The Fifth Enlightenment is the best breakthrough for a Divine.
People love to talk about Divine Ranks as if they are neat little ladders you climb with effort and perseverance, but that is not how reality works at all. The moment someone begins approaching the upper thresholds of Divinity they realize very quickly that the rules governing existence become… unpleasantly strict.
The Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Enlightenment are massive walls. Most Divines spend their entire lives slamming into them.
To explain this properly, I should probably start with the ways someone can even increase their Divine Rank in the first place, because contrary to what legends love to claim, advancement in Divinity is not some inspirational journey of hard work and friendship.
There are exactly three ways.
The first method was the most reliable one in the ancient eras, and that involves traveling to the Islands of Inexpelcae, where the Aquatic Goddesses once presided over a series of trials designed specifically to test the limits of a being's Divinity. If someone managed to complete those trials, the Goddesses would increase that person's Divinity percentage directly, allowing them to progress through the Enlightenment ranks far more efficiently than ordinary training.
In simpler terms, they cheated the system for you. Of course, that method became entirely useless after Stephos' charming little family incident.
His son slaughtered the Aquatic Goddesses and stripped nearly all Divinity from the world in the process, which means the Islands of Inexpelcae are now little more than vacation islands.
So that option is gone completely.
The second method is the one most people talk about because it sounds heroic, and that is simple training.
You hone your body, you refine your mind, you exercise your Divinity and you push yourself until your existence begins to resonate more strongly with the fundamental laws that created you. Eventually, after enough time, you break through.
Mortals hate this method because it takes centuries. Immortals and Divine Beings tolerate it because they can live for thousands of years.
But here is the inconvenient truth most people conveniently forget to mention: training alone only reliably gets you to the Fourth Enlightenment. Beyond that point, the system stops being cooperative.
The third method is Forced Ascension. Now this one is… unpleasant.
Forced Ascension is exactly what it sounds like: you violently push your Divinity beyond its limits through external catalysts, rituals or catastrophic energy injections until your existence forcibly crosses into the next Enlightenment tier.
It can work. Sometimes.
The problem is that the success rate is so catastrophically low that most Divines who attempt it simply die. Also, it only works on Divine Beings in the first place. Mortals attempting Forced Ascension tend to detonate before they even reach the Second or Third Enlightenment.
So yes, technically there are three methods. But realistically, only one of them is viable now which is training. Which brings us to the real problem; the Enlightenment tiers themselves.
The First, Second, and Third Enlightenment are relatively straightforward. If someone pushes their body, mind and Divinity to the extreme limits of what they can handle, those breakthroughs happen naturally.
The First Enlightenment is basically the moment a being truly begins to awaken to their Divinity. The Second is refinement. The Third is stabilization.
By the time someone reaches the Third Enlightenment, their Divinity has already reached a high level of integration with their body and soul.
Then comes the Fourth Enlightenment.
At that stage, a Divine finally experiences a complete realization of their capabilities, unlocking the full potential of their Base Tethers, their Divinity flow and the metaphysical structure of their being. Most people consider the Fourth Enlightenment to be the peak and in a way, they are correct.
Because that is where ninety percent of Divines remain forever.
You see, when someone reaches the Fourth Enlightenment, their Divinity percentage is already sitting at ninety-nine percent. Which means they are technically only one percent away from the Fifth Enlightenment.
Sounds easy, right?
Wrong.
That final one percent is the single most difficult threshold in the entire Divine Ranking system. Even when the Aquatic Goddesses still existed and were actively helping Divines progress, they could not push anyone past that barrier.
They could help someone reach the Second, Third and Fourth but the Fifth?
That had to be earned and the reason for that is something called a Codex.
To break through into the Fifth Enlightenment, a Divine must create a Codex.
In case you forgot, Reader From Behind The Curtains, a Codex is essentially a series of metaphysical enchantments imprinted into your existence after you accomplish something that should have been impossible. The universe itself recognizes that act and the resulting phenomenon becomes encoded into your system as a Codex. That Codex then becomes the foundation of what we call an Overwrite.
Overwrites are the defining feature of higher Divines. They are alterations to reality itself.
However, there's an inconvenient detail most Divines learn too late: if someone created a Codex before reaching the Fourth Enlightenment, that Codex becomes insufficient for the Fifth.
They must create another one worthy of overwriting the rules of reality itself. This is why so many Divines die trying.
The kind of feats required to produce a Codex at that level are almost always lethal. For instance, Darling obtained his Codex The Ingenious Prince by outsmarting and surviving against a Minor Deity. That was enough to carve a metaphysical record into reality.
That is the level of absurdity we are talking about.
When a Fourth Enlightenment Divine finally completes a Codex capable of supporting an Overwrite, their Divinity shatters that final one percent barrier and they ascend to the Fifth Enlightenment. When that happens, literally everything changes. The power increase alone is monstrous.
Between the First and Second Enlightenment, the increase is roughly 5x. Between the Second and Third, it's about 10x. From the Third to the Fourth, the jump is around 20x. But the moment someone reaches the Fifth Enlightenment, their power increases by 100x.
The difference between a Fourth Enlightenment Divine and a Fifth Enlightenment Divine is so vast that it might as well be an entirely different species. That is exactly why lower Divines almost never defeat higher ones unless the higher being's Overwrite is weak or incomplete.
Unfortunately for us, the giant Elyonari is fighting possessed a World Overwrite, which is nearly ten times stronger than the more common Enhancement Overwrites.
I also know exactly what Elyonari's attempting.
When a Divine is on the verge of creating a Codex strong enough to cross the final threshold, their entire existence begins resonating with possibility. But that moment is also when most of them die.
The impossible task required to form that Codex is usually the very thing that kills them. And Elyonari, stubborn Verdarite that she is, already decided exactly what her impossible task would be.
She was going to kill that monster alone.
Honestly, even with my Omniscient perception split across six separate consciousness streams, I couldn't help sighing quietly to myself as the debris of an entire sky castle continued raining down around us.
Because when Elyonari Mintheris decides something like that, convincing her otherwise becomes considerably more difficult than killing the giant.