Earth's Greatest Magus

Chapter 3025: Clones

Alone once more, Emery turned his attention back to the matters still waiting for him.

The light avatar had come a long way. Months of relentless combat had tempered and refined its soul into something far sharper than before, yet the breakthrough Emery sought remained frustratingly out of reach.

Even so, those same months had confirmed a realization that had been slowly taking shape in his mind.

Since settling within Neo Terra Palace, Emery had devoted nearly a decade to cultivation and training.

There had been undeniable progress. His cultivation had advanced steadily, and he had mastered techniques that would have been impossible for him only a few years earlier.

Yet true breakthroughs could not be achieved through meditation alone.

They had to be forged through experience, born from the friction of a life genuinely lived.

His fight against the Midnight Brotherhood had taught him more in a matter of weeks than months spent in secluded cultivation. The Baeldum campaign against the Scourge, brief though it had been, had deepened his comprehension in ways no ancient manual ever could.

Most surprising of all, even the quiet rhythm of fatherhood—the ordinary days spent caring for his newborn daughter—had awakened something profound within him.

Insight.

Enlightenment.

These were never things a cultivator could simply study into existence. They emerged from living, from hardship, joy, loss, and the countless experiences in between.

The Khaos Voidweave had only reinforced that truth.

Whenever the Khaos seeds gathered, and the weave linked their minds together, insight flowed freely through the network. One cultivator’s mastery brushed against another’s, decades of accumulated understanding exchanged in moments between people who otherwise would never have crossed paths. Emery benefited from every one of them, while they, in turn, learned from him and from each other.

The value of that shared enlightenment was immeasurable.

After realizing this, Emery stopped confining himself to endless seclusion.

His light avatar continued throwing itself into the chaos of the frontlines. His dark avatar sought out every Grand Magus willing to spar, traveling across Neo Terra and its allied worlds while relentlessly refining his mastery of the Gravestone Ruler and [Khaos Riftstep] through real combat rather than empty repetition.

As for Emery’s true body, it had devoted itself to a project of equal importance.

He was going to create a better clone body.

This was no idle experiment born of curiosity.

Having lost three true clone bodies in succession, the matter had become painfully urgent.

Every replacement came at a tremendous cost.

Hours of painstaking work and a small fortune vanished every time he created a new body, only to send the light avatar back into the war where it would eventually be destroyed once again.

It was a cycle Emery had no intention of repeating forever.

Three months remained before the Tartarus expedition.

The path toward his own Three Cosmos breakthrough was still uncertain, while the road to Kieran and the fourth Khaos Gate had, for the moment, reached a dead end.

The elusive drow had withdrawn to the safest place imaginable, remaining deep within territory protected by layers of formations and watched over by Supreme guardians. Recent multiple reports of Emery’s shadow clones gathered pointed to the same conclusion: Kieran had entered seclusion, abandoning all public responsibilities to focus entirely on cultivation.

That single piece of information closed countless possibilities.

With no immediate way to reach Kieran, Emery was forced to seek another solution—and unexpectedly, it was the repeated destruction of his light avatar that inspired one.

If Tartarus was too dangerous for his true body...

Why not send the dark avatar instead?

The soul itself did not seem to be the problem. As long as his true soul remained anchored within the Khaos Domain, Emery believed he could eventually recall one of his avatars, even across the boundary between realms. At the very least, it should prevent the avatar from becoming permanently stranded.

The real problem was the body.

Would he send his own body together with the avatar?

Better not.

His physical body had become one of his greatest treasures. Years of apothecary refinement, repeated bloodline purification, countless life-and-death tempering sessions, and, most recently, the Stellar Beast body refinement had transformed it into something extraordinarily valuable.

It was irreplaceable.

He would rather not risk it inside a realm that had already stolen decades of his life once before, lost and unable to attend the coming duel with the Skylord.

The True Clone Body technique he had inherited from the Serpent Supreme was undoubtedly a divine art, capable of reproducing his current physique with astonishing accuracy.

Yet it was never meant to last forever.

As his cultivation increased, so too did the burden placed upon the clone. The stronger the original body became, the more unstable and resource-intensive the duplicate would be.

Even worse, if his true body entered Tartarus and the connection to the Khaos Domain became disrupted, he would lose the ability to create replacement vessels for the light avatar who was doing his important duty on the frontline.

The same dilemma existed in reverse.

If he sent the dark avatar into Tartarus inside a clone body, how long could that vessel survive without maintenance? If it collapsed deep within another realm, recreating it would be impossible until he solved the connection.

Every possibility led back to the same obstacle.

He needed a clone body that could truly endure.

###

Clone body technology itself was hardly uncommon.

Among the higher realms, it was one of the most heavily researched branches of cultivation, so valuable that many major factions maintained private laboratories dedicated solely to its development. The knowledge was guarded as carefully as any divine inheritance.

The half-blood factions were perhaps the best example.

Their clone bodies required specially prepared blood samples to function correctly. Without them, the replacement vessel could never awaken the unique bloodline abilities that defined its owner. Emery had long ago anticipated such needs, storing preserved blood samples from himself and every half-blood under his protection within Utopia gene laboratories.

By that logic, creating another body for himself should have been nothing more than a matter of time, funding, and resources.

Unfortunately, everyone knew there was a ceiling.

The gene centers openly admitted they could only produce clone bodies up to the Magus Realm. Anything beyond that simply did not exist...

Officially.

But Emery had lived long enough to recognize the difference between what powerful factions admitted publicly and what they quietly kept for themselves.

Rumors persisted of Grand Magus-grade clone bodies, reserved exclusively for the upper echelons of the halfblood alliance. There were even whispers of techniques capable of accelerating a clone body’s cultivation instead of forcing it to begin again from the bottom.

If even half those rumors were true, they could solve nearly every problem standing before him.

There remained another option.

He could seek out the Serpent Supreme once again.

It had been a very long time since their last meeting, long enough that the silence between them had begun to feel increasingly unusual.

Emery considered the thought for a long moment before finally rising from his seat.

”I suppose...”

A faint smile crossed his face.

”...it’s time to pay them a visit.”

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