Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

BOOM!

The world seemed to lose its color. Fragments of spatial glass spiraled through the surroundings, each one carrying either a reflection of the world around it or a window into the world beyond it. It was the most ethereal sight that Ryu had ever seen, and he completely forgot about his father for a moment.

He had never seen space react like this. The push and pull between two worlds, the fragile construct that separated the two, it felt like... vibrations... resonance... wavelengths... strings...

The thought almost left Ryu's control as it sprinted down several possibilities. It all moved so fast that he thought of several possibilities before he even realized that the battle in the skies had reached a penultimate point.

The flame that erupted didn't even seem to have a form. It was both everywhere and nowhere at once, covering everything.

Ryu realized that neither his father nor the three Faeries even knew the exact location of the core of it. He could see his father's brow knitted into a tight frown of worry, not for himself, but for his son, obviously. He felt that if Ryu was fine, he would have told him where to look already.

Ryu chuckled to himself. He didn't do it on purpose, but that was nice payback. Who asked the old man to suddenly die in front of him?

His lips moved again and the words drifted toward his father.

This time, however, they didn't make it. The qi was too volatile and his voice had to duck in and out of several worlds. Let alone making it to Titus, even the three Faeries who were in the process of protecting themselves and trying to kill Titus didn't sense it.

Ryu frowned. He knew where the kernel was. Even with his eyes in this fatigued and somewhat blurred state, it was easy for him to find it. It didn't even take effort.

But if he couldn't get the information to his father, then it would all be for naught. He certainly couldn't go and get it himself; he would die a hundred times over.

Suddenly, he thought about his sudden inspiration just now.

When he first began his journey and created techniques like [Warped Ripple], he had thought of space like a box. He could press it together and pull it apart somewhat, he could flatten it into its pieces and even change its dimensions...

When he gained his Spacetime Soul Nature, his view of space changed again. Rather than a box, he thought of it as multiple thin layers, countless two-dimensional constructs layered atop of one another to form a three-dimensional system, and hidden between those layers, there was the void.

But just now, he broke it down even further.

He began to see space as individual, singular and one-dimensional strings, not just strings, but vibrating ones, each one carrying its own unique frequency that divided the world into planes.

But then he took it even a step further.

He thought about how Fading Star had been able to connect him with Ailsa across such impossibly far distances. It wasn't an act of Spatial Qi, obviously. But it had felt like something deeper, something almost more magical...

The magic didn't come from the qi type itself, though, but rather, the concept.

If Fading Star had used raw qi and tried to accomplish the same feat, let alone her feeble state at the end of the attempt, she would have ended up dead.

She used a far more ingenious, far more clever, far more elegant form of qi control...

One that reminded Ryu a lot of Aika's Dao, but simplified and streamlined.

Ryu suddenly opened his mouth again and spoke. But this time, he saw his father's ear visibly twitch.

A wide grin spread across his face as Titus suddenly shifted, dodging out of the way of an avalanche of techniques and suddenly grabbing at empty space.

Before the three Dao Sovereigns could even be shocked by what was happening, he directly swallowed it and his body exploded again.

Ryu was speechless. What was with this old man's fascination with dying?

What he didn't know was that Titus had already unlocked three Rebirths, but he had had no good opportunity to use them. One he had been forced to use out of pure necessity, just to save his life. And now, after all these years, he used the second and third on the same day.

His aura exploded forth, the Natural Treasure becoming a catalyst that turned his flames into something completely new.

The black and red fused together, gaining hints of a silvery luster. Eventually, it looked like a complete black flame with a border of shimmering red and silver.

Titus' aura exploded, his body seemingly unable to contain it. His cultivation rose from the Lower Dao Lord Realm to the Peak in a single bound, but his actual strength itself seemed to be on an entirely different level.

Seeing this scene, Ryu finally stepped out from the void. He didn't think that it was necessary to hide anymore.

If there was one person he didn't mind asking for favors from, or relying on...

It was his own father.

The appearance of a young man in ragged white robes startled the Dao Sovereigns who had just been entirely focused on Titus. When they realized it was a False Sky God walking through the air as though it was land, they were even more floored, not just by the fact he was clearly flying, but also the fact he hadn't been burnt to ash yet.

Titus looked over and was somewhat stunned when he saw his son's bright smile. After he got over his shock, his eyes went red. It was subtle, something hard to tell considering his irises were already so crimson already, pouring some of its light into his sclera.

"Oof..."

A strong hand slapped Ryu's shoulder so hard he thought it dislocated it for a second.

"Easy. You have no idea how many things I've been through in the last day. It started with a wild beast lady, then the most powerful Dao God in Existence glanced at me, and then some bastard sneak atta-"

Ryu was pulled into a hug much too tight for him to get out of.