Myriad Heavens: Rise of the Rune God

Chapter 289: Chapter 290: Bootstrap

The platform was wide enough for two people to sit without touching, yet the air still felt crowded. Humidity clung to skin that had forgotten what sweat was supposed to feel like. Every breath carried the thick scent of wet leaves, rotting wood, and something sharper underneath — the residual animal musk of a jungle that had never been meant for mortal lungs.

Wukong sat with his back against the trunk, staff resting across his knees. He wiped his forehead with the back of one hand and scowled at the moisture.

”Sweating is exhausting,” he muttered.

Runar ignored him and settled into position — legs crossed, spine straight, hands resting loosely on his knees. The simple act of holding the posture required deliberate effort. Muscles that had once moved without thought now complained. Joints ached in small, unfamiliar ways. Gravity pressed against him like a constant reminder that the body he inhabited was no longer a vessel of power. It was just flesh.

Twenty days.

The number sat in the back of his mind like a countdown carved into stone. Full recovery to Multiversal levels was impossible in that window. The first realistic target was the Planetary stage. With their accumulated experience, technique, and comprehension, Planetary-level foundations would be enough to survive encounters with Galaxy-level monsters through skill rather than raw force. Anything less and a single misstep would end them permanently.

Wukong watched him for a moment longer. ”You’re really going to try that old brain thing?”

”Yes.”

”And if it cooks what’s left of your mortal skull?”

”Then you will have a quieter tree.”

Wukong snorted, the sound short and dry. ”Fair enough. I’ll keep watch. Don’t die in a way that makes me look bad.”

He turned his attention outward, golden eyes tracking the dense canopy and the shifting shadows far below. Something large moved through the undergrowth at a distance — heavy, deliberate, uninterested in the safe zone for now. Wukong’s grip on the staff tightened once, then relaxed. The staff was ordinary wood and metal now. It would not save him from a Galaxy-level existence. But habits died harder than power.

Runar closed his eyes.

He did not sink into blind meditation. He began to build.

Spirit force generation from the brain was the first and only available spark in a null-energy environment. For most cultivators the process was slow, crude, and unreliable — hours of forced concentration to produce a thin thread of usable force. For Runar it was simply the re-execution of a finished system.

He constructed the mental runic models with absolute precision. Every rune he had ever absorbed — the full library from the Reliquary’s trials, the residual research of the Rune Sovereign, the structures he himself had refined across his prior existence—assembled inside his mind at atomic and structural resolution. The visualization was not approximate. It was exact. Channels, junctions, frequency gates, conversion nodes — each component locked into place as if he were reading a schematic he had drawn himself centuries ago.

Because the blueprint was already complete, the process required almost no warm-up. Spirit force ignited behind his forehead in a clean, cold bloom. Pressure spread through the skull, sharp and controlled. No external energy was drawn. The brain itself became the furnace, converting pure mental exertion into usable force at maximum efficiency from the first second.

An ordinary cultivator attempting the same method under these conditions would have spent days stabilizing even a crude visualization. Runar’s was finished on the first pass.

He directed the newly generated spirit force inward.

The mortal body under suppression was a collapsed network of dormant channels. Most had sealed completely. Others were narrowed to near-uselessness. Runar did not destroy and rebuild. He edited live. The same precision that had driven the visualization now guided the spirit force through every meridian, every secondary path, every microscopic junction. Blockages dissolved. Collapsed sections reopened. Width and elasticity were restored with surgical control.

The physical sensations were precise and unpleasant — deep aches that flared and faded as pathways reconnected, brief flashes of heat and cold racing along lines that had been silent for what felt like forever. He accepted them without reaction. Pain was simply data.

Once the channels were viable, he calibrated them.

The Infinite Circulation Method was not a single-frequency system. Its core architecture was adaptive conversion — the ability to accept any energy type the environment offered and translate it into usable form. Runar attuned the rebuilt channels to that frequency structure with the same absolute mastery. The body stopped rejecting the surrounding world and began listening to it.

Circulation activated.

At first the draw was weak. Faint thermal energy from the humid air. Sparse solar traces that managed to pierce the thick canopy. Residual life-force clinging to the massive tree and the dense undergrowth below. The newly opened channels pulled these scraps inward, converted them, and fed them into the growing system.

Then the true multiplier engaged.

Because his comprehension of the technique sat at absolute mastery, Runar was not limited to radiant or ambient energy. He began converting matter itself. Microscopic amounts — dead cells, metabolic waste, minute portions of moisture in the air, even the faintest particulate traces drifting near the platform — were broken down and rewritten into pure usable force. The process was clean, controlled, and continuous. No ordinary cultivator attempting the Bootstrap method could have reached this layer. Matter-to-energy conversion at this resolution required the finished blueprint, not an incomplete sketch.

The burn that followed was accelerating and perfectly contained. Heat without damage. Pressure without rupture. The mortal body, still fragile, began to change under the load.

Energy compressed around the heart.

The first minor ring formed — a thin, luminous halo of compressed force that settled into place with a quiet internal click. Physical and mental parameters doubled in a single step. Strength that had been baseline mortal became something noticeably sharper. Perception clarified. The heavy drag of ordinary gravity lessened by a measurable fraction.

Excess energy beyond what the ring required did not dissipate. It redirected into continuous cellular circulation — a low-level, constant strengthening that reinforced tissue, refined blood, and stabilized the new foundation rather than delivering a one-time spike.

The second ring followed. Then the third.

Each one doubled the previous baseline. The body that had felt like dead weight an hour earlier now carried a growing internal pressure, clean and structured. Breathing deepened. Heart rhythm settled into a stronger, more efficient cadence. The ache in joints and muscles began to recede as cellular repair — still slow, still mortal — received a steady trickle of refined energy.

The full loop locked into place.

Visualization continued to drive spirit-force generation at peak efficiency. The rebuilt channels and forming rings fed the absorption architecture. Matter-to-energy conversion supplied the bulk fuel. Ring compression and cellular circulation refined the output. That refined output fed back into even sharper mental precision, which in turn accelerated the next cycle. The system was no longer a sequence of separate steps. It was one integrated engine, self-reinforcing, accelerating with every completed loop.

On the platform, subtle signs became visible to the only other person present.

Wukong noticed the change in Runar’s breathing first — deeper, steadier, no longer the slightly labored rhythm of a pure mortal. A faint heat haze shimmered near his skin, almost invisible against the humid air. The space immediately around him felt thinner, as if the environment itself were being quietly drawn inward.

”You’re glowing a little,” Wukong said quietly. ”That’s new.”

Runar did not answer. The process required no verbal confirmation.

High above the canopy, beyond the reach of mortal senses, the Ancient Will observed through its viewing threads.

Interest had sharpened into something colder and more focused. The speed was outside expected parameters. A fully suppressed mortal should have required days simply to generate stable spirit force, weeks to open channels, months to form even a single viable ring under these starved conditions. Runar had bypassed the entire developmental curve. He was not inventing under pressure. He was re-executing a finished system with absolute mastery over every component.

He already held the complete blueprint, the Will noted. Spirit-force generation, visualization, channel architecture, frequency attunement, matter conversion, ring formation — all of it pre-mastered. The suppression removed power. It did not remove comprehension. This vessel is more valuable than projected.

It elected not to interfere. The twenty-day window would reveal the true ceiling of the method. For now, observation was sufficient. Hunger, however, had grown sharper.

Time passed on the platform in measured increments. The jungle continued its indifferent rhythm — distant calls, heavy movement far below, the occasional crack of a branch under something large. Wukong remained on watch, tracking every shift in the canopy, every unnatural stillness. He did not interrupt again. The changes in Runar were steady and controlled. Whatever was happening, it was working.

By the time the light filtering through the leaves had shifted toward a deeper green, several minor rings had stabilized around Runar’s heart. The path to the first fused golden ring — the completion of the initial ten-minor-ring cycle — was no longer theoretical. It was measurable. The mortal body remained mortal, but it was no longer baseline. Strength, speed, perception, and mental clarity had already climbed through multiple doublings. The most basic functions of the Eye of Myriad Truths felt fractionally less muted, as if the growing foundation were beginning to push back against the suppression from underneath.

Runar opened his eyes.

The golden-white light within them was still restrained, still locked behind the trial’s absolute restriction, yet a quiet intensity had returned. He exhaled once, slow and controlled.

Wukong glanced over. ”Still alive?”

”Yes.”

”And?”

”The system is online. Acceleration is stable. Planetary threshold is reachable within the window.”

Wukong’s grin was small but real. ”Of course it is. You always did cheat at the basics.”

Runar did not correct him. In a sense, the assessment was accurate. Absolute prior mastery under conditions designed to strip everyone to zero produced results that looked like cheating. The gap that had closed when they were reduced to mortality had already begun to open again — this time from absolute zero, driven by nothing more than a perfected blueprint and the refusal to waste the only resource the suppression could not erase: comprehension.

Below them the jungle breathed. Somewhere in the distance a heavy body moved through the undergrowth, unhurried, lethal, still bound by the safe-zone restriction for nineteen days and some hours more.

Two former Multiversal existences remained in the high branches of an enormous tree. One kept watch. One had already begun rewriting the foundation of his existence from pure thought outward.

The twenty-day clock continued to run.

And Runar was already ahead of it.