Chapter 270: Breaking Through The Core Formation Realm
Chapter 270: Breaking Through The Core Formation Realm
Inside the quiet inner chamber of his secluded courtyard, Rhain sat cross-legged on the floor.
With a flick of his wrist, a flash of spatial light illuminated the room.
The Mystic-Grade Spirit Gathering Profound Banner materialized onto the ground.
Rhain’s dark grey eyes flashed with a golden hue as he activated the Eyes of Truth, peering through the floorboards to locate the optimal essence channels flowing beneath the Valdris Royal Academy.
Unlike Stormveil Academy, the spiritual veins here were vastly denser and more complex.
With a precise thrust of his dark essence, he drove the Mystic-Grade banner deep into the subterranean earth, anchoring it directly into the primary spiritual vein.
Buzz—!
The banner activated silently.
Instantly, a vortex of pure, highly concentrated essence was sucked from the earth, flooding directly into Rhain’s sealed cultivation chamber.
"This is still not enough," Rhain murmured.
With another wave of his hand, several exquisite jade bottles appeared, hovering before him.
Inside them were the flawless Mystic-Grade pills he had refined over the past week.
For a normal peak Spirit Manifestation cultivator, consuming even a fraction of a single flawless Mystic-Grade pill to break through to the Core Formation Realm was a luxury beyond imagination.
To consume more than one would mean certain death by essence explosion.
But Rhain simply popped the corks off three bottles at once.
He tilted his head back and dumped the flawless Mystic-Grade pills directly into his mouth.
BOOM—!!!
The moment the pills slid down his throat, an ocean of pure essence detonated within his stomach.
The Abyssal Sovereign Technique was immediately pushed to its absolute limit.
The pitch-black void within his dantian spun fiercely, acting like a supermassive black hole.
It violently refined, and absorbed the rampaging energies of the Mystic-Grade pills and the torrential flood of essence funneled in by the profound banner.
But a major realm breakthrough was not a simple matter of accumulating energy.
Crossing from the Spirit Manifestation Realm to the Core Formation Realm required him to condense the core crystal in his dantian.
Hours began to pass.
The sun outside set, and the dark night blanketed Valdris City.
Sweat poured down Rhain’s forehead, evaporating into white steam the moment it touched his scorching skin.
The friction of the unimaginably dense essence rushing through his pathways caused burning pain.
His meridians were continuously tearing under the pressure, only for the tyrannical recovery power of the Abyssal Sovereign Physique to instantly knit them back together—stronger, wider, and more resilient than before.
It was a grueling, torturous cycle of destruction and rebirth.
"Compress!" Rhain gritted his teeth, his vast Soul Power pressing down mercilessly upon his dantian.
The pressure inside his body skyrocketed.
CRACK!
The bottleneck was completely obliterated.
An explosive, tyrannical aura erupted from Rhain’s frame, sending a shockwave crashing against the walls of the sealed chamber.
Core Formation Realm—Level 1!
But the profound transformation had only just begun.
Inside his dantian, the vast, formless sea of pitch-black essence began to compress.
It swirled inward, condensing under an unimaginable pressure until it solidified into a perfectly round, solid object.
A pitch-black, crystallized core.
It hovered in the center of his dantian, radiating an aura of destruction and boundless depth.
The hallmark of the Core Formation Realm.
Rhain’s dark grey eyes snapped open, a flash of astonishment crossing his features.
"It acts like a second dantian..." Rhain murmured, thoroughly amazed.
The moment the pitch-black core formed, the newly elevated, qualitatively superior Core Formation essence flooded his body.
And right at the center of his forehead, the mysterious seed mark appeared again.
The Seed of Darkness had awakened.
Sensing the massive influx of higher-tier essence, the Origin Seed went into a feeding frenzy.
It greedily devoured the newly formed dark essence, and in return, it flooded his spiritual sea with fragments of the Law of Darkness.
Rhain closed his eyes, entirely submerging his consciousness in the profound truths of the world.
His comprehension of the supreme law skyrocketed.
Thirty-five percent!
Forty percent!
Forty-five percent!
The profound mysteries of devouring, isolation, and absolute void became as clear as daylight in his mind.
The Origin Domain of Darkness expanded in his consciousness, its suppressive power multiplying exponentially.
Finally, the explosive surge of understanding began to slow, coming to a firm halt.
Fifty percent!
Rhain slowly opened his eyes.
They looked like a swirling vortex of darkness for a while before returning to its normal dark grey colour.
Fifty percent comprehension of a supreme law at the very first level of the Core Formation Realm.
If the Domain Masters of the outside world knew of this, they would likely cough up blood and die of sheer inadequacy.
Most veteran Domain Masters spent centuries just to reach twenty percent.
To possess half of an entire Law’s fundamental truth at the first level of the Core Formation Realm was a feat that completely defied the common sense.
"With my current cultivation, and a fifty percent Origin Domain of Darkness..." Rhain’s lips curled into a ruthless smirk. "If I encounter those three assassins again, I won’t even need the Emperor-Grade bell to slaughter them."
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Thousands of miles away, in the center of the Solathane Dynasty.
The Royal Palace stood like a celestial fortress, its golden spires piercing the clouds.
It simply looked like a breathtaking paradise.
At the highest balcony of the imperial palace, Crown Prince Lucius stood.
The wind fluttered his gold-embroidered imperial white robes, a red rose held delicately between the fingers of his left hand.
He lifted the flower, lazily smelling its fragrant petals as he overlooked the sprawling dynasty.
Kneeling on the polished marble floor behind him were ten figures in unadorned grey robes.
The ten Domain Master assassins had returned.
The atmosphere on the balcony was so oppressively heavy that the air itself felt frozen.
"So," Lucius spoke softly, his velvety voice carrying a chilling, lethal undertone that made the kneeling Domain Masters tremble. "You are telling me that ten Domain Masters—including a seventh-level expert—failed to kill a single Spirit Manifestation Realm bug."
Veydris, the 7th-level leader, kept his head pressed firmly against the marble. Cold sweat drenched his back.
"Your Royal Highness... please forgive our incompetence," Veydris pleaded, his voice shaking with dread. "But I swear upon my life that I struck him. My attack tore straight through his chest. I personally obliterated his heart with my own hands! Any normal cultivator would have been dead after that grave injury! I do not know what kind of demonic power he possesses to have survived that!"
Lucius’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits.
His heart utterly annihilated, yet he still survived?
"A cockroach," Lucius hissed through his perfectly white teeth. "He is nothing but a filthy, insignificant cockroach that refuses to die."
First, that man killed his clone, and then he even got a marriage contract with Lyra.
It was just unforgivable!
Lucius raised his right hand. His fingers trembled with the urge to instantly execute Veydris for his failure.
But then, he stopped.
He raised the rose in his fingers to his nose once more, closing his eyes, and inhaling the scent deeply, forcing the manic rage down into the depths of his stomach.
When he opened his eyes again, the charming, serene smile had returned to his handsome face.
"He thinks he has won," Lucius whispered softly to the rose, "That by scurrying away and hiding like a rat behind the walls of the Valdris Royal Academy, he is safe from my grasp."
Lucius crushed the blood-red rose in his fist, letting the bruised petals fall into the wind.
"He is dead wrong." Lucius smirked, brushing the residual pollen from his fingers. "If the Old Dean wishes to shield my prey, then I will simply have to force them to hand him over."