The Empyreal Gem Master - Chapter 246 - 246: Cosmic! I
The White Ascender, Arthur, felt like he was watching reality itself unravel in front of him.
He had lived for an extremely long time- a period stretching across eons before he was killed by the Crimson Ruinborn. He knew firsthand how brutally hard it was for any Gem Master to ascend through the realms.
And yet, at this very moment, he was forced to watch someone who had taken over his legacy do things that shattered everything he thought he understood.
This successor used a single Luminarch Cache of the Cosmos and broke through it within a single day. The moment it happened, he assimilated the entirety of the Primordial Cosmic Tao.
Then, he utilized a second Luminarch Cache. This one shattered in just half a day. And when his existence awakened again, after receiving the ten percent boon from the Cache, he had already assimilated over a dozen Grand Taos and hundreds of thousands of Universes were forming in his Origin.
And even before those universes finished forming… he was already diving into the third Luminarch Cache of the Cosmos.
This time, it took only three hours.
Three hours before the Luminarch shattered again, and his existence emerged, another round of assimilated Grand Taos roaring around him, and more than three million universes now forming in his Origin.
And he kept going.
Luminarch after Luminarch shattered.
In the later stages, it took mere minutes before each Luminarch Cache crumbled. And each time, his existence would awaken once more, further perfecting his Universal Filament.
On the eighth Luminarch…
In that life, he found himself to be a humanoid creature born in a domain of endless water.
An Atlantian.
And for the first time ever, in that life, he watched with calm, serene eyes as his number of universes reached one billion. Due to their nature as Supermassive Empyreal Universes, they were more than enough to begin forming something new…
A Cosmos.
“A Cosmos…”
His eyes were calm as he observed the formation of this wonder.
The word itself meant order. Harmony.
And when he attained this Cosmos in his eighth life, he felt a serene stillness settle within him. It stayed with him for quite some time.
But this was no ordinary Cosmos. This was a Supermassive Empyreal Cosmos.
Ordinary ones couldn’t compare. Even he couldn’t tell whether its density and complexity were five, ten, or even a hundred times more than normal.
To understand it properly, you had to grasp that from the very stars to the black holes to the galaxies- and to the billion universes that made up this Cosmos, every single one was a Supermassive Empyreal stellar body.
Every. Single. One.
Compared to others, it was unfathomable. If he were to meet another entity at the same stage who possessed a normal Cosmos, it would be like a 400-pound bodybuilder standing next to a newly minted 100-pound teenager.
It sounded drastic, but at the end of the day, the bodybuilder and the teenager were both human. Their realm was a humanoid one.
Alexander and the others? They were cosmic. Their realms were on a cosmic level.
But his… his was something else entirely.
He began to dig into the secrets of this peaceful and serene realm of power. He discovered new ways to utilize Taos, allowing his newly built Supermassive Empyreal Cosmos to grow in density and power. After a single week, the surroundings of that life began to crack and collapse.
When he returned to outer reality, what followed made Arthur fall to his knees.
He saw the serene expression on Alexander’s face as he raised his hand, watching the stellar glow of a forming Cosmos within his chest- something that was now happening with absolutely no effort.
Before even using the final Luminarch Cache of the Cosmos… he had attained his Cosmic Realm.
His Enneagram buzzed with wonder, erupting with endless notifications regarding how powerful he had become. But he ignored them all. Instead, he split his existence and entered the final Luminarch.
This time, he entered the dazzling orb as he expected it to shatter after a minute.
And within that single minute, he lived another lifetime- one that began with him already possessing the Cosmic Realm.
That life only lasted a day.
And yet, when he returned, the glow of his Cosmos became even more radiant. Because within that single day, fifty Apex Empyreal Clones had operated in the Temporal Enneagram Space to elevate his realm. Inside that space, it was not one day that had passed for him, but twenty days.
A 20:1 Time Dilation.
Fifty Empyreal Clones.
Not Minor Ones.
Not even the next stage- Greater Empyreal Clones.
These were Apex Empyreal Clones, and the power they brought to his main body was absurd.
And that wasn’t even the wildest part.
Having achieved his goal, Alexander raised his head and looked at the stupefied figure of the White Ascender, Arthur.
With eyes swirling with an illusory Cosmos, Alexander could now see the true nature of this remnant creature—this lingering obsession of a being who had been slain, yet left behind a part of himself to carry out a legacy within a domain of Primordial Cosmic Tao.
This Tao…it made the impossible possible.
Alexander nodded toward the man and said simply.
“Thank you.”
Thanks were the least he could offer. Through this being, he had leaped from the realm of universes to Universal Filament, then to Cosmos, all in an impossibly short amount of time.
There were strings attached, sure. Promises made. But he intended to keep them.
Existence, after all, was give and take.
From millions of years of memories and the mysteries he now understood with his current power, Alexander grasped the truth behind existence, behind choice and causality.
Cause and effect.
He had once met a random Universal Realm expert. Due to his eruption of Taos, that expert invited him to ascend the Infinite Cosmic Tower with them.
That meeting was the cause.
The effect? Like a butterfly, it spiraled out until it culminated in Alexander achieving the Cosmic Realm through the hand of an Ascender who had died ages ago.
Cause and effect.
And now, another ripple from that sequence of events was about to manifest- the hunt for a Cosmic Filament Entity.
Alexander had no intention of waiting.
His confidence in his current stage of power was enormous. He instinctively understood that even against a Cosmic Filament Entity, he might just be able to sever the cords of causality and end things entirely.
So he exhaled.
There was still so much to learn about himself.
First, he allowed the spread of the core features of the Investigator and the Peacemaker.
A simple spread.
And yet his will reached out- stretching across countless light-years with his vision sweeping left and right until it hit the observable edges of the Infinite Cosmic Tower. Then it climbed, ascending through multiple universes and Tao Domains, collecting information in torrents.
And Alexander suddenly realized…he might actually find out where the enemy he needed to sever the karmic chains was hiding.
This was just the beginning of discovering how absurdly powerful he’d become.
And maybe, just maybe…it would be enough to uncover the secrets of the Infinite Cosmic Tower.
Maybe even step beyond it!
