Before the sharp clack of Adrian's finger against the wooden table had even faded into the vacuum of space, Elder Voss moved. A long, cerulean-bladed spear materialized in Voss's grasp, its haft inscribed with dense runes.
In the same instant, his massive armored body lunged across the distance with terrifying speed, and the wooden table Adrian had created only moments ago shattered apart from the force of his movement, splinters scattering into the void before dissolving back into stray mana.
Malakor and Tyberius remained seated in their chairs, casually floating backward to allow the destruction to unfold.
As the spear thrust forward at him, Adrian gracefully dodged it, his crimson robes flowing around him as he moved backward through the void. A crimson energy blade appeared within his hand, just in time to deflect the trailing shockwave of Voss's attack.
The impact rang through the void, sending a violent tremor up Adrian's arm, but his posture remained completely unbroken. He floated a few dozen meters away, his eyes locked onto the form of the Cerulean Spear Sect elder.
From the outside, everything Adrian had done today, from stopping the fleets at the border to creating a wooden table in the middle of the void, from casually dismissing their offers to openly declaring that he was interviewing them, looked unbearably arrogant to these elders.
Adrian knew that clearly, and he had done it intentionally. This exact moment of combat was one of the outcomes he had wanted to create.
First, he needed to experience the power level of Astral Stage beings directly, through his own body, blade, and perception.
Of course, Adrian was not foolish enough to believe these elders represented the absolute peak of the Astral Stage. They were not top Astral Stage beings from the Great Sects, nor even sect leaders of Upper Major Sects.
If Adrian fought such beings, even with all his trump cards, it was something he could not confidently win. But these envoys came from lesser Major Sects. They were elders, powerful and experienced, but still clearly weaker than their own sect leaders and far weaker than the Astral beings who stood near the apex beneath Divine Stage existences. In simple words, these three Astral Stage beings were those in the lower tier of the entire Astral Stage.
If Adrian could not even deal with these elders, then all his words about protecting his people and building his own foundation would be nothing more than empty arrogance.
Second, if Adrian only wanted to confirm their strength, there were easier ways to provoke a limited exchange. He could have requested a spar, tested their strength, or allowed them to demonstrate their abilities under controlled circumstances.
But he had chosen this 'arrogant-looking' path because he wanted the confrontation to carry meaning beyond personal measurement. He wanted to show the universe that he was not merely a weak, newly ascended junior waiting to be bought, threatened, or harvested.
The only way to break the endless chain of probing, recruitment pressure, and hostile testing from larger powers was to establish supremacy and fear early. This had always been Adrian's mindset. If the titans of the universe only respected overwhelming power, then he would show them enough to make their hands hesitate before reaching toward his people.
In front of him, Voss did not expand his domain, invoke authority, or even use any kind of elaborate divine spell. He simply dashed forward and attacked with his physical body, displaying terrifying martial prowess.
Voss's spear became a blur of cerulean light. He unleashed a storm of thrusts, sweeps, and crushing overhead strikes. Every single movement was flawless. It was the terrifying culmination of millions of years spent fighting, bleeding, and surviving on the deadliest battlefields in the universe.
Adrian raised his crimson blade, blocking a thrust aimed at his throat, only to find the spear instantly redirecting to sweep at his legs. He parried, the force of the blow jarring his Source veins, forcing him to retreat another dozen meters.
"So this is what millions of years of combat experience and physical body refinement looks like," Adrian analyzed, his mind working rapidly as he deflected another three strikes in the span of a microsecond.
Adrian did not possess such a refined physical body or combat experience like Voss, and he could clearly see that from the very first exchange.
This situation was similar to facing Hazel back in the supremacy war. She had been physically much faster than Adrian, and Voss appeared much faster than Hazel.
Realizing that blocking Voss's relentless assault with pure physical body speed would eventually result in him making a fatal mistake, Adrian decided to use his Astral Domain. Voss had not used his domain, but that did not mean Adrian had to accept the same restriction.
But before the Astral Domain could even manifest around him, something entirely unprecedented occurred.
Deep within Adrian's consciousness, the mysterious golden dot of energy pulsed.
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It was a single, silent heartbeat inside his mind.
Instantly, the universe around Adrian changed.
Voss, who was currently mid-lunge with his spear driving directly toward Adrian's chest at a speed that defied ordinary perception, suddenly appeared to be moving through thick mud.
Adrian blinked. The blinding velocity of the spear had slowed to an agonizing crawl. He could see the microscopic shifts in Voss's armor as the elder's muscles contracted to deliver the killing blow. He could even see the faint ripples in the void where the spear's force was attempting to displace the surrounding space.
"Time manipulation?" Adrian's first instinct was to check his arcane Time concept. But the chamber within his Source Seed remained completely dormant. The concept of time was not active, and he hadn't manipulated the rules of reality.
Then, the realization struck him, "This isn't time. This is my perception."
As Adrian tried to move, he even felt that his physical body was slower than his perception, as though his mind had stepped into a speed his muscles had not yet learned to match.
He stopped summoning his Astral Domain and instead raised his sword, guiding the blade into the path of Voss's attack.
BOOM!
The spear collided with the crimson blade, and the force erupted outward in a brutal shockwave that rippled through nearby space.
Voss did not stop; he dashed forward again, spear thrusting, sweeping, reversing, and hammering in a relentless storm of attacks. Their weapons clashed again and again, and within a single second, they exchanged hundreds of moves.
Sparks of crimson and cerulean energy scattered into the darkness, and the force of their collisions sent ripples through nearby space. With every exchange, Adrian used his improved perception to study Voss's rhythm, stance, feints, and patterns. He adapted with terrifying speed, correcting his blade angles, adjusting his body in the void, and learning to account for the gap between what his mind could perceive and what his body could execute.
"What is going on here?" Voss thought as he continued attacking Adrian with increasing intensity. At the beginning, Adrian had clearly been much slower. He had reacted decently, especially for someone newly ascended, but not this fast.
Yet as the exchange continued, Adrian's speed increased at a rate that made no sense. It was as if Adrian had been pretending to be slow at the start and was now gradually revealing his true speed.
Malakor and Tyberius watched the battle closely, and their expressions gradually changed from cold amusement to genuine shock. Among their generation of Astral Stage elders, Voss was the fastest, and anyone who wanted to face him in battle could only rely on authority, domains, or willforce techniques to match his physical speed.
Yet Adrian, who had supposedly only entered the Astral Stage recently, was doing exactly that in front of them.
It did not make sense.
The longer Voss attacked, the more Adrian adjusted, and the more the impossible became visible. He was no longer being driven backward as helplessly as he had been during the first second of contact.
Voss looked at Adrian, and his battle lust grew fiercer. It had been a long time since he had faced someone this fast. Even more than that, it had been a long time since someone was willing to meet him head-on without immediately hiding behind authority.
His scowl twisted into a savage grin, and the cerulean runes across his armor flared brighter as he drove more physical force through his body.
Voss moved at an even more terrifying speed, his body blurring into a storm of afterimages. His spear became dozens of overlapping arcs, each one carrying enough force to pierce through Peak Rule Stage beings easily.
The surrounding void bent and trembled beneath his movement, and even Malakor and Tyberius could only barely follow the full sequence of attacks with their eyes. To most Rule Stage cultivators, Voss would have vanished entirely, leaving only the moment of death behind.
But to Adrian, Voss's rapid movements still felt slow to his perception.
"This improvement… is this because of my willforce expanding?" Adrian thought, his gaze following every spear path, every feint, every shift of Voss's center of gravity.
That was the only explanation that made any sense. His consciousness had grown after the Chime of Consciousness, and then it had expanded further after connecting with trillions of people through the [Crown of the Source].
But strangely, this extreme perception had not manifested during the quiet days after connecting with his people. Only when battle began, only when danger and combat intent ignited his mind, did the dormant improvement suddenly activate, as though his consciousness had been waiting for a true battlefield to reveal its new function.
Why didn't it reveal itself before?
Adrian could not fully understand the mechanics of it. Was his willforce enhancing his perception automatically? Was the golden dot acting like a combat-focused consciousness core, accelerating the processing of incoming information under pressure? He did not know, and this was not the time to drown in speculation.
Without wasting more thought on it, Adrian dodged Voss's next thrust by shifting his torso just enough for the spear to pass beside his ribs, then counterattacked with a sharp upward slash of his crimson blade.
His perception was faster, but his body was still slower than what his mind desired, and he had to take that into account with every move. He could not simply act on what he saw; he had to calculate the delay between perception and execution, using smaller motions, tighter angles, and predictive positioning to compensate.
Instead of trying to match Voss's raw physical speed directly, Adrian began to move earlier, placing his blade where the spear would be rather than where it was.
BOOM!
The effect was immediate. Voss's spear hammered downward, and Adrian's blade was already waiting at the correct angle, redirecting the force instead of blocking it head-on.
Voss reversed the spear into a horizontal sweep meant to cut through Adrian's waist, but Adrian folded backward through the void, letting the edge pass over him before driving his knee toward Voss's armored ribs.
THUD!
The attack did not break the armor, but it disrupted Voss's rhythm for a fraction of a moment, and that fraction was enough for Adrian's blade to carve a shallow crimson line across the elder's shoulder guard.
The wound itself was insignificant, barely more than a scratch across armor reinforced by a Major Sect. But the meaning behind it was not insignificant at all.
Voss's grin widened into something almost wild. Malakor's fingers tightened against the armrest of his chair. Tyberius's shadows stilled.
Adrian floated in the void, crimson blade held loosely in his hand, his eyes calm and focused as the golden dot within his consciousness pulsed once more. He still did not know exactly what stage of consciousness mastery he had reached, nor how much his trillions of connections had improved him, but the result was becoming undeniable.
He could see Voss.
And if he could see him, then he could learn to beat him.
