Breaking Through to Battle Sovereign, Saint Grade Genes
Lu Yuan smiled and said, "Since Elder Adams is planning to seek a Battle Saint's help, there shouldn't be any major issues. Amy, relax — it'll be fine."
Amy had been somewhat anxious after hearing what Adams had said earlier, but Lu Yuan's reassurance lifted her spirits considerably.
She gave a small nod, and before long a bright smile returned to her face. "You big liar — I broke through to Battle King Rank!"
Lu Yuan heard this and gave a quiet nod, his expression warm and easy. "Oh, nice. I was just about to break through to Battle Sovereign."
Amy: ???
The smile froze on her face.
"How are you advancing so fast?"
She could barely believe it. Then Lu Yuan noticed Wang Lingling's face peeking out from behind Amy — even her gentle, perpetually warm smile carried a faint trace of astonishment.
Her shock was no less than Amy's.
Lu Yuan glanced at Wang Lingling and figured she had probably been listening from the side the whole time.
He smiled. "I've been working pretty hard lately, I guess. You both know how it works — climbing the rankings earns you cultivation resources and Origin Stones for breakthroughs, which makes training a lot smoother."
Amy gave a slight pout at that. "Hmph! I can make it onto the King Rankings too!"
Having absorbed the spirit fruits Lu Yuan had given her earlier — ones that bolstered both physique and Mental Power — and equipped with several powerful Gene Armaments, Amy was no pushover now. After breaking through to King Grade, attempting to engrave Emperor Grade genes was a realistic next step, and if she put in the effort, climbing onto the King Rankings wasn't out of reach.
Lu Yuan smiled. "Then keep at it. Train hard."
"Yeah yeah, I know. Hey, do you want to come hang out, you big liar? I just finished my cultivation session."
Amy looked at him with hopeful eyes.
Lu Yuan shook his head. "My training time for today isn't up yet. I need to keep going."
A flicker of disappointment crossed Amy's face, but she understood — daily cultivation time wasn't something to let slide. She nodded. "Alright, go train then."
Lu Yuan said his goodbyes, ended the call, and wasted no more time at the Auction House. He left and made his way to his rented room, intent on breaking through.
On the way, he received messages from both Si Tingxue and Rebecca — also about the Aberration Feral Beast Amy had mentioned. Only then did he learn that Elder Si Qi and Elder Li Xinghai had gone to deal with it as well.
That only deepened his sense of just how terrifyingly powerful the creature was, and sharpened his urgency to break through and evolve his genes as quickly as possible.
Back at the rental, Lu Yuan went straight to the bathtub — roughly two meters across — sat cross-legged inside, and began absorbing Origin Stones.
As he absorbed them, dense Spirit Power surged and flooded into his Gene Lock, shattering the chains one by one.
With over a hundred and fifty Gene Lock chains, just breaking through the Gene Lock alone consumed a considerable stretch of time.
When every last chain was shattered, the next Gene Chain — previously veiled behind white mist — revealed itself.
That was the seventh Gene Chain. The Battle Sovereign-rank Gene Chain.
At the same time, a euphoric sensation of life ascending washed through his body, and his strength across every dimension rose by a significant margin.
He had broken through to Battle Sovereign rank.
Concerned about the Aberration Feral Beast situation, Lu Yuan allowed himself no extended rest and immediately began evolving his Transcendent Genes.
He had already poured eighty million Seventh-tier Spirit Crystals into the Evolution Cube beforehand. Now the cube pulsed with a deep blue glow, and under Lu Yuan's will, that light surged into his Gene Chain.
The Gene Chain erupted into violent transformation. His body convulsed along with it — wounds tore open across his flesh, blood spraying out and dyeing the bathtub crimson.
But with the restorative power of the Great Solar Spirit Body and Life's Aria working in tandem, his wounds writhed and began to close almost immediately.
Time passed. When the transformation of the first Gene Chain concluded and the Evolution Cube's glow faded, Lu Yuan's first Transcendent Gene had completed its evolution.
The Emperor Grade Transcendent Gene — Great Solar Spirit Body — had evolved into a Saint Grade Transcendent Gene.
The information seemed to flow into his mind on instinct, and in an instant he understood everything about the newly evolved gene.
Saint Grade Transcendent Gene: Stellar Body.
Compared to the Great Solar Spirit Body, the Stellar Body offered a dramatically greater all-around boost — primarily in defense and strength, with secondary gains in agility, and even a substantial increase to Mental Power.
Beyond that, unlike the Great Solar Spirit Body — which required sunlight to greatly amplify recovery and strength — the Stellar Body only needed to be somewhere in the cosmos where stellar energy was present. As long as one wasn't inside a Spatial Rift, it could enhance all attributes simultaneously while boosting physical recovery and Spirit Power recovery alike.
The amplification from activating the Stellar Body was naturally far superior to anything the Great Solar Spirit Body could provide.
At the same time, just as Lu Yuan had anticipated, the mastery and inheritance embedded within a Saint Grade Transcendent Gene went far deeper. The Stellar Body's command over earth, stone, and metal dwarfed the Great Solar Spirit Body's, and its control over gravity had surged dramatically as well. It had even branched out to encompass the ability to manipulate gravitational attraction and repulsion.
At its core, the motion of celestial bodies — massive objects with mass pulling at one another — made reversing gravity into repulsion a relatively achievable feat.
All in all, the Stellar Body was vastly superior to the Great Solar Spirit Body. The gap between them was even wider than the difference between Emperor Grade and Sovereign Grade.
It had to be said: the more powerful a Transcendent Gene, the more extraordinary the boost it granted a Gene Warrior upon engraving.
Lu Yuan suspected that once he evolved all his Transcendent Genes to Saint Grade, his combat power might actually surpass even his own projections — which was, naturally, a very welcome thought.
While he reviewed the Stellar Body's information, the brutal wounds across his body healed one by one. Lu Yuan stood, rinsed away the blood, cleaned the bathtub, then rested briefly to recover his energy before diving into the next evolution.
The second evolution: the Emperor Grade Transcendent Gene — Life's Aria.
Compared to the first evolution, his body was now considerably stronger, and the pain was noticeably lighter as a result. The wounds that appeared were also fewer than before.
He completed the evolution quickly.
Saint Grade Transcendent Gene: Life's Gift.
Like Life's Aria, it was a healing-type Transcendent Gene — but compared to its predecessor, Life's Gift almost deserved the grandeur of its name. As long as death wasn't absolute — as long as the spirit itself hadn't been extinguished — this Combat Technique could pull someone back from the brink.
Reading that, Lu Yuan's eyes went wide. *That's essentially unlimited lives, isn't it?*
As long as he had enough Spirit Power, no matter how grievous the wound, he could recover at maximum speed. Regenerating lost limbs? Completely standard. And if his spirit still persisted... rebirth from a single drop of blood might not even be out of the question.
That was frankly terrifying.
He realized this Combat Technique was even more powerful than he'd imagined.
Of course, after evolving to Saint Grade, the amplification bonuses from Transcendent Genes were also far greater than at Emperor Grade, and the inherited knowledge encoded within was correspondingly more profound.
His understanding and application of life force and nature force reached new depths. Even without actively using a Combat Technique, Lu Yuan could now effortlessly channel life force to heal others, use nature force to make plants shoot up in an instant, or turn those same forces against his enemies.
He noticed that as his Transcendent Gene quality kept rising, the knowledge embedded within them grew ever more similar to true dominion over the laws these genes represented.
*If Saint Grade is already this powerful... by the time I reach Divine Grade, I'll truly be something like a deity wielding the laws themselves.*
At that point, calling it a Combat Technique would almost be a misnomer — it would be closer to a divine art.
For Lu Yuan, this was obviously a good thing — after all, he could hold dominion over several different aspects of the laws and wield many such divine arts.
*Keep evolving. Surpass Divine Grade. Go beyond even divine arts.*
He cast Life's Gift on himself. The wounds still slowly knitting shut from the previous evolution vanished almost instantaneously — so fast he barely registered the moment of transition.
After cleaning himself off and recovering his energy, Lu Yuan began the third evolution.
The third Emperor Grade Transcendent Gene: Mechanical Emperor.
The Evolution Cube's deep blue light once more enveloped the Gene Chain, and the chain began to transform.
After two consecutive Saint Grade evolutions, his body had grown immensely powerful. Though he could still feel pain, it was even milder than during the second evolution. The wounds that appeared were reduced yet again — barely more than surface scratches.
The evolution concluded swiftly. The deep blue light dispersed, and Lu Yuan received the information of his new Transcendent Gene.
Saint Grade Transcendent Gene: Mechanical Saint.
The all-around improvements this Transcendent Gene granted a Gene Warrior went without saying.
His ability to control mechanical lifeforms had grown dramatically — so much so that, provided his Mental Power was strong enough, even a Saint-rank mechanical lifeform might not be beyond his control.
Lu Yuan found that hard to believe. *A Saint.*
In the grand scale of the universe, Saints stood among the absolute elite. Beneath the War God, Saints represented the ceiling of combat power. And now he might be able to control one.
He was half-tempted to visit one of the Mechanical Race's domain planets and test it on a mechanical Saint.
Though he quickly decided that if he actually tried it, a Mechanical War God would probably slap him dead on the spot.
An anomaly at the Saint level was no small thing — it would inevitably draw a War God's attention.
Beyond control, the inherited knowledge in the domain of mechanical science was extraordinarily advanced. Given sufficient materials, Lu Yuan could now construct spacecraft capable of spatial jumps.
Thinking along those lines, a thought struck him — if that Saint-level Aberration Feral Beast truly proved unmanageable, building a few warships as a means of escape might not be the worst fallback plan.
Of course, if he had any say in the matter, Lu Yuan absolutely did not want to abandon Great Qi Star.
Additionally, the Mechanical Saint's amplification of Mechanical Gene Armaments and mechanical weapons had received a substantial boost compared to the Mechanical Emperor.
Lu Yuan thought it over and decided he would eventually fabricate a batch of floating cannon-type Gene Armaments. Once evolved to Saint Grade and further enhanced by Mechanical Amplification, they would provide a considerable upgrade to his combat power.
If evolving them to Saint Grade proved too burdensome, keeping them at Emperor Grade was also viable — Emperor Grade with Mechanical Amplification wouldn't lag dramatically behind Saint Grade in raw destructive output.
That was a solid strategy worth keeping in mind.
He filed it away mentally, planning to try it when the time came. If that Aberration Feral Beast really did show up, every increment of power mattered.
Coming back to himself, Lu Yuan noticed that the wounds from the evolution had already healed on their own. He cleaned up, recovered his energy, and began the next evolution.
The fourth Transcendent Gene: the Emperor Grade Transcendent Gene — Starfield Roaming.
Compared to his other Transcendent Genes, Spatial Type genes demanded the greatest resources to evolve — roughly eight million Seventh-tier Spirit Crystals just to bring this one to Saint Grade.
By this point in the process, Lu Yuan could barely feel any real pain at all. There was only a faint stinging sensation, and no wounds appeared on his body any longer.
He checked the gene's information.
Saint Grade Transcendent Gene: Spatial Walker.
Compared to the Emperor Grade Starfield Roaming, the improvement offered by the Spatial Walker was enormous — that went without saying.
The Combat Technique's function was the same as Starfield Roaming: spatial traversal.
But unlike Starfield Roaming, the Spatial Walker possessed far greater affinity with space itself. True to the gene's name, it was as though the user were a being who simply existed within the spatial fabric. Activating the technique allowed him to merge seamlessly into space — lower-tier Spatial Type Transcendent Gene users might not even detect the spatial disturbance his movements produced.
It faintly reminded Lu Yuan of the Abyssal Demon Gate from before.
Though it was naturally nothing like an Aberration Entity's ability.
When traversing space with Spatial Walker, the movement felt no different from running through ordinary space — there was no lag or delay whatsoever. With this gene, Lu Yuan could maneuver within the spatial fabric just as freely as he would in open air.
Even spatial binding techniques would struggle to hold him, because even a sealed space felt to him like ordinary space.
With this gene, there was nowhere in existence he could not reach.
The more he read, the more his mind reeled. *No wonder Spatial Type Transcendent Gene users are so rare among the powerful.*
If someone possessed the Spatial Walker gene — even if that person were only Battle Venerable rank — Lu Yuan would have absolutely no way to catch them.
They might be unable to hurt him, but he would struggle equally to land a blow on them.
He even found himself wondering whether the Spatial Walker could pierce a Law-enforced barrier. If it could... then even a War God might not be able to touch him.
He was almost tempted to test it — but if the answer turned out to be no, that would mean his death.
*Yeah... best not to find an opportunity to test that.*
He let out a slow breath.
As for the rest — the inherited knowledge encoded within the Spatial Walker gene was extraordinarily profound, elevating his mastery and command over spatial force to an entirely new level.
He could now craft a number of powerful Combat Techniques using spatial force alone: burying spatial bombs at locations and detonating them as enemies passed through; using spatial folding to achieve effective invisibility — all of it entirely viable.
And because of the unique nature of spatial genes, the Combat Techniques he created this way might cap out at Emperor Grade in raw quality — yet even against a Battle Saint, they would be far from useless. That was the part he found most satisfying.
After finishing his review of the Spatial Walker gene's information, Lu Yuan exhaled slowly, suppressed the excitement welling up inside him, rested briefly, and then prepared for the next evolution.