FREE USE in Primitive World

And right in the dead center of that swirling ring of liquid silver and blood-red fire, pooling at the center of her core, the phantom of a fifth layer began to form.

It was tiny at first... a hairline layer of raw, unshaped light no thicker than a thread of silk. But the moment it appeared, the surrounding reality pushed back.

”She’s almost there.” Zephyra gasped, ”She is touching the threshold! Sol, the barrier between Layer 4 and Layer 5 is not an ordinary wall... it is a moat of pure void! To bridge it, the core must expand to twice its natural capacity without bursting!”

Sol’s jaw were locked shut. His neon-crimson eyes bored into Veylara’s floating form, watching the subtle, terrifying war playing out across her skin.

She wasn’t past the danger. The sky had run away, but the sheer physical reality of mortal limits was still demanding its toll.

Veylara’s jaw clamped shut, her teeth grinding together with a sound like crushing gravel. The fifth layer was trying to seat itself into her core, but her mortal flesh... even tempered by decades of warfare and Layer 4 resilience... was resisting the expansion.

The spiritual channels along her collarbones and down her arms swelled to the size of thick ropes, pulsing with violent, erratic bursts of light.

Beneath the smooth bronze of her skin, tiny crimson veins burst, weeping fresh drops of blood that sizzled and turned to red steam the moment they touched the scalding air.

”Push through it, Veylara,” Sol muttered through clenched teeth, his bare hands curling into fists at his sides. ”Don’t fail after reaching this far.”

Her body violently jolted in mid-air.

CRACK.

The sound came from inside her chest. A sickening, dry fracture that made both Sol and Zephyra freeze.

The fifth layer had stalled.

Barely half-formed, the ring of silver-red light was vibrating erratically, threatening to tear itself away from her core.

Her body was drawing in power faster than her spirit channels could hold. If that layer broke apart now, the sheer, unchecked volume of swallowed essence wouldn’t just dissipate; it would detonate outward from her center, vaporizing her torso and taking the entire clearing with it.

Veylara’s eyes, which had been glowing with sovereign fury, suddenly snapped wide with sudden, suffocating panic.

She was drowning. The sea of essence she had greedily swallowed had become too vast, too heavy.

It was stagnant in her core, pooling like molten lead, refusing to take the shape of the fifth layer properly. Her lungs locked, her arms trembling as the pale luminescence around her frame began to flicker with dangerous, chaotic instability.

”The spirit beast!” Zephyra shouted, her voice cutting through the rising wind like a whip. ”Her anchor! She can not advance without the beast’s transformation to Layer 5! If her beast cannot handle the transformation, the fifth layer will reject her soul!”

Right on the heels of the shaman’s cry, a low, guttural shriek echoed from the depths of Veylara’s spiritual space.

And from the sound of it, it definitely wasn’t human.

From the white light radiating behind her shoulders, a massive, semi-transparent silhouette erupted into the night air.

It was her soul beast—the supreme totem that had carried her through a hundred bloody battlefields. The White Tiger.

Normally, when Veylara summoned her beast’s projection in combat, it was a majestic, terrifying entity of pure white light, with a height of forty paces and talons sharp enough to cleave through ancient tree shields like dry paper.

Now, however, the tiger looked like it was being dragged through a slaughterhouse.

Its fur was ragged, shedding blinding silver sparks as it writhed in the air above her head.

The beast shrieked in agony, its form stretching, distorting, and cracking as the incoming torrent of Layer 5 essence violently forced its way into its spiritual form.

The creature’s maw snapped wildly at the empty air, its legs thrashing against the invisible boundary of the clearing, unable to assimilate the foreign, red-tinged power surging through its master’s veins.

All in all, compared to the layer it was reaching, the beast was too weak.

Its ancestral lineage, bred entirely within the narrow, shallow confines of this low-tier continent, lacked the conceptual weight required to support a Layer 5 existence. It was a beast born for the plains and low mountains; it did not possess the wings to soar into the upper heavens.

”It can’t bear the transformation,” Zephyra cried, despair bleeding back into her voice as she watched the great white tiger begin to unravel into loose strands of light. ”The bloodline is reaching its limit! Without a higher origin force to temper the beast, her spirit beast will explode... and her core will follow it into the void!”

Sol watched the massive beast thrash, watched Veylara’s head fall forward as her consciousness began to waver under the suffocating pressure of her failing totem.

A higher origin force? Sol thought, his eyes narrowing into cold, calculating slits.

He didn’t need to ask what that meant.

The only reason Veylara had even touched this threshold in the first place was because of the raw, bottomless vitality he had poured into her belly under the willows.

He remembered that his own sun core could transform those shallow bloodlines. He remembered those purple drops! Since using them last time, he had accumulated quite a bit of them.

His seed had lit the fire. His seed had melted the boundary.

If her totem was choking because it lacked the backbone to carry Layer 5, then he’d just have to shove his own strength down its throat until it learned to swallow.

Sol didn’t hesitate for a single microsecond.

”Zephyra, wait here,” Sol barked.

”What—”

Before the High Shaman could finish the word, Sol’s bare feet dug into the mud.

BOOM.

The ground cratered beneath him as Sol launched himself straight towards the searing, scalding heart of the essence storm!

”Noooo! Sol stop! It’s dangerous! Your body won’t be able to handle the onslaught!”

But it was already too late, as Sol had already reached the edge of essence tornado.

Even at the very edge, heat and pressure cut him like a thousand heated knives working at once.