As a cultivator, Sorin was no stranger to seclusion and even less so to extended periods of concentration without rest. Even so, his calculations took the better part of two months. That was with the help of Ophiuchan Simulation and with Mordecai’s occasional insights.

Lorimer lasted about a week before he scurried off to find Gareth. After being cleared by the Night Hawk, he was free to roam the city and even spend money as long as he broke no local laws.

It didn’t take long for Sorin to discover that ten thousand poisons couldn’t reasonably fit into a wraparound spherical structure. Five thousand poisons at most could be accommodated, assuming they were all compatible. The rest would need to fit inside the sphere and provide internal support for the otherwise unwieldy spell structure.

Fitting together his entire collection of equivalent spell matrices turned out to be extremely easy. The problem was that there were too many combinations and not all over them were equally stable.

The more powerful the poisons involved, the stronger the supporting poisons had to be to stabilize it. It took tens of thousands of iterations, but eventually, Sorin was able to incorporate 4,950 different poisons into a spherical arrangement of moderate stability.

That was when it became brutally obvious that Mordecai’s theories and Sorin’s calculations were, in the end, mere simulations of reality. The ‘perfect’ droplet of runic poison Sorin produced collapsed almost instantly, filling the room was thousands of different toxins that he immediately reabsorbed into his body.

Whereas Mordecai forged his poisons with mana, Sorin mass produced with his blood with the simplest of thoughts. He made a few more tweaks before trying again, then a few dozen more times before confirming that it really wasn’t possible to incorporate all five of his hundred-poisons without expanding his poison collection.

What followed was a series of rigorous experiments where Sorin removed one of the hundred-poison anchors and whittled away supporting runes. He eventually produced a theoretically stable variant with 4560 unique poisons that remained stable for over 24 hours.

This time, the problem occurred when he tried incorporating the poison into his blood. The poison was aggressive but nothing he’d never seen before, but problems occurred it contacted the corruption in his blood, causing an explosion that ripped apart a third of his body and destroyed all the bones in his right arm.

Sorin spent two full weeks rebuilding himself and discovering that his regeneration was beyond monstrous. To a Flesh-Sanctification cultivator, losing sanctified flesh was one of the most difficult injuries to recover from, but losing their supporting bones came in close second.

Normally, specialized life mages and absurdly expensive potions were required to rebuild the bones step by step over several months. Yet for Sorin, it was as simple as imbibing three-star poisons to generate vitality that regrew his bones, his organs, and even the sanctified flesh he’d lost in the explosion.

The experience was a rude awakening, one that forced Sorin to abandon a second hundred-poison, leaving only the minimum three hundred-poisons to complete a spherical structure. He whittled the supporting runes down to 4,100 before rigorously testing the position with concentrated corruption independent of his tarnished blood.

Weeks passed as he continuously adapted and reworked the runic structure, eventually leaving him with only 3,999 of his available poisons.

This is it. This is the one. A fully stable prototype. A combination of 3 hundred-poisons to produce a higher-level equivalent.

Still nervous but determined to see this experiment through, Sorin used his blood to assemble the poison inside his body, aiming to replace his entire blood stream one tiny molecule at a time.

The new poisons was ruby red and was based on Gorgon’s Lament, Eater of All, and Night Lily’s chains. He dubbed the temporary poison Red-Eyed Devourer, a name that would become famous should he manage to fully replace his blood.

Each new droplet of Red-Eyed Devourer ate away at Sorin’s blood stores and attacked his mana pathways, organs, bones, and even his sanctified flesh.

It took a day for his body to adapt just a single drop of the powerful poison, and a week to adapt to a fully thimble. Once the amount of converted blood reached a full litre, his organs began to actively dissolve. New portions regrew thanks to his S-ranked regenerative abilities, this time with increasingly sanctified flesh that could resist the new poison.

It took an agonizing week to convert all his organs. Only then was he able to increase the amount of Red-Eyed Devourer in his blood to two litres, at which time his bones began actively disintegrating. Their tarnished runes warped and shifted to create sanctified runes that could support his increasingly divine essence.

Finally, Sorin converted the remainder of his blood. Tiny points appeared inside his blood vessels as the conversion was completed. His blood hungrily absorbed energy from his surroundings and thickened several fold.

Golden strands appeared inside his flesh, further strengthening his sanctification level. This continued until his flesh reached 30% sanctification and the process stopped entirely. His body clearly wanted to keep transforming, but a blockage existed that prevented this from happening.

This blockage was none other than the Gate of Expanse, the second threshold that Flesh-Sanctification cultivators had to deal with before advancing. Opening the gate would result in the amplification of a cultivator’s spirit. This amplification was dependent on how thoroughly the gate was opened.

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Sorin didn’t immediately open the gate and instead spent the next few days recovering. He produced a large amount of blood in advance for Mordecai to feed to the queen and met with Lorimer and Gareth, who would keep watch as he broke through.

Preparations complete, Sorin injected a whole vial of his perfected Expanse Tincture into the gate’s approximate physical location and impacted the gate with his tarnished divinity. It opened a crack, and a new spiritual representation of himself opened its eyes inside an infinite world.

In this world, there were countless stars and an immeasurable amount of space. That limitless expanse pulled on his spirit and attempted to stretch it apart, and it took a significant amount of willpower for Sorin to prevent his spirituality from leaking out.

Before Sorin’s body was an ancient gate. The gate was cracked due to his injection of the Expanse Tincture, leaking out a large amount of spiritual energy.

Simultaneously, Sorin noted an interesting development that no one in his clan had ever noticed while breaking through. Beneath his spiritual representation was a gate through which dense divinity and corruption poured forth. It was none other than the Gate of Initiation he’d opened when breaking through the Flesh Sanctification Realm.

And according to everything he knew, it should not be there.

The stone gate was falling apart and gradually feeding spirituality into Sorin’s body. There were two parts to opening the gate, the first breaking down the gate to maximize the throughput of spiritual energy. The second part was to drink in as much energy as possible before finally giving in to the formless urge to expand.

Due to the cracks created by the Expanse Tincture, Sorin only had to send a wave of poison into the door to widen the existing cracks into pits that merged together to fully clear out the door. It was amazing how easy opening the gate was with the Gate of Initiation supporting him when it shouldn’t. It was like a hidden lock, a hurdle that could never be overcome if he hadn’t fully destroyed the Gate of Initiation during his initial breakthrough.

Power gushed through the gate and filled his spirit to bursting.

He wanted to break free. He wanted to expand.

Still., Sorin wasn’t satisfied by such a breakthrough, so he clamped down on his spiritual representation with his willpower and refused to allow a hint of spirituality to leak out. The more he accumulated now, the better his future growth would be.

He inspected the door with his limited senses and saw that like before, the door didn’t just consist of a door, but a frame as well. It was a restriction on his consciousness, a shackle preventing it from exceeding its predetermined mortal limits.

Sorin hated it. He wanted it gone.

The gate was many time stronger than the Gate of Initiation. Had he not shattered the Gate of Initiation in the first place, he would have been helpless to harm it.

But having opened the gate, Sorin had nigh endless energy. This enabled him to pour every ounce of his cultivation, every hint of tarnished divinity his body had to offer into the gate. And as he replenished it, he sent in more.

His poisons were an endless tide. They infiltrated the stone and the runes making up the framework, washing away at it wave by wave until finally, small chips began to fall. The change was minute, but it heralded the beginning of the end.

Through these tiny openings, Sorin’s mana was able to infiltrate the gate and attack it runes. He followed the runes until he reached a chain heading into the sky. That chain joined with other chains, forming a network so dense that even his superior spirituality and Ophiuchan simulation couldn’t fully process it.

Strictly speaking, these chains were invisible. They could not normally be seen without greatly expanded spiritual senses that exceeded mortal limits. But now that the door was gone and the frame was chipped, his poisons had free rein to explore the physical makeup of the gate and all that lay beyond it.

Most of the runic framework protecting the doorframe is simple enough to break through, thought Sorin as he mobilized his four-hundred poison, Red-Eyed Devourer to eat away at the powerful gate runes. What he couldn’t break, he corrupted, modifying it slightly to introduce a weakness.

Thanks to the stream of endless divinity and corruption feeding into him, he had no issue breaking down the gate, bit by bit, until finally, only a faint outline remained.

Sorin felt his spirit suddenly swell and expand as the last of the door shattered like a pain of broken glass. His spirit expanded uncontrollably, and the vast network of chains appeared before his eyes.

The chains that had been binding the door were golden and were connected to roughly five thousand separate locations. In addition, there were billions of spectral chains of possibility. Each chain was tied to a single human.

The sight of it caused Sorin’s blood to boil. What had humanity done to deserve such punishment?

Sorin’s vision was fading as his spiritual representation faded to merge with his now endless Gate of Expanse.

At the limits of his spiritual vision, he saw a golden mountain. It was a fading divine relic of the past age now festering with corruption.

It’s the anchor, Sorin realized upon seeing the edifice to a broken past. It’s the block holding all of us back. I might have cleared my gate, but its still holding back the rest of us.

Sorin wasn’t a violent person as a general rule, but the sight of the anchor overwhelmed him with an urge to retaliate. He wasn’t satisfied with breaking free. He wanted to retaliate against humanity’s oppressors and break the chains holding back their entire species.

The mountain was at the edge of his fading perception, so attacking it was out of the question. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t act on it indirectly. He had the perfect conduit, after all: a single chain, flitting about in the wind after he’d forcefully destroyed his own Gate of Expanse.

Sorin reached deep into himself and his newest poison knew what needed to be done. He infused Red-Eyed Devourer with all the corruption at his disposal and sent it surging into the flapping chain.

His control over mana was limited in this place and was rapidly falling due to his representation’s disintegration, but this was poison. Less was more, and thanks to Autogenesis, anything his poison consumed would replenish it.

The problem with this approach was that if his were cut off from his main body, they wouldn’t survive for long.

No, that was before. Now, it’s different.

His increased spirituality was boundless, just like his mana. All he needed to do was tear apart a tiny piece of his own spirit and infuse it into the poison.

It wasn’t a clone. It couldn’t act indecently and needed to be given instructions to act on.

That said, he didn’t really need complicated instructions. Grow. Break the chains. Attack the mountain. Destroy them.

A painful sensation ripped through his body as a tiny piece of his spirituality joined with his most powerful poison and infected the chain.

It was only a small drop, but it was endless. It wouldn’t stop until it accomplished its mission.