Ryker stood before the flickering Earth Flame. It was an odd bluish purple color. But the reason for the oddity was that there was a third color that added to its foundation, a bronze that felt almost ancient and grainy.

Standing this close to an Earth Flame, with his current level of a strength, he should have been burnt to ash already. He had been ready for the fight of his life just to get close to this thing. But to think that it would just be sitting here, so easily approachable, so simple.

And that changed everything.

After melting the prison metals, Ryker knew that this flame could still perform the duties of a real flame. But after he allowed the little guy to mature, he understood it even more intimately.

“Speaking of which, I just haven’t given you a name, huh?” Ryker chuckled, looking at the chain wrapping around his arm.

It wiggled about in one part acknowledgment and another part confusion. This made Ryker laugh more. Clearly, it didn’t understand what a name was.

“From now on… you will be Prometheus.”

As Prometheus bristled with excitement, Ryker suddenly leapt into the Earth Flame.

If anyone from his world saw him now, they would think him to be absolutely insane. But when Ryker decided on something, he didn’t hesitate. And usually, if he didn’t hesitate, he was probably right.

The fox creature was before had jumped out of this very flame, and there was a good reason for that. It could be said that while all these violet creatures were the birth of something new, this Earth Flame was probably the largest example of this.

Earth Flames were the core of planets. It was they that sustained the life of a world. Though the sun also played a large role, neither could function without the other.

Due to this, Earth Flames would normally have a large amount of life associated with it. It was just that this “life” was almost never accessible due to the sheer heat. Ryker had never heard of even Gods managing to take advantage of this flame. At best, they could take a few embers to bolster their strength or save as a trump card.

But this odd environment had allowed Ryker a chance that simply didn’t exist under normal circumstances.

Not only did he enter the flames, but he didn’t protect his body. Instead, he allowed its embers to pour in.

Almost immediately, Ryker felt like his body was being eroded. If this continued, he would die in mere seconds.

But that was when he relied on two things.

The first was Prometheus’ partial Dao, and the second was Prometheus itself.

The concepts that dictated the Earth Flame were the exact same as the violet chaos Spirit Energy that Prometheus and the other members of its race used.

With their help, not only could Ryker control the flames to some extent, he could even use it to cleanse his body.

Ryker’s cultivation had been too low in the Valorian Clan. As a result, he had never had the right to look at their higher order techniques. As such, the cultivation method he used was still the very same simple method that all children of the Clan were taught regardless of status.

That was to say that while Ryker had a lot of theory about the Ascension Realm, he had never had a real, tangible step-by-step method on how to enter it.

All he knew was that this step was all about compressing, purifying, and elevating our Spirit Energy into an Ascended State. Or, in layman’s terms, liquid Spirit Energy.

However, by this point, Ryker had seen many methods.

He had seen the techniques of the Crimson Federation and the Shadow Clan. He had also seen the methods of countless Iterations and all the various thoughts and theories they had come up with in this regard.

All of that information made what he thought was a simple process far more complicated.

There was one Iteration that spoke of fusing the soul and Spirit Energy into one to help it ascend.

There was another that spoke about doing the same, but with Combat Type Spirit Energy instead.

The most shocking one spoke of using a Spiritual Resonance. In this world, if you weren’t born into a family with a Spiritual Resonance, you could never reach the Ascension Realm in your lifetime.

That begged the question of how the first families succeeded in doing so.

The obvious answer now that Ryker knew of the prison was that they had always had Spiritual Resonance. But there was another, more shocking answer.

And that was that they created their own Spiritual Resonances while still in the Enlightenment Realm!

This was an interesting conclusion to draw for one very important reason: Ryker was now aware that the Spiritual Resonances of his world were incomplete because they lacked the support of the Dao.

In that case, could it be possible to rely on the Dao to purify your Spirit Energy into a liquid state?

It seemed possible.

All of these possibilities and paths swirled about in his mind, and he had yet to make a decision. He didn’t know which path was the right one, if all of them were right, or if there was just one that the outside world chose above all others.

However… there was one thing that Ryker did know.

Of everything those jailers did to them, the most striking thing was stripping them of the right to use the Dao.

Ryker had no doubt that if he was in the outside world, outside this cage, he would have long since grasped it. Maybe even while he was stuck in the 1st Enlightenment Realm, he would have progressed by leaps and bounds regardless… relying on the Dao alone.

So why? Why not take Spirit Energy? Why not Resonances? Why not Mythical Types?

The answer was obvious.

Their puppets gaining control over the Dao was the one thing they actually feared.

Ryker could feel the searing pain enter his veins.

One might wonder which Spirit Energy Ryker was actually purifying right now. Since he could switch between so many types at once, what was he actually changing?

The answer to that question rested in his Dantian.

Within, there was an array of 81 Circles, each trembling with a pale white light and formed of the purest Spirit Energy there was.

Within these Circles, eight of them formed a tower. It was inside this “tower” that Phoenix was in hibernation.

It was precisely these Circles that Ryker targeted.

These were his foundation, his essence of sorts. So long as his Circles underwent a qualitative change, then any Spirit Energy he took in from outside sources would immediately reach their standard of quality after some purification.

The Earth Flames entered his dantian and Ryker almost passed out from the pain. If his eyes had been open, one would have seen nothing more than their whites.

Attacking one’s dantian like this might as well have been like cutting off one’s life. And the fact that Ryker was also purifying the rest of his body at the same time, unearthing more and more of his potential, only made the pain doubly worse.

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But he sat there in silence, his veins bulging across his body and his mind focused.

Almost two decades. This was what he had been waiting for.

Right now, the Valorian Clan was probably standing around his Soul Flame, watching the candle flicker wildly.

What would the faces of those bastards look like as they watched him progress so fast? He hadn’t even been in this world for much more than three months, yet he had progressed from the 1st Enlightenment Realm to the 9th.

He had always told them that they should be thankful that he had made such a mistake as a child. Thankful that he was so stubborn. Thankful that he was obsessed with perfection and ferocious in his pursuits.

Otherwise, he would have long since crushed them beneath his feet.

But almost two decades later, his revenge would taste all the sweeter.

These thoughts fuelled Ryker like an oil to flame. For once, his impeccable memory was nothing more than an asset. He could remember every humiliating word, every slap to the face, every boot on his neck.

He would never stop due to a little pain. What was this small pain to what he had suffered for all those years?

It was then that Ryker opened his mind’s eye.

He knew that progressing with a Dao was the best decision, but he didn’t completely abandon the path of the Valorians. He would do both.

On the one hand, he would purify his Spirit Energy to an extreme, peeling away its impurities until there were none left at all.

And on the other, he would comprehend the Dao.

What Ryker was doing now was nothing short of arrogant. He hadn’t attempted to grasp the Dao before, but had instead chosen to do so while right in the midst of a world of pain and a momentous breakthrough.

But this was the pride of a Pure Soul.

When he first peeked into the greater universe, he had felt that it was all so…

Easy.

He had already been meditating on the Dao of Time and the Dao of Sealing for weeks already. It was just that the veil of this world refused to allow him to poke through that final barrier.

But now he had.

He didn’t know what it would mean to use more than one Dao to break through… but he was about to find out.

The first breakthrough came in the Dao of Sealing.

When he stared into the vast expanse, he could just barely see a net enveloping it all, acting as a balance of all things.

Sealing didn’t just mean restricting. Often, it represented boundaries, not just in the sense of warning, but also safety…

This sort of view on Sealing broadened Ryker’s horizons. He didn’t always have to perfectly counter his enemy’s power. He could guide it, using its own nature against it. That was what it meant to Seal.

It was flexible, all-encompassing… there was nothing that couldn’t be sealed, and there was never be anything that was immune.

BANG!

Ryker’s hair fluttered wildly in the flames as a starlight descended on his body.

He had never sensed such a thing before, but he still reacted quickly, gathering up the starlight and guiding it along with his flames.

What happened next was far more to Ryker’s surprise.

The Dao began to form runes on his slowly purifying Circles. The pain was alleviated somewhat as well, but this wasn’t what caught his attention.

‘… only nine…’

Ryker’s eyes flashed as he realized something.

The Dao of Sealing he had just comprehended was only able to occupy nine of his Circles, leaving the other 72 completely unoccupied.

Before he drew any conclusions, he decided to move on to the next.

The Dao of Time.

It was extremely mysterious, and watching the constellations with his mind’s eye, Ryker found that it was difficult to grasp perfectly…

And that was because it was relative. It changed as it pleased, and observing it in a different state could change its reaction…

Or did it?

It was the fourth dimension. You could only accurately describe a location with all four coordinates. If there was no time, it was all useless.

So how could it be so relative?

That was when Ryker understood something.

It was both.

Time was relative based on the observer, but constant to you. Only when both clashed would confusion ensue, however, even in the chaos…

Time would remain unmoved.

BOOM!

A second pillar of starlight fell before the first was even truly finished.

Once again, complex runes began to appear on Ryker’s Circles. And once again, it was just nine.

Ryker was suddenly beginning to think that his obscene number of Circles were a problem. But he needed one more test before he could confirm exactly what was happening.

Surprisingly, he didn’t choose the chaos Dao that Prometheus had partially grasped. Instead, he chose the Dao of Fire. This was obviously for Phoenix.

After unlocking so many of Phoenixes talents, he had a deep understanding of all of Fire, Wind and Earth Spirit Energies. He wanted to see how well that translated to the Dao.

It was mind numbingly fast. Ryker was even worried that he was doing something wrong because it was too easy.

The Dao of Fire pillar came down… but what left Ryker speechless was that it only took up three Circles.

That was when Ryker confirmed what was happening with certainty.

It seemed that much like Spirit Beasts, Daos had their own “Circle Talents”. Top tier Daos could take up nine Circles, but weaker ones only took up three.

Something about this still felt off, though.

Back when he was thinking about the comparison of the Dao of Sealing to the Dao of Time, he had wondered which was stronger. This seemed to suggest that they were both equal in measure, but…

Was there really such a thing as a weak Dao? How could the law of a world be weak? Was it really that the Fire Dao was weak? Or was it that his comprehension of it was lacking?

Rather than moving on, Ryker decided to test out his theory. He really focused on the Dao of Fire, digging deeper than he had before rather than just casually accepting what he made the first connection with.

An explosion went off in his mind and connections began to be formed, one after another.

First, he saw Fire as a small ember. Then it became a burning brush, leaping from source to source and burning everything in sight. Then it became an inferno, spiralling and eating up the air.

And in the end, it settled down, leaving nothing more than wisps of ash and the last flickers of undying embers.

Ryker suddenly snapped out of it, realizing he had been pulled into some illusion of some sort. Everything had practically frozen around him.

When he checked his dantian, he was surprised to find that the Dao of Fire runes were still taking up just three Circles.

However, the runes had become manifold more complex and even seemed to faintly suppress the existences of his Dao of Time and Dao of Sealing.

‘There are levels…’ Ryker blinked in realization.

It seemed that he had ascended a tier of the Dao, though he wasn’t sure what this meant, how far he had gone or how far there was yet to go.

But what he did feel was that his Circles were all frighteningly pure at this moment. In fact, they were already in a liquid state and he hadn’t even finished yet.

‘Could it be that I’m not actually supposed to fill up all my Circles?’

What Ryker didn’t know was that while it was true that geniuses outside this prison did use the Dao to progress into the Ascension Realm, they didn’t need to fill up all their Circles. That was the requirement for the God Realm, not the Ascension Realm.

The vast majority wouldn’t even use a Dao. This was reserved for the best of geniuses. Instead, they would take the Valorian Clan’s method and hope to comprehend a Dao to further purify their Spirit Energy later.

The average genius would comprehend a Dao that could fill just a single Circle. These were Daos even beneath the Dao of Fire, Daos like the Dao of Piercing or the Dao of Sturdiness. Benign, weak Daos that has uses to be sure, but were far less impressive.

Top class geniuses would use a Dao like the Dao of Fire or any of the other elements, thus filling three Circles with a Dao.

Absolute monsters would use Daos that filled six Circles. These were Daos, like the Dao of Momentum, or the Dao of Gravity. These Daos were important laws that governed the world, but they still weren’t at the very pinnacle.

The number of geniuses that could form a Dao that contained nine Circles to enter the Ascension Realm might as well have been zero. They weren’t even classified along with the others; they were known as one in generation prodigies, sons and daughters of Heaven that existed on a plane all to their own.

Yet… Ryker had formed two, still not understanding what was happening. He wasn’t even aware that after he comprehended his first Dao, the others wouldn’t make much of a difference to his foundation.

Each Dao was meant to correspond to each of the nine levels of the Ascension Realm. So only when he became a Second Ascended would his other Daos begin to matter, and only when he became a Third Ascended would a third Dao matter.

One might wonder, then, if that meant that all God Realm existence comprehended so many Daos?

Well, the first thing to consider was the fact that not everyone had 81 Circles like Ryker did. Only he would have such an obscene number of Circles to fill.

The second thing to understand was that there were actually many God Realm existences that would focus on just a single Dao.

It was just that they would comprehend it from a different lens every time they grasped it. As such, it would trigger a new set of runes and occupy a new set of Circles.

These were all things that Ryker wasn’t aware of, so he was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, he wanted to fill up all his Circles for fear of ruining his foundation. But on the other, he didn’t want to comprehend useless Daos that wouldn’t help his future partners. He still had them to think about. He didn’t plan on stopping at the Silver Mirror, Phoenix, and Prometheus alone.

Ryker’s jaw set, making a difficult choice.

He would comprehend the Dao of Wind and Dao of Earth, then he would finish with the Dao of Chaos.

After that, he would stop suppressing his breakthrough and shatter his way through.

As for what that did to his foundation, he would just have to accept that he could make everything perfect. He didn’t have that luxury this time around because there was a group of powerhouses waiting to crush him.

He had been patient for a long time. He couldn’t be that anymore.

Pillars of starlight began to fall one after another, a shuddering change echoing through Ryker’s body.

The Dao of Wind, Fire, and Earth swapped over, taking over the Circles that surrounded Phoenix as though resonating with them.

They each took up a trio of Circles and formed a perfect set of nine together.

This filled 27 of Ryker’s Circles before he turned to the Dao of Chaos.

This one should have been the easiest. He already had a partially formed one and it shouldn’t be a problem. And yet, he subconsciously knew that it would be.

He fell into a deeper and deeper state of meditation as his mind wondered into the vast cosmos.

At that moment, something lurking in the depths of the darkness stirred.

At the same time, unbeknownst to Ryker, high above him, two creatures stirred.

A fox of ice and a fox of fire opened their eyes at the same time.