FREE USE in Primitive World

She slowly lifted her head, her milky eyes wide, sensing the holy stillness that had reclaimed the clearing.

”It’s... gone?” Zephyra whispered.

Her voice cracked, trembling with the sheer impossibility of what had just failed to happen. She remained on her hands and knees in the churned mud, dark blood still dripping from her mouth onto the broken ground, her blind, milky eyes fixed upward as if waiting for the other shoe to drop.

For a High Shaman steeped in ancestral lore, an absolute heavenly execution was the end of the line.

The decrees of the realm did not negotiate, they did not waver, and they certainly did not pack up and evaporate into thin air without bringing down cataclysms that change the geography of the surroundings.

After all, according to records passed down from generations, even though the descent of heavenly decree was incredibly rare, maybe once in a thousand years, but whenever it happened, there was widespread destruction and bloodbath.

”The decree...” she muttered, shaking her head in stunned disbelief, ”it actually retreated?”

”Well, looks like it,” Sol replied smoothly, shrugging his broad shoulders. He deliberately kept his tone flat, casual, and thoroughly ignorant. ”I don’t know what the hell just happened.

One second the sky looked like it was about to cave in our skulls, and the next second everything just backed off and went back to normal. Guess whatever was up there realized it wasn’t worth the trouble.”

He kept his posture loose and unbothered, though internally his pulse was still hammering from watching that primordial needle casually swat the cosmos aside.

He wasn’t about to start blabbering about a four-pointed phantom compass carved from solid midnight, let alone explain how a divine relic of the First Dawn was currently taking a nap inside his skull. Some cards were meant to stay buried so deep even the gods couldn’t dig them up.

Zephyra opened her mouth to argue, but the words died in her throat as the center of the hollow violently reignited.

The golden-white luminescence around Veylara, which had dwindled to a dying spark under the suffocating malice of the sky, exploded outward with unbridled, incandescent fury.

Without the crushing weight of the realm bearing down on her spine, her physical body roared to life like an unbound sun breaking out of an eclipse.

The surrounding air warped and an even vaster, terrifyingly dense flood of ambient essence rushed in from the dark expanse of the Great Orrath, converging onto the clearing like a dozen roaring rivers plunging into a bottomless chasm.

Mixed into that tidal wave of spiritual power was a strange, alien residue... a red, otherworldly afterglow left behind by the abrupt retreat of the heavenly force.

It was as if the ancient rules and restrictions of this continent had not just stepped aside for her, but had been forcibly ripped away, leaving the path wide open for her to resume her sprint toward Layer 5 with ten times the ferocity she had shown before.

Before the sky had backed down, her ascension had been an agonizing, uphill struggle.

Even with a massive concentration of essence gathering in the clearing, the unseen ceiling of the realm had choked her off. Her foundation had been forced to fight two wars at once... trying to feed and upgrade her spirit beast and core while constantly beating back the suffocating pressure of a cosmic cage.

Trying to absorb energy under that restriction had been like trying to force water through hairline cracks in solid granite; a few drops seeped through, but the vast majority was battered away, wasted and dispersed into the air.

And now?

The stone had vanished and the barrier had turned into dust.

Her body had turned into a starving, bottomless sponge, greedily drinking in every single thread of essence that touched her skin. The white tide poured through her pores in continuous, heavy torrents, bypassing the usual resistance of mortal flesh.

The terrifying change was visible to the naked eye. The spiderweb fractures running along her pale, sun-kissed skin sealed shut in a fraction of a second, leaving behind smooth, untamed bronze.

The torn channels deep within her flesh... strained to the absolute brink of ruin only moments ago... knitted together with terrifying speed, reinforced and widened into pristine, golden conduits capable of carrying a small sea.

The essence-blood trickling from her nostrils and the corners of her eyes was instantly vaporized into fine, glittering mist by the sheer, furnace-like heat radiating from her core.

Her flesh became an incandescent crucible.

But underneath that surface, beneath the smooth planes of her shoulders and the hardened muscle of her stomach, an entirely different war had begun.

Layer 5 was not a title handed out because the heavens had tucked their tail and fled. The absence of the cosmic boot simply meant she was no longer being executed on the spot.

The actual transformation... the brutal, agonizing alchemy of turning mortal flesh into a vessel capable of holding the power of an apex sovereign... still demanded every single drop of her willpower.

Deep inside her chest, where her fourth-layer sun core had rotated for nearly a decade, the core had ceased its normal rhythm. It wasn’t spinning anymore.

It had expanded, stretching against the walls of her spiritual sea until it was paper-thin, vibrating at a frequency so violent that Sol could hear the low, metallic whine from where he stood ten paces away.

HUMMMMM.

The sound vibrated through the limestone bedrock, shaking the loose pebbles around Sol’s bare feet.

Veylara’s head jerked back, a sharp, choked gasp tearing through her clenched teeth. Her hands, which had hung loosely at her sides, snapped into rigid claws, her fingers curling so hard that her nails bit straight into her own palms.

”She’s touching it,” Zephyra croaked from the mud, slowly hauling her battered upper body onto her elbows. Her silver-white hair hung in tangled, damp clumps across her face, her milky eyes staring fixedly into the center of the hollow. ”She has finally reached the threshold of Layer 5.”