The Insane Regressor: Throne of Pride

Ravian quickly adjusted the simulation.

The fourth attempt lasted for three pulses before collapsing, while the ninth completed half a circuit. By the forty-third attempt, a thread of power flowed out of his Aura Core, entered his mana circles, then returned without damaging either structure.

Success!

Ravian did not celebrate yet. Instead, he repeated the process.

The forty-fourth attempt failed, as did the next six. Well... that number was slightly higher than Ravian had expected.

The fifty-first attempt succeeded, followed by the fifty-second and fifty-third. At last, he had achieved several consecutive successes.

’Phew...’ Ravian finally exhaled.

Only then did he accept that the principle itself was genuinely sound and could be relied upon without concern.

That accomplishment allowed him to understand the second page.

’Damn... I’ve only just reached the second page?!’ Ravian thought, almost shocked.

Void Aura was not merely ordinary Aura dyed gray or fused with an unusual element. Aura remained spiritual power refined through the core and bound to the body through will. Once projected outward, the nature of the Aura itself could consume reality, although Ravian’s current comprehension was far too shallow for him to determine how much control he would need to reach such a level.

Void Mana followed the opposite path. The mana retained the precise structure required by magic, but the new technique used the Void Element to strip away the interference that had caused conventional techniques to damage Ravian’s body automatically. In simple terms, the process continued as normal while the Void Element filled the gaps—or, more accurately, erased them.

They were not two separate paths that had been forcibly joined together. They were two directions within a single cycle, neither interfering with the other.

Ravian finally understood why the path had received its name.

He also began to understand the element itself.

The Void was not simply darkness, for darkness was merely the absence of light. Nor was the Void the same as empty space, because space possessed distance, direction, structure, and countless other properties, whether they could be measured or not.

The Void, however, was negation granted the power to become something with a genuine existence.

It could erase what existed, what did not exist, and what sought to exist. The Void Element Ravian currently wielded was merely a limited expression that his present soul was capable of enduring.

All of this was knowledge Ravian acquired as he read the new Path Book and attempted to apply its technique. None of it had simply descended upon him through some sudden moment of enlightenment; he was merely struggling to understand the principle of the Void well enough to complete the technique.

Every use required him to determine precisely what should be erased and what had to remain. Ambiguity did not make the Void more obedient; it merely gave it more opportunities to devour the wrong thing.

’So the element best suited to me is one that punishes imprecision with self-destruction,’ Ravian concluded.

A faint smile appeared upon his face.

’This is ridiculously overpowered.’

The more Ravian learned from the technique and attempted to comprehend the principle of the Void, the more he began to form an idea of how his regression worked.

However, this was not the time to think about that. He had an appointment he needed to keep.

Ravian withdrew from his imagined mental world.

Before attempting to practice what was written in the book with his physical body, he moved away from the public desks and entered one of the private study rooms reserved for restricted research within the archive itself. The fact that he was permitted to use one surprised him as well.

The room contained nothing more than a table, a chair, reinforced stone walls, and a narrow window beyond which the afternoon light had already begun to fade.

Ravian sat down, closed his eyes, and reconstructed the cycle once more.

Aura Core. Mana circles. Dual Soul. Void.

The power began to move little by little.

Ravian was attempting it in earnest now. After mastering a method that allowed him to perform the technique in the real world without accidentally destroying his body, a failure would merely force him to begin again.

The first physical attempt ended when his Aura Core pulsed with enough force to compel him to stop. The second produced a numbing cold that spread across two of his fingers after the Void devoured the heat from his hand instead of producing it.

Again.

He was almost there. He could feel it.

During the third attempt, the mana reached his first circle before dissipating.

Ravian opened the book again.

When described in ordinary words, the first exercise was almost insulting in its simplicity.

Create a flame.

He still did not understand how he was supposed to accomplish that without possessing the Fire Element, but those were the words written before him.

The Prohibian formula beneath those three words occupied most of the page.

’Of course. What did I expect?’

Ravian returned to his imagined world and failed so many times that he became genuinely irritated. The flame vanished, exploded, froze the surrounding air, or devoured his simulated finger until, at last, it stopped doing any of those things. Despite its power, his Void was more lethal than anything Ravian could have imagined.

Then he opened his eyes.

He raised his right hand above the table and extended a single finger.

Mana circulated through his first circle.

Aura stabilized his body and prevented the formation from damaging his hand. The Void passed between the two systems, devouring only the rejection that would otherwise have shattered their shared circulation.

For a moment, nothing appeared.

Ravian narrowed his eyes as he stared at his hand.

The air above his fingertip trembled as though space itself were shuddering around it.

Then a tiny flame appeared from nothing, and Ravian’s eyes immediately widened in surprise.

It was no larger than his fingernail, pale around the edges and gray near its center, yet it burned steadily without devouring his skin or collapsing beneath the influence of the Void.

Ravian stared at it.

He had witnessed an explosion large enough to swallow entire buildings and powers capable of tearing space apart. By every logical standard, the flame above his finger was insignificant.

Yet it was the first phenomenon in this world to exist because Ravian understood mana well enough to command it into existence.

The corners of his lips rose.

’This is so damn cool!’