The light was not a physical sensation. It was a spiritual one. Ren's consciousness was torn from his body and pulled into the heart of the Primordial Lightning Font. He was no longer a boy in a vault; he was a single, disembodied thought adrift in an infinite ocean of pure, sentient energy.
This was the collective consciousness of the Raijin bloodline, the source from which their power sprang. It was a sea of memories, of emotions, of triumphs and sorrows that stretched back for millennia. He felt the joy of the first Sky-Lord who had learned to command the thunder. He felt the pride of the artisans who had forged the Storm Spires. He felt the cold, hard resolve of the warriors who had stood against the horrors of a thousand Rifts.
And he felt the final, soul-crushing despair of their end. The memory of the Obsidian God, the silent, absolute void, was here too, a scar of darkness in the brilliant sea of light.
A lesser soul would have been instantly annihilated by this experience, their consciousness dissolved like a drop of rain in the ocean. But Ren's soul was different. It had been tempered in the fires of solitude and scorn, honed by the relentless training of Zephyrion, and scarred by the very memory of the cataclysm itself. His will was an anchor of iron in the storm of memories.
He did not fight the ocean. He did not try to command it. He simply… floated. He accepted the memories, the emotions, the history. He let the power of his bloodline wash over him, through him, becoming a part of him.
And the ocean, in turn, accepted him. It recognized his right to be there. It recognized the song of his soul.
The torrent of raw energy that had been testing him now became a gentle, nurturing current. It flowed into his spiritual core, a flood of pure, refined Aether that was beyond anything he could have ever imagined.
His cultivation rank, which had been a solid Rank 11, began to skyrocket.
Rank 12… Rank 13… Rank 14…
Each new rank was not a struggle. It was a release. A barrier dissolving into nothing. The Font was not just providing fuel; it was providing the perfect blueprint, the most efficient pathway for his own power to grow. His Aetheric channels, now flawless thanks to the Stoneweaver's Root, eagerly accepted the immense influx of power without any strain or damage.
Rank 15… Rank 16… Rank 17…
He felt his understanding of the Aether deepening with each passing moment. The complex theories Zephyrion had tried to explain to him were now simple, intuitive truths. He could see the weave of reality, the dance of energy, with a clarity that was almost blinding.
Rank 18… Rank 19…
He reached the final bottleneck of the Aether Apprentice tier. The barrier between Rank 19 and Rank 20, a wall that took most Spirit Masters years of hard cultivation to polish and break through, felt like a thin sheet of glass before the tidal wave of the Font's power.
Rank 20!
He had reached the absolute peak of his tier. His Aetheric core was now a swirling, miniature star, brimming with a power that was dense, stable, and perfectly under his control.
Back in the vault, his physical body, which had been floating weightlessly before the Font, was now blazing with a light so bright it illuminated every corner of the vast chamber. Anya watched on the Nautilus's drone feed, her mouth agape, her sensors failing as they were overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the energy readings.
But the process was not over. He had reached the peak. Now, he had to take the final step.
"The beast," Zephyrion's voice echoed, no longer just in his mind, but as a part of the Font's own consciousness. "The law must be obeyed. To cross the threshold, to claim your second Soul Skill, you must have a sacrifice. You must have a Core."
Ren had no beast. He had no Core. He was alone in a sterile vault at the bottom of the sea.
But he was not without resources.
He focused his will, drawing upon the immense power now at his command. He reached out to the only other Raijin artifact in his possession—the "Heart of the Tempest" shard at his belt.
The shard, a memory of a fallen weapon, pulsed in response. It was not a true Aether Beast Core, but it was the next best thing. It was a concentration of ancient, powerful, and compatible energy. It was a ghost of a soul.
"The boy is mad," he could feel Zephyrion's awe and terror. "He intends to use the memory of a dead god's heart as the sacrifice for his own ascension! It has never been done! It is either the work of a genius or a fool!"
Ren pulled the shard from his belt. It floated before him, its azure light brilliant. He drew upon the power of the Font, not to absorb it, but to use it as a forge. He focused the energy of the living star onto the shard, the dead memory.
He was not going to absorb it. He was going to reforge it. He was going to use the Font's power to awaken the shard's dormant battle instincts, to give its ghost a temporary, violent life, and then he was going to slay that ghost and take its power as his own.
The shard began to tremble, to vibrate. The azure light within it intensified, the lonely spark becoming a raging fire. It began to take on a new shape, not a physical one, but an Aetheric one. A spectral image formed around it—a massive, lupine creature made of pure, crackling lightning. The battle avatar of the original Storm Spire.
Ren had not just awakened a memory. He had awakened its battle spirit. And now, he had to defeat it in a duel of wills, here in the heart of his own soul. The final trial had begun.