MANA CORE

The key to this change was the title of Wise Star Order. Leonel thought a lot about it. In fact, he had spent an entire ten years on exactly this problem.

What did it mean to be a Star Order? What did it mean to be a Wise Star Order?

Leonel had his answer.

The light in Leonel's eyes glowed even brighter.

When Leonel first awakened his Star Order, officially becoming a Wise Star Order, he had felt it more clearly than he ever had before.

However, it was only thanks to Aina that he was truly able to understand.

The protocol that Aina created to allow his Lineage Factor to rely more on his soul than his body was precisely what he needed.

The core of a Wise Star Order was in their soul. In these years, Leonel had realized that precisely the difference between Star Orders and those who just carried the Northern Star Lineage Factor was how much their soul was involved in their strength.

Those in the latter group were existences who could only strengthen their bodies, pulling on the affinities granted to them to power themselves.

However, the former used their soul and bodies, reaching into a state and level the latter couldn't match up against.

This was why Star Orders were able to pull on much more power even from the weaker levels of the hierarchy... it was because they were able to access far more of the Envoy's power!

In that case, this meant that the key for Leonel to be able to become a Wise Sea Order resided in his heart.

He had not a single idea how to do this until he realized that he had the perfect medium...

His Mana Core.

From the beginning, the existence of the Mana Core had always been a bit of an anomaly to Leonel. He went through waves of using it heavily and then ignoring it because sometimes he would think of great methods to put it into action, and at other times his personal strength would long surpass those methods, making it difficult for him to do much of anything with it. In the latter cases, using it at all would have been more a waste of his time than anything else.

However, years ago now, he had made a great breakthrough.

Using his Mana Core and his comprehension of Force Arts, Leonel had been able to crush Patriarch Khafra and clear the Force Art Tower with great ease.

By using his Mana Core as a proxy and his soul to analyze the world, he was capable of creating the perfect Natural Force Arts, ones that were capable of countering the Force Art Tower near instantly every time.

Then there was his enlightened self... the version of himself that stopped holding back and pulled the Dream Asura bloodline out from its hidden depths...

It had to be remembered that Leonel's Mana Core hadn't always been the elaborate tree of Force Arts that it was now. It was once far more simple and bland, looking much more like a real core.

Leonel had never truly understood why his enlightened self had decided to change it to what it was now...

It was a looming tree with leaves that danced an array of colors, each one for the various Forces he had managed to comprehend and each one a complex Force Art of runes. The longer you looked, the more complicated it seemed to become.

The more Leonel thought about it, the more it reminded him of Natural Force Arts.

Runes... that was the name he had chosen to randomly give the markings on his two Innate Nodes, so he had transferred the name over to the Mana Core as well.

But weren't they just Natural Force Arts? Natural Force Arts perfectly tailored to one set of Forces? Natural Force Arts, if taken to their logical extreme...

Could replicate the effects of Innate Nodes as well?

This was a shocking realization, but it was one that Leonel also cared little about.

His interaction with El'Rion had told him that to the Gods, creating Innate Nodes was nothing special at all. If it was up to El'Rion, he could have ten Innate Nodes and it wouldn't even put a dent in the wealth of the Pluto Race.

No.

Why this really mattered was because this meant that Leonel had a perfect method to achieve exactly what he wanted. Right here and now.

The main quest wanted him to return the Sea God Verse back to its original state. He could sense the natural state so clearly through his Mana Core.

Using it to communicate with the world around him, his Mana Core began to changes.

Leaves of fire and space and darkness began to fall as though summer had just ended.

In their place, gorgeous leaves of bronze and sparkling sapphire began to grow.

The trunk was the same.

Its main body looked as though it had been carved out from brass, shimmering like gold, and on its body complex runes of radiant blue were carved in step by step.

Leonel could feel it clearly.

If before he could only speculate what it meant to be an Oracle, now it was all but certain.

What did it mean to be a Wise Sea Order?

You needed the foundation of a Wise Star Order to build upon.

It was the communication between the Star and the Sea that became the power of a Wise Sea Order.

If in one breath you could gaze into the Stars and in another, you could ground it in reality...

What part of the world would you not understand? What couldn't be in your grasp? What could your mind not control and what could you possibly not see through? owns all content.

BOOM!

Leonel's Dream Force tore through the barrier of the Creation State with such forcefulness that the world was nearly torn apart.

Slowly, the Zone began to crumble into motes of light as the Hidden Quest was cleared.