Myriad Heavens: Rise of the Rune God

Chapter 351: Chapter 6: First Resonance 2

What he saw stole the breath from his soul.

An infinite void stretched in every direction. There was no up or down, no near or far. Through that endless darkness ran countless long, thin cosmic strings, perfectly parallel to one another. Each string glowed with its own internal light. Some burned brilliant gold. Some pulsed deep crimson. Some shone cold silver. Others shifted through colors that had no names in any human language. They stretched so far in both directions that their ends simply vanished into infinity. The scale was so vast that Ash’s mind struggled to hold it. It felt like standing inside the cosmic loom of creation itself.

For a moment he could only stare, completely overwhelmed.

Then the drain suddenly hit him.

Even though the Boundless Origin had been passively refining and strengthening his soul since the moment of awakening, the cost of projecting his consciousness into the multiverse was enormous. He felt his mental energy dropping at a steady, alarming rate, like water pouring from a cracked vessel. A dull pressure built behind his eyes. His thoughts grew slightly slower. Staying here for long was impossible.

He forced himself to focus and began searching.

Threads of resonance stretched from him toward the nearest strings. Snippets of other lives flashed through his awareness like half-remembered dreams.

In one universe he saw a version of himself who had never awakened any power at all. That Ash lived as an ordinary office worker on a still-normal Earth. He sat in a small cubicle under harsh fluorescent lights, rubbing his tired eyes and complaining about overtime. At night he ate instant noodles in a cramped apartment while watching old shows on a cheap screen.

In another, an Ash who had become a professional dancer in a world where cultivation never existed. He moved under bright stage lights, sweat shining on his skin, while the audience applauded. His body was strong and graceful, but his life was short and ordinary by the standards of cultivators.

In a third, a cold-eyed Ash who ruled a vast corporate empire built on reverse-engineered alien technology. He sat at the center of a dark room filled with holographic screens. Silent bodyguards stood in the shadows. Everything about him radiated control and quiet ruthlessness.

In a fourth, a scarred Ash leading a desperate guerrilla force against an overwhelming alien occupation. His left arm had been replaced by a crude mechanical prosthetic. His eyes were hard with the weight of endless war. Every day was a fight just to survive.

In a fifth, an Ash who had chosen the path of pure scholarship. He spent decades inside sealed libraries, surrounded by ancient books and glowing data crystals. He never once stepped onto a battlefield.

In a sixth, an Ash who had died young in a traffic accident before the portals ever opened. His life ended on an ordinary rainy night, long before any of this could begin.

In a seventh, an Ash who had become a notorious, feared tyrant in a high-technology society. He ruled through absolute, ruthless suppression. Cities burned under his orders. No one dared to speak his name without fear.

Weird. Divergent. Sometimes mundane. Sometimes tragic. Sometimes terrifying. None of them matched what he needed.

He pushed farther, ignoring the accelerating drain on his mental force. The pressure behind his eyes grew sharper. His thoughts felt heavier with every second.

Then he found it.

The resonance locked onto a string that burned with a deep, steady, blinding golden light. The moment stable contact was made, a clearer and far denser flood of information poured through.

This Ash had been born in a unique martial world where the ambient energy density was several times higher than Earth’s. He had awakened only an ordinary martial soul, yet his pure talent for cultivation and combat had been monstrous from the very beginning. He rose through relentless battle — clan wars, continental tournaments, inter-planetary conflicts, and finally full-scale universal wars against invading civilizations from other galaxies. By the time he reached the realm equivalent to Martial Saint, he had tempered his body and soul through thousands of life-and-death fights. His battle instincts had been honed to a razor edge. His comprehension speed allowed him to master high-level techniques in days rather than months. His martial physique had been reforged so many times that ordinary attacks simply could not injure him.

Ash’s excitement surged so strongly that it nearly destabilized the connection. This version fit every single requirement.

He focused and began the true resonance immediately.

The first attempts were clumsy and incomplete. The connection flickered, stretched, and nearly broke several times. Each failure cost him another heavy portion of mental force. A sharp pain stabbed through his temples. He adjusted, refined his intent, and tried again. On the fourth attempt, the link finally stabilized.

A steady transfer began.

The sensation was unlike anything Ash had ever experienced. It felt as though liquid starlight was pouring directly into the core of his being. Streams of pure aptitude — refined battle instincts, deep combat experience, fragments of high-level battle arts, profound insights into energy circulation, the foundational structure of a vastly superior martial physique, comprehension of universal concepts — flowed across the resonance and settled into his soul and body.

But then the sheer volume of the data hit him.

It wasn’t just information. It was experience.

A thousand years of muscle memory flooded in at once. The exact feeling of dodging plasma blasts that could melt mountains. The precise moment a sword pierced an enemy’s heart. The crushing gravity of meditating under a dying star. The sound of planets breaking. The taste of blood and cosmic dust. It was a tsunami of a god’s intellect trying to pour into a mortal cup.

His mental energy, which had been a calm lake, was now being churned into a violent, agonizing whirlpool.

Warning. Cognitive overload. Synaptic degradation imminent.

The Boundless Origin fed the clinical, terrifying alerts directly into his mind.

Ash gritted his teeth in the mindscape. The euphoric ”goddess’s hands” from his awakening were gone, replaced by the crushing, suffocating pressure of the Martial Saint’s memories. He felt his own memories — his favorite anime episodes, the taste of cafeteria food, Rylan’s smile — beginning to blur. They were being threatened with being overwritten by the cold, bloody memories of shattering planets.

No. I am Ash Apeiron. I am the anchor.

He forced the Boundless Origin to spin faster, using its passive absorption to fuel his mental defenses. He visualized his own identity as a solid core of light in the center of the storm. Everything else could flow around it, but that core would not break.

The connection was tearing. The golden string was flickering violently.

In the physical world, his body began to tremble on the narrow bed. A thin line of blood trickled from his left nostril, dripping onto the gray academy robes. His muscles locked up. Micro-tears formed and instantly healed as the martial physique data forcefully rewrote his biology. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His breathing turned shallow and rapid.

10% mental energy left.

He couldn’t hold it much longer. The pain was blinding — a white-hot spike driven through his frontal lobe. But he could feel the foundational marrow-refining instinct just on the edge of his grasp. If he let go now, he would lose the most crucial part of the physical transformation.

Just a little more.

He threw the last dregs of his willpower into the tether, screaming silently in the mindscape as his consciousness began to fracture at the edges.

5%... 3%... 1%...

Mental Energy Depleted.

He managed to copy approximately 3.2% before his mental force hit absolute zero.

The connection shattered like glass.

His consciousness was slammed back into his physical body with brutal, disorienting force. The dorm room spun violently. A splitting headache exploded behind his eyes, so intense it made his vision go completely white. His limbs felt distant, heavy, and completely uncoordinated. He barely had time to register the sensation of the lumpy mattress beneath him, or the warm blood still dripping from his nose, before darkness rushed up and took him.

Ash collapsed sideways onto the bed, completely unconscious.

Inside his body and soul, quiet but irreversible changes had already begun. The Boundless Origin was working furiously, digesting the 3.2% of a Martial Saint’s foundation. His bones were subtly increasing in density. His neural pathways were literally rewiring themselves to accommodate the lethal battle instincts. His very cells were being tempered by the echoes of a thousand universal wars.

Outside the window, the academy continued its ordinary evening. Students walked between buildings. Instructors gave quiet instructions. The elite ranks enjoyed their superior resources in the eastern villas.

None of them knew that the quiet E-Rank student lying alone in a standard, peeling dorm room had just reached across the multiverse and stolen a future that should have belonged to someone else.

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Outside the universe, trillions of light-years away, across the impenetrable membrane of a vastly superior universe, the golden-string Ash stood atop the shattered crust of a dead planet.

The sky above him was a swirling vortex of cosmic dust and dying stars. Broken planetary fragments floated in the distance like silent tombstones. He was a Martial Saint — a being whose mere breath could shatter clusters of solar systems — and he was currently gathering his overwhelming aura to force a realm-breaking breakthrough.

Suddenly, he paused.

A strange, inexplicable ripple had just brushed against the very core of his soul. It wasn’t an attack. It wasn’t a heavenly tribulation. It felt bizarrely like... a gentle tug. A fleeting, phantom echo of his own existence from somewhere impossibly far away.

”Uhn... what was that?” he muttered. His voice boomed across the dead world, rolling out like distant thunder.

He swept his divine sense across the entire star system with casual, overwhelming power. He found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. The sensation had already vanished without a trace, leaving no mark on his invincible foundation. He couldn’t explain the weird feeling, nor did he have the time to ponder the mysteries of the cosmos.

He shook his head, dismissing the bizarre anomaly. ”Never mind. Let’s focus on my breakthrough.”

He turned his gaze toward the dark, churning nebula at the edge of the system. There, an ancient, world-sized leviathan was slowly waking up from its eons-long slumber. Its massive body shifted among the clouds of cosmic dust, stirring space itself with every movement.

The Martial Saint’s eyes ignited with golden, battle-hungry light.

”I might need to battle that old monster to finally shatter this bottleneck.”

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