I UNDERSTAND

Leonel was truly speechless. He had lost count of just how many times his father had pranked him in the past, but this just felt... ridiculous.

"Why the hell is my soul only at 0.17%?!"

Leonel shook the dictionary a bit as though he was grabbing his father's shoulders. Unexpectedly, or maybe expectedly, he received an answer.

"Your soul was mostly sealed in the past, any attempt that you might have made only released it in part, while what remained was still chained within you."

When Leonel heard this, he calmed a bit. But what he heard next made him feel helpless.

"In addition, there are layers to the soul. These layers can be looked at much like Force Manipulation. There are multiple Dimensions, and the soul is layered throughout each one. The stronger your soul is, the more Dimensions it is layered throughout.

"If you want to fully separate your soul from your body after birth, you have to first reach the Impetus State in Dream Force-Life State if you find yourself outside of an Incomplete World-and only then can you fully sense all the layers of your soul.

"Then, you can begin the process of true separation."

The reason why Leonel felt helpless after he heard this was because he was in the Impetus State now, but he was already on his way out of their Incomplete World. This place should still be in an Incomplete World, so he should be fine for now. But all of this essentially meant that he had to find a method to separate his soul from his body fully before all of this came to an end.

Judging by the situation of the humans, even in Complete Worlds, it was obvious that they didn't have such a method, so he couldn't expect to just stumble onto such a thing while roaming this world.

That meant that he would have to find this method on his own. Or would he?

Even if the true progression path his father had laid out couldn't be started until he checked off all of these boxes, that didn't mean that Velasco hadn't laid out a detailed plan for these individual tasks.

So, Leonel chose to ask, and luckily, his father didn't leave him hanging. And better than that, the fake digital voice that he was using in the past seemed to have been left there, so it really felt like his dad was speaking right to him.

"Meditate within the Dream Plane. The more you understand yourself, the easier it will be."

The words were vague and cryptic, but this told Leonel that there must be some sort of bar of comprehension that he had to clear.

After some hesitation, he chose to find an abandoned region before he used his Earth Force to bury himself deep underground. Only then did he enter the Segmented Cube.

He sat in the midst of a forest and entered a deep state of meditation. In a flash, he had appeared in the Dream Plane once again.

'Layers... sense of self...?'

Leonel thought deeply about what this would mean, but almost instantly, he understood the first. There was a vague line connecting his true self and the self that entered the Dream Plane. The Dream Plane was the Second Dimension itself, but his body...

When he focused on that vague line, he found that his body was being stretched across several planes of existence, pulled in countless directions. There was his body which was in the Third, his mind which was in the Fifth, his Forces which were in the Seventh.

This all confused Leonel, though. He had begun to stray away from the concepts of "Dimensions" a bit. Once he had accepted the Vast Bubble as a Complete World, he felt that their magic system was more "correct".

The Vast Bubble didn't use Dimensions, they used Stars as a gauge instead.

But what was odd about this was that Force Manipulation used Dimensions, and his father was obviously also using Dimensions. So who was...

It clicked.

'Those sons of bitches...' Leonel shook his head.

This was obviously another ploy by those Four Great Families to keep people in the dark. The less they understood about Dimensions and their weighted importance, the less likely they would be to grasp certain things.

Soon, these youths here would probably be like him, thinking the so-called "Gods" were obviously correct, and abandon their already adequate comprehension of progression and how progress should be made.

The Dimensions were important. Extremely so. And they actually seemed to be loosely based on Earth's physical sciences as well.

The idea of Dimensional Folds, of one step above being infinitely more powerful than the last...

Then it clicked for Leonel once again.

'To understand myself... should mean to comprehend just how much my soul is doing for me. It's being stretched in so many directions, supporting my existence in the Third Dimension, and even up to my Forces in the Seventh.

'It's so flexible. It's the very foundation of my life and it does so with ease, but that doesn't mean that it's working optimally either.'

Leonel meditated in silence, trying to understand what that might mean. His thoughts drifted and he thought of the first seven individuals that he had killed when he entered here, how their thoughts were so different from one another, and how they all knew and understood that absorbing the souls of others was bad not just morally, but for their own progression path as well.Content (C) Nôv/elDra/ma.Org.

And then he thought about how his soul seemed to be anchored to this place. It couldn't move across large distances from his location because...

'Because my body is an anchor holding it down...'

To separate the soul from the body. Didn't it mean to give the soul absolute freedom?

But he felt like he was missing something. It shouldn't just be absolute freedom, or else wouldn't he be essentially killing himself? If the connection to this soul and body was fully severed, his body would atrophy and die.

'I understand...'

Leonel's progression bar suddenly trembled, and from 0.17%, it began to skyrocket upward in 10% increments.