COUNTER
Leonel honestly didn't expect himself to just figure it out. If he was that confident, he would have just done this from the very beginning without wasting his time thinking about so many other methods.
However, what he didn't expect was that he was more intelligent than he assumed himself to be. This was rare for him, honestly. Usually, he erred on the side of overconfidence. Maybe this was part of the changes brought about by his new Dream Force Sovereignty Path.
But Leonel didn't think it was so simple. It wasn't really that he had underestimated himself. Rather, he just happened to have the exact set of information he needed to deduce exactly what was before him.
In a lot of ways, this was a huge coincidence.
If he were to describe the weak of the Sea Gods in a single line, it would be as follows.
They were trying to replace the function of Earth Force and had failed to do so perfectly.
As such, they had a weakness that they carried around with them. Ironically, it was a weakness that hurt the absolute strongest of them the most.
When Leonel first broke through to the Life State with his Dream Force, it was because he had comprehended the function Earth Force served on all worlds.
It was an anchor, an existence that allowed all other surrounding Forces to gather and use its stability as a foundation to lean on.
This was never more obvious than it was in Incomplete Worlds. This text is property of Nô/velD/rama.Org.
Why was the vastness of space bereft of Force? Why did Force only accumulate on Planets?
This was an open secret that not many could deduce. Even Leonel had taken many years before he finally put two and two together. And it was only after succeeding that he could finally use Earth Force to its full potential.
The only unfortunate part was that Leonel didn't have any methods of maximizing his use of Earth Force right now, aside from his Metal Body. When it came to actually using and executing with Earth Force, it was crude at best, which was why it had sat on the back burner for many of his battles.
He had had thoughts of exchanging for a technique from the Life Tablet for a long while now. It had been a very long time since he did so, and since he gained the Tablet, he had accumulated a large number of points.
It was just that he was truly too busy, and one thing after another seemed to come up constantly.
What he didn't expect was to suddenly run into such a thing. Because the weight of this discovery might carry into the future for him in ways that he couldn't see just yet.
If he was correct, then he was fairly certain that he had about 80% of the story at the very least.
In a distance past, the Sea Gods were likely naturally a Race with his Water Force affinity. However, as they grew, they likely also felt that this was a limitation.
The ocean had a great amount of Water Force in it, but it was a lot like neutral Force in the way that it functioned.
Unless it was a special lake or river, or one put a lot of effort into purifying and barring off a region, the ocean was just a huge amalgamation of countless different types of Water Force.
Plus, even if they were a Race with great affinity for just one element, they were still humanoids and not beasts. That meant that they were often born with Ability Indexes and other affinities that couldn't be properly used in the water.
In order to combat this, at least in Leonel's speculation, the Sea Gods wanted to turn their oceans into a replica of earth.
Essentially, they wanted a method of binding other Forces and attracting it to the ocean, much like planets could act as anchors for Forces as well.
Surprisingly, they succeeded.
Unfortunately, it came at a price.
It was likely that an abundance of freshwater weakened them greatly, but not in an obvious way. Their bodies were fine, but their Force control became skewed wildly.
To make a complicated matter simple, while they had succeeded in replicating the function Earth Force served on planets, they had failed to replicate an identical function.
The way Forces interacted when dissolved into Water was much different from the way it reacted naturally in the air.
They had cultivated methods to produce good effects when in the presence of saltwater, but by extension they lost the ability to do the same in a normal environment.
There was an obvious reason, too.
Earth Force acted as an anchor for other Forces, true. But these other Forces weren't diffused into the earth. Instead, they just settled down across its surface.
The method the Sea Gods used obviously required the Force to be inside the water, or else how would they remain underwater? It was completely necessary.
In the end, they ended up handicapping themselves.
This was a huge weakness, almost inconceivably so. That meant that without saltwater, the strongest of the Sea Gods couldn't even begin to exhibit their true strength.
They would have to attempt to terraform a planet like they did here, or they would have to carry around large reserves that they could immediately deploy into a Domain of some sort.
But this only made Leonel grin. That was because the other reason he had figured this out so quickly was precisely because of his first major breakthrough in Earth Force. That breakthrough being the importance of Earth Force in the body, and its relation to minerals and vital metals that kept one in good health.
Wasn't the sea of the Sea Gods a perfect one-to-one relationship with this concept?
The salt was only part of the equation. In all likelihood, the ocean was pumped full of all sorts of other minerals as well.
So what would happen if Leonel countered it with his Earth Force?