As Dorian walked the main street to the Sinkhole, there was not a soul in sight. Most everyone was grinding in a factory, manning artillery, conscripted into an army, or otherwise holed up. The whole city felt wound up like a clenched fist. The end was near; they all knew it.

He passed through the Sinkhole gates, manned by two sober-looking guards. Then the great steel doors swung shut behind him and there was only him and the expanse of water before him.

They’d gotten the Torchdragon corpses removed but he could still see the huge valleys their bodies left on the sands. Their blood still shimmered in the water like oil.

There was little here left for him. No Torchdragons. Whatever critters remained were, to his current form, hardly worth his time. He was here for one thing only.

Closing his eyes he felt for his interiors, felt for that fuming ball of Fire Laws orbiting his Dark Star. He teased out a thread of Fire Law qi—his first time grasping such a thing, his first time manipulating anything fire-aspected since his Rust Tribe Techniques, really. Then he let it out into the world. He pointed out a finger.

Out came a stream of crimson and white, like he’d opened a portal at his fingertip which connected to the heart of the sun. It scorched a brilliant line through the air, air which seemed to give way to it as servants do for an emperor, before burrowing into the Sinkhole.

There was a hissing—no steam. The Sinkhole waters did not quench the fires, did not evaporate; instead his fires left a strange black line through the Sinkhole before sputtering out and vanishing. It almost seemed an ink-trail.

The Laws of Fire commanded the world to burn, and so it did. Even water burned, whether it was in its nature to or not. That was something never seen in nature, something only producible by Law: burned water.

The trail dissolved, tugged away by the Sinkhole currents.

Dorian flexed his fingers, nodding. He felt as Good. As expected!

Now, he could stop here. Name this ‘Finger of Flame,’ or something of the like. Anything could be a Technique, even a strike this small. A Technique was simply a moniker for an application of qi: it was all an invention of the mind. But this little outburst would hardly put a scratch on a godly avatar. He would finalize nothing until he himself felt threatened by the strike he produced. Again.

The next half hour or so he spent familiarizing himself with Fire Laws. He threw them out wantonly. He molded them into spheres, into spears, into pinpricks and needles and lashes. What to do? He could augment his Yama’s Chains, he supposed—add a sizzling flavor to the Technique. He frowned. It was not as simple as slapping in some Fire and calling it a day. It would be like trying to change an iron sword into a copper-and-iron alloy; he’d need to melt it and rebuild it from scratch. No—no augmentations.

What to do, then, with this new capacity? What to make? He scratched his chin. There was no time to forge anything intricate. He was making a Technique for maximum impact. It would be a club, not a sword. Nothing fancy: a simple tool to channel the vast sea of powers he had boiling within.

A sardonic grin traced his lips. What better Technique as a base than the very first he’d ever learned in this Life?

[Ray]. Its main virtue twofold. The first was it was incredibly simple. ‘Channel qi in a beam at the enemy’ summed it up. Just what he needed! The second was that it was immensely scalable. If he tried a Fireball technique, the more he qi he poured in, the more unstable the fireball would get, for instance. At high powers all sorts of headaches arose. But [Ray] could work like turning on a faucet. All he needed, really, was the wherewithal to direct the beam vaguely in the direction of the enemy and let loose. It’d let him blast out an insane amount of power.

But Fire Laws by themselves would not be enough. A killer Technique, he decided, would need to combine both of his strengths: Fire and Darkness.

Only—how would he put them together? He scratched his chin. Perhaps—

As a test, with one hand he threw out a blistering [Ray] of Fire. With the other he did the same, only with Darkness. They converged at a dune at the far end of the Sinkhole. An instant later only a fathomless tunnel remained.

Hmm..

Good, but not quite the level of destruction he imagined. If he really wanted a world-ender he’d need these two to synergize—a two-in-one. But how?

Given a base Technique he could probably hack together a synergistic Technique in under an hour. But it got much more finicky when Laws got involved. Laws did not play nice with one another. If he wished to blend Fire and Darkness into a fusion Ray, it’d need a lot of designing and testing. And he had very little time.

For the hells of it he gave it a shot. Who knows? Maybe with my new cultivation system the normal rules don’t apply to me!

This time he fed qi from his Fire planet and qi from his Dark Star into the Ray. He tried treating them as one stream.

It exploded in his face.

He was mostly unharmed—qi was rather kinder to its owner—but he did feel very dumb sitting flat on his ass with his face blackened.

…okay then.

Just to make absolutely certain he couldn’t hack together he tried it another two times. Same result.

Alright then!

By now the sun was worrying far on its journey across the sky. Dorian frowned at it. How many hours left? Maybe three? He really should get going with this—

“Sir Hero! Sir Hero!”

The booming voice, amplified via qi, came from messenger atop a small balloon aircraft hovering a safe distance away. There was a very loud gulp, also amplified.

“So sorry to bother you! But General Heilong has dispatched me to inform you that a Beast Tide has been sighted by our scouts via scrying-glass! We estimate two hours until arrival!”

Dorian rolled his eyes. “Understood!” he yelled back.

“I—“ Another gulp. “I have been told by General Heilong to ask when you shall be ready, mighty Hero?”

Dorian paused. What a ridiculous question. “Tell him not to ask questions he doesn’t want know the answer to!”

He could see the messenger’s tiny face pale from here. The balloon craft scuttled off.

Sighing, he turned back to the Sinkhole. The problem of combination. Tricky, tricky.

He had all the pieces arrayed before him. He had them almost right. But how they’d all piece together was eluding him… he frowned.

In an ideal world he’d create some fancy twining technique. He’d braid Fire qi and Darkness qi together, spiraling together but not touching—it was a standard and powerful way of qi fusion. But the problem of intricacy stumped him again. Too tough to do. Too little time.

He sat there and thought.

And thought.

And thought.

He felt the sun’s light rays tickling his temple. A light wind ruffled his hair. He sat cross-legged on warm sands next to a sparkling pool. He could’ve been on a tropical beach. The world about him was blissfully unaware of the very literal life-or-death pressure he was under. It almost seemed mocking.

And then a thought lit up his mind.

He sat bolt upright.

An idea for an alternate construction popped to mind. One that would require no advanced planning on his end at all! Really it would use the same Ray template. His mouth went dry. It was almost too perfect! So perfect he was suddenly very worried it wouldn’t work at all.

The idea was very very simple.

His qi was all stored in a planet of Fire which orbited a star of Darkness. This lay within his body and soul, a natural geometry.

Wasn’t this already the twined qi structure he was looking for? Fire circling Darkness? He didn’t need to design anything new at all. The very nature of his path was that lesser laws orbited greater ones!

All he needed to do was to bring it out exactly as it was, drawing both at once in one contiguous stream from his core—and, critically, keeping the structure they already had! The result—in theory—would be a beam of darkness surrounded by a spiral of fire. Extending a star and the planet orbiting it in a flat plane into three dimensions. It would be a Technique modeled after a solar system, a crescendo of Fire around a Darkness core. A [Galactic Inferno].

He was so giddy he didn’t plan, or prepare, or hesitate at all, really. He did. He grabbed at all the qi within him and yanked.

He opened his mouth. He was not sure why. It seemed a fitting path. Sometimes you went with your instincts on these things. And it poured out into the world.

He nearly shed a tear then and there. A wire of blazing red twined around a pillar of smoldering black left his mouth and, with astonishing speed, blitzed across the air and made contact with the Sinkhole. It was godsdamned beautiful.

Only then did he realize, with some alarm, how qi-intensive the thing was. Even for him—this thing had yanked out over half his qi in a blink! It was too much, too fast, too powerful—he winced, trying desperately to hold the structure—

He lost control of it.

What happened next he wasn’t sure. It came to him as a blur of harsh sensations. A crashing, very very loud. Then his body felt like a leaf in a hurricane. He felt his body slap against something hard and realized with some consternation he’d been plastered against the Sinkhole walls.

He felt himself slide down and land in an unceremonious heap. Spitting sand from his mouth he leapt up, eyes wide.

…What.

The sands that had surrounded the Sinkhole were now terraformed. Pushed up against the walls.

He blinked again. He grew painfully aware that the Technique had somehow managed to drain nearly three quarters of his qi in the space of five seconds. A staggering amount of qi—an amount of qi that could level a mountain.

…

And he saw clearly now where it all went.

The Sinkhole was perhaps more aptly described now as merely a very big hole. Because all the Spirit Water within it had vanished.

[Level-up!]

[Galactic Inferno] Lv. 0 -> 1