Ryker’s rain of curses was relentless. He was absolutely livid. This creature really was too stupid.

It had aimed the pillars of lava right at itself, falling for the oldest trick in the book. It was such an idiotic move that even Ryker didn’t think of it.

Even if it hadn’t lost control of its body thanks, and Ryker’s plan had actually ended up falling flat on its face, this close even it would end up harmed.

Although the beast was clearly immune to Fire and Water, its chaotic or destructive abilities against other Spirit Energy Types were far less overpowered. They were certainly there, but they weren’t as insurmountable.

Lava wasn’t just a huge concentration of Fire Type Spirit Energy, it was also a large influx of Earth Type as well. Even if the beast was unmoved against the flames, that was still thousands of tons of earth crashing down from above. How the hell was it going to survive that?

And now Ryker was stuck right in the middle, not even sure of what to do. His body had been taxed to the limit, and he really wasn’t sure if he had anything left to give.

In those last moments, Ryker’s thoughts moved like lightning and it almost felt as though time had slowed to a crawl.

He summons Phoenix and without giving the big guy time to understand what was happening, he gave out a command.

Phoenix’s tail whipped out, slapping against Ryker and the beast.

Just when it looked like Phoenix was about to be crushed beneath the falling avalanche of lava, Ryker pulled with the last bit of his consciousness, sending Phoenix back into his dantian.

Ryker crashed into an island of rock as the pillars of lava crashed down. Tsunami-like waves rose up as he coughed up mouthfuls of blood, his body practically falling apart.

His vision was slowly fading to black. He tried to hold on to it, but it was no good.

Ryker was already very fast on his feet. For his speed to overwhelm what he could do on his own, Phoenix couldn’t hold back in the slightest.

He was just a human, but he had just withstood a violent blow from a behemoth of a creature. Every bone in his body had practically shattered at once.

The pain was far too much, and he directly fainted.

**

Ryker didn’t know how long he spent out. When his eyes snapped open, the first thing to hit him was the pain that made his vision swim again, then it was the feeling that everyone around him was just far too bright.

He had already used up all the meat balls he brought down with him. The rest were at the surface, and there was no way he could make it there now, not in this condition.

He exhaled a shaggy breath. Even his breathing hiccuped and hitched, every intake feeling like hot coals running through him.

‘I don’t even know where the metals are. What the hell did I do all this for?’

Ryker felt a hint annoyed. He didn’t do a good job of controlling his emotions this time, so it was instead the wave of pain that snapped him awake.

‘Focus, focus…’

Looking around as slowly as he could manage, he realized a few things.

For one, he was on the same rock formation he had been on before. Two, his legs were burnt to a crisp up to his shins. The tsunami from earlier must have had a wave that made it this far, but to his surprise, his body’s condition was so bad that what must have been that searing pain didn’t wake him up until now. Three, the beast was luckily still captured, but part of Ryker thought it might be dead.

Phoenix’s tail had hit it just as hard and it had lost a bit of its form. Half of it still looked like a fox, but the other half was an amorphous blob of violet energy.

It was only after observing for a while that Ryker realized it was still alive. Its healing factor had just been considerably slowed by his Divined Chains, so it had fallen into a deep sleep.

This could have been considered the only real positive of the situation until Ryker spotted something else.

There, floating in the lava, there were two orbs of discolouration in the golden red depths. They were clearly the two metals that had solidified after Ryker successfully melted them. It seemed the temperatures of the lava were indeed not high enough to do anything to them. In fact, they had cooled down significantly.

Ryker sighed. “I guess there’s only one way.’

He really didn’t want to do this, but at this point, he really didn’t have much of a choice. It might affect his breakthrough into the Ascension Realm if he lost too much of a lifespan. He was already late to the cultivation game to begin with. If his effective age was too high, it would only be worse.

Unfortunately, he would waste too much time waiting for his body to heal naturally. His deadline was already looming overhead.

Ryker closed his eyes and began to circulate his Time Type Spirit Energy, merging it with his Combat Type Spirit Energy.

There was a huge drain instantly. The blood in his body plummeted and soon he looked as though he had lost a considerable amount of weight… if he hadn’t already looked terrible enough.

This was the other problem of using Time Type Spirit Energy to heal himself. It wasn’t just a matter of lifespan, though that was horrible as well. But with the way it functioned, if he tried to heal an injury that was too severe, he would end up killing himself in the process.

The Time Type Spirit Energy was speeding up his healing by taking loans on his future. The problem was that the amount of blood he had was finite and tailored to the present. There wasn’t enough time to replenish it.

So by the time Ryker was barely at 50%, he had already felt completely drained. On top of that, he had lost at least 10 years of his lifespan.

That effectively put him at 31 years of age.

As a Valorian, even if he didn’t cultivate, his life expectancy was still around 200 years old. But losing 10 years just like that was a true gut punch.

If he had been born into a lesser family, his odds of entering the Ascension Realm smoothly would plummet by more than 50% even though 31 wasn’t that old in the grand scheme.

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Even as a Valorian, he could feel that his breakthrough potential had plummeted by at least 20%.

Ryker was still 100% confident in entering the Ascension Realm, but in the future, if he kept overdrawing his potential, the same wouldn’t be true of the Elevated Realms or the Mythical Realms… let alone reaching Godhood.

The worst danger, though, was the hidden danger. If his loss of lifespan slowed his cultivation enough, he might not hit his already aggressive goal. He couldn’t afford to push it too far.

That was why when he felt heal enough to move, he stopped. Not just to save himself from dying from loss of blood, but also because he couldn’t allow himself to get any older if he could help it.

Though he said all of this, Ryker’s looks hadn’t changed much at all. He still looked like a 20-year-old young man and his aura was stable… for the most part. But that was because he wouldn’t start showing signs of aging until he was at least 70 or so years old.

Slowly, he picked himself up. He had concentrated the healing on his legs and his meridians. So the rest of him was still a mess. Especially his ribcage, which was where Phoenix’s strike had landed.

“You damned beast, you really put me through the wringer…”

Ryker shook his head as he lumbered over to the creature.

Losing 10 years of life was not on his to-do list today, but he could only hope that this beast would make it worth his while.

He pulled out the egg from his dantian. It bobbed and floated around him, moving like a little fairy. Well, if that “little” fairy was at least three quarters of a meter tall.

Its conceptualization of the world was quite bland and white, so it didn’t even know that its master was heavily injured.

Ryker urged the egg forward somewhat cautiously. Many things could go wrong here, but after all of this, it was impossible for him to not at least try it.

The moment the egg began sapping away at the beast’s energy, the fox stirred as though it was about to wake up. It struggled, and the egg reeled back, whimpering.

Ryker’s eyes narrowed. His body might still be a mess, but his soul was a different matter entirely. That quasi coma he had been in was just perfect for his soul’s recovery. He was already back up to at least 70%.

That was more than enough.

He pulled on his Divined Chains and strengthened them. The fox’s struggle blinked out.

Its body was already far too weak in this state. When the seals were factored in as well, there was no overcoming it at all.

Ryker felt his new contract slowly growing stronger and his smile. When it absorbed half of the creature’s essence, and it could already long be considered dead, the egg rose to the 8th Circle and occupied yet another in Ryker’s dantian.

By the time the fox was completely consumed, the strength of the egg had completely stabilized as well.

There were no official distinctions between Circle Talents of the same level, but there were some differences, nonetheless. Not all 6th Circle Talents were created equal, for example. Even if they would all have the same number of available Circles, there would be some differences in how well they absorbed Spirit Energy, etc. These differences were even more emboldened depending on soul talent.

For Spirit Beasts, there was no separation between Soul Talent and Circle Talent, they were just given one label for everything. So it made it even more important.

Now, the egg could be considered to be among the very best of 8th Circle Talent, just like Phoenix.

Phoenix’s Race, the Twin-Headed Serpent Phoenixes, were all 8th Circle Talents among their best. But Phoenix, who controlled three elements and likewise had three heads, was obviously head and shoulders above them, nonetheless.

Ryker grinned. “Worth it.”

His gaze shifted to what was left of the creature and there was surprisingly quite a bit. It was his Divined Chains that had stopped it from dissipating away.

The first thing Ryker noticed was the bundle of energy that should represent the cultivation of the now-dead beast.

The egg had absorbed its talent and foundation, not its raw Spirit Energy, or else it wouldn’t be an egg anymore.

‘I should be able to use this to help the egg mature and progress faster. These Elemental Spirit Beasts seem very good at absorbing like-energies. But that also means that in the outside world, it’ll be hard to find the little egg stuff that it actually wants to eat. I’ll have to take advantage of this world to the best of my ability.’

Ryker was about to begin when he noticed something else.

‘This…’

It wasn’t just energy, and there wasn’t a Beast Crystal either. Whatever would have formed a Beast Crystal had been taken by the egg.

Instead, it was a mysterious energy that Ryker recognized instantly.

Wasn’t this the Dao that he had sensed earlier? That mysterious force of energy coming from this creature…

‘It can take tangible form? Wait, it’s a type of energy itself?’

It wasn’t that Ryker hadn’t tried to comprehend a Dao. He had more than enough references, and he had vaguely caught the edge of a few in these recent weeks.

The problem was that nothing seemed to allow him to cross over that hurdle. He didn’t even quite understand what a Dao was.

Everything he knew about Daos came from the cat lady. There was no reference to Daos in the literature and experiments, almost as though it was impossible for the people of this world to touch on it at all.

Ryker had begun to think that this was actually the case. It didn’t make sense that no one would stumble onto a Dao otherwise.

Even if it was some amorphous concepts, with how many Gods this world had created already, one of them would have sensed something mysterious and chosen to explore it.

From what Ryker had seen of the Daos, there was nothing all that special about them. Well, in a relative sense.

For example, creating a Spiritual Resonance should be far more difficult than creating a Dao. But he could name several figures in history who had succeeded in doing exactly that.

But when he took a step back… were any of these created Spiritual Resonances as powerful as his Valorian family’s?

No. None of them were…

Now was this because his Valorian Clan was just that great and mighty…?

Or was it because the Spiritual Resonances completed by these genius-level characters had always been missing something important?

There was a reason Ryker was suddenly thinking of Spiritual Resonances now, and that was because after he found the form of his Divined Chains in his body, he put two and two together.

If his Spiritual Resonances had a physical form, and these Daos had a physical form, and they even seemed to naturally feed off of one another…

Were they not related?

The Dao of Sealing was practically the perfect mirror of his Divined Chains.

The Dao of Spacetime was the perfect mirror for his Temporal Weave Spiritual Resonance.

And now, staring at the floating bundle of incomplete runes floating within that cloud of violet, Ryker couldn’t help but wonder…

‘What do I do?’

Ryker was hesitant, for good reason.

The obvious option seemed to be to allow his beast to swallow this as well to strengthen itself, but was this the smart choice?

There was clearly something about this world that wasn’t allowing him to grasp a Dao, but this beast had managed to do so despite the barriers.

This might be the only chance he had to understand what that barrier was and climb past it.

But staring at the runes now, he was making no progress. He didn’t even know what this Dao was to begin with. It was just so… chaotic. It didn’t seem related to Fire and Water at all, but then again, the violet energy his egg and the others of its species he had run into didn’t really do so either.

The violet energy could act both like Fire and Water, but it was neither hot nor cold. Instead, it was like a destructive presence that forced all other Spirit Energies to crumble in its presence.

The Dao seemed to amplify that. His senses couldn’t even get close without crumbling. But it was also hard to tell if this was just a natural function of all solidified Daos, or if it was just this one in particular.

‘Maybe I’m being too greedy. I’m not getting anywhere like this. But if I have the little egg absorb it, at the very least it’ll always be may might side. Maybe in the future I can find a clue that’ll help me take that step.’

Ryker didn’t hesitate anymore after he made his decision and he urged the Dao imprint toward the egg.

That was when something unexpected happened.

The egg gobbled it up without issue, but it seemed to have also fundamentally changed somehow.

A great deal of energy gathered up from its surroundings and it even took the initiative to take the creature’s Spirit Energy as well.

Ryker’s brows raised up, but he didn’t stop it. In fact, he was ecstatic. That was because, thanks to the Dao, the egg was able to take Fire and Water Type Spirit Energy and fuse it into this new energy all on its own.

This was absolutely huge.

Ryker was wondering about how he would feed it in the future. Elemental Spirit Beasts needed a large number of elemental resources to progress, and they obviously had to be of a like type. But where was he going to find this violet energy? This seemed to be the only place in the whole universe it existed in. Was he just going to have to stay here forever?

But the egg solved this issue all on its own. Now, if he just found a large number of Fire and Water Type treasures for it, it would be able to form it into the energy it needed all on its own.

It was then that the egg reached a breaking point.

‘It wants to hatch.’

Ryker nodded and urged it to continue. But that was when he realized that it was asking him for something.

What form should it take?

Ryker paused. What should he answer?