Lord of the Truth

Chapter 2303: The mysterious path

A few seconds earlier—

"Damn it!!"

In a place of absolute darkness, with no way to tell its size or extent, no way to know whether she stood inside a tiny bubble or an endless universe whose boundaries could never be reached or even imagined... a place well known to everyone who had ever reached the brink of the peak of the Nexus State, yet one that none of them could truly describe afterward because words simply failed to capture what existed there.

Within that pitch-black darkness, there was only a single rope hanging from above. Only its incredibly thick end was visible, while the rest stretched upward into the darkness, swallowed completely by the endless blackness. Its distinctive color stood out against the void like a star, yet it was a star that seemed impossibly distant, forever beyond reach no matter what happened or how desperately one wished to approach it. It was impossible to tell which Law it belonged to or what it truly represented, nor whether it represented a single Law at all. It simply remained there in silence, unmoving most of the time, neither welcoming nor rejecting anyone... merely watching as though it had observed countless beings arrive before her and disappear just as quietly.

Other than that rope, there was only a single girl.

"Damn it, damn it!" Renara shouted as she sat hugging her knees with her elbows, clutching her thick hair so tightly that several strands slipped between her fingers. "I know now... I know perfectly well that you’re not from separate Paths like everyone believes, or like I believed. All of you belong to a single Path. All of you are waiting for me to choose one of you to complete my breakthrough, and every attempt I’ve made until now has only convinced me of that even more."

Then she looked upward. "But I’ve been ordered to break through with a Major Law. I can’t do it!! I simply can’t ignore those orders no matter how tempting all of you make this choice."

She cried out again as she noticed the thick rope hanging alone overhead. "...And why is there only one rope showing, for heaven’s sake, when I can sense all nine of them at the same time? Why aren’t there nine ropes for nine Laws? Which one are you?! Or are you truly none of them and all of them at once?"

Silence.

The thick rope swayed gently, as though a faint breeze had passed by it, even though there was neither wind nor air nor anything else within that strange place capable of making such a movement.

Renara’s affinity toward the nine Minor Laws had risen to a terrifying level after she absorbed the blood of a Nine-Tailed Beast Emperor. It could even be said that her entire body, from her bloodline to every fragment of energy flowing through her, had reached a level of strength and evolution unlike anything it had ever attained before, as though years of cultivation had been compressed into a single opportunity.

It could be said that she had already possessed remarkable mastery over seven of them, while she could barely use the remaining two. But now, all nine had reached an unprecedented level of affinity within a single body—a perfectly balanced level that awaited nothing but a choice, with none of the nine showing the slightest sign of being inferior or superior to the others in her perception.

His Majesty’s arrangement had secured an entire family of Nine-Tailed Beasts for her, yet she had not personally touched any of them. Every resource extracted from that family had instead been used to strengthen the Kyomaji bloodline as a whole, allowing generation after generation to benefit from that priceless opportunity, and indeed, over the past decades, several individuals had successfully reached the Nexus State because of those accumulated resources and the foundation they had provided.

As for her, she had enjoyed the Beast Emperor blood all by herself... and now, after finishing every last bottle without wasting even a single drop, she had reached a terrifying level of affinity with all nine Laws, enough to break through into the rank of a Law Dominator with any one of them and finally fulfill the long-cherished dream of her ancestors, a dream that had remained unattainable despite countless generations of effort.

Yet she restrained herself.

She had been ordered to become even stronger... to discover their true origin before making her decision, because only then would her breakthrough carry the value His Majesty sought.

The Major Heat Law that His Majesty had sent her?

No... they did not belong to the Heat Path. She had tried countless times without success, repeatedly attempting to use that Major Law as the bridge connecting everything together, and through her extraordinary affinity with them, she could almost feel the nine Laws laughing at her every time she stubbornly forced them toward a conclusion that simply was not true.

"..." Renara calmed herself before slowly lowering her gaze again.

"Frost, Flame, Explosion, Vibration, Cutting, Pressure, Friction, Momentum, Beam..."

"...What do all of you have in common?" she continued in an even quieter voice. "Please... I can’t stay here forever... They need me outside... I’ve already spent far too long searching for an answer that refuses to reveal itself, and I’m beginning to forget my goals..."

Silence.

Shwaaaaaaaaa—

"Ah!" Renara immediately looked up as something strange appeared, her eyes widening before she even had time to think.

A golden sun.

A sun that emerged from nowhere, illuminating the darkness with brilliant radiance as though the surrounding blackness had never existed in the first place. The rope, of which only a tiny end had been visible, suddenly revealed the portion above it, appearing to stretch upward for endless miles, its true length so overwhelming that the section she had previously seen now seemed almost insignificant by comparison.

Renara slowly rose to her feet, staring upward with her mouth slightly open, her eyes instinctively tracing the endless rope as far as her vision could follow before ultimately failing to find where it truly ended.

The newly revealed section of the rope was covered in engravings running along its entire length, with each section bearing different patterns that flowed naturally into one another without any obvious boundary separating them.

She recognized many of those engravings, having already mastered all of them up to the Sixth Grade. That single rope bore the engravings of all nine Laws, yet the moment she saw them with her own eyes, she realized something...

There was so much she had never noticed before despite studying those Laws for years. Certain patterns connected all nine Laws together in ways she had never perceived, as though each engraving naturally continued into another one before eventually returning to its own path again, creating relationships that had remained completely hidden from her previous understanding.

And beyond those connections... there were countless patterns she had never seen before, patterns that did not resemble any of the nine Laws she knew and yet somehow seemed inseparably intertwined with every single one of them, as though they formed the unseen foundation supporting everything else.

"So that’s how it is... so that’s how it is..." Renara murmured.

------------------

In front of Renara’s body—

A broad smile spread across Robin’s face the moment he heard Renara murmur those words, the satisfaction in his expression growing naturally as though a long-standing suspicion in the back of his mind had finally begun taking shape through someone else’s realization.

He lowered the hand that had been about to open a Spacetime Gate, deciding there was no longer any reason to interrupt what was unfolding, took a chair out of his ring, and calmly sat down in front of Renara while maintaining that same smile, his eyes never leaving her face for even a moment.

"..." Glatheon frowned slightly. He also wanted to hear whether she would say anything else, sensing that her understanding had not yet reached its conclusion, but he quickly remembered that Richard was still ill. He took out another chair, helped him sit down so he would not have to remain standing during what might become a lengthy revelation, then quietly walked over to stand beside Robin, fixing his own attention on Renara.

They did not have to wait long before Renara began speaking aloud once again, her voice carrying far more certainty than before.

"...So that’s how it is... Frost isn’t about turning things to ice. It can only be described as the process of extracting thermal energy from matter itself, lowering its temperature by reducing the energy contained within it. Flame wasn’t actually fire—it was the process of converting my body’s internal heat, using my own energy, into something visibly manifested, giving invisible thermal energy a tangible form. Explosion is fundamentally the conversion of the energy stored within any material into sudden, violent expansion, forcing that energy to escape all at once instead of remaining confined!"

"....." Robin’s brows knitted tightly, not because he disagreed, but because every sentence she spoke seemed to broaden the scope of the Path far beyond what he had imagined.

"...Cutting is the conversion of energy into incredibly sharp lines that sever the bonds between the particles of matter, allowing separation without relying on a physical blade... Vibration is the conversion of energy within materials from stillness into localized motion, producing powerful oscillations that spread through the substance itself... Friction is the conversion of the properties of energy from viscosity to elasticity whenever needed, allowing me to make things either slide effortlessly with almost no resistance or generate overwhelming friction powerful enough to stop or ignite them."

"Ah... Momentum. That incredible speed I gain or use to propel objects... it’s the conversion of potential energy into kinetic energy? And Beams... they’re actually the release of stored energy through an extremely thin strand, concentrating it into a single direction and giving it the properties of a laser instead of allowing it to disperse naturally."

"...?"

Renara continued, "All those years... I kept looking at the final results and trying to connect them together, convinced that the answers had to lie in the finished phenomena themselves, but I never examined the path leading to those results. I never considered that my manipulation of energy was what produced all of this from the very beginning... and that if the process itself is understood completely, then it could produce far more than the nine abilities my people have always treated as separate Laws?!"

"All those Laws unique to my people—the Laws of the Nine Halls—aren’t Laws originating from different Paths at all, but a single Path that we’ve been using in nine different ways, each Hall inheriting only one application while remaining ignorant of the whole... one Path capable of affecting the energy of everything... a Path capable of transforming energy from one form into another, from one state into another, influencing it equally within living beings and lifeless matter without any fundamental distinction between the two... this... is the Energy Conversion Path!!"

Rumble! Rumble!

Robin ignored the explosions echoing across the heavens above, paying them no more attention than distant thunder. It was obvious that Renara’s breakthrough into the Law Dominator domain had already begun, and that the violent reactions filling the sky were merely the natural consequences of such an extraordinary advancement.

Instead, he kept his gaze fixed on the girl’s face, carefully memorizing every word she spoke as though each sentence might reveal another hidden piece of the puzzle.

The Energy Conversion Path?

Shouldn’t that be a Law belonging to the broader Energy Path? Why did an entirely separate Path exist under that name? Was there truly enough difference between controlling energy itself and converting it to justify an independent Path, or was there an even deeper distinction hidden beneath the surface?

And more importantly...

The name of the Path itself was terrifying, but Renara’s words were even more terrifying, because they described not a collection of techniques, but a universal principle capable of explaining them all.

Everything was made of atoms, and every atom was filled with energy. Detonating just a handful of atoms could unleash a massive explosion capable of obliterating an entire planet... and the Creator of the universe had used an immeasurable amount of energy to create everything that existed, an amount of energy beyond calculation, comprehension, or even meaningful comparison by mortal standards.

Renara could manipulate that energy inside objects?

Not merely release it or suppress it, but alter its state, redirect it, reshape it, and convert it into entirely different forms while it remained inside living beings or ordinary matter?

Just how powerful would this Path become if it were mastered to its absolute limit?

Did the description "Fundamental" even do it justice, or had the Path merely been classified that way because no one had ever fully uncovered what it was actually capable of?

What could someone accomplish with it once every possibility hidden within it had been explored?

The applications weren’t simply numerous—they seemed to expand endlessly the longer he thought about them, with every conclusion naturally giving birth to several more possibilities until the concept itself appeared to have no discernible limit.