Even now, Ryker still felt that it was unbelievable. Watching the egg increase its talent like this, he felt that it was surreal.

He was correct about the fact the two he had found were far from the only two. He was quickly able to find three more, though their states of evolution were even worse than his own Contract.

Even so, it allowed the egg to firmly stabilize itself at the 7th Circle and even begin making some headway toward the third.

In truth, Ryker was actually already satisfied. The difference between the 6th and 7th was huge for an Elemental Spirit Beast, that was because there should be no issues to enter the God Realm.

Well, satisfied probably wasn’t the right word. Content was more accurate. This was the threshold where he could feel that he had progressed enough that the egg wouldn’t become an anchor in the future. He was already thinking more about what form he would have it take once it hatched.

But then he ran into another large pulse.

Ryker protected the egg to his back. This time, he caught his fall almost instantly, and his Divined Chains didn’t show signs of wilting away any time soon.

‘It’s already born,’ Ryker thought, a frown appearing on his face. ‘This is a bit troublesome.’

He had been over drafting his Spiritual Resonance for a while now. He was able to use his with much greater ease than most because Temporal Weave had moved the fuel necessary from his body to his soul, but that didn’t mean that he could use it endlessly. It was especially bad because he also had to continuously use Inductive Touch to keep himself safe from the Magma.

The consumption of his soul strength was enormous, and the appearance of this creature didn’t seem to bode well for that.

Elemental Spirit Beasts were notoriously difficult to deal with because they didn’t have to be corporeal if they didn’t want to be. The strongest of them could just as easily be beasts as they could be natural phenomena.

The only way Ryker had to deal with them currently was his Divined Chains. Spirit Energy would work against normal Elemental Spirit Beasts, but this one seemed to counter and devour all energy. That obviously wouldn’t work.

‘Not true…’ Ryker thought to himself. ‘The Domain of an Ascended should work, so if I use [Soul Ripple], I can mimic some of those effects.’

Ryker thought through his options, and by the time he had, the creature had already noticed his presence.

It hadn’t yet chosen its form, but it too seemed to be about to become a fox. It had the workings of ears and a long tail coming from its back. Other than that, it was just a nebula-like blob of violet energy.

Sensing the threat Ryker posed, it immediately shot out a beam of light that appeared before him in an instant.

Ryker waved a hand, and the energy was easily sealed away by his Divined Chains.

The silvery blue chains surged forward, wrapping around the beam in a criss crossing pattern and suddenly biting down. It shattered the attack, but Ryker shook his head.

That took way too much effort. It was better if he sealed the creature itself.

He immediately took action, but after the first interaction, the beast seemed ready. It turned and seemed like it was about to flee.

Ryker raised an eyebrow. These creatures shouldn’t be so intelligent, especially not right after birth. It was odd for it to have such a good reaction.

There was definitely something weird going on here.

BANG!

The creature was repelled back toward Ryker, a net of chains having appeared in its path. While chains that came directly from his body were stronger, that didn’t mean those he manifested from the air were useless.

Especially when it was against an infant Spirit Beast.

The cycle continued, and after it was caught, Ryker allowed his contract to absorb it.

‘Still not enough, huh?’

Ryker nodded, not feeling that it was too much of a surprise.

His grandfather was the only 7th Circle Talent in his Valorian family, even his own father was only a 6th Circle Talent. Talents above the 6th Circle didn’t just grow on trees. Every successive leap required something enormous.

“Be patient, little guy. We’re gonna do our best, but this is enough if that’s all there is.”

Ryker decided to focus on descending to the Earth Flame instead of increasing the talent of his best. So long as the egg was in his dantian, its evolution would slow to a crawl and he didn’t have to worry about it spontaneously hatching.

The egg was already quite happy with its gains, so this time it didn’t show any sort of dissatisfaction. The hints of closeness it gave off were even more obvious now. It already seemed attached to Ryker at the hip.

Ryker smiled and continued his descent.

The journey was smooth, even smoother than it had been in the past. That was because from time to time Ryker would use his Divined Chains to get past any particularly difficult hurdles, he could even alternate between using them and his Fire Type Spirit Energy just to conserve one or the other.

The mysterious violet energy that he had grasped a small part of had surprisingly made the use and execution of his Divined Chains far more powerful. Taking bits and pieces of how this energy seemed to be able to disrupt and disperse everything around it and apply it to his seals made his Divined Chains orders of magnitude more powerful, even when he was applying it to unrelated matters.

He was able to swiftly make it below, and soon the heat was so outrageous that even Inductive Touch showed signs of giving way.

By this point, there weren’t many of the meatballs left in Ryker’s mouth. He had truly gone all out to make it to this point, and he could only hope that it was worth it.

He looked at the piece of metal in his hands. It looked just the same as though it couldn’t feel the surrounding heat at all, and that was despite the fact Ryker hadn’t wasted any energy on protecting it.

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‘There’s a strong current here.’

Suddenly Ryker was falling through open air again. He was so used to it by this point that he reacted without any lag, but to his surprise, it wasn’t another egg.

He had just fallen out of a waterfall of lava and into an underground world.

The heat here was dense and lava flowed in rivers and pooled in lakes. The earth that sporadically appeared in some areas or formed large islands in others was practically painted a perpetual shade of crimson.

However, the lava wasn’t alone. There were rivers of ice blue akin to something right out of a fairytale on the opposite side of the space.

What was odd about these rivers of ice was that they were almost blue like condensed shards of ice, but rather than rising every which way, they followed a set pattern that was directly in contrast with the lava as though to complete the balancing act.

It was quite the beautiful scenery, but it confused Ryker.

‘A waterfall? If there’s one here, why is the lava up there so level? There has to be something feeding into it.’

That was the only logical explanation, but it also felt foolish. For a source to feed into the volcano to keep it level, it had to come from higher ground just by virtue of gravity’s existence. But where…

Ryker blinked, suddenly forgetting his distracting thoughts.

Far ahead, he saw a dense blue and bronze flame, it flickered with both colors.

‘Earth Flame.’

Ryker recognized it immediately, but the irony was that this Earth Flame looked like none of the ones he had read about, and its heat wasn’t as great as Ryker had expected either.

It was almost like the temperature had formed a perfect balance once again, and aside from high humidity, there was nothing else to worry about.

Even so, Ryker rushed toward it.

The Earth Flame was located in a network of vein patterns. Its size was actually quite substantial, and that was just the parts of it that Ryker could see.

It was actually inaccurate to call this the Earth Flame because the Earth Flame of a World was impossibly vast. It was akin to the entire core of a planet.

This was more like a small strand of hair, but it should give Ryker what he wanted.

After some observing, Ryker tossed the metal forward and then raised his hands. He began to draw several Spiritual Patterns in the air, trying to control the process as much as possible.

Ryker’s eyes glowed beneath the reflections of the flame. His soul was practically on its last legs already, and that was saying quite a bit considering his Pure Soul talent. But he would always have enough for this. He would push as much as he needed to.

The Silver Mirror had been the bane of his existence for too long. It was always one problem after another, after another.

He had had enough.

It was time for it to soar.

Inwardly, though, Ryker was worried.

All he had were speculations, a far cry from how prepared he had been before.

He had spent 18 years making a progression plan for his Silver Mirror, only to find out he had brought it down the wrong path. He had never truly grieved this mistake, but it was a blow that hit him hard.

Now, he wasn’t even sure what metals formulated his alloy he was melting down. All he knew was that there was a chance, and that was all he could grasp upon.

Where else would he find Time Type metals? He truly had no idea. This might be the only chance in all the Iterations.

It just had to be the right path.

‘It’s melting,’ Ryker’s eyes lit up.

He was almost embarrassed by his excitement. He already knew this would happen or else he wouldn’t go through so much trouble. An Earth Flame was no joke, and if not for the weird quirks of this place, Ryker would have died before he could stand so close to it.

He had wracked his brain for a while to come up with a method to stand near the Earth Flame and not die, but he never thought that it would actually end up being so easy.

Soon, the large rod became a large globule of molten metal floating with Ryker’s network of Spiritual Patterns, but it had still not separated.

Alloys worked together well for a reason. You couldn’t just melt it down and hope that they separated.

The easiest method was to separate them by melting point, but the alloy seemed so perfectly fused that there was no such separation. It completely melted as a single unit.

In that case…

Ryker’s Spiritual Patterns began to churn as he used a special Spiritual Cooking method. This process was usually reserved for preparation of highly poisonous plants or beasts for consumption, but in this process, it was the best method Ryker had.

Although Ryker had quite some knowledge in forging treasures, something like reversing the process of an alloy formation wasn’t a common practice. He would have to think outside the box.

Soon enough, he began to feel some separations in the metal. But it wasn’t just that. Not only could he feel the separations, but he began to learn about the processes that bonded them in the first place.

‘These techniques… are spectacular.’

It was no wonder the alloy was so powerful. This wasn’t just melting a few metals together, it was practically like taking Hydrogen and Oxygen and forming water out of it. It was beyond metallurgy; it was chemistry… no…

It was alchemy.

It took even more effort for Ryker to separate them thanks to this, but it also allowed him to sense something curious.

‘Is this the Dao as well? To think it could be incorporated into something so intricate…’

His understanding of the Dao until now was quite superficial, but he had always seen it as a large, overarching, macro sort of ability. He didn’t know that it could work on such a granular level. It was almost like this metal was its own iteration with its own Daos.

‘Fascinating…’

Ryker almost forgot about the Silver Mirror as he lost himself in this world and his thoughts from several days about came back.

He had questioned whether the Dao of Sealing was superior to the Dao of Time and Space or not. Understanding this was key to the progression of his comprehension into the future.

And now he felt like he had an answer…

His question was stupid to begin with.

There was no such thing as a superior Dao. The strength was decided by its wielder.

The Dao of Sealing wasn’t superior to the Dao of Time and Space because it could replicate it, nor was it inferior because it had to replicate it. Rather, a powerful enough Dao of Sealing could replicate a powerful Dao of Time and Space, while a weak one could only do the same for a weak Dao of Time and Space.

Looking at the complex inner workings of this alloy, it clicked for Ryker because of one simple reason.

This Dao was more profound than anything he had seen from the Dao of Seal or the Dao of Time and Space, but he was fairly certain that this Dao was most accurately called the Dao of Earth.

Compared to the grandiose names of the first time, it had no business exhibiting such awe-inspiring abilities. And yet here it was, doing exactly that.

Ryker felt his body feel so much lighter when he reached this conclusion, but he was so focused that he hardly gave it a glance.

Slowly, he began to undo the threaded lines piece by piece until, finally, the large rod was broken up into three thick globules of metal, each one easily over a foot wide.

Ryker had brought a substantial piece of the metal down because he had no intention of making more than one trip if he could help it.

And this was certainly more than enough for the current Silver Mirror. The question was, what were these metals?

Now that they were separated, Ryker could sense the quirks and characteristics of the three metals far more easily. Only then did he breathe out a sigh of relief.

One of them really was a Time Type ore, and though it was the smallest by volume, it also exuded the sharpest aura.

In addition, it was perfect for what Ryker needed.

This Time Type ore seemed to have a stabilizing aura to it, as though it was designed not to shift or change time, but to control it. These seemed to describe the same things in different words, but the control aspect was key.

Right now, Ryker’s Silver Mirror had two affinities, and because Ryker had only stoked the flames of one, the latter, that being the Time Type, was growing unstable.

This stabilizing factor was exactly what it needed, and even beyond that, it was an excellent path for growth as well.

‘Finally,’ Ryker exhaled a breath. Soon, he would finally be rid of this curse that had plagued him for so long.

Ryker looked toward the other two floating orbs and raised an eyebrow.

One of them was related to space. It was powerful, but not something that Ryker could make use of. Spatial Type Beasts were impossibly rare, and unless he found one, controlling the element was a pipe dream.

The last was intriguing, though… because it seemed related to sealing.

With the Dao protecting it undone, Ryker was fairly certain that he could forge with these metals now. He wondered how a chain formed from this sealing metal would function…

Just as Ryker’s dreams were getting the best of him, there was a rumbling that caught him off guard.

He frowned, realizing it was coming from the flame, or so it—

Ryker retracted his Spiritual Patterns, pulling them back toward himself with the molten metals in tow as he accelerated backward.

‘What’s happening?’