After having some more conversations with Hestia to soothe the lingering tension and reassure her of his caution, Adrian finally retreated to the quiet solitude of a private room.
He took a slow breath as the doors sealed shut, locking away the ambient noise of the thriving sanctuary outside.
With a flick of his wrist, a large barrel materialized from his spatial ring and settled onto the floor with a dull thud. It was filled with Origin Ink. Adrian raised his hand, and the white-grey liquid rose into the air, hovering like a suspended constellation waiting for his command.
He began to inscribe a compact time formation onto the floor of the chamber. As the intricate runic lines flowed from his fingertips, Adrian couldn't help but reflect on the stark differences between his current situation and the past.
Back when he had first pushed his mana reserves to one hundred million, he had been forced to hide within his suite in the Crimson Vital Sect's headquarters in the Andromeda Galaxy. At that time, he had layered the room with the heaviest spatial and concealment formations he could construct, paranoid that the ambient pressure of his cultivation or the mere presence of Origin Ink would be detected by Hestia, the sect elders, or the unseen scrying arrays of Major Sects. He had operated in a constant state of calculated fear, unsure of who was watching.
But here, in the Virelith Galaxy, that paranoia was completely gone. The Virelith Galaxy was entirely cut off from the prying eyes of the UNI-Sect and the cosmic titans. Furthermore, he no longer needed to hide his anomalies from his own people. The elders of the Crimson Vital Sect had already witnessed the impossible reality of the Origin Ink, and they had sworn secrecy. He trusted them, and more importantly, they were loyal to him.
The white-grey ink etched the final stabilizing rune into the floor, completing the compact time formation. But this was not merely a standard temporal array. The entire inner-zone base of the Azure Garden was already operating under the massive time formation Adrian had inscribed previously, where a single day in the outside world equaled four years inside.
What Adrian was doing now was something that bordered on arrogance against the laws of reality: he was stacking a localized time formation directly on top of an already active time formation.
It was a concept of "time within time." The multiplicative effect of such a layered temporal distortion would place an astronomical burden on the local spatial fabric. If he had attempted to construct this stacked anomaly within the Andromeda Galaxy, the resulting friction in the universal rules would have undoubtedly acted as a beacon, drawing the immediate gaze of Major Sect envoys or Astral Stage diviners. But here, insulated by the isolation of Virelith, reality's screams would go unheard.
Adrian placed a massive reserve of high-tier pure mana crystals at the center of the array to fuel the compounding temporal pressure, then stepped into the center and activated the formation.
The air inside the room instantly thickened, the ambient light shifting into a surreal, elongated spectrum as the dual temporal domains locked into synchronization.
Before beginning his cultivation, Adrian reached into his spatial ring and pulled out the scroll Hestia had purchased for him from the Universal Auction. He unrolled it carefully, scanning the dense knowledge held within.
It was a First-Stage willforce technique, specifically designed for a cultivator who had reached the Chime of Consciousness. As he infused a thread of his intent into the scroll, the knowledge flowed directly into his mind.
Adrian's eyes narrowed in focus. The technique was inherently defensive in nature, a method to weave raw willforce into a mental barrier. As the diagrams and structural logic of the technique imprinted themselves into his consciousness, a faint smile touched his lips.
"This is essentially the same Willforce Wall that Navira used against me in the Providence Hub," Adrian realized, comparing the knowledge from the scroll to the memories he had captured with his Source Eyes during their battle.
When Navira had defended against his crude barrage of willforce needles, she had woven a dense wall of intent. At the time, Adrian had managed to learn it.
Now, even though this scroll did not teach him a completely novel concept, it acted as a master blueprint. It showed him how the lower, foundational versions of the technique were structured, revealing the weaves and stabilizing anchors that transformed raw mental weight into a fortified shield. By understanding the steps, Navira's defense finally made complete sense to him.
With the logic of the First-Stage defensive weave successfully parsed and adapted to his Anchor-stage mind, Adrian set the scroll aside. He closed his eyes and turned his awareness inward, sinking deep into the expanse of his Source Seed.
It was time to cultivate. His objective was straightforward: he needed to push his mana capacity far beyond its current limit of one hundred million units.
Adrian reached into the chambers, holding his comprehended arcane concepts, extracting the necessary rule fragments. With practiced, effortless precision, he guided random fragments together, forcing them to harmonize and stabilize into a brand-new Ultimate-tier divine concept.
The moment the concept solidified within its chamber, a resonance echoed through his being. His Mana Sea expanded, permanently increasing its capacity by 10,000 mana units.
Adrian paused, bracing himself instinctively. In the past, this was the exact moment when the crushing backlash would hit him. Previously, the mental strain of forging an Ultimate-tier concept and enduring the resultant pressure on his expanding Mana Sea would leave his willforce completely exhausted. Even with his passive Willforce Recovery spell running continuously, he had only been able to create two Ultimate-tier concepts before being forced to stop and recover, hard-capping his daily growth at a mere 10,000 to 20,000 mana units.
Seconds ticked by. The newly expanded Mana Sea churned, and the newly forged Ultimate-tier concept pulsed brightly.
Yet, the agonizing mental strain never came.
Adrian opened his eyes, a look of genuine disbelief washing over his features before slowly transforming into fierce elation. He felt absolutely no willforce exhaustion. Not even a fraction of a strain.
The mysterious golden dot anchored deep within his mind pulsed with a quiet stability. The burden that had once crippled his mind was now nothing more than a gentle breeze against a mountain.
"If I don't feel any exhaustion..." Adrian's mind raced through the mathematical implications, his pulse quickening. "Then the old limitations no longer apply."
He immediately closed his eyes and put the theory to the test. He reached into his Source Seed and dismantled the divine concept he had just created and then forged a second Ultimate-tier divine concept. Then a third. Then a fourth.
Within a mere matter of minutes, he had seamlessly constructed multiple random Ultimate-tier divine concepts, each one permanently expanding his Mana Sea by 10,000 units. And still, his willforce remained an untroubled, boundless ocean. He was barely utilizing a fraction of his willforce…
The realization was staggering. If he could spend just a few minutes to create a random ultimate-tier divine concept without any fatigue, he could theoretically expand his mana capacity at an absurd velocity. He could forge hundreds of concepts a day, adding millions of mana units to his reserves in the span of a single waking cycle. If he pursued this path relentlessly, his mana capacity would expand so fast and so effortlessly that it defied all established laws of cultivation.
"There is no reason to hold back," Adrian concluded, his resolve hardening into focus. He severed all external perception and surrendered himself entirely to the grind.
Inside the stacked temporal isolation of the time formation, days blurred into months, and months bled into years. Adrian became a machine of pure conceptual creation. He forged Ultimate-tier divine concepts one after another, feeling the constant, explosive growth of his Mana Sea.
He fell into a trance-like rhythm: isolate rule fragments, force harmonization, solidify the concept, expand the sea, dismantle the divine concept, and immediately begin the next. His Anchor-stage mind absorbed the pressure, and his body hummed as the density of the mana within him began to exert a gravitational weight on his very physical structure.
Years passed within the stacked formation.
Then one day, Adrian slowly opened his eyes, the white-grey light within them so dense it briefly overwhelmed the ambient illumination of the private room. He exhaled a breath that caused the air pressure in the chamber to spike dramatically. For several long moments, he remained perfectly still, his consciousness turned inward toward the vast reservoir that had become something far greater than what he had once called a Mana Sea.
It had expanded to an incomprehensible scale, no longer feeling like a mere reservoir. He had crossed the threshold of one billion mana units. An amount of pure energy so staggering that even ancient monsters from Major Sects would need millions of years to reach this stage had been achieved by Adrian in a few years of internal time. In external time, it had not even been a few days.
With this level of mana, the exorbitant costs of Absolute Source Order and the draining toll of direct reality commands were no longer the suffocating limitations they had once been. He could warp reality repeatedly without fearing immediate depletion. Commands that once demanded strategic restraint now felt almost casual, provided he did not become careless with the unknown scale of the universe's tolls.
"Could I use my Source Form for a long period now? Could I cultivate with it?" Adrian thought as a series of increasingly reckless questions erupted within him. Until now, even with his hundred million mana units, he could not hold onto his Source Form for long. It had not been due to mana alone, but because of his limited willforce. His mind had not been able to bear the pressure of that state for extended periods.
And now, for the first time in his life, Adrian was in a state where both his mana and willforce had reached an extreme level.
A fierce excitement rose in his chest as he slowly steadied his breathing inside the isolated chamber. "Let me try it," Adrian whispered, his eyes gleaming with white-grey light.