Several months had passed within the Founder-grade training chamber since Adrian turned his attention toward reconstructing the Devour-based divine concept.
He now sat cross-legged at its center while dark-crimson essence revolved around his body in broad currents. A heavy suction spread through the surrounding space, drawing mana toward him several times faster than his ordinary circulation could gather it and forcing the chamber's formations to release increasingly dense streams to replace what disappeared.
During those months, Adrian had completed the reconstruction.
The former Low-tier structure had been dismantled and rebuilt at the Ultimate tier, and he had separately developed its divine spell until it reached the Ultimate level. Its present absorption rate was nearly ten times greater than the crude divine concept he had used before, allowing it to gather in one interval what the previous structure would have required almost ten such intervals to consume.
The greater improvement lay within his control over that consumption. The former concept had operated through the Rules of Consumption, Separation, Purification, and Stabilization, but Adrian had never developed their relationships far enough to choose precisely what the spell retained.
During the reconstruction, he selected the necessary rules from the Arcane Concepts of Devour, Fire, and Ice, drawing the Consumption and Separation Rules from Devour while excluding its Hunger Rule, using Fire's Refinement and Purification Rules to remove unwanted impurities, and relying upon Ice's Preservation and Stabilization Rules to protect whatever he chose to keep.
Tests upon mana and ordinary physical materials confirmed that this control was far greater than before, but Adrian did not assume it would remain equally precise against memories or fragments of consciousness. Tenyz's memories had nearly displaced his own identity, and Hestia had already forbidden him from attempting another whole-body consumption without a proper extraction technique. Until a controlled consciousness-level test became possible, that part of the Ultimate spell would remain promising rather than proven.
With Devour completed, Adrian examined everything else he possessed. Most of his major abilities had already reached the state he wanted.
The Ultimate Willforce-Recovery Spell restored his reserves at five times their natural rate, the Time, Space, Life, and Void foundation already possessed its complete spell paths and authority techniques, Crimson Genesis and its component concepts had long since reached the mastery required for Astral cultivation, and his willforce walls, needles, concealed drills, and microscopic thread technique had all been corrected through repeated training.
As his examination continued, however, one common authority technique stood out. During his battle with Orveth, Adrian had altered the Rule of Spatial Vacancy and delayed the moment when reality acknowledged that a position he had already left had become empty. The modification allowed his afterimages to retain his mass, momentum, essence, and the attack already impressed upon them for an instant, converting what appeared to be remnants of movement into temporary physical continuations capable of striking alongside him.
The technique worked, but Adrian had never properly refined it. It was more of a common authority technique used by many in the universe. If Adrian could refine it further, it would help him in future battles. So that became his next focus.
Several days passed inside the chamber…
By modifying the Rule of Spatial Vacancy more precisely, Adrian could now delay reality's recognition that several previous positions had become empty for close to two seconds rather than a split moment. The retained figures preserved his mass, momentum, divine essence, and the motion already impressed upon them, but they could not think or alter their attacks, while increasing their number or duration demanded a rapidly growing share of his mana, willforce, and authority.
After this, Adrian examined himself again. Among the divine concepts Adrian had, only Ruination remained neglected. It had been one of the earliest concepts he constructed after entering the wider universe, inspired by a formation that produced continuous environmental degradation and created when he needed to present the image of an ordinary Early Rule cultivator.
Corrosion, Poison, Metal, and Decay had been combined into a Mid-tier divine concept that served that immediate purpose, but Adrian had rarely touched it once stronger and more versatile abilities became available. Its mastery had therefore remained at the Low spell level while concepts created much later were already complete.
Adrian remained seated in silence for several moments while examining the neglected chamber.
"Do I even need to refine this?" he murmured. Spending subjective months raising a mid-tier concept merely because it remained unfinished offered little value by itself.
Before Adrian dismissed the concept, a new realization struck him, "Wait, what if…"
Adrian had already reached the conclusion that he needed to become stronger, Origin needed to become stronger, and Crimson Vital needed to become stronger.
He had already started moving all three objectives forward. His immediate personal strength had now been pushed close to the limit of the abilities he currently possessed, while Origin's first proper foundational inheritance had been placed in Lysandra's hands so that she and the others could select four suitable disciples and determine whether ordinary cultivators could safely reproduce it.
But the Crimson Vital sect remained more difficult. The sect already possessed an established path toward the Astral Stage through Crimson Vital Dominion and Verdant Genesis. Life formed part of Verdant Genesis, which meant cultivators following that path eventually committed the corresponding foundational rules to a fixed Rule Core. Those same cultivators could not then place Life into another independent Rule Core and simply learn Origin's Time, Space, Life, and Void foundation as though the earlier commitment did not exist.
Hestia's transformed chambered foundation escaped that restriction, but Adrian still possessed no method for granting the same freedom to anyone else.
That meant he could not simply hand Origin's inheritance to the Crimson Vital Sect and expect its established cultivators to adopt it.
There was another problem even if compatibility could eventually be solved.
Adrian had always intended Origin to become the mysterious power standing behind the publicly visible Crimson Vital Sect. For now, however, the relationship between the two organizations needed to remain hidden until Origin became powerful enough to survive the attention such a revelation would attract.
If cultivators wielding that same foundation began appearing whenever Crimson Vital encountered a threat, anyone studying their battles would eventually recognize a shared inheritance. The first intervention might be dismissed as coincidence, but repeated appearances would connect Andromeda to the hidden Origin sect, its developing economy, and whatever records outside powers had already gathered about Aeon.
Crimson Vital therefore needed a temporary power between itself and Origin, but Adrian did not need to build another genuine sect to create one. There was no reason to establish a separate headquarters, industry, leadership, or public history for an organization whose only purpose was concealment. In the wider universe, a common inheritance already served as evidence of a common lineage.
If several masked cultivators appeared at different times, carried altered identities and mana signatures, yet consistently wielded the same unfamiliar domains and divine spells, anyone studying those encounters would supply the missing explanation on their own. They would assume the cultivators belonged to a hidden power, shared a master, or inherited the same cultivation lineage even if none of those people ever provided an organization name.
That illusion only required a distinctive inheritance unrelated to the powers Adrian actually wanted Origin and Crimson Vital to display publicly.
Ruination and Devour could provide the inheritance that made the illusion credible. The Devour-based divine concept obtained its required rules from Devour, Fire, and Ice, while Ruination drew upon Corrosion, Poison, Metal, and Decay. None of those arcane concepts overlapped with Origin's four-concept foundation, nor did they interfere with Crimson Vital Dominion or Verdant Genesis.
Disciples drawn from either sect could therefore potentially construct the necessary Rule Cores without revealing the characteristic foundations of the organization they truly belonged to.
A fused Devour-Ruination inheritance could become the disguise.
The more Adrian considered it, the more useful the arrangement became.
With the new plan established, Adrian turned his full attention toward Ruination. Its original structure degraded the environment by allowing Corrosion, Poison, Metal, and Decay to attack different portions of a target, but most of the material and energy released through that destruction was wasted.
Devour could consume and refine what entered its reach, yet powerful artifacts, formations, and reinforced divine essence first had to be broken apart before the spell could process them. When the two concepts were joined, Ruination could weaken physical and conceptual integrity until mana, essence, and damaged material were released, after which Devour could separate the usable portions, reject harmful remnants, and return part of the consumed energy to the attack. The process would allow a destructive spell to preserve itself for longer while cutting through barriers, defensive formations, and fortified structures.
Several more months passed within the training chamber.
During this time, Adrian had dismantled the Mid-tier Ruination concept and rebuilt its four arcane components around a more precise progression of corrosion, contamination, structural failure, and decay. After raising the concept to the Ultimate tier and mastering its divine spell at the Ultimate level, he moved the completed Ruination and Devour structures into an empty chamber of his Source Seed and joined them there.
Dark-crimson and deep-purple essence intertwined throughout the fusion as he refined the first spell born from the new Astral inheritance.
When the final circulation stabilized, Adrian rose and faced one of the chamber's reinforced wall sections built from high-grade Void Alloy. He carried no sword or artifact as his right hand moved through the air in a controlled cutting motion. A narrow crimson-purple arc formed beyond his fingertips and crossed the chamber before the surrounding formations could react.
The arc struck the Void Alloy without producing an explosion. A shallow diagonal groove appeared across the wall, and dark corrosion immediately spread along the edges of the mark. The exposed alloy began losing its cohesion as decay turned a thin layer into fine particles, but they did not scatter. A suction gathered the released mana and essence back toward the crimson-purple line, feeding enough energy into the spell to preserve it for another moment and deepen the original groove before Adrian withdrew his intent.
The remaining corrosion stopped with it, while the chamber's restoration formations awakened around the damaged section and began repairing the shallow cut.
Adrian watched until he confirmed that the spell had stopped exactly where he intended. The first Ultimate-level spell of the new Astral inheritance was complete within his foundation, although its construction inside ordinary Rule Cores, its eventual fusion during another cultivator's ascension, and the formation of the proposed cadre all remained untested. For now, it gave Adrian a distinct power he could display in conflicts surrounding Crimson Vital without exposing Origin's foundation.
A slight smile appeared upon his face before he turned away from the recovering wall. The chamber doors opened, and Adrian entered the corridor leading toward the rest of the Central Origin Construct carrying the first inheritance of a sect that had never existed.