When one considers Akevorax’s string of research for the first three days, it just seems logical that some sort of revelation would’ve come the next day as it had already. This left him stuck in a situation without any help, wherein the solution required illogical reasoning, and with a ticking deadline adding onto the stress. He could say, with something like a 99% accuracy, that absolutely no Soul or Mind existed in either the clouds or mountain.

He sat beside Adret, in deep thought again, more tests only gave the same results he’d seen hundreds of times. In a few hours, the 6th day would end… And then in 24 hours, he either obtained that reward or lost it. Potentially forever.

The things he knew and confirmed took more than a short while, but all of that was easier said than done. With Adret’s help, he actually managed to confirm that consciousness alone couldn’t form intent. It very specifically depended on the existence of a mental space alongside. Not that it mattered, as he somehow later proved that the only part of a Soul required for intent was the will, or ego.

Amazingly he confirmed things already written in books! No, it didn’t at all help find an answer. Shots in the dark wound up a lot less effective than imagined.

One other realisation was that the bolt not only contained an intent to destroy, but also contained an unimaginably thin sliver of destruction element within. While the lightning failed to damage the mountain on every strike, this element directly wore down the mountain top. In retrospect, the peak’s strange flatness came from somewhere.

“It literally cannot be a Mind, Adret would’ve spotted it a mile off, so it has to be Soul-related. And if it’s the Soul, then it revolves around will,” he said with a fanaticism for the results. With a day left, he felt the results slipping away bit by bit as this conclusion truly proved nothing. And sometime yesterday, he completely ignored any possibility of an unknown method creating this intent.

No possible knowledge or experience could tell him where to start in that case. Supreme tiers routinely spent months or years focused on new fields of research!

Alkuthuzen’s dedicated decades to his ‘dragon heart potion’ was a perfect example of dedication to such research. His lab also showed all the additional projects and equipment he created over the years as well. Unsurprisingly, the dragon dedicated to mutation research had very few Soul or intent-focused projects. Adret and himself already combed over the finished devices just in case.

On that note, she asked a question in response to his personal ramblings, “I take it you still haven’t figured out a way to locate the existence of will on its own?”

“It doesn’t have any impact on the universe… And it’s a non-real object too.”

“Well this sucks. And you really don’t have an answer? Nothing to pull out of that ring and solve the problem?”

“Sometimes you just can’t win; other times you pull something out of nowhere. Try not to get captured again though, I didn’t like those odds.” He gave a soft chuckle to change the mood slightly. A depressed Adret benefited no one here.

Even so, she didn’t really care for the laugh. That one sentence clearly stuck as their placement here only ever happened because of her. If she hadn’t been captured, through completely shit luck in his opinion, this all could’ve been avoided. Whether Alkuthuzen would’ve kidnapped her regardless was up in the air though. He didn’t put it past the psychotic dragon.

Stuck in her lull, Adret bit her lower lip while asking, “He… Didn’t die. Did he?”

“No. But it’ll be fine, at least for several years while he recovers. And by then, killing him will be a breeze,” his words turned gentle to soothe Adret’s sudden worries. Whenever they talked about the seized equipment, both sides explicitly ignored references to their situation or Alkuthuzen as a whole. This was truly the first time either confirmed their mutually accepted fact.

“I can’t believe she actually let you come… Why would she do that? Just for me,” she said with a scowl at the end. Her claws gripped into the charred layer of earth just thinking about it.

“It’s hardly her fault, I was fine just helping you in the lunar realm before heading home.”

She softly repeated, “Helping me?” But that quietness did not last long, Adret turned to face him with overwhelming rage on her face, forcing him to even pull his head back as the glare confused him. “Did she say I needed help? Well?!” Unsatisfied with pure questioning, Adret ended her words with a growl.

“Yes, that you sent out a distress… message,” his thoughts all slowed as he spoke. Adret clearly implied he was told a lie, and the reason she’d focus on the source–

“He sent a ransom message! And I thought you actually came of your own volition! So, why did she betray you?”

Her emotions somehow doubled down on their authenticity. Unlike when she let loose for the first time, Adret expressed herself wholeheartedly with honest and focused thoughts. To see such a thing had him question if he ever showed such powerful feelings before. All of this irrelevant to the real situation, Akevorax could not think of a single answer to why this happened. His eyes slanted at fantasies of the situation upon returning. Finally, saying coldly, “It seems we will be having a discussion when we arrive back home. She better have something.”

Flying off once more, he didn’t need to research for now, but the blasts of lightning or high speeds cleared his thoughts slightly. Nothing about the Clan Lord’s potential reasoning made sense. Unless she truly intended to trade him away…

He just tried to tuck the thoughts away and try to find an answer to his current problem.

All his work pointed to the will or ego sitting at the forefront, both of which appear within the Soul, and yet, he never found reputable documents stating that ‘a will must form inside a Soul’. It was the one open loophole in everything so far, but even if he claimed that’s where the intent came from, he had to answer how a will might form outside a Soul.

Out of boredom, and because he never tried it before, Akevorax waited until the next lightning strike with the orb floating beside him. The result of such a collision didn’t matter, it just sounded fun.

As the cloud darkened to a depth no less than the orb, charged with sky blue lightning, he accelerated immensely to collide with that bolt’s path. Under a 20 times acceleration, he could barely react to the lightning’s path and move the orb beneath its starting point.

And when the obstacle is just in the way, it’d make sense to hit it, especially at those speeds, but the moment both surfaces touched, he could only watch as the lightning split and curved around the orb! Like air blown onto a sphere, it immediately dispersed in every direction and left a small tail before reforming a short distance away. Akevorax’s eyes glued to the sight without a care as the blast of lightning shot through him, the orb’s presence all which filled his thoughts.

His body exploded into the pieces from that shockwave. Limbs, wings, and tail completely vaporised, but head and chest protected by a sudden silver armour. Not that he cared as it retracted once more.

In Akevorax’s eyes, only the layer of extremely dark green mattered. Everything turned silent as his senses wholly focused on it, the missing link realised in these few moments.

“Orbs… Unseen… Orbs in Souls… They can be outside! They’re covered by the universe or too tiny! There has to be an orb with either one!” His thoughts exploded and left a dreadful mess composed of his panic, ideas and concepts unfolded around him as though the walls of a cage around his mind fell away. The panic turned to illumination and confidence, bells rampantly rung within his head as far too many thoughts led him astray.

With so little time, and far too much around him, confusion and hesitation set in. Akevorax stared at the dark orb in front of his eyes, turning his head up and down to face the question which lay in front of him.

“It doesn’t matter. Will or ego, they create intent all the same. All I need to know is one thing for the whole story; What causes either one of these to spontaneously appear without a Soul?” He spoke out loud to quell the thoughts which led him to waste time. So many questions asked why he always ignored this oddity of Souls, how he could trace them in the future, or even reproduce them in his own way.

All of these questions failed to solve the mystery.

His thoughts hunkered down on the problems regarding their creation which still remained. The sudden removal of stress, among many things, gave him an answer almost instantly. A glaring fault looked over by his incorrect understanding of Souls.

In retrospect, the time gap between the mountain and lightning’s appearances never mattered. In nature, the number ‘1,000,000’ sounded so impressive with such size and length, but only to lifeforms with such limited spans. To a planet, it was merely a blip since their inception, all planes shared this reality, acting like a 20 million year gap mattered in their history was a mistake on his part.

Just like late bloomers, some children only showed their talent when inspired or suppressed from those better than themselves. Intent required an impedance, in which case obviously the lightning only obtained it once the mountain threatened it.

As for the crystal… Maybe its intent never changed in the hundred million years since its inception?

Grow and stabilise, without end.

Akevorax noticed the desires whenever beside that simple mountain core, a consistent and contained intent, a source so weak yet carried out perfectly. The time difference even made more sense from that standpoint. One side depended on an endless existence as its power, something available from creation, but the other formed an uncanny emotion for its type and sought destruction…

Who ever heard of clouds which destroyed the earth?

Egotistical clouds which resented mountains so much that their focused intent formed Destruction elements. It forced him to think of countless other sub-realms mentioned or seen.

Maybe he misunderstood how a will or ego came to be, and he argued to himself while descending to the mountain’s base, “All things in nature can have it. And given enough time they’d achieve that ‘desire’. Is that why it only happens in sub-realms? Of course… Else how could a single power win?”

Looking out to the flat plains of charred land all around, his thoughts cemented even further. When both dragons first arrived, why hadn’t they questioned the situation or looked even slightly interested?

Because all sub-realms swept by lightning looked like that. Blackened ground as far as the eye could see; hills and mountains flattened or pulverised. When both descended, it was this mountain which struck them as strange, but it fit expectations if certain types of stone existed. Either lightning-resistant or master tier worked. All of that slowly overturned these past few days, even frustrating Adret to a lesser extent.

Reminded of some old facts, he entered the library once more and searched for an introductory book on Souls once more. Reading through it, he said aloud a line written into his Mind Palace, “Everything has a will, from the smallest bugs to the leviathans haunting blank space– Those are two different sentences?”

Finding it, the latter half actually went,

‘It is far from unique, and from the tiniest bugs, whether seen as pests or food, to the gargantuan leviathans who roam the emptiness between planes, in this aspect they are all the same. Nothing’s will is greater than any other, but there are places where that difference is black and white.’

“Maybe even they were unsure if inanimate objects without Souls could have wills,” he joked to himself. Even now he wasn’t able to definitively claim such a thing.

Everything required such ridiculous conditions that he hardly believed the list given, but something drew the Nexus’ eyes here. The series of events he concluded all more or less lined up too, especially given the better evidence gathered early on, which only left its unsure origin in the air.

He had one full day left too. Without a doubt he could uncover enough facts to fulfil this challenge.

[No more will be necessary. You were tasked to ‘discover the source and origin’, evidence of your claim was never required so long as you came to this conclusion through logical means. Please move at least 15 kilometres away from the mountain]

An unexpected message caused his head to jerk back slightly, he’d completely ignored the possibility of them, but the content satisfied him more than anything. That one line instantly confirmed his suspicions and guesses!

Akevorax just returned to the camp placed slightly outside that range, where he asked with a relieved smile, “Why do you think it asked us to make the camp so far out?”

Adret almost replied instinctively but faltered upon seeing the smile and relaxed face beside her, then frowned unsurely.

A few seconds turned their faces to stone, astonishment set in with every moment. Adret’s crown appeared on her head and the metal band trembled gently, something it hadn’t even done with roared at by Akevorax’s True Will. Meanwhile, his jaw already dropped with a momentary thought spent to draw out the pocket watch and throw all caution to the wind. Divinity clad his body, and he used every drop of energy to accelerate both options. A 30 times increase for 16 seconds.

Both dragons pushed off the ground with a powerful leap, Akevorax’s speed double Adret’s, and with such extreme acceleration, he already flew two kilometres off the flattened land, quivering eyes focused on the great mountain in clear view.

Drawn purely in mana, with precision on atomic scales and all variables frozen in both space and time, arrays appeared around the mountain at unfathomable speeds. Hundreds of arrays surrounded the mountain, each drawn in the speed his accelerated body blinked, all to be followed up by gigantic forms which sliced the mountain into hundreds of sections, further ones being slanted arrays drawn on its black surface. Every line of mana emanated its lustrous blue light, dyeing the world a sea of blue… When had the lightning stopped falling as well?

As if these hundreds of arrays drawn in seconds hadn’t already exceeded everything’s capabilities, a giant sphere of great runes now encompassed the whole mountain and sky above it. While placed down at a speed where he saw things happen, none of that helped if every few combinations of runes required several times the time to analyse. This sphere grew outward from all six axes, millions of lines introduced every second outside of his acceleration.

And it continued.

What followed didn’t even fit inside his understanding of higher level arrays. As rings now formed above the giant sphere, thick rings like those formed by spellcasters… But instead of runes, it was mimicked with entire arrays. At the edge of these rings, runes and junctions bent to ensure they preserved the overall structure.

His acceleration ended.

The first ring wrapped vertically around the ball with a slight gap, face on rotated slightly to his left. A second formed horizontally with the front rotated upwards and anti-clockwise. Then came the third, fourth, and fifth.

No two rings repeated, all of them offset at different angles with massive variation, and all contained wildly varying arrays.

At the seventh ring, things finally slowed, as it took a laughable 8 seconds to complete. The eighth took 14… And the ninth an incomprehensible 25. While he couldn’t clearly make out too much detail at this distance, even he could notice that the previously controlled lines of space shook ever so slightly. But as soon as that final ring reached completion, that stopped.

Blue light completely filled through the sub-realm. From the farthest ends to the heights above the clouds, the sun-like ball of arrays was a mega-construct great enough to obliterate weaker planes. Just what was this all for?

Why did the Nexus do this?

[That was slightly tougher than expected. It’s good our bet succeeded in the end, we believed you’d find the answer with the tools and knowledge available. Congratulations for your success]

Like every pent up bolt of lightning suddenly struck at the same moment, a shockwave exploded in their heads. Both dragons flipped and fell a short while before the effects passed. However, when their focus recovered, expectations were already met. No matter which direction either looked, the mountain of crystal already disappeared.