He closed that notification as well, unable to dally any longer. Deciding to go with the physical upgrade first, he allowed his Constitution threshold to go through. As his body started to twist and change, he gritted his teeth, determined to tough it out. He could feel his form, both physical and spiritual, expanding.

Now that his senses were more potent, he could detect more of how the Constitution stat actually worked. If Resilience gave him durability, then Constitution gave him something akin to depth. Rather than increase his solidity, it instead acted like compressing a mountain down to the size of a human. A mountain could be damaged far more easily than a diamond, but the diamond would be destroyed long before even a fraction of the mountain had been worn away.

He managed to sink into a meditative trance, doing his best to ignore the torment that his body was going through. However, a large portion of the pain still made it through, and he watched in detached horror as his body bulged and contracted in bursts. He probably should have left the Dao Tree enclosure before doing this. The other people in the area were looking at him with expressions of thinly veiled horror. All of them knew the pain of thresholds, of course but for one to simply go through one on a whim was alien to them.

Sam gave them a pain filled grin, which on second thought, probably had not been wise. The expression looked more like the gaze of a corpse than anything else. A subtle shift went through the onlookers, and they started to edge away from him. The process grew worse and worse until his body was breaking down and reforming every few seconds. By this point, people were starting to leave the Dao tree enclosure. Sam couldn't care less at this point.

Eventually, the process finished, and his body remade itself, denser and stronger than ever before. He felt like he could take a full on punch from one of the Titans and live to tell the tale.

Before he could let himself procrastinate, he initiated the ceremony for Intelligence. Like the first time, a sudden blast of insight ravaged his brain, containing wisdom that was too intense for a mortal to understand. It seemed like the weight of reality itself was pressing down on him, but he managed to convince himself that it was nothing more than a figment of his imagination. With a roar, he marshaled his will and opened his eyes, seeing the world bathed in rays of gold. His mind trembled as he looked upon something that should have been beyond his reach. The true meaning of a higher order Dao.

The energy coalesced around the Dao Tree, creating whirling spirals of power and majesty that seemed to loop in infinity signs around it. He immediately knew it for what it was. The Dao of Inspiration. He could tell that this was a Dao far more powerful than his own, more powerful even than the Dao of Gordanus. No, this was something that he was a long way away from. He could feel his body beginning to tear as he looked upon it, but he forced himself to do so. He knew that he had a unique opportunity here, the reward from marshaling the will to resist the pain of his threshold. The odds of this happening were astronomically low, so he was reasonably confident that if he managed to gain something from this, he would have a source of power that almost nobody else at his level had.

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Even as he gazed upon the golden light, he knew that it was too much for him. The concentrated weight of the Dao was beyond his means to capture with his mortal spirit. Then a sudden chime rang out throughout his body as he felt something resonate with the Dao. His Dao Heritage was making itself known. With a tearing sound, a tiny speck of the Dao energy surrounding the tree broke off and slammed into his temple, sinking into his brain. As the last of the threshold and the colossal energy contained within the mote of light combined, pain unlike anything he had ever known scoured his mind clean. He fell backwards, already unconscious.

Sam woke up a few minutes later, the king of all headaches ripping through his mind as he did so. A scream of pain erupted from his mouth as he rose, but he managed to stifle it in time. Notifications waited for him, with one in particular blazing with power and importance. Naturally, he opened that one first.

You have gained a Dao Echo!

Dao Echo of Inspiration(Fragment Stage)

Dao Echoes are one of the rarest sources of power in the Multiverse. When a being sufficiently skilled in the ways of the Dao manages to capture the essence of a Dao beyond their current understanding, there is a small chance that they will be able to gain a shadow of its power. You managed to incorporate a tiny fraction of the concept of Inspiration into your being, as it resonated with your path. Dao Echoes provide bonuses based on your current level of Dao understanding at acquisition. Gaining one Dao Echo opens the gateway to more in the future.

+100 to Intelligence

+100 to Wisdom

Sam simply stared at the notification, amazed at what he had just accomplished. With a single whim, driven by his threshold induced haze, he had gained over three hundred stat points with his multipliers.

With a current of excitement running through him, he opened the next notification.

You have passed the Second Threshold of Constitution.

Many are those who disdain the path of Constitution. Many are the insults leveled at those who follow it. Compared to the followers of the other paths, Constitution is not one that makes itself flashily known. One cannot blast a mountain in half with a single punch or spell. One cannot cross a planet in a matter of seconds. What one can do is very simple. Survive.