Kranos’s thoughts entered his mind, and he was stunned to see that just beside his Golden Core was a black rock. "Is this the Heaven-Defying Treasure?" Kranos was startled. For a moment, he felt that the old man had tricked them, but recalling that terrifying lake, he knew that wasn’t possible.
He reached out his senses and immediately took the rock out. It appeared in his hand; he stared at it for a few minutes and was puzzled, as it looked no different from a common rock. "Could something be inside?" Kranos wondered silently. With that, he knocked lightly on the rock; if anything was inside, he would definitely feel it. However, he was stunned to realize that he still couldn’t sense anything.
Kranos’s eyes widened slightly as he also realized something else: "Did I just hit the rock and nothing happened?" With his cultivation at the tenth stage of the Golden Core Realm, even if it was a slight knock, the rock should have cracked on a minuscule scale, but Kranos realized that no harm was done to the rock.
He hesitated for a moment before deciding to try something. He took out the Azure Sky Sword from his spatial ring and scratched it lightly against the surface of the rock. He raised his brow in surprise the next moment; the sword didn’t even leave a mark on the rock.
Kranos quickly understood that the rock was far from ordinary. He scratched the Azure Sky Sword on the rock once again, this time increasing his strength slightly. However, he realized that the rock was still the same.
Kranos stared at the rock, then repeated the same thing once again... still no damage.
After multiple trials and increasing his strength, until he even used his true strength, Kranos realized that he couldn’t harm the rock in the slightest. He tried to sense if the rock emitted any energy, but he couldn’t sense anything.
Kranos shook his head in regret. Since the rock was far from ordinary, if only he knew how to use it, he would definitely be overjoyed. Placing the rock into his mental space, Kranos studied it once again before removing his thoughts from the rock.
However, just as Kranos was about to remove his senses from his mental space, he thought of something and was stunned. According to the time core manual, one would cultivate a Golden Core and then fragment it to form a Time Palace, stepping into the Time Palace Realm. But what if he didn’t?
"Is it possible that I can condense multiple time cores and Golden Cores? Then fuse them just like with my foundation and form a peculiar core that had never existed?" Kranos’s thoughts ran wildly; he was one who dared to imagine terrifying things and put them to practice!
Ignoring the heaven-defying rock, he focused his attention on the mana core in his time-space. Presently, there were ten strands of mana engraved on it. Kranos had always been occupied, so he hadn’t had the time to increase his strength. Now that there was a great battle coming up which involved monarchs, he knew that it was the most optimum time to increase his strength.
Taking a deep breath, he took out the near-infinite mana stone he had obtained from the treasure box, then began condensing mana strands from it.
The mana strands engraved in his core grew rapidly. From 10, it quickly increased to eleven in a span of a few minutes, then twelve... twenty... fifty... Soon, Kranos continued engraving the ethereal blue mana onto his mana core.
More than a month passed while Kranos was engrossed in this process. At this moment, he finally opened his eyes; a bright light passed through them. This was because he had completely engraved his mana core with... strands of mana! Now the mana core no longer had any traces of looking transparent; rather, it was completely ethereal blue.
Kranos stared in amazement at the mana core, then his thoughts moved, and he began condensing another mana core. Shrinking the ball of mana, Kranos entered a delicate process of extracting the remaining transparent part of his mana core, which was buried beneath the ethereal blue engravings. ɴᴇᴡ ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ ᴘᴜʙʟɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴏɴ nοvelfire.net
Slowly, white strands began to seep out of the ball-sized core, causing its size to decrease. Time passed very slowly. Kranos took his time during the process, as he didn’t want there to be any errors. Soon, the time core had shrunk to the size of a small egg.
Kranos stared at the egg-sized mana core. Although it looked small, Kranos could sense the completely pure mana buried within it, which was even purer than that which was inside the infinite mana stone. Then his gaze moved to the second mana core, which looked slightly smaller than the previous ball-sized mana core but was completely transparent.
"I really did it! I have a second mana core!!!"
Kranos was overjoyed. Then his thoughts moved, and, using the infinite mana stone, he began engraving mana strands onto the mana core.
In the blink of an eye, more than nine months passed while Kranos remained in seclusion.
At this moment, Kathryn was pacing in her room; a deep frown was etched across her face. She stared at her brother, who was sitting on the bed, for a moment before withdrawing her attention back to her thoughts.
"Sister, I don’t believe he has seen through our plans," Kevin said to his sister gently. Since Kranos hadn’t stepped out of his room since coming to the Elven Immortal World, Kathryn’s mind had began to run wild with all sorts of imagination. She thought Kranos had realized her plan and was unwilling to step out of his room. If that was the case, everything she had plotted would all be for naught.
Hearing her brother’s words, Kathryn sighed, then spoke, "In that case, why hasn’t he stepped out of his chambers for the past nine months? Even if he is cultivating, he isn’t an old monster who has integrated with the feeling of being in seclusion for a long time."
She didn’t know that Kranos was indeed that old monster... he already had more than a chaos cycle of loneliness, so just a short nine months was nothing to him.
"Then why don’t you come up with something like a dinner and invite him to come? That way we can put the plan forward," Kevin suggested, causing his sister to once again look at him in a new light; this was truly a good plan!