Chapter 358: Order and Chaos

Aalam

The benefits of a transcendent soul, the level above sublime, were far more than Aalam had hoped for, completely worth the absolutely ridiculous amount of resources required to obtain one—even if it didn’t allow for any extra classes beyond sublime soul’s two. First, a transcendent soul was far more pure than a sublime soul, increasing the natural base affinities of one’s race by a ridiculous amount and making the removal of impurities from consumed resources almost as easy as breathing. Second, a transcendent soul was far more solid, vastly reducing a monster’s soul burden from all effects and immensely strengthening all energy channels, granting vastly improved control over all energies. And, third, a transcendent soul was far, far better at drawing in energy from the outside, improving qi, mana, and psyforce regeneration rates by an awe inspiring amount and fundamentally altering a soul’s acupoints, the connection points between a soul’s energy channels and the outside world.

Opened as part of advancing through D rank, the opening order of acupoints, when combined with the effects of a cultivation technique, created a special energy flow within a cultivator or monster’s soul, and this energy flow increased the effects of the cultivator or monster’s stats by a fixed amount, an effectiveness boost. With a transcendent soul, however, that special energy flow was strengthened, and, instead of resulting in an effectiveness boost, it increased the maximum stats of a cultivator or monster’s race. For Aalam, for example, his maximum soul stat was increased by 648%, having an absolutely massive effect on all his other stats in turn because of his Soul Lord Law Emperor Battle Armor.

Soul Lord Law Emperor Battle Armor (Supreme): Increase the foundational value of all stats other than Soul by 50% of your effective Soul stat.

As a Supreme grade racial ability, it increased his extra base stats by a further 17% compared to its previous version, but the most important change, and the one his fifth class’s effect of increasing the racial ability’s grade hadn’t been able to accurately copy, was that it now affected his Luck stat as well, AKA his resistance to the natural suppression of universes, slightly increasing the likelihood of epiphanies and reducing the strain of high stats.

Then, with his fifth class, the 50% boost was increased to 66%, which was even more ridiculous.

And the only regretful thing was that Mila’s acupoints opening order would only increase her Soul stat by a factor of 198%, along with her Aura stat by the same amount and her Agility and Perception by 99%, while Diana and Isaiah both had small increases to all stats, making their increase to their Soul stats even smaller.

Primal Heart (Supreme): Prodigiously increase the normal flow rate of your qi, mana, and psyforce while exceptionally increasing their burst potential and ability to break down impurities.

Unkillable Elemental Law Form (Supreme): Freely switch between material and elemental forms at will, with elemental forms embodying any combination of the twelve elements, and maintain the possibility of full body regeneration from even a small piece.

Heavenly Spark Essence Conversion (Supreme): Efficiently convert any energy inside your soul into the same type of energy aligned to any element or mix of elements, be the energy mana, qi, psyforce, or even nascent energy.

Eternal Soul of the Primal Elements (Supreme): You may rapidly heal from soul injuries or increase the inherent quality of your soul through the use of elementally unaligned pure refined nascent energy.

Power of Divinity (Supreme): Increase all stats by a multiplier of up to 8 after all other effectiveness calculations, depending on the number, power, and religious fervor of your followers.

His and Mila’s race’s five other original inherent racial abilities had similar upgrades, the advancements of Primal Heart, Heavenly Spark Essence Conversion, and Power of Divinity simple but powerful, while the change of Elemental Law Form to Unkillable Elemental Law Form and Soul of the Primal Elements to Eternal Soul of the Primal Elements provided the foundation for full powered expendable clones, only requiring a new skill Aalam would create after gaining his sixth class to keep one of his minds in a small protected piece of his body.

More important for his future, however, were their two new inherent racial abilities.

Power of Order (Supreme): Increase the effectiveness of all stats by 25% for each grade of every order category Law within three grades of your highest Law, further multiplied by two for early grade True Law level Laws and by four for middle grade True Law level Laws.

Power of Chaos (Supreme): Easily learn chaos category Laws you experience, easily combine multiple Laws for use at the same time, and easily split up existing Laws into component Laws.

Aalam had done a lot of work so their race could include both Power of Order and Power of Chaos—including hundreds of thousands of years of research, stealing directly from the hoard of an elder god, and spending an utterly ridiculous amount of resources in testing—all because the two racial abilities were so useful when combined together.

Given the number of order category Laws, i.e. Laws representing fundamental principles of the natural world, he had control over, Power of Order increased his stats by a lot, and this included Attunement, which made advancing Laws even easier. Just by itself it created a cycle of empowerment, with high Attunement leading to the advancement of Laws, leading to higher Attunement, leading to more advancement of Laws, etc.

But this cycle was further strengthened by Power of Chaos to a ridiculous degree.

Power of Chaos made it easy for Aalam to learn chaos category Laws, i.e. Laws with a more specialized focus generally not representing fundamental principles, just by experiencing them. Trying to find Mila when she used her Laws of Illusion and Stealth, for example, would make it much easier to learn those Laws. And fighting Isaiah would make it much easier to learn the Laws of Speed, Defense, Destruction, and Regeneration.

Sure, with his 36 powerful Laws that covered almost everything he ever wanted to do, these chaos category Laws weren’t that useful to him, or even Mila, by themselves, but they weren’t what Aalam wanted Power of Chaos for. Instead, he was interested in the component early grade Law Eggs which made them up.

For every Law Larva, there were 16 component early grade Law Eggs combined together to make a more powerful whole. This was general knowledge almost every cultivator and monster with a decent education knew. And for every Law Pupa there were 256. So on and so forth. By extension, it was reasonable to theorize that all Laws were actually part of one giant whole, at least according to the model of Laws Aalam subscribed to, and Aalam liked to think of this giant whole as one huge multidimensional puzzle where each early grade Law Egg was a puzzle piece.

He didn’t know how many pieces the puzzle actually had, and he didn’t even know most of the pieces as he hadn’t heard of them yet, but he did know that rearranging the pieces into different clusters would produce different results. Mila’s Law of Illusions, for example, had components of the Laws of Light Emission, Sound, and even Matter mixed together to make a more functional chaos category whole. But, if Aalam were to learn Mila’s Law, the Supreme grade version of Power of Chaos would allow him to break it down into its component order category Laws, or even further into its component Law Eggs. And these Laws could then merge with his existing Laws if their component puzzle pieces were adjacent to the pieces of his own Laws.

With just a few simple steps, Aalam could use the Laws he learned from Power of Chaos to advance Power of Order, creating a new even more powerful cycle of empowerment. And, as the master of multiple universes, he had so, so many sources of new early grade Law Eggs he could experience and learn.

Nascent/Primal Energy Constructor (Supreme): Any extra stats which would be lost due to the stat’s limit having been reached instead become pure refined nascent energy. You may also convert primal energy into pure refined nascent energy and use pure refined nascent energy to increase the size of your soulstructures up to Gargantuan.

Heavenly Spark Pure Soul (Supreme): Increase the effectiveness of the Soul and Attunement stats by 500% and raise affinity with all Laws by 700%.

Supreme Soul Laboratory (Supreme): Gain a unique Small size soulstructure for long term storage and study of deceased souls. You gain complete control of the souls inside, allowing for the easy extraction and manipulation of all power and energy they possess.

True Monster (Supreme): Increase the max stats of your race by 300%.

Personal Storage (Supreme): Gain a unique Small size extradimensional soulstructure for storing non-living objects in as many individual subspaces as desired, hidden from all sensing effects.

Concentrated Primal Energy Well (Supreme): Gain a unique Small size soulstructure for gathering and processing primal energy, making your soul far, far more efficient at gathering ambient primal energy than any normal monster.

Concentrated Soulbound Afterlife (Supreme): Gain an easily modifiable unique Small size soulstructure for holding the followers of your deceased believers and the deceased believers of any divinities in your pantheon who designate this soulstructure as their followers’ afterlife. You gain extra faith energy from souls inside who believe in you and can influence their reincarnation.

Compact Soulbound Totem (Supreme): Gain a unique Small size soulstructure for gathering and processing faith energy. You have greatly improved control over all faith energy processed.

His non-inherent racial abilities had also advanced, most with pretty straightforward upgrades, but there was one of his old racial abilities, Emperor’s Command, which, with Mila’s help, he’d modified quite a bit.

Emperor’s Holy Command of Law (Supreme): Prodigiously increase the power of skills designed to make use of Law energy, natural energy, or faith energy, i.e. all skills.

They’d modified and merged his Emperor’s Command racial ability with her Divinity Savant and combined the result with racial power obtained from a runic dragon corpse to create a racial ability similar to runic dragons’ Runic Enhancement, but a level more powerful, for both of them.

And Aalam had also gained three new racial abilities as well, for a total of 12.

Compact Soulbound Territory Core (Supreme): Gain a unique Small size soulstructure for gathering and processing natural energy. You have greatly improved control over all natural energy processed.

Triforce Compression (Supreme): Compress qi, mana, and psyforce stored inside all soulstructures, effectively increasing the size of all core containers, mana wells, and mental forges by a factor of four while slightly increasing the speed of skill activation.

Transcendent Control (Supreme): Seriously increase control over all forms of energy.