Chương 462: Breadcrumbs

When my consciousness snapped back from the vision, my physical body was still sitting cross-legged in the empty void of Sector Z-99. I opened my physical eyes, gasping for breath as my star-cores spun frantically to re-stabilize my equilibrium. My dark cloak was soaked in cold sweat, and a thin trickle of dark blood leaked from my nose onto my armor. The memory of the auburn-haired woman and my two children being vaporized by that High Court orbital beam still burned in my chest like white-hot acid.

I didn't stay silent. I activated my communication slate, opening a direct, high-frequency telepathic conference with Kasian, Jeeves, Edward, and Eliza back in Bastion.

"Master Eren?" Jeeves' voice came through immediately, laced with subtle concern.

"Your biological and spiritual metrics spiked into critical distress for roughly twelve seconds. What happened at the coordinates?" I took a slow, steadying breath, wiping the blood from my chin.

"I found something. Or rather, something found me." For the next twenty minutes, I laid out every single detail of the experience: the ten hours of deep void meditation, the appearance of the mysterious yellowed paper fragment inside my Inner World, and the terrifying, interactive vision that had pulled my consciousness into an ancient past life right before its death. The communication link went dead silent as my team processed the metadata.

"An interactive soul-memory..." Kasian's spectral voice murmured, full of ancient awe.

"Master Eren, you did not experience a standard hallucination or an external psychic illusion. Perhaps you have witnessed… a soul-scar."

"A soul-scar?" I asked, leaning back against the empty space. Edward chimed in, his [Thirst for Knowledge] skill humming with excitement across the link.

"Lord Eren, consider the physics of the Wheel of Reincarnation we discussed. When a soul crosses the Wheel, its outer memory-lattice is stripped away. But Vael has confirmed that the immortal central core retains the scars of your original Will." Edward's voice quickened as his analytical mind assembled the pieces.

"You are sitting at the exact nodal intersection where the three Dark Essence rivers meet. That background energy is ancient, dating back to before the First Shattering. By meditating there for ten hours, your expanded soul gate acted like a tuning fork, drawing out a dormant memory-fragment embedded in your own soul-scars."

"And the timing of the memory," Eliza added thoughtfully from her medical lab.

"You said the vision placed you in that body roughly three minutes before the Transcendent's strike hit. In high-tier spiritual trauma, the moment of death leaves the deepest, most violent imprint on a soul gate. The paper fragment was a record of your past incarnation's final moments." I sat quietly in the void, my analytical mind examining the implications of their theory. The horror of the vision had shaken me, but beneath the lingering emotional shock, a brilliant, revolutionary realization took shape.

"If these paper fragments are interactive records of my past incarnations," I mused slowly, a sharp glint returning to my eyes, "then every vision is a direct, hands-on masterclass."

"How so, Master?" Jeeves asked.

"In that vision, I was in a completely different body," I explained, my voice growing energized.

"I felt that cultivator's core-rotations. I felt his unique elemental affinities, his vector-slopes, and his martial habits. If I can learn to navigate these visions without being overwhelmed by the emotional trauma, I can directly experience dozens of ancient cultivation methods, lost martial arts, and pre-Shattering spell structures firsthand…"

"It would be the ultimate training ground," Kasian agreed, his spectral eyes flashing.

"A direct bridge to your ancient lineage."

"I'm going back in," I decided cleanly.

"I want to test this theory. Keep monitoring things from Bastion."

"Understood, Master," Jeeves replied.

"Proceed with caution." I closed the comm-link, took a deep breath, and closed my physical eyes once more. I locked my [Primordial Shell] into zero-friction stasis and resumed my deep void meditation, focusing my zeroth-tier [Symphony of the Animus Arch] on the background Dark Essence highway flowing through the empty coordinates. This time, because my foundation knew the frequency, the process took less time. After eight hours of continuous, patient focus, a microscopic ripple flared inside my Inner World.

I shifted my consciousness inward. Hovering above the emerald-green grass of my inner meadow, right beside the floating Primordial Spark, was a second yellowed paper fragment. Gluttony's hydra heads poked out from behind their basalt pillar, watching the paper with nervous curiosity. I didn't hesitate. I walked up to the second fragment, wove my mental fortress tight, and reached out with my [Lattice Perception] to touch the parchment. Reality shattered once more. The transition was far less jarring this time.

Because I anticipated the shift, I maintained absolute, conscious control over my thoughts as my perspective was pulled into a new host body. I opened my eyes, gasping as a harsh, freezing wind whipped across my face. I was standing on the narrow stone parapet of a high mountain fortress, surrounded by jagged peaks of blue ice. Above me, the sky was a swirling vortex of dark storm clouds crackling with violet lightning. I looked down at my hands.

They were the slender, calloused hands of a fifteen-year-old boy, clad in tattered blue training robes embroidered with a soaring crane emblem. I scanned the host body's core conduits in a fraction of a millisecond. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. The boy was a prodigy of high-frequency kinetic lightning and fluid wind-stepping.

His Star-Core was small but spun at an absurd, terrifying velocity, cycling a volatile, electric-blue Mana that made his nerve endings hum with near-instantaneous reaction speed. Before I could fully memorize the core-rotations, a deafening roar shook the mountain. Down in the valley below, an army of massive, hundred-foot-tall obsidian war-golems was smashing through the sect's outer gates.

Violet plasma lances were raining down on the mountain spires, collapsing the ancient temples into avalanches of burning stone.

"Disciple!" An older swordsman in shredded robes yelled from the stairway behind me, blood pouring from a severed shoulder.

"The defensive wards have fallen! Take the library slates and flee through the southern pass!" Before the older swordsman could finish his sentence, a gargantuan, mile-long kinetic lance of dark lead-alloy dropped from the clouds, falling toward our mountain peak at terminal velocity. The strike carried the unmistakable, unyielding authority of a high-tier Transcendent orbital barrage. I had less than ten seconds before the entire mountain range was vaporized.

I didn't try to flee, and I didn't waste time panicking. Instead, I used every single microsecond to learn. I took full control of the young disciple's body, opening his core conduits to absolute maximum throughput. I channeled his volatile kinetic lightning into his leg-channels, executing his sect's high-tier movement technique: The Storm-Crane Step. The sensation was incredible. The boy's movement didn't rely on spatial deletion or gravity manipulation.

It relied on high-frequency electrical pulses that stimulated the molecular lattice of the surrounding air, allowing him to step across the stone parapet at three times the speed of sound with zero kinetic resistance. I memorized the exact nerve-firing patterns. I recorded the micro-conduit rotations that prevented his legs from tearing apart under the acceleration.

Two seconds before the lead-alloy lance struck the peak, I drew the boy's training sword, channeling his volatile lightning into the blade, and swung an upward counter-strike toward the sky. The sword released a soaring, magnificent crescent of violet lightning that cut through the lower clouds like a razor. Then, the lead-alloy lance slammed into the mountain. The world turned into a blinding, white-hot nova of kinetic destruction.

The mountain peak shattered into dust, the boy's physical frame disintegrating in a fraction of a millisecond. My consciousness was yanked out of the vision, snapping smoothly back across causality into my Inner World. I opened my physical eyes on the green meadow, panting softly. There was no lingering emotional trauma this time. I had observed the boy's death with a cold, analytical detachment. I immediately stood up, walking across the green grass, and channeled a thread of my own Mana into my leg-conduits.

Because my Tier 9 physical body was composed of conceptual matter held together by soul-will, my flesh was infinitely more malleable than the vision's. I replicated the boy's Storm-Crane Step, pulsing electrical Mana through my conduits. I blurred across the green meadow at three times the speed of sound, leaving behind a faint trail of harmless, violet sparks. A wide, excited grin spread across my face.

"It works. The techniques can be directly imported… and my Soul seems entirely in sync… it feels even stronger than in the vision…" I sat back down on the grass, eager to continue. I rested for two hours, letting my conduits stabilize beneath the warm celestial light of the Primordial Spark, before returning my consciousness to my physical body in the deep void. I resumed my meditation, opening my zeroth-tier [Symphony of the Animus Arch] to synchronize with the Dark Essence highway once more.

Ten hours later, a third paper fragment materialized in my Inner World. I entered the third vision with complete, effortless familiarity. I opened my eyes, feeling a profound, heavy ache in my bones. I looked down at my hands. They were the withered, wrinkled hands of an ancient man, covered in deep scars and age spots. I was clad in simple, coarse hemp robes, sitting cross-legged on a dusty dirt road in the center of an unpaved mountain pass. I scanned the host body's core.

The old man possessed almost zero active Mana. His star-cores were ancient, calcified, and barely rotating. Yet, his physical body carried an extraordinary, pre-Shattering martial art: The Resonance of the Iron Marrow. The old man had spent three centuries conditioning his skeleton, aligning the mineral density of his bones to the exact frequency of the surrounding stone. He didn't use Mana to strike; he used physical, structural resonance to shatter matter at the atomic level.

A hundred yards down the pass, a chittering, screeching swarm of thousands of chitinous void-beetles was surging up the road, threatening a small village of unarmed refugees huddled behind the pass. The old man stood up slowly, his joints popping with dry, wooden clicks.

"Hold the pass," the old man's raspy voice muttered through my throat. I took control of his withered frame, stepping into his ancient martial stance. When the first wave of armored void-beetles leaped toward my chest, I didn't cast a spell. I simply tapped the air with my index finger, sending a micro-vibration through the atmosphere. The physical vibration hit the lead beetle's shell.

A split-second later, the resonance traveled through its chitinous armor, causing its entire internal skeleton to shatter into fine powder. The beetle collapsed mid-air, dead before it touched the dirt. For three minutes, I used the old man's withered body to hold the mountain pass against thousands of monsters, dancing through the swarm with minimal, effortless finger-taps and bone-strikes that obliterated carapaces like fragile glass.

Finally, three massive, armored beetle-matriarchs converged on the road, their razor-sharp mandibles snapping through the old man's exhausted defenses, crushing his ribcage into the dust. I snapped back to my Inner World. I stood up in the green meadow, my optical arrays blazing with immense, fiery excitement. I raised my gauntleted right hand, channeling the old man's Resonance of the Iron Marrow directly into my [Primordial Shell]. I tapped the air with my index finger.

A shockwave of high-frequency physical resonance rippled across the meadow, neatly cleaving a boulder two miles away into two flawless, mirror-smooth halves with zero expenditure. I opened my communication slate, linking back up with Kasian, Jeeves, and Edward in Bastion.

"Edward," I said, my voice full of energetic focus.

"The visions aren't just random past lives."

"What did you discover, Lord Eren?" Edward asked eagerly.

"In all three visions, the host bodies lived and died near active tributaries of the Dark Essence highway," I revealed.

"The yellowed paper fragments aren't just memories; they are almost like… navigational breadcrumbs left behind by my previous incarnations across the cycles… Each fragment carries a subtle coordinate vector that points deeper into the veil."

"Navigational breadcrumbs across lifetimes..." Kasian gasped, his spectral projection flaring with immense awe.

"Master Eren, are you saying your previous incarnations were leaving a trail for you to follow?" I looked out at the empty, starlit void around my physical body, a slow, fierce, and utterly fearless smile spreading across my face. The Well of Origin was waiting. With every fragment I decoded, my martial repertoire expanded, my body's malleability grew, and I took another step closer to unlocking the ultimate furnace of my lineage.

I took a deep breath, adjusted my dark cloak, and closed my eyes to begin the next meditation cycle.