107. Breakthrough (II)

Steel essence poured out of the Worldseed like water escaping a dam. Into him.

Zane closed his eyes. He reached out with his soul.

Usually, he had to make an effort. It took some searching. Not so right now. It was impossible not to feel Elemental Steel.

It screamed at him everywhere. Scathing winds scoured him from the outside. A little tempest brewed from within as the Worldseed gave him more and more, soaking him from the roots of his hair to the nails on his toes. It felt like a second bloodstream pumping fiercely through him, suffusing him totally. It was chock-full of Law—he just had to pick out the one he needed.

Magnetism.

The Worldseed kept flooding him with steel Law, steel essence. It wasn't just saturation. At a very small level, the tiny things that made up who he was, the structure of his essence, the structure of his body, the stuff of his bone, and marrow, and muscle—it was all shifting as it took on the essence. In subtle, fascinating ways. Shifting the way a magnet shifts, he realized.

Suddenly he was acutely aware of the pull on him and within him; it tingled all over. It was like his whole body was the needle of a compass, pointing toward the current. It struck him in an instant—a flash of insight. And he knew the way steel pulled.

𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕙𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕕!

𝕄𝕚𝕟𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕠𝕗 ℙ𝕠𝕝𝕒𝕣 𝔸𝕥𝕥𝕣𝕒𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟

He was shocked how easily it came. It was a good sign.

He sought out the other way—the push. It came even easier; he could feel viscerally the wave buffeting him, shoving him all over at once. It wasn't the first time he'd been shoved like this. That Treant had thrown him all over the place. He'd felt the way it worked, felt it down to the bones; push with the soul hand-in-hand with the Universe, and you could make a magnetic field do your bidding. The field was a projection of the will. He was used to pushing and pulling as a purely physical thing. But just as his hand carried out the will of his mind, so too did this field. It was just a different way of pushing. He had to think a little sideways.

He could reach out. He could shove back. And when he did—pushing in that same way—he felt the field blooming there too, shoving aside the flakes in the air, shoving at the steel glossing the ground. He could spread it wide, diffusing its force. He could narrow it to just himself and it was like a little force-field, blunting the meteor's currents. He had it.

𝕃𝕒𝕨 ℂ𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕙𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕕!

𝕄𝕚𝕟𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕠𝕗 ℝ𝕖𝕡𝕦𝕝𝕤𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣𝕔𝕖

Which left just one more steel Law.

He took just seconds to find it. He sat there still, and he fell away. The sensations of the body—the little things, the feeling of the weight of him against the ground, the random pricklings on his skin, to the big things, that huge magnetic push-pull… he felt like a child holding onto a bunch of balloons. There was something oddly pure, almost childlike about his state of mind right now…he let go. He watched his body's feelings drift off into the void. All that was left was the soul.

One more Law. He'd find it in the currents, he knew. He felt then like an old weathered stone in a wild stormy sea. Not a sea made of water, but not so different. It shoved and pulled and crashed over him just the same. It wasn't one stable flow like he'd first thought. These magnetic currents twisted and curved, played on each other. They were waves, and they came from two sources. He felt that very clearly now.

One was the Worldseed. And Zane too, now that he was connected to it. The other was the Meteor. Their waves crashed off each other, and it was the way they interacted that made the landscape of the field around him. In places they doubled, swirled together, grew doubly strong; in others, they crashed and broke against each other.

It felt like a eureka moment. He saw it, and he knew it. He knew how he could call on the Universe to disrupt the magnetic field just as you could enhance it. He felt how to break it. How to control it.

𝕃𝕒𝕨 ℂ𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕙𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕕!

𝕄𝕚𝕟𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕠𝕗 𝕄𝕒𝕘𝕟𝕖𝕥𝕚𝕔 𝔽𝕝𝕦𝕩

He was just breezing through these. Something strange was happening to him, something unusual, something wondrous. He was more in tune with the Universe than he'd ever been. Even as he blinked and settled back into himself, he was more there than here. The real world felt unreal. As he looked around and cast out his senses, he saw souls, not bodies. Laws, not forms. Like some kind of X-ray vision that showed him the inner workings of anything and everything. It was so strong right now he wasn't sure he could turn it off if he wanted.

He blinked. Huh.

When he brought up all the Laws he'd just comprehended, he hardly needed to reach at all. They were just there. And when he put them together, they snapped together easily, like they wanted to come together.

𝕃𝕒𝕨 ℂ𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕙𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕕!

𝕄𝕒𝕛𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕠𝕗 𝕄𝕒𝕘𝕟𝕖𝕥𝕚𝕔 ℂ𝕠𝕞𝕞𝕒𝕟𝕕

And that was the last Major Law he felt. He had everything.

His eyes fluttered open. He breathed out and and looked at the sky. It looked like it had hardly been an hour or two hours, surprisingly—he sun was still halfway up the sky. Early-morning. Then he turned his gaze down and saw a crowd gathered there. Tommy—that steel enthusiast guy—gave him a wave. Right—he said he'd gone to tell his friends Zane was breaking through.

That…was a lot of friends. That was something like a hundred people. Maybe his friends told other friends. They flinched as he glanced over; there was a cloud of nervous anticipation hanging over them—more nervous than he was, funnily enough. They were excited too.

Then he realized he was glowing. He was kind of like the meteor—he was pouring off Law too. Maybe it was the strange, almost psychedelic feeling state he was in. He figured it was the sheer amount of treasures he was throwing into himself. He had to take advantage of it.

One more step. The biggest of all. Zane knew it took weeks, for those other World Rankers to break through this—the ones that managed it anyway. And they were all super-talents.

Something told Zane it wouldn't take him that long. He closed his eyes once more, and settled in for the final push.

***

Not thirty feet away, Cassius Reed, World Rank 33, sat at the edge of the crater's middle ring. Staring as Zane Walker closed his eyes.

He felt the magnetic field shifts all around him, bending toward that one man. The disturbance grew stronger second by second… "Incredible," he whispered.

Behind him were the elites of his Faction. They've taken the week-long trek here all the way down from Denver. They were here on a Steel Law bootcamp. His second-in-command piped up behind him. "Sir? What is it?"

Cassius whirled around. "It's happening!" The rest of them were staring too—no one in the Stellar Steel Crater was comprehending Law anymore. They couldn't if they tried; it was like all the air was being sucked out of the room.

"Pay attention!" he said, heart thumping wildly. "If the Savage Sage manages this, it'll be like when Eze broke through. Just being in the blast radius will give us a hell of a boost!"

They all nodded. And Cassius turned back too. He could barely breathe.

***

About a mile away, there was a state-of-the-art arena called the Five Seasons Arena. Its arena could support hundreds of different biome presets, and it could seat tens of thousands. Though there were only two people in it right now.

The 1st was a well-built middle-aged man. His swordsmanship was second to none. He wielded a katana that had seen the blood of half a dozen World Rankers. He was dressed in a traditional kimono. He was World Rank #17, Niko Tanaka.

The 2nd was a very pretty young man, late teens, in stylish silk robes. He wore his hair long and wild, windblown. In his hands was a simple yet elegant painter's brush. He was World Rank #6, Yuki Urabe.

They sparred on floating islands. Bits of greenery fuzzed huge chunks of brown stone. Niko roared and leaped at him, face red, bulging muscles straining against his kimono top, sweating up a storm. He slashed, slashed again; the air erupted with sword-light.

But Yuki just smiled lazily and danced out of the way. Gently, without a fuss. Then he swept his brush in a simple clean pattern, and painted a zephyr into being: a pink-purple wind poured into the world. It didn't move particularly fast, nor did it come particularly fiercely. But somehow Niko couldn't get out of the way. He was knocked sprawling into the depths. A gentle blue wind carried the frazzled World Ranker to safety.

Niko shook his head, gasping. "Every time. You could at least pretend to struggle, young master. For my dignity."

Yuki tapped the base of his brush against his lips, pretending to consider it. "Hmm…" Then he smirked. "Nah."

Then they both stilled. Niko frowned. Yuki raised his brows. "Oh?"

"Is that that Brit? Hastings?" said Niko, baffled. "Surely not. Last I heard, he was still a Major Law away!"

"Who knows?" mused Yuki.

***

A few miles away lay the Earth Cavern of Insight—Mantle Core. It was a stretch of underground tunnels going two-and-a-half miles underground. Chambers popped up throughout. Each was more dense with Law than the last. Each had a higher pressure too.

The chamber at the very bottom was the highest-pressured of them all. Its walls were pure bedrock, and even they were cracked all the way through. The fissures on the ground ran to unfathomably deep places. If you spat here, it'd evaporate before it touched the ground. Even the fires on the torches had trouble staying upright.

And only one man sat within. Meditating. Emeka Eze opened his eyes, revealing pure gold pupils. He cocked his head, felt the tremors on the air. He smiled knowingly.

***

More and more folk were joining the crowd around the Stellar Steel Crater. One Xiaoshan Chen, World Rank #13, had a transmission crystal clutched tight in his palm. Watching closely. A breakthrough wasn't likely. Even Eze took four tries, spread out across two weeks, to break through.

Yet there were rumors that there was something different about the Savage Sage. A kind of comprehension talent no one had ever seen before… just rumors. Nothing concrete. Yet Chen supposed he was about to get an answer.

If this happened, his boss—the World Rank #5 Jian Shi Ming, the Spitfire Monk—would like to know. Among World Rankers, he only considered the other perfect-talent powers his true rivals.

Depending on what happened today, there could be an exception.

It wasn't just top World Rankers coming to watch. Most of the crowd were in the Level 50s, 60s, hailing from all over the world. It was a very rare thing that a top World Ranker performed his breakthrough in public like this. They were just here to witness history.

***

But by then Zane was far gone. He wasn't conscious of them at all. The Major Laws of Steel began to cascade in his mind, one after another. Slowly he drew them together; it felt like moving heavy objects. He had to drag each of these heavy concepts with his soul and hold them all up at once. Even for him it was a painful, shaky effort.

And yet there was no stopping him now. He would find harmony.

First came the Major Law of Undying Might. It felt like playing a note—something mighty, and bellowing, and unyielding.

Then he drew in a second note. Echoing Clangor. A struck gong. Jarring and clashing, and yet, pitched just right, it was somehow in tune with the first. Together they made a new sound. A beautiful sound.

Carefully, Zane drew in a third. Pure Forging—the melding of metal and spirit, the burning away of impurities, and it sang out clear and high…

Somehow, thinking of them this way just made sense. At least, to his mind as it was right now; he was thinking at right angles to everything. But it was working. He went with it.

Absolute Sharpness came next, slicing through all the other sounds. It was the hardest to meld so far. But Zane found where it fit in. The harmony was only growing fuller…

Then came Steely Density, lowest of the bunch, and the deepest. It sank into the depths of the harmony, making up the lowest register.

Magnetic Command was the last of them, a field of pushing and pulling and fluctuating, a note that spread over it all. Saturating it.

They were all playing at once now. One perfect harmonic spectrum. And he found within it the essence of steel, something that resonated with him, and the Universe, all at once. It was there when swords clashed and hammers rang; there in untold millions of battles and forges; there in the mundane things too—the bridges, the pillars, the lightning-rods, and the compasses; it held up the world; you found it in the heart of stars and the fists of men alike. Strong. Pure. Sharp. Dense. Resonant. Magnetic.

I know you.

Zane opened his eyes.

𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕙𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕕!

𝔼𝕝𝕖𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕒𝕝 𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕠𝕗 𝕊𝕥𝕖𝕖𝕝