He was this close! How dare that wyrmshit heart of his give out?!

He probed his body, and then realized it wasn’t entirely the organ’s fault.

Huh. It appears I don’t have any blood left in my body…

It’d all evaporated!

Then he came the rather startling realization that he had perhaps ten seconds of consciousness left. His thoughts were growing fuzzy, bogged down. In a panic he thrust out a thread of his still-stabilizing qi to his body. It was the only source of life he had left!

And to his relief it began to heal, to mend and bind together. Deadened tissue nourished fast, swelling back to life like cracked, dried-out grounds splashed with rain. A few more tendrils of qi came out—as many as Dorian dared pull. The qi raced up and down his body, a surrogate bloodstream. His dying was not reversed. It hadn’t even really stagnated. But this bought him some time, at least.

Time to put out the other fires this measure had caused.

Because that small act had two large consequences. The first was that qi now flowed through his body again; qi resisting the pressure on his body. Which also meant that pressure, which had done so well to mold his core, was now blunted.

But the rest of the qi in his core began to stretch and struggle against the seams of Law binding it together…

To make things worse, the second consequence of Dorian’s siphoning out some of this qi was that he’d destabilized the core! It was now a restless writhing thing. He hadn’t stabilized the advancement—now it was about to cost him. The strings of Law he’d woven so quickly now groaned like a dam straining before floodwaters. Any moment now the whole experiment might implode. Again.

Except this time there would be no second chances. He was more brittle than a wafer. This time if there was an explosion all that’d remain of him would be shards of bone and charred flesh.

There was nothing for it. He had to bail at least a little bit. It made his dead heart ache, but he yanked out a solid quarter of the qi in his nascent core—yanked it straight out of the bindings of Law. There would be no putting it back. He drew it in a slow arc around his body; he felt his organ systems gasping, reviving, felt fresh blood flow down his body and his heart at last stutter back to life.

His Core, too, finally seemed to be stabilizing—after he’d ruthlessly cut out 25% of its mass! The bindings of the Laws, which had been woven to contain far greater a star, were settling into it. It was now a quickly spinning star, still teeming with power, still shining deathly black light. Still saturated with the Laws of Darkness. That tiny goblin of greed within him was screeching, half in pleasure, half pain.

For it seemed to have worked! He was about to succeed. He was about to be a being newly made, a being now with qi run through with Laws, qi whose very nature had been bolstered and altered forever! It was as though he’d been burning with wood all this time and now had access to the world’s finest oils. And yet…

25%! Morosely he felt his life energies running through him, healing him, relieving his stress. Beautiful glorious life energies. Energies that he’d purposefully excluded from the Laws of Darkness, in order to save himself… energies that could no longer mingle with those within his new Star. Energies that would have no home.

[Rank-up!]

[Earth -> Star]

And whatever bittersweet feelings he had were suddenly washed away. All that shadow leaping, all that swimming through lava, nearly dying to those strange apes, nearly dying in this very breakthrough—all godsdamned worth it. Haha! He’d done it! Star! A new wondrous Realm, a realm beyond the imagination of any of the poor ants on this damned plane! Oh, and he could hardly wait to try his new qi… Laws changed everything. A Technique manifested with Law-laden qi might look entirely different! Would his Yama’s Chains even be corporeal?

[Star Level: Dwarf]

[Darkness Law Saturation: 2%]

[Darkness Law Grade: Very Low]

Oho?

A level name was already recorded in the system. So he wasn’t really the first to stumble upon this path after all! Some other sod had given this Star Level a name. Dorian had been about the Multiverse a long time. He’d sampled his share of cultivation Techniques. Never had he seen this one. Must be some obscure, Realm-specific lineage—or perhaps. No matter.

If he had to guess—a very safe guess, given how almost all cultivation progression in the Multiverse worked—he’d simply have to pack on more mass to progress this level. Perhaps increase density too by binding in more laws? He could do that.

It was a pity about that 25% of un-Lawed qi still floating about in his system, though… sooner or later a cycle had to come to its end, and after saturating his body the leftover qi would have nowhere to go except out. All that qi—far more precious to him than limbs!—gone forever…

Unless.

For a moment his newly-revived heart almost stopped beating again. Can I…?

He reached out with all his will and gathered as much of the qi as he could. He could hold it but for a few breaths between the palms of the mind. Lacking support, his body began to crinkle again under the brunt of the heat and the fiery qi; he paid it no heed.

For the qi he’d gathered up, the qi he’d cut out of his Star, was also drawing inward.

Now this qi wasn’t spinning as fast. It didn’t have that flagrant potency, nor did it shine quite like the star. But it was condensing into its own sphere; almost like a second Earth Core.

With his mind’s eye Dorian watched his star carefully. If this model was set up as the name suggested… well. A star isn’t the only thing in the vast firmament, is it? The core Law is not the only one a god can wield. There can also be secondary Laws. A Sky Realm can have clouds. A Dao Tree can bear Dao Fruit. Couldn’t a Darkness-Law Star, then, have a Fire-Law Planet?

This time, reaching for the Laws of Fire was easy. There was nothing which served quite as well as a crash course in familiarizing oneself with a law as being cooked alive in it multiple times over! And in this place the air was choked with the laws of Fire; they were nearly overpowering. They rushed to Dorian’s beckoning.

He wove them one by one over the burgeoning mass of qi he’d cut out. It was but a third the size of its star cousin, and by now he was wise to the kinks of the process. Round and round the Laws went, binding over the mass in heaps, smooth as he could’ve possibly hoped. Like wrapping a gift it was—a gift from himself to himself, repackaging a part of himself he’d cut out into something new, something of its own: a domain of Fire-Law qi to draw from which began to shift slowly about his body, drawn in by the gravity of his Star…

[Planet Level: Infant Dwarf]

[Fire Law Saturation: 1%]

[Fire Law Grade: Very Low]

He’d guess that the Planet Level was the qi mass and density metric. Law Saturation was self-evident. Law Grade was tough to encapsulate in numbers; Dorian preferred to keep his mental estimate at Very Low to Very High. But of course hidden in there were various Lesser Laws and Greater Laws of Fire, each of which needed their own comprehensions... some Godkings--his brother Houyi, for instance--liked their Systems to list out each sub-Law, its own degrees of comprehension, and so forth. Dorian had no patience for it. To him that sort of thing was rather anal and cluttering.

Now, orbiting the black star was a tiny planet which seemed to smolder—the way coals smoldered. Smoldering with the Laws of Fire. Made anew.

The breakthrough was, at last, done. He breathed out from regenerated lungs, and clouds of noxious smoke poured into the skies.

He grinned checkerboard teeth. He felt awful and wonderful all at once—wonderful since he felt ungodly levels of strength within him; he didn’t even need to test it to feel it! And awful, since he was sadly still confined to this fleshy mortal form, and even remade in magma, even with new supercharged Star qi coursing through it, it was only half-regenerated. Most of his toes still had no skin on them and chunks of his thighs were stitching back together. With the regeneration came renewed nerve endings, which also meant—joy!—starbursts of pain lighting him up from fingers to eyes to his half-formed ankles.

Then a very important thought struck him upside the head.

He looked to the Dweller, suddenly tense. He was nearly incredulous to find it still sleeping. To be fair, it’d been here a while. It must’ve slept through its fair share of upheavals. It’d take something quite dramatic, Dorian imagined, to wake it.

Quite lucky, all told! Dorian’s Law saturation was still infantile. There was no telling where the Dweller’s was! As a fallen God it could wield powers up to a Demigod’s if it so wished—if at the cost of its own lifespan. Its Law Saturation might even be past fifty percent! A fight with the thing, even at his current stage, would almost certainly spell a great deal of trouble.

It was then that he sensed something change in the tenor of the air.

He was wrong. His breakthrough had not left everything undisturbed. The Laws of Heat and Darkness in the chamber had been disrupted. There was a great vacuum in the air—a space that Nature could not tolerate.

Dorian leapt up, eyes wide—but he could do nothing as all around him as a shivering went up the spine of the floor, sending piles of bones click-clacking in an eerie dance. The walls of the chamber began to tremble…

***

Nijo, Prince of the Ugoc, trudged through snow that went up to his knees. He smiled. One could fly, of course. But there was something pleasant about savoring these tiny meaningless things. For what else was there to life? He stuck out his tongue, let a snowflake drift down upon it and slowly dissolve; how fresh! How lovely! How various! He sighed, still trudging. All life’s complexities could be reduced to the taste of a snowflake. It was all there, if only one paid attention.

Alas his journey was coming to an end! A few last paces took him up to an uneven blanket of snow. They were heaped over corpses, he knew—corpses of beasts. Natural graves. But there was only one grave he was interested in here, and its occupant was still alive. If barely.

Then he blinked once, very slowly. Twice. He turned his eyes to the horizon, one dark crease marring his brow.

For there had been a sharp twang, invisible to most yet loud as a foghorn in the space of Law. A great upheaval of Fire and Darkness in the far distance.

“…Eruption?” he muttered. “Old friend—what are you playing at?”