Alaric sat cross-legged on the grass outside the massive hut on the mountain top. Looking at it from the outside, nothing seems to have changed over the past eight years, except its size, which has grown approximately 2.5 times. But upon entering, the space within has been carefully modified by Tian through advanced spatial manipulation. It was in this hut that the library he calls the endless library resides, along with many other massive areas.

Calling it endless isn’t entirely accurate. It was just a whim of his when he was young and naive. Now that he has read every book within, he finds it difficult to refer to it as such, but he still does out of nostalgia.

According to Tian, he was certain Alaric was the most knowledgeable mortal in existence, though such a title held no significance beyond self-gratification. Still, it brought a sense of accomplishment and recognition of his great effort through the years. It wasn’t easy, but the results were satisfying.

Now, he would be turning 14 in a few minutes and was patiently waiting for the Heavenly Dao to assess his diligence over the years and determine whether he qualifies to continue his cultivation journey. He wasn’t worried about being rejected. In fact, he was confident he was going to pass this assessment of heaven, because no mortal ever recorded was as powerful or had a more perfected body than his.

His flaw has acted more like a blessing than a curse to him since his awakening, and he took full advantage of it without batting an eye. With every training session, he would wake up vastly stronger than when he went to bed, and every day for the past eight years, every part of his body, from his skin, nails, muscles, bones, eyes, organs, etc., has been through the grinder. Crushed and repaired repeatedly every single day till there was no room for his mortal body to progress.

Now, he could no longer physically get stronger until the heavens deem him worthy, so he moved on to adapt to other things, like poisons. He was immune to any form of mortal poison; anything beyond that is way above his resistance level.

In the same way he was confident about his situation, he was also confident about his partner Eva, who was about two kilometers away from him right now, also waiting for the appointed time. Taking advantage of his innate trait, he made sure she could get the best out of every ingredient he identified, even managing to find a combination to strengthen her internal organs, though not to the extent of his, but way above mortals.

Even from this distance, without his perception, he could feel her position and her general emotional state. The confidence he radiated seemed to affect her most, making her rapidly beating heart settle into a calm rhythm.

’This is what a bond should be like. Sharing each other’s burdens. Uplifting your partner when they are in distress. With this profound bond, they could do all that even without talking to each other.’

This situation brought him a soft smile.

’I am grateful to have a partner like her, willing to share my worries with. Oh, it’s starting.’

He sensed an immense, unfathomable consciousness descend upon him, a presence so subtle that only his heightened perception could even detect it. The sensation was gentle, enveloping him like the soft embrace of a loving mother checking her child for wounds. Its touch was slow, tender, and impossibly comforting; for a moment, Alaric nearly surrendered to the warmth, letting himself drift, but his discipline brought him back to focus swiftly.

He noticed how the force scanned his entire existence. Every cell and molecule was accounted for and carefully mapped out. He could sense the approval within it as it passed through each cell, ensuring they functioned properly. After a long hour of this assessment, the force finally settled.

Usually, this would be the time he would finally shed his mortality and smoothly enter the body refinement realm without any hassle, but something strange began to happen.

The first thing he felt was heat. Not on his skin but beneath it, inside the layer where sensation lived. The heat spread from his sternum outward, and for two breaths, he thought it would pass. Individuals of his age sometimes felt a strange warmth during assessments. He had read of this before, so he wasn’t surprised. What surprised him was his skin.

It began to move under an invisible force, one that was hidden behind the force of assessment before, but now raring its fangs.

The outer layer of him, the skin he had lived in for fourteen years, separated from the layer beneath with a wet, low sound, the way bark peels from a tree that has long finished needing it. It did not come off in sheets. It dissolved at the edges, turning grey, then translucent, then into fine dust drifting from him, leaving his muscles exposed.

It happened so fast, so suddenly, he couldn’t even react. The pain assaulted his consciousness like a blizzard, but to him, who had lived and tampered with his willpower through eight years of pain, this was nothing. He didn’t even flinch at the pain.

His muscles came next.

This time, more careful than the last. The Heavenly Dao worked with patience. The muscle along his thighs was separating from the fascia, dissolving strand by strand, each filament of tissue releasing its anchor and coming apart like thread pulled too slowly from an old weave, feeling like violence. His arms hung. The muscles in his forearms unwound. His back lost its architecture.

He took a deep breath, his now-exposed lungs expanding for all to see.

Last came his hardened bones.

What happened to them was slower: their crystalline structure softened, not into brittleness but into something like clay, and then the clay dissolved into the marrow, and the marrow dissolved into the blood, and the blood turned a deeper shade.

His organs followed as well, dissolving into nothingness.

The only things that remained of him were his consciousness and his now deeper blood, which were being anchored by an unknown force.

Then new bone came from the blood.

It was drawn upward from the stone, gathered and compressed, and laid down joint by joint with a sound that was not quite a click and not quite a chord. The density of it was perfect in the way diamonds are perfect compared to coal: too precise, too complete. It did not look like bone. It looked like something that had decided to be bone and had exceeded the original intention. Each piece locked into the next. The skeleton that rose from the bloody pool was the same shape as Alaric’s, and it was nothing like the one before.

The muscle came from the bone. It wove itself across the new skeleton like a script written by something that had read every body that had ever lived and understood what they had all been reaching toward. Smaller in fiber than what came before. More precise, durable, flexible, and perfect than it was. Capable of things the old muscle had no room for.

The skin sealed it all shut.

A new layer of flawless skin sealed the transformation, smooth and pristine, perfection untouched by time or hardship, like untouched snow on the highest peak. His already handsome features went up by several degrees.

He opened his eyes.

He was still sitting in the position he had been in before the heavenly assessment, and even his red robe had been remade. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Without any further thought, he used his perception to scan his physical body in the same way the heavenly dao just did. He felt power like never before, but that wasn’t the end of it. Something was now present in his perception. A vast construct that he can now perceive.

It felt like it had always been there, but only now revealed itself when his worth was proven. He felt a very strong, profound connection with it.

’That must be my martial soul. I can’t sense its shape, though, but I can tell it is very massive. something the mortal mind cannot fully comprehend. This must be resonance, so strong." The thought of having a natural martial soul with a very strong resonance excited him more than anything else that had happened.

The remodeling of his body was a reward from the heavenly dao for having reached the zenith of mortalhood, an event that had never happened before in history.

But what fascinated him the most was the resonance. It was growing stronger as time passed, so he waited patiently, trying to see what would happen. And something did happen, something miraculous.

When a person exceeds their limit, they can immediately access and perceive the world’s natural essence. This first step of Origin essence infusion is often guided by the Heavenly Dao, and it is a slow process that might take days to finish, but his ethereal martial soul hijacked it.