Bruce didn’t answer Evan’s question.
He neither confirmed nor denied what Evan had said.
Silence lingered between them for a while. Seeing that Bruce had no intention of speaking, Evan finally broke it himself.
"You still haven’t told me why you brought me to this place. If it was just about obtaining all these divinities, you could have kept doing it the normal way, like you did with the previous three, right?" Evan said.
From what Bruce had told him, the situation with the Abyss had pushed him to act, forcing him to bring Evan into this dimension ahead of schedule. Was all of this simply to make him stronger as quickly as possible?
That was the only explanation he could think of, after all, ever since arriving here, his growth had been nothing short of absurd.
Not only had he reached C-rank in a remarkably short amount of time, it had taken him even less time after that to reach B-rank, and judging by his current advancement rate, he was already closing in on A-rank.
A pace that, under normal circumstances, would have taken an talented awakeners decades to achieve, and even for Evan, it should have required at least two or three years.
But thinking about it more, what else had changed besides his rapid growth in strength?
Learning two entirely new Laws.
And right at that moment, almost as if to confirm the very thought forming in his mind, Bruce spoke.
[Your arrival in this dimension was predestined. I only sped things up a little, because of the situation at the time.]
[While this place is nothing more than a death sentence for almost everyone else... for you, it is different.]
[You’ve probably realized it already. Not only can you grow stronger here by absorbing the energy contained within those creatures, but you can also begin comprehending the two fundamental Laws that govern this dimension.]
[The original plan was to wait until you reached Overlord rank before bringing you here, because only then would you have been strong enough to bear the weight of two additional concepts. These two concepts are among the five fundamental concepts of the universe, and their weight on a being’s soul goes beyond anything you could possibly imagine.]
[But your soul had already been strengthened beyond what should have been normal, thanks to the concepts of death and life, and your progress has been abnormally high, higher even than I myself had anticipated. So I decided to bet on your unusually high capacity to adapt, and brought you here far earlier than originally planned.]
He said this, then paused, as if turning something over in his mind before continuing.
[I’d like to tell you more, I really would, but it seems the time you had available is about to run out.]
"Hm? What do you mean by that? What exactly is going on?" Evan asked, noticing the subtle shift in Bruce’s tone, and the strange weight behind his words.
[The reason I said those two new Laws would weigh heavily on your soul wasn’t because you couldn’t receive them, but because what you were about to receive here wasn’t just some fragment. It was the complete inheritance of those two Laws, an inheritance that was prepared across past cycles specifically for this moment]
he said, and before Evan could ask anything more, a visible change began rippling through the crystals still floating around him.
They started glowing brighter, trembling faintly, vibrating with an energy that hadn’t been there a moment ago, and before Evan could even begin to process what that meant, one by one, they shot straight toward him with terrifying speed.
"Wait, what is-" He was caught off guard by the sudden shift, and seeing them rushing toward him at that velocity, every instinct in his body screamed at him to move, to dodge, to do anything, but he never got the chance. Their speed was simply too great, far beyond anything he could hope to react to in time.
A moment later, the first one struck him.
He’d braced himself for sharp pain, for some kind of damage, some violent impact tearing through flesh and bone. But nothing of the sort happened.
Instead, the crystal struck him square in the chest, only to sink straight into him without resistance, and vanish entirely, as though it had never been a physical object to begin with.
’What’s happening?’ Evan thought, feeling a strange, unfamiliar sensation wash through every inch of his body the instant that first crystal disappeared into him.
It was the dark one. The one that had seemed made of living shadow, pulsing with an aura that felt colder than anything natural. The concept core of death.
And Evan could actually feel it settling inside him. His body didn’t treat it as something foreign, something invasive to be rejected or resisted.
Instead, it felt achingly familiar, like something that had always belonged to him, something that had simply been away for a while, and was only now finally coming home.
[Ding! Your synchronization with the God of Death’s bloodline has increased]
[Ding! Your synchronization with the God of Death’s bloodline has increased]
[Ding! Your synchronization with the God of Death’s bloodline has increased]
...
[Ding! You have assimilated 50% of the God of Death’s bloodline]
[Congratulations, you have obtained the concept of death!]
Hearing these notifications, Evan didn’t quite know what to make of them.
His synchronization with Shadow had already surpassed 38%, something that had given him a solid affinity with the element of death over time, gradually, through effort and repetition.
But now, in the span of seconds, that percentage had skyrocketed several times over, and more importantly, far more importantly, he had actually obtained the concept of death itself.
Not an affinity borrowed through his clone, not a passive echo of something Shadow carried. The concept itself, whole and complete, now belonged to him directly.
It felt as though everything Shadow had painstakingly cultivated up until this exact moment had simply been uprooted and transplanted straight into him, root and all.
Naturally, this left Evan completely stunned, the implications of it far too vast, far too absurd to fully wrap his mind around in the moment.
But he had no time to dwell on it, because in the very next instant, the concept core of death was followed by another arrival, and then another, and then another still, each one crashing into him in rapid succession.
Within only a few seconds, all six concept cores had struck him, one after the other, each delivering that exact same disorienting sensation, differing only in intensity, in scale, in how deeply each one seemed to root itself within him.
[Ding! Your synchronization with the God of War’s bloodline has increased]
[Ding! Your synchronization with the God of War’s bloodline has increased]
...
[Ding! You have assimilated 90% of the God of War’s bloodline]
[Congratulations, you have obtained the concept of fire!]
...
[Ding! Your affinity with void energy has increased]
...
[Ding! You have surpassed 70% affinity with void energy]
...
[Ding! Your synchronization with the God of Life’s bloodline has increased]
[Ding! Your synchronization with the God of Life’s bloodline has increased]
...
[Ding! You have assimilated 10% of the God of Life’s bloodline]
[Congratulations, you have developed the concept of life!]
It didn’t take Evan long to register the striking differences each concept core produced. His affinity with void energy, for instance, had leapt to 70%, up from what had been sitting at roughly 50% only moments before he’d stepped into this strange space.
Or how his assimilation of Ash’s bloodline had rocketed straight up to 90%, a near-complete assimilation, the highest so far, and with it, he’d genuinely obtained the concept of fire, one facet of Ash’s own mutated concept, and, right alongside it, the concept of life as well, no longer some vague, secondhand influence, but something whole and his own.
The raw numbers alone might have seemed almost insignificant to someone glancing at them casually, but Evan understood better than anyone how deceptive that impression was.
Even the smallest percentage increase represented something monumental, and he had, in fact, genuinely developed the concept of life itself now, a true concept rather than the passive, secondhand effects he’d carried before.
With just these three alone, he already felt as though he were soaring somewhere far beyond what should have been possible. But it seemed the surprises weren’t finished yet, not by a long shot, because what came from the two remaining concept cores was what truly left him reeling.
[Ding! Your synchronization with the bloodline of Space and Time has increased]
[Ding! Your synchronization with the bloodline of Space and Time has increased]
[Ding! Your synchronization with the bloodline of Space and Time has increased]
’Wait. Bloodline? What is it talking about?’ Evan thought, genuine confusion cutting through the haze of everything else happening to him.
With Ash and Shadow, the system had always classified their concepts as assimilated bloodlines, that much made sense. But he didn’t have a bloodline tied to Space and Time. Only an affinity, hard-won through study and near-fatal trial and error, with the two Laws themselves.
He strongly doubted the system would make an error with a distinction as fundamental as that.
But right at that moment, a memory surfaced, unbidden. The system notifications that had come through right after the avatar had died, the ones he’d barely had time to register before everything went dark.
’Could this be my new clone?’ he wondered, but he had no time to chase that thought any further, because the notifications kept coming, relentless, one after another.
And when Evan finally saw the last notifications tied to this new, impossible bloodline, he nearly staggered where he stood.
"Wait, this... no, how is this possible?!"