldn’t be accessible. To Uhtred’s knowledge, Zara wasn’t some sort of astronaut who had direct, physical experience with space to warrant a class that controlled it.
A dozen pressing questions rushed to the tip of his tongue, and he could barely hold himself back from pressing her on how she had acquired a class that manipulated something as abstract as space — especially to a level high enough to make her a Pathfinder.
Uhtred opened his mouth to ask, but then he caught himself.
A sudden memory flashed in his mind, causing him to pause immediately. Now that he thought about it, hadn’t he also been offered a list of standard classes during his own integration before the System bugged out and granted him his Primordial Grade class?
Among the list of options presented to him by the System back then, there had been a spatial class as well.
What was it called again?
Void Walker.
Yes, that was it. He had been offered a Unique-grade Void Walker class.
Uhtred was no astronaut either. He had zero background in astrophysics, aside from general hobbies like stargazing, basic science from school, and random videos and movies he had watched over the years. However, none of those could be taken seriously as deep "understanding."
If he had been offered a spatial class without any deep, personal experience with space, then didn’t that mean the current theory about classes being driven by past life experience and understanding was entirely flawed? Or at least, not the whole truth?
Faced with that reality, Uhtred had no choice but to hold his tongue and refrain from questioning Zara on how she had obtained her class. Instead, he shifted to another question, one that was still probing, perhaps even offensive. But since she had answered the first without issue, he clenched his jaw and asked anyway:
"So what’s the title of your class then?"
"Singularity Sovereign," Zara answered immediately, her clear blue eyes boring straight into his without a trace of hesitation.
Singularity... Sovereign? Uhtred thought.
Suddenly, everything made sense. The title instantly explained the weird phenomena he had experienced whenever he fought against or alongside Zara: the way physical blows seemed to redirect or slide off right before hitting her skin, throwing her opponents completely off balance.
For a long time, it had looked as though she possessed some form of kinetic force magic. But it hadn’t been force at all. It was simply her Singularity class, her mastery over space.
Even within the Mortal Realm, her body was already beginning to passively influence the space immediately surrounding her. It was subtle, only manifesting clearly during intense combat, and restricted to specific points on her body, but the effect was undeniable.
Uhtred had zero doubt that the full might of her class would only become more and more powerful the higher she climbed.
As he mused over her class title, he also realized why that strange phenomenon had occurred during her cultivation earlier. That, too, was a result of her spatial magic.
She had used the spiral gathering technique normally at first, but somewhere along the line, while Uhtred had been focused on his own core, she had begun to experiment. She had created a tiny, localized spatial fold, a miniature singularity of some sort, near her core.
It allowed her to pull in the ambient essence at the focal point of the spiral with vastly superior density, compressing it right at her chest. It had likely allowed her to isolate and separate the spatial aspects of cosmic essence far more efficiently, accelerating her cultivation speed to an absurd degree.
Come to think of it...
As Uhtred analyzed all of this, he realized he had never once seen Zara cultivate using a beast core.
Every single beast core she harvested, she either handed to him or sold to the Multiversal Store back when it was available on the main continent. Now that they were in the trial grounds where the store was locked, she gave every core to him because none of them were compatible with her attunement.
Finding a beast attuned to space on Earth was practically impossible. Zara was the first human he had seen with the attunement, and as for natural animals, Uhtred couldn’t picture a single beast that had anything to do with spatial magic.
He remained stumped in thought for several seconds, until Zara waved her hand in front of his face, snapping his attention back to the present.
Realizing he had been staring off into space, Uhtred cleared his throat. He asked no further questions, simply nodding and returning to his silent cultivation, and Zara did the same.
He treated her reveal with the same casualness she had shown in giving it, not wanting to make a big deal out of it. But deep down, Zara’s willingness to share such critical information struck a real chord in him.
Zara was not someone who made decisions on a whim. Uhtred considered himself pragmatic and straightforward, but Zara was even more guarded than he was. She most definitely knew how vital that information was, and the fact that she had shared it anyway meant she truly trusted him. She believed he wouldn’t use it against her or leak it to anyone else.
Uhtred closed his eyes and focused on his internal energy flow, doing his best to keep his face completely neutral.
On one hand, he felt a subtle pang of discomfort that he hadn’t offered any information about his own core, his talent grade, or his class in return. But that was non-negotiable. There was no way in hell he was going to reveal the truth about his Formless Core or his Primordial Grade status to anyone.
Zara didn’t seem to care, though. She didn’t even notice his brief discomfort.
They both sank deep into their respective cultivation cycles. Uhtred lost himself in the rhythm of his essence flow, while Zara continued using the spiral technique, periodically switching to her modified singularity method in short, intense bursts.
.
.
Night fell over the Grotto Heaven, and a new day arrived.
By the fourth day of the seven-day trial, Uhtred had officially reached the true peak of the Mortal Realm, standing right at the threshold of the Nascent Realm.
Zara hadn’t slacked off either. She had broken straight into Level 23, a cultivation speed even faster than her previous breakthrough. Her rapid advancement impressed Uhtred once again, even though he now understood the nature of her spatial class.
However, he couldn’t afford to dwell on her progress. The pressure within his own core had reached a critical limit.