The Primordial Record

Entering the Great Abyss was far easier than Staff had anticipated, especially for an immortal of her power.

Unlike every other Primordial Domain, the Great Abyss did not have a high rejection threshold for foreign entities. Instead, it opened its gates wide open to all who dared to find and enter them. This was a realm where battle and slaughter were an intrinsic component of its foundation, and it was said that the moment a single drop of blood did not nourish the ground of the Great Abyss, it would cease to exist.

To find her way into the Great Abyss, Staff had been transported out of reality by a dozen Sovereigns, each of them lending her their speed, and in the blink of an eye, she had found herself outside of reality, standing in the Nothingness with no idea which direction to follow.

With her power over the Space-Time Dimension, the impossible nature of existing inside nothing did not harm her psyche or physical form. She sat down, cross-legged upon nothing, closing her eyes in meditation.

Rowan had given her two revelations about her path forward and how this task she was to accomplish for him would greatly aid her, and the first revelation which was no longer a secret after her numerous encounters in the past that pointed out her Demonic heritage but hearing from him was the final confirmation that she needed was that her bloodline was deeply related to the Great Abyss.

It was not difficult for Rowan to show her everything about her Primogenitor, Minerva, and her conspiracy with the God King, Golgoth, to fuse the blood of Demons into the bloodline of Trion, creating a new Noble House.

However, because her father, Telmus, was a direct descendant of Minerva, the potency of his and her bloodlines was quite different from the rest of her people's. Rowan believed that this variant of their bloodline was extremely special.

A talent like Telmus and hers could not be found anywhere; several factors had to come into play to support the sort of power they could control, even as mortals.

Rowan had told her that he suspected Minerva was not acting alone. In creating Telmus and, therefore, herself, this relatively unknown Demon King had been nothing but a pawn to some greater entity inside the Abyss.

As the killer of Minerva, Rowan had gone through her soul and bloodline. He couldn't find anything special about it, among all the bloodlines he had gathered from the Great Abyss, Minerva's was extremely average, and she was only a bit special in her innate ability to weave Aether into stable dimensional constructs involving time and space, even as a relatively weak immortal being.

Of course, it was very possible that treasure could be born from trash, and Telmus and Staff could be a particularly impressive strain of mutation that arose from the fusion of the Demonic bloodline of Minerva and the Eldar bloodline of the children of Elura, Empyrean of Life. That explanation had satisfied Rowan for a long time, until he became more powerful and knew that this was impossible.

Mortals and many lesser immortals may believe that coincidences are possible and that certain random events might lead to a new and unexpected outcome based on the laws of probability, but Rowan had long had the ability to manipulate probability using his bloodline, and there could be no accident in his designs.

His bloodlines were far too powerful and essentially perfect for the hands of chance to manipulate any portion of them. So he realized that Telmus and Staff's bloodline was too powerful and too perfect to be the product of Minerva, and luck had no hand in it; this was purely by design.

The second revelation was about the innate power of her bloodline. Staff did not fully understand her father's abilities, and the closest she assigned to his capability was perfect comprehension and execution. The description of this ability might seem simple, but like her own, she knew it was anything but simple.

This ability meant that Telmus could instantly learn anything and execute it perfectly. It was the reason he was never injured during combat and was only killed when an overwhelming amount of power was used against him. As her father had always said, in the same rank, he had no equal, and this was what Staff believed with all her heart, despite knowing about the tyrannical nature of Rowan's strength.

Her ability absorbed all forms of energy and converted them into kinetic force, but the conversion rate was not one-to-one. Initially, it was like one to a ratio of ten; that is, she could swallow a Joule of thermal energy and emit ten Joules of kinetic energy.

Staff had never really bothered to calculate how much power she could output from the energy she was swallowing since she was always getting stronger, and her limits were increasing unstoppably.

Currently, she could absorb a Joule of energy and burst out with ten million Joules of kinetic energy, and that was when she was not even trying. It was undoubtedly apparent that she would be gaining the Will of Force, which enhanced her abilities to manipulate more energy out of what she collected to utilize her powers more effectively.

The real question about her abilities that needed to be answered was where the extra energy came from during the conversion. It was not emerging from her Aether and Essence; those were simply helping her to control the energy inside her body, and for so long, she did not have an answer to this question.

Staff had seen this as a quirk of her bloodline powers and dismissed it, but Rowan told her the source of her strength was the Nothingness itself.

Now, Staff was meditating inside the Nothingness on her way to the sixth-dimensional level because Rowan believed it would do two things.

The first was that it would deepen her bloodline connection to the Nothingness, and the second was that this deeper connection would trigger her Abyssal bloodline roots, drawing her into the Great Abyss.

Staff opened her eyes to discover that she had found herself in the Great Abyss when she was meditating in the Nothingness.