Chapter 404: The Next Evolution...

"They adapted faster than I expected..." he said observing his fellow surgeons...

No, faster than anyone should have.

They weren’t just strong. They were structured. Organized. Each of them had become a core pillar, not just individually powerful, but functioning as anchors that stabilized the mana flow around them. Their presence alone reduced environmental volatility in their regions.

S-Rank wasn’t just a measure of strength anymore.

It was a classification of influence. Of authority over reality within localized zones.

Bruce’s expression hardened slightly.

"That explains how humanity is still standing..."

But it wasn’t all controlled.

Beyond the fortified zones, chaos ruled.

There were vast territories where human authority simply didn’t exist anymore. Areas dominated by evolved creatures, mana-born entities, or phenomena that didn’t fit into any biological classification.

Some regions even showed signs of... intelligence.

Not human.

But organized. Adaptive. Watching.

Bruce’s aura paused briefly over one such region before pulling back.

"...So it’s already at this stage."

He exhaled.

The world hadn’t ended. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

It had escalated.

What had once been an apocalypse was now an ongoing evolution, one that rewarded adaptation and erased hesitation.

And above it all...

The sky itself felt thinner.

Not physically. But structurally. Like the boundary between dimensions had weakened.

Void tears, small, unstable ones, were appearing naturally across the planet, flickering in and out of existence. Most collapsed harmlessly.

Some didn’t.

Bruce lowered his gaze, his voice quieter.

"So what’s the next step beyond where I am now...?"

Because whatever came next...

This world wasn’t going to survive it by accident.

Akashic’s reply came in his mind.

He needed to visit the Soul Realm and raise his Soul to SSS Rank.

Bruce was surprised. He already knew there were high ranked souls from what Adoni had told him, but hearing it directly from Akashic made it feel more real.

’So there’s another evolution for the soul?!’

<Yes, and the mind as well. A living sentient being possesses a soul, a mind and a body. To completely erase a being from reincarnating, you have to be capable of destroying not only the body but the soul and mind also. As you are right now, you stand no chance against an SSS Ranked Soul or an SSS Ranked Mind.>

Only then did Bruce truly realise how weak he still was.

He sighed. He needed to get stronger, and faster than his current pace.

He left Earth without a word.

The moment he cleared the atmosphere, the silence of space swallowed everything. No sound. No wind. Just the vast dark and the distant glow of stars scattered like dust across an endless black canvas. He floated there for a moment, still, and looked out at the solar system laid bare before him.

The planets drifted in their slow, ancient orbits. Or what remained of them. Most had already been destroyed, their remnants spinning in scattered debris fields that caught distant light and threw it back in dull glimmers. Bruce moved through it all at a calm pace, watching, taking it in.

Then Akashic spoke again.

<Just as every planet has a core, every system of planets has a core too. The core of your solar system is the Sun. The galaxy Earth belongs to, the Milky Way, also possesses its own core. And the universe itself has one.>

Bruce already knew where this was going.

He turned toward the Sun.

Even from a distance it dominated everything, enormous and burning, casting light across what remained of the system. He flew straight into it without slowing down.

The surface hit him first. Around five thousand degrees Celsius, an inferno that would reduce anything ordinary to nothing in an instant. Bruce felt nothing. Not even warmth. He crossed the surface like it was open air and pushed deeper.

As he descended, the heat began to build. The further he went the denser it got, the light around him shifting from orange to a deep, pulsing gold. At some point he crossed past a threshold of over a hundred million degrees and felt the first real bite of damage against his skin. He healed without thinking and the immunity followed immediately after, his body adjusting, absorbing, hardening against the new temperature. It confirmed what he had suspected. His class was still functioning perfectly. The only damage he couldn’t heal from was Akashic’s, and he was almost certain he knew why.

Akashic had given him his powers. His heal operated within the rules Akashic had set. Until he evolved past those rules, past Akashic itself, he would always have that ceiling. And transcending Akashic meant transcending the universe. Only then would his heal be strong enough to affect the universe as a whole and stop what was coming. The next Big Bang. That was probably why Akashic needed him in the first place.

But the gap between where he stood now and where he needed to be was something Bruce couldn’t even properly measure. Akashic was as old as the universe, over thirty billion years of constant evolution. A hundred years felt laughably short standing against that. It wasn’t Bruce’s fault. It was simply the scale of what he was being asked to do. And yet Akashic believed he could do it, with a certainty that Bruce still didn’t fully understand.

He kept going deeper.

The interior of the sun was nothing like the surface. It wasn’t just heat. It had texture. The deeper he went the more pressure he felt pressing against him from every direction, not painful, but present, like being submerged in something alive. The plasma around him moved in slow, churning currents, vast rivers of superheated matter rolling past him in waves. It had colour too, not just orange or yellow but deep reds shifting into blinding white at certain depths, and the light didn’t behave the way light normally did. It scattered, bent, pulsed. Sometimes it felt less like light and more like something breathing.

By the time the temperature crossed two million degrees, it felt like a warm bath.

Bruce kept his pace steady, healing constantly, each heal hardening him a little more. His muscles were changing. His tissues were changing. It wasn’t just immunity he was gaining. The heat was tempering him, the same way a blade gets harder the more it’s worked. He could feel the qualitative shift, a real increase in density and strength running through his entire body with every layer of heat he pushed through and absorbed.

He didn’t rush. He let the sun work on him.

At some point he noticed something shift in the texture of the plasma around him. It grew quieter. Denser. The currents slowed. The light thinned. And then the core came into view.

It was massive. Planet sized, solid, sitting at the heart of all that heat like a sleeping thing. Orange and hot and ancient. Bruce approached it slowly and reached out, pressing his palm flat against its surface.

It was hard in a way that surprised him. And from within it he felt something, a deep, slow aura, immense and still mostly dormant, radiating outward through every layer of the sun above. The heat, the plasma, the light, all of it was just that aura breathing. A physical expression of something not yet fully awake.

He didn’t punch it. He had no interest in damaging the core of Earth’s solar system.

’Are all cores sentient?’ he asked.

<No. Not all of them. Though they do awaken sentience over time. This applies to me as well. I have existed with the universe for over thirty billion years, but I only awakened sentience about fifteen billion years ago. Sentient cores have more potential than non sentient ones.>

Bruce frowned. ’If you only awakened sentience fifteen billion years ago, how do you know your exact age?’

<It is an inexplicable instinct. You will understand when you reach my level.>

Bruce sighed and kept his hand on the core.

’Is the sun sentient?’

<No. But it is close. It will awaken within a few years. When it does, new life will emerge across every viable planet in this solar system. Multiple races.>

That should have been good news. Bruce didn’t take it that way.

He thought about Earth. About the humans still there. Less than one percent of them had reached S Rank. Half of the ten S Rankers on the planet were the surgeons he had done research with, right before his transmigration. The rest of humanity was nowhere near ready.

If the sun awakened in its current state, with most of Earth still below S Rank, the wave of aura that hit the planet wouldn’t be survived by most of them. New life might emerge across the solar system, but at what cost. At the cost of every Earthling who wasn’t strong enough to endure it.

Akashic seemed to read the thought before Bruce finished it.

<Anyone who evolves to S Rank can easily withstand the Sun’s awakening. Do not worry.>

It didn’t help. Bruce knew the numbers. Most of humanity wasn’t there and wouldn’t get there on their own at their current pace. He still felt that pull toward Earth, quiet but stubborn, the same one that had never fully gone away no matter how far he had come.

He looked at the core again. The heat at this depth, close to four million degrees, felt like nothing now.

There was something he had been hesitant to try for a while. Something he had been sitting on, turning over, not quite ready to move on.

Maybe now was the time.

Maybe it was the only way to give humanity the push they needed.

He kept his eyes on the core and thought it through.