Dimensional Descent

”The flashing eyes pulsed one final time before solidifying. The moment they did, an eruption of violent Force surged out like a raging tide. At first they weren’t very controlled, splashing out like a spray of water from a hose, but very quickly, the Oryx seemed to get a grip on their bearings, reining in the trembling blast of Force and concentrating it into countless red lasers that covered the skies.

The force was devastating. It crushed everything in its path, disintegrating it. Many died without even time to scream out for help, and the so-called walls of Gold-Grade were crushed like paper, collapsing without any sort of resistance.

Seeing this scene, Leonel couldn’t help but think about the first time he had come across an Oryx. Back then, the Oryx in question had had an Ability Index almost exactly like this, but that man had just been one of many. And since it was an Ability Index, it couldn’t just be casually passed down from Oryx to Oryx, Ability Indexes weren’t hereditary from Leonel’s understanding of things.

However, what was so crucial about this memory was what it told Leonel about the Oryx race. The eye was an incredibly fragile thing. As crazy as it was for Leonel to have formed a Node in his brain stem so long ago, forming one in your eyes was seen as equally crazy if not even more so.

Nodes had to be connected to one another, so running a Nodal Pathway from your eye to other parts of your body only gave you, really, two choices. The first was to go through your face, and the second was to go through your brain.

The first might not seem so bad, until you realized that there were only two choices for succeeding in this path as well. The first was to disrupt the normal flow of your bone structure, or most accurately, your skull, and the second was to use the thin skin on your face. Both weren’t very good options.

Running a Nodal Pathway through your bones would ruin its structural integrity and create a weak point in your body. And as for running a Nodal Pathway through the skin and muscle of your face would limit how thick you could make it, unless you were alright with a large, vein-like snake running across your face, or you were alright with limiting your future potential.

The second option of running it through your brain, but this was even more dangerous than forming a Node in your brain stem. There were even more moving parts, and increasing the size of your Nodal Pathway in the future would come with a new set of challenges every time.

To top all of this off, there wasn’t usually much of a necessity or benefit to forming Nodes in your eyes to begin with. Those who had eye-related Lineage Factors could use their strength naturally without doing this, that was because the existence of one’s Ethereal Glabella alone already created all the networks you would need in your mind. And those that didn’t have such abilities would just be wasting their time for what was effectively just vision that was a little bit sharper than normal.

This, however, was where the anatomy of the Oryx became so absolutely shocking. Their third eye wasn’t just in place of their Ethereal Glabella, Leonel was actually quite certain that it was their Ethereal Glabella.

The implications of this matter were shocking because it went beyond just hoping for an Ability Index related to eyes was birthed within them. Instead, it was possible to take advantage of this such that they could create their own abilities off the back of it.

This wasn’t just a quirk of their anatomy, it was effectively a Lineage Factor. What else was a Lineage Factor if not a biological quirk that could be passed down through the generations? The problem was that the Oryx faced a similar problem to Leonel after he had evolved beyond the level of the Snowy Star Owl, and that was that they were too far in their infancy to have the techniques they needed to make use of their abilities. So...

Leonel created it for them. Rather than wasting time creating techniques, refining them, and improving them, Leonel took the crudest ability such an eye would have and amplified it to the greatest degree.

What was the Ethereal Glabella if not a hub for the affinities of its owner? It was through the Ethereal Glabella that one gained access to their Ability Index. It could be said that it was the hub that made a person a person, and it also happened to be the location within which one could gain access to their soul.

The Spiritual were born only as Ethereal Glabellas, and it was around said Ethereal Glabella that they constructed their own bodies. As a result of this, it could be said that almost from birth, they had already entered the Fourth Dimension, and not only that, they were intimately familiar with both their affinities and how their bodies worked alongside it.

This was part of why the Spirituals were so absolutely powerful, and Leonel even believed that given enough time, it might actually be possible for the Oryx to replicate something similar given the access they had to their Ethereal Glabellas.

It could be said that, better than any Force Art, better than any treasure, what the Ethereal Glabella was best at was accumulating Force and expelling it. When one gained such unprecedented access to one’s Ethereal Glabella, right from the purest possible source, the effect could only be said to be...

Absolute.

Feeling the power coursing through them, for the first time, the Oryx became keenly aware of just the kind of strength and power they had. There were many sayings about the eyes being the window to the soul, none of them being literal. But in the case of the Oryx, it just might very well be.”

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