"Phew… Finally she"s gone…"Lars could feel his neck ache as he waved off the pink dragon with a stiff smile plastered on his face. He sucked in a deep breath and ma.s.saged his shoulders – he felt more fatigued from this encounter than from the struggle for his soul.
He watched carefully as she flew into the horizon with both of her 200m long wings flapping purely for aesthetic purposes. After all, as a land dragon, her flight mechanism was entirely non-physical as her size was too large for wings even twice the span to bear. Land dragons were only able to fly once they reached the Legendary realm and even then they were bulky and far from agile in the air.
Once she was far enough away, he could finally relax and focus on more important matters.
Lars hurriedly looked inwards towards his internal while still maintaining a sliver of consciousness to monitor an area of dozens of kilometres around.
Once he entered, he found to his surprise that everything was exactly as it had been before the soul-attack had occurred – orderly, tidy and with every soul-imprint where they were earlier.
In fact it seemed that the whole event had never even happened. Lars would even have wondered if it had just been a figment of his imagination if not for Frenoshreth arriving to investigate.
Except…
Lars felt a sense of trepidation as he could somehow recall not just the images of horror, bloodshed and terror, but also sizeable chunks of a new law, one that seemed to transcend all the laws he had grasped thus far. Though the memories were not complete, Lars could see the patterns of the law clear as day within his thoughts.
This law was complex, so complex that when he brought it to mind, his consciousness was strained to its limits just trying to take the entire rune pattern in. He even felt a wave of dizziness. .h.i.t him until he was forced to shut the laws off from his mind and grit his teeth until the sensation pa.s.sed.
"W-What is this…? Wait… This sensation…" Lars eyes narrowed as he hurriedly focused his mind on the sigil of Insight.
At his beckoning, the pure-white rune floated in his inner vision, pristine and untouched. No matter how Lars looked at it, there were no signs at all of a nightmarish creature being held within. If anything, the sigil now looked stronger, more robust with golden threads outlining key sections.
Nevertheless, Lars scrutinised the sigil of Insight slowly, going over it inch by inch and covering every angle. It was only after repeating this several times and probing it with every type of sense and power he had available that Lars withdrew his mind, satisfied that there was nothing wrong – at least, nothing he could detect at his level… He still felt traumatized from the soul-erasing attack on his consciousness and sweat flowed down his back as he recalled the event.
Taking a deep breath, Lars could only accept that things appeared fine… At least for now. He decided to continue investigating the new law that had been left in his mind, adopting the highest caution as he prepared himself to sniff out any further traps.
Sweat flowing down his back and breathing quickening, Lars hurriedly crossed his legs and sat down on the dirt floor to investigate deeper. He called up the image of the laws once more, this time slowly and tentatively, splitting it into four equal parts to reduce the mental strain.
This time though he was stretched, the dizziness was not as bad and he managed to make out both the outline and details of the exceedingly complex rune of law.
However, Lars" brows furrowed as he studied it. Though he could now bear to look at it without swooning, what he saw… Had no logic at all to it.
"What is this… It"s too weird and doesn"t make sense…" Lars struggled to digest the threads of law as he tried to grasp the overall concept of the rune.
He tried to start from just one of the 4 parts, beginning first from the right side, only to fail before he followed the lines even 10% of the way into the rune. Then he chose to start from another corner but could not even get half as far as before. He tried beginning from the centre outwards, but found his head spinning and stars swimming in his vision – it was even more difficult than his earlier approaches.
At some spots there were bright fiery dots which did not appear to move, however, they would slowly drift away while pulling along some other smaller dots. However, those smaller dots did not move in a uniform pattern, instead moving at odd trajectories and arcs.
Lars swallowed deep, jamming his eyes shut before he overstrained himself. This was just too difficult.
"This can"t be real… Every law has a pattern, every concept has an order, and every rune has its rules… Unless this isn"t even a law…?" Lars paused, frowning as he pondered this thought.
But shaking his head, he quickly discarded it. The fluctuations of power in these memories were too similar, too reminiscent of the creature hidden in the sigil of Insight, and whatever he could do to understand the creature better, he would do. Otherwise, wouldn"t he just be left as a sitting duck if it suddenly managed to break through the bonds of the sigil of Insight and appear again?
His face was set in a look of deep determination; he had to understand this enemy within, understand its powers and identify a way to defeat it!
Lars put these extraneous thoughts away from his mind as he redoubled his efforts.
As he saw, studied and attempted to digest the four individual segments, it seemed as if though the formation were just a ma.s.s of tangled threads and points criss-crossing one another at random angles. At one point the threads would be moving in an orderly fas.h.i.+on, then abruptly the formation would descend into a chaotic pattern reminiscent of atoms in Brownian motion…
"Brownian motion…? That"s it!"
With that simple phrase came images and memories of science lessons and Physics textbooks, ones in which the motion of every atom in the universe was described as being by random walk or Brownian motion. This type of motion was caused by the energy within each particle ///research browning and get a description///
And with this information, Lars called up the new rune of law once again. This time, he forced his mind to zoom out, placing the four segments side by side. As his consciousness once again began to waver, he waved his hand and blurred out all the detailed lines of the formation.
"Remove layers of lines… First layer… Second…" Lars whispered to himself as he worked double time to simplify the rune image, stripping the overly complex rune of the fine lines that made up the mess.
"Fifteenth level of detail removed… 12,496 layers of detail erased… Come on…!!" Lars paused when he reached this point – the lines were now far cleaner and clearer, letting his almost make out something significant. However, it was not yet enough. He still felt his vision swimming and his mind spin as he tried to lay eyes on the full formation.
"Come on… Remove… Colour, yes, remove colour! Then... I"ll remove motion! That should make it simplified… And… There! Finally it"s… It"s done!!"
Pressing onwards, he stripped the image of further levels of details and finally, stepped back with delight as he laid eyes on the outcome.
Lars let out a breath of air, then immediately sucked it back in sharply. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped as he could finally see the forest without being obstructed by the trees. What Lars saw literally blew his mind away.
"Amazing!!! Wondrous and… Amazing!"
Finally with the four segments placed together and with his eureka moment of understanding the concept behind it all, Lars could see the pattern, the grand image ill.u.s.trated within the formations, within the majestic rune of law.
It was a galaxy, a system of stars and a system of systems of stars. A constellation pattern, the paths of meteors and asteroids twinkling beautifully within. Planets...o...b..ting one another, dust clouds surrounding them with multiple moons spinning gracefully around some while others were bare, solitary and lonely.
When he took in the full picture of even this fragmented image of a galaxy, Lars whole body began to tingle with exhilaration. The sheer magnitude and weightiness of this law almost blew his mind with its scale and power.
Lars eyes then widened in shock. If this law were so all-encompa.s.sing… Wouldn"t that mean it also had tremendous, overwhelming power?
Excited by his discovery, Lars hastily tried to add back one layer of detail to the image of the galaxy – from the planet level, he went down to add back colour to the image. To be safe, he did so little by little and started with only one of the 4 segments.
His vision wavered as he progressed, but his mind slowly adapted. He could also feel that this exercise was developing his senses and sharpening his soul-imprint of Insight, strengthening his comprehension and perception by many folds.
However, his focus was on the rune of law and what he saw when he added back colour.
His face turned pale as he realised why the creature of terror within would possess this law.
"This is…"s