The first lightning struck at high speed and with ridiculous force. It was an attack that the previous Kayden wouldn’t have been able to handle easily, it would have taken a lot of effort on his part, but now? His domain absorbed the lightning completely and distributed its attack force easily across dozens of kilometers.
Kayden didn’t even blink at the first bolt. The second came even stronger and suffered the same end. He was at a much higher level of strength than before. Your choices were correct. Your constant maximizations were correct. He was walking a perfect path. The third ray had the same result.
Merlin was not impressed by this. The first rays weren’t powerful. He was slightly surprised when Kayden did the same with the fourth ray. Not even two seconds had passed from one lightning strike to the next, yet Kayden’s dominance remained undefeated.
When the fifth bolt struck, Kayden placed a barrier of weathering layers and a funnel to defend the attack. It was the same strategy he had used previously and it proved successful.
Even with five lightning bolts, Kayden still hadn’t gotten up from his spot. He didn’t even seem to be paying attention. His mind was focused on understanding the situation he found himself in. Kayden was feeling something different at this moment. He was feeling his own body die.
The fifth beam was still falling, but Kayden was diluting its strength and dragging out time. Merlin was confused by the situation. The fact that he couldn’t freely predict Kayden’s actions bothered him deeply.
Kayden was able to hold off the attack for a few more hours. The feeling he was feeling increased even more. It was something incredible in his vision. At times, he stopped feeling certain parts of his body, almost as if those parts were disconnecting from his mind. He began to stop feeling his body as his property. It just seemed like a carcass to hold his mind.
The sixth ray made him pay much more attention. He had to put all his efforts into making the lightning last longer. He had more time in the third realm than most people should have.
While everyone had a century, he had two full centuries. It was a much longer time and this caused his strength to grow to a much more ridiculous degree than before. Winding the sixth ray was something that didn’t cost him much.
For every hour, he felt his body changing. When he had just two hours left to live, something incredible happened. His left arm...ceased to exist for him. He had no sensations in that arm, no blood circulation. Absolutely nothing. Kayden only saw a cluster of dense, compacted mana. Slowly, he began to stir this mana. The problem was that with the slightest movement, his arm crumbled into pieces of flesh and bone and fell to the ground.
He wanted to continue experiencing this sensation to discover something, but the seventh ray was about to come. This time, he abandoned any thoughts of holding him back. His focus was totally on defending the lightning.
Meanwhile, Merlin watched Kayden like a human being would watch a unicorn in a zoo. What Kayden was doing was beyond ridiculous. The closer a mortal got to death, the more his soul left his body.
Merlin was able to see Kayden’s soul leave his arm and try to concentrate on his body, a common attempt to survive longer. The problem was that, in this state, when the soul itself began to move, the mortal should not be able to reason.
It was a state of pain and madness so great that even a peak ninth-realm mage, who had lived thousands of years, should not be able to think clearly. Meanwhile, Kayden seemed to be studying the situation as if it weren’t in his own body. At that moment, he stopped his study and began to prepare for the seventh ray.
The golden clouds opened. For hundreds of meters, Kayden could witness a golden lawn with flying grass. There were some structures, more exactly eight strange constructions, each of them containing a unique design and different from what Kayden had ever seen. Only one resembled a normal house on planet Earth.
Your domain has been expanded. Hundreds of pentagrams were thrown and distributed evenly. A funnel was made to hold the seventh ray. Kayden hadn’t paid attention to the other lightning bolts, but as soon as this one started falling, he was impressed.
It was ridiculously strong, far beyond ridiculous. His funnel only held the attack for a few seconds and was destroyed. The barrier held for a few more seconds and was destroyed.
Kayden had to keep pulling mana around him like crazy, trying to rebuild his defenses with the seconds he managed to buy. His pentagrams rose to hold the lightning.
This time, his defense was much stronger and held for several seconds, practically twice as long as the other two protective measures combined. It was enough time for Kayden to mount a strong attack with an incredible twelve hexagrams, twice what he normally could.
His poise and confidence gave the impression that he was doing something easy, but in reality, it was all a gamble. With every second that passed, Kayden felt a part of his body stop responding. Every time this happened, his mind became clearer and a state of transcendence began to assault his mind.
The pentagrams did nothing but float. Kayden was stalling for as long as possible. His domain took a few more seconds to be completely torn apart. Excessive use of mana brought him closer to death by the second.
The lightning struck his barrier at the moment he could no longer feel either of his two arms or either of his legs. Merlin could see Kayden’s soul gathering in his mind, something even he had never seen before.
Kayden didn’t have any thoughts in his mind as he looked at the lightning and launched an attack of his own, backed by twelve hexagrams. The resulting explosion was not enough to damage even the grass around it. This made the lightning seem weak, but if the situation occurred in the same place where he made his breakthrough to the third realm, the circumstances would be different.
The destruction would probably reach more than 50 kilometers with just the residue from the attacks. Even the roof of the abyss could fall from this attack Kayden was receiving. It was a level of strength far above the fourth realm, and it still couldn’t make Kayden despair.
At the moment, Kayden had already lost sensation in almost his entire body. Only from the neck up did he still feel something. At this moment, he was at the absolute peak of his existence. His thinking was ridiculously fast.
His body didn’t respond, but his mind responded hundreds of times faster. He had felt something state before, once, when he was with the guide to learn how to kill, many centuries ago. But this time, the sensation was magnified hundreds of thousands of times.
The world has changed in his view. Grass and earth ceased to exist with colors and matter. The very air in front of him was changing. His dominance took a leap forward that should not have been possible in his kingdom. Kayden looked at one of his legs. He couldn’t feel it or move it, but the mana that was in it?
"Come to your Monarch," he said. Kayden’s leg... disappeared into pure mana and ceased to exist. At this moment, no matter how hard he tried to regenerate her, he wouldn’t be able to. Not even Merlin would be able to heal his leg.
The amount of mana Kayden got from this was beyond ridiculous. It was probably equivalent to 100 kilometers of mana at normal densities. He looked at his other leg and did the same.
All the members of his body followed the same path, leaving only one head floating in the air. At that moment, the seventh ray would continue to fall, but Kayden almost instantly made hundreds of pentagrams.
Merlin looked at Kayden scared. What the boy was doing was considered a universal taboo by the gods. No matter how bad you were or how desperate for power you were, this path Kayden was taking shouldn’t be an option.
There was a reward for the advice that would make even the most useless god reach the peak below the peak. This reward was given to anyone who could find a wizard who was doing what Kayden was able to do.
The pentagrams bought Kayden a few more seconds, enough for his next action to have Merlin’s heart beating at a high frequency and his hand sweating like that of a mortal seeing his creator.
Kayden looked at the grass like a god looks at an ant, like a god looks at something that is under his control and will, Merlin followed the boy’s gaze and began to mumble some words of shock.