The convergence zone collapsed into war.
Energy storms erupted across the ruins as dozens of elite candidates surged toward Kali simultaneously. The battlefield twisted under the pressure of their combined power. Towers disintegrated. The ground shattered. Rivers of molten energy burst from fractures in the obsidian streets.
Kali stepped into the storm.
The first elite reached him — a towering man clad in black combat armor, his fists wrapped in crackling plasma. He struck with the force of a falling star.
Kali caught the blow.
The impact drove him back three steps, his boots carving trenches into the stone. His bones screamed, but his core absorbed the force and returned it.
Kali's counterpunch detonated.
The armored elite flew backward, crashing through a collapsed spire and vanishing beneath the rubble.
Another elite attacked from above — a woman wielding twin crescent blades of compressed void energy. She descended like a god of war.
Kali pivoted, ducked beneath her first blade, blocked the second with his forearm, and drove his knee into her abdomen.
Her breath exploded from her lungs.
She hit the ground and did not rise.
The space-walker moved.
Reality bent.
He appeared behind Kali, fingers wrapped in gravitic distortion, aiming straight for Kali's spine.
Kali's senses screamed.
He twisted, barely in time.
The strike tore through his shoulder instead of his heart.
Pain ripped through him.
Kali roared and slammed his elbow into the man's jaw.
Space rippled.
The elite staggered.
Then the silver-eyed woman attacked.
Her black crystal blades multiplied, filling the sky like a storm of obsidian stars.
Kali raised both arms.
He compressed his core.
The relic's inheritance surged.
The air screamed as Kali's aura exploded outward, forming a dense pressure shell around his body.
The crystal storm shattered.
Fragments rained across the battlefield.
Silence fell for half a heartbeat.
Then the world charged again.
The Core Awakens
Kali fought without pause.
Strike.
Break.
Shatter.
His movements became pure instinct — no wasted motion, no hesitation, no mercy.
But the pressure was monstrous.
Dozens of elites.
Hundreds of attacks.
The convergence zone was no longer terrain.
It was a furnace.
Kali felt the fracture inside his core widen.
Not breaking.
Opening.
His energy condensed further, sinking deeper into his being, as if gravity itself had formed inside his chest.
A new presence emerged within him.
Heavy.
Majestic.
Unyielding.
His aura changed.
The battlefield felt it.
Candidates faltered.
Their attacks weakened.
Fear crept into their eyes.
They were no longer fighting a rising cultivator.
They were facing something… different.
Kali stepped forward.
The space-walker attacked again.
Kali caught him mid-warp.
His hand closed around the man's throat.
The elite's eyes widened.
Kali drove him into the ground.
The impact created a crater fifty meters wide.
When Kali stood again, the space-walker did not.
The Pressure of Sovereignty
The silver-eyed woman backed away slowly.
Her voice trembled.
"You… what are you becoming?"
Kali did not answer.
He felt the shift clearly now.
The Abyssal relic had finished merging.
His core had changed structure.
Not a breakthrough in rank…
But a transformation in existence.
He was standing at the threshold of a new realm of power.
A realm that did not yet have a name.
High above, Federation instruments screamed.
"Energy signature exceeding projection!"
"Reality compression increasing!"
"This is impossible at Planetary Rank 7!"
The commander whispered:
"This is not planetary power anymore."
Back in the ruins, the remaining elites hesitated.
Then one stepped forward.
A man whose presence crushed the air itself.
His eyes glowed gold.
A king's aura surrounded him.
"So," the man said quietly,
"you are the variable they fear."
Kali met his gaze.
The convergence zone trembled.
And the true war was about to begin.