MAGUS INFINITE

How could one man hold back the ocean? The answer was simple... they could not. It was the same for me. With every Earth Gate I opened, the benefit I gained rose dramatically, ensuring that I could not easily hold against the tide.

I was that man in front of the ocean, and I was washed away... I would never be ready for something like this, and it did not care.

The sea of essence arrived inside my soul like a raging storm, and flooded it, and I felt them split inside me and run to two different places. I screamed, and the scream had no air to leave in, so it rang inside my soul instead.

The first sea went to my Anima Depth, and the second went to my bones.

∞

The first storm of essence entered my Anima Depth, and it was held back, as there was a mysterious barrier that prevented it from touching my core. At the moment, my Anima Depth was still at 90, and had not grown since I reached the Arcanist level... I don’t know how hard it was to grow my Anima Depth at this level, but I thought my soul may need time to adapt to the changes it had experienced from moving from Adept to Arcanist before it began to grow again... but the Celestial Essence pouring into me did not care.

With every new gate I opened, the quality of the essence I received grew as well; it was one reason why I could face no bottleneck in my growth, since every new wave of power was purer and stronger than before.

Whatever barrier held back the growth of my Anima Depth held for a while, but the new essence pouring into me was so powerful that it felt as if I had acid pouring into my soul, and it ate through the barrier and poured into me, and the growth that I suspected should have taken me years to attain vanished in front of my eyes.

[ Anima Depth: 90 → 97 → 106 → 114 → 119 ]

It climbed, and it climbed hard, all the way to a hundred and nineteen, the peak of the Arcanist tier, and it stopped. I felt my domain explode in size, and massive streams of information poured into my head.

I had reached the peak of the Arcanist Tier, but the storm had not ended; it just kept pouring into my Anima Depth. Even though I had just been pushed to the peak of the Arcanist level, there was still so much power left, and it forced itself into my soul.

The Tribulation that carried me to the Arcanist level had expanded my soul, but it did not matter to the volume of the storm pouring into me; there was no more space for this power to enter, and yet it kept coming, and when I thought my soul would explode, my soul began to hum.

This humming was like music, and for a moment I was transfixed in place as I listened to it, because it felt as if the core of me was speaking for the first time. How can I describe it... It was like looking in the mirror and seeing your reflection step out of it and talk to you.

I said before that the world was my teacher, and perhaps this was more true than I had imagined. As my soul hummed, I understood what was happening, and why, even though I had reached the peak of Arcanist and was skilled to the brim, I could still hold more power.

I had thought crystallization was about density; after all, my liquid Anima was crushed into a smaller and smaller space until it was crystallised, and don’t get me wrong, it was that, but when this overflow pressed in, my Anima did not just compress; it purified.

My crystalline soul that was dense and shone like the moon began to clarify and lose its color, and what was left behind grew clearer, and clearer, until the crystal was not silver anymore but almost transparent, it was a clarity like water so pure you cannot see it, like glass with no flaw to catch the light, and through the pain I understood what crystallization actually was.

It was not my soul getting heavier. It was my soul getting true. Every impurity that a boy’s hasty climb through the loop, the scars left behind in my soul from forcefully tearing it apart over and over again, and had left harmful traces in my soul was being pressed out, and what remained was purer than anything an Arcanist could hope for, unless they grind for centuries to make it flawless, and closer to whatever a Sovereign’s soul than I had any right to be.

I did not have it in me to be shocked again when I saw a new progress bar for the crystallization of my soul. I had fought and killed Arcanists, and I had touched their souls, and none of them had a soul purity and density like mine, and now my soul, which already exceeded everyone I knew, was going through a second round of crystallization.

[ Crystallization: 14% → 22% → 29% → 33% ]

Finally, the storm inside my soul was consumed, and I was left a third of the way to a transparent soul. So many new mysteries awaited me to explore with the new state of my soul, but this crossing was not over, and while my soul had been experiencing a tribulation, something else was ongoing inside my bones.

∞

The second storm had gone to my bones, but unlike my Anima Depth, my Endurance had remained at the peak of Arcanist for a long time, and the last time this had happened, when all the dense Celestial Essence had poured into my bones, it had led to the creation of Titan’s Marrow.

The new essence transformed into marrow and began to devour my old marrow, and this process happened so quickly that it was almost laughable. A few drops of my new marrow absorbed all the marrow in my bones before the storm began to pour into me while slamming against the barrier.

My body was different from my soul, and the crystallization process that happened with my soul could not happen with my body. The barrier holding my Endurance in place was seemingly unbreakable, but the essence that poured into me was excessively powerful, and yet it could not breach this barrier.

The pressure I felt in my body began to build and build as the storm continued to pour into me. My body expanded until I was fifteen feet tall, then sixteen... then twenty!

It did not seem to matter, as the barrier that held my flesh bound did not shake in the slightest, and I felt something flow through the storm... five fragments that seemed to be windows to nothing and everything at the same time.

The five Law Fragments the gate had given me, unattuned, belonging to no Law, and yet seemingly encompassing every law, rose out of wherever the gate had seated them, and they did not wait for me to understand them.

They went into the barrier my Endurance was breaking against, and attached themselves to it, and they began to melt, and in that moment, I felt them connect two parts of me that were in the same place, but apart... my Endurance, and Titan’s Marrow.