[FOR EVERY 100 POWERSTONES = 1 EXTRA CHAPTER]
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The oppressive heat and cataclysmic pressure that had choked the castle for a month vanished, replaced by an unnerving, profound silence. The door to the underground chamber swung open, and John stepped out. He looked… peaceful. Serene. A faint, internal luminescence seemed to emanate from his skin, and his eyes held the calm, deep grey of a placid cosmic sea.
This tranquility was immediately shattered.
Merlin stood before him, his face a thundercloud of fury. The usual twinkle of ancient wisdom in his eyes was gone, replaced by a cold, hard anger that made the very air crackle.
"John Ashborn Pendragon," Merlin's voice was low, but it carried the weight of a collapsing star. "Do you have any conception of the danger you have brought upon this place? Upon yourself? This is not a child's game with fire! This is the fundamental fabric of reality you were tampering with!"
John, who had just faced down the annihilation of his own being a million times over, found himself shrinking under the archmage's wrath. He looked genuinely chastened. "Master Merlin, I… I apologize. To you, and to everyone." He bowed his head towards the gathered founders and a pale, trembling Sharon.
It was Sharon who moved first. The fear and worry of the past month, the terror of feeling his life force flicker and rage like a dying sun, erupted in a single, sharp motion. She crossed the distance between them and slapped him across the face. The crisp sound echoed in the stone corridor.
"Do you think this is a joke?!" she cried, her voice cracking with emotion. "Do you have any idea what it was like?! To feel you… to feel you tearing yourself apart over and over again and being unable to do anything?!" She began pummeling his chest with her fists, not to hurt him—he was invulnerable now—but to vent her sheer, helpless frustration. John, the God of Shinobi, the master of Source Energy, simply stood there and took it, his head bowed, accepting the beating from his wife just as John Pendragon had a lifetime ago.
Merlin watched the display, his anger slowly giving way to a grim, weary understanding. When Sharon's fury was spent, he stepped forward again, his voice still deadly serious.
"John, listen to me. Every action in the cosmos has an equal and opposite reaction. This is a universal constant. But what you did…" He paused, searching for words. "You were not just performing an action. You were attempting to rewrite the constants themselves."
He began to pace, his lecture taking on the tone of a master explaining the most basic, sacred truth to a dangerously ignorant pupil.
"Energy is the only true constant in all of existence—across universes, across multiverses, across the omniverse itself. It cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed. A blade of grass stores a minuscule amount of solar energy. A worm eats the grass, converting that energy to sustain its own life. A bird eats the worm. A fox eats the bird. A man eats the fox. When that man dies, his body returns to the earth, its energy nourishing the soil to grow new grass. The cycle is eternal, the energy merely changes form, adapting to its vessel."
He stopped and pointed a trembling finger at John. "But you! You did not just change its form! You tried to take different types of universal law—Chakra, Cursed Energy, Magic, Cosmic, Solar, Natural—each with its own fundamental properties, and you forced them to de-evolve. You reverse-engineered them back towards a primordial state that predates their differentiation! A single miscalculation, a single fluctuation in your will, and you would not have merely died. You would have been unmade. Your soul, your consciousness, every record of your existence across every lifetime would have been erased from the cosmic ledger as if you never were!"
The color drained from Sharon's face. The founders looked at John with a new, horrified respect. They had known it was dangerous, but they hadn't understood the sheer, absolute finality of the risk.
Merlin, finally calming, took a deep breath. "Now, show me. What is the nature of this… this new energy you have forged?"
John perked up, eager to demonstrate his success. He held out his palm. With a thought, a shimmering, three-dimensional symbol materialized above it. It was a perfect, complex hexagon, its lines glowing with a soft, internal light that seemed to contain every color and none at all.
"Every energy has a fundamental shape," John explained. "Fire is a cluster of sparks, points of intense energy. Water is a flowing, spherical form. Earth is a stable, conical structure. My Source Energy… its base form is this hexagonal lattice."
Merlin leaned closer, his eyes wide with a fascination that overpowered his lingering anger. "A Divine Runic Symbol," he whispered, the words filled with awe.
John nodded. "The hexagon is one of the most stable and adaptable structures in the universe, found in honeycombs and crystal formations. It can tessellate perfectly to fill any space. My runic symbol has the same trait: ultimate adaptability. If I encounter a new energy law in the future, integrating it will be seamless. It will never harm me as it did this time."
The founders and Sharon were now utterly captivated. Rowena, her brilliant mind alight, could not contain her curiosity. "Master Merlin, we have studied Runes and Ancient Runes. What are these 'Divine Runes'?"
Merlin straightened up, his expression becoming that of a teacher imparting forbidden knowledge. He first waved his hand, enveloping the entire group in a powerful, multi-layered silencing and anti-scrying barrier.
"What you know as Runes are simplified symbols to channel magic. Ancient Runes are more powerful, used for warfare and large-scale environmental manipulation. But Divine Runes…" he lowered his voice, "…are different. They are not tools. They are the literal, visual representation of a Universal Law. To possess one is to have a degree of control over that aspect of reality itself. Your imagination becomes the only limit."
"Odin," Merlin continued, "sacrificed his eye and hung himself from a branch of the World Tree for nine days and nights to gain a fragment of the Wisdom Divine Rune. He learned it, but he never mastered it. Thor was born with the Storm Divine Rune woven into his very soul, which is why his command over thunder and lightning is absolute, surpassing even his father's in raw power. Zeus bargained and pleaded with Gaia, the Cosmic Mother of Nature, to learn a fraction of the Sky Rune, and he too never mastered it. Jesus of Nazareth was born with the Peace Rune, his very presence a balm to reality."
He looked at each of them in turn. "There are only two ways to obtain a Divine Rune. The first, and easiest, is to be born with it, like Thor or Jesus. These individuals are destined for greatness, their power innate and overwhelming within their domain. They are vanishingly rare—perhaps two or three per universe. The second way is to learn it from the cosmos through immense sacrifice, like Odin or Zeus. But no mortal or god has ever been known to master a Divine Rune they did not born with. And no one…" His gaze locked onto John, filled with a stupefied reverence, "…no one has ever been recorded creating a new Divine Rune. That is an act reserved for the Creator of all dimensions, the being we call the God of Existence."
The name hit John like a physical blow. The God of Existence. The same entity his grandmother Izanagi had mentioned, the one who had blessed his soul and sent him to the shinobi world. The pieces of a cosmic puzzle were slowly, terrifyingly, falling into place.
Merlin's face was grave. "This matter ends here. I am placing a powerful sealing charm upon all your memories of this conversation. No one, not even under Veritaserum or Legilimency, will be able to retrieve it. The world is not a pure place. Ancient evils, fallen gods, and power-hungry sorcerers still walk in the shadows. If they were to learn that a mortal man has not only attained but created a new Divine Rune—the Rune of Source, of Primordial Unity—they would tear this world apart to claim it. This is why the old gods are now only stories; they were hunted for the fragments of divine power they possessed."
Everyone nodded, their faces pale but resolute. They understood the weight of the secret they now carried.
Merlin placed a final, gentle hand on John's shoulder, his anger completely gone, replaced by a profound, almost paternal concern. "John, you have a talent that defies the heavens themselves. But talent without the wisdom to wield it is merely a feast for predators. Your light must have time to grow, to learn when to shine and when to remain hidden. Otherwise, it will not be a beacon, but bait."
John looked at the hexagonal symbol still hovering over his palm, the symbol of a law he had written into the cosmos. He had thought he achieved ultimate power. Now he understood he had shouldered an ultimate responsibility. The path ahead was no longer about mastering energy; it was about surviving the attention of every entity that had ever coveted a piece of the divine.
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