Magical Soul Parade

Chapter 390: Aspect Adaptation (I)

The deep, abyss-like gaze of the entity watching through Ailin’s eyes narrowed across the distance.

The blackness within those eyes seemed to search Finn, trying to peer directly into the mechanics of what he was doing to achieve a power that was fundamentally not his own.

To an entity of that caliber, it was a phenomenon that should have been absolutely impossible to actualize in any dimension under the Great Dao.

But while the ancient gaze observed from the shadows of the battlefield, Finn’s next move caused the pitch-blackness in Ailin’s eyes to widen in genuine shock.

The moment his Aspect Adaptation reached its absolute peak, the unformed soul mass hovering between his hands grew heavy with the conceptual weight of karma and inevitability.

Instead of drawing it into himself, Finn suddenly thrust both hands forward, forcing the impossible orb of divine energy directly toward Althea.

Immediately, Finn’s face twisted into a painful grimace behind his white bone mask. A sharp, agonizing strain ripped through his soul. Adaptation itself was nothing new to him. He had channeled the aspects of various Gods and Mythological figures during his previous life on Earth.

But never in all his existence had he ever attempted to embed an adaptation into another living soul.

In fact, when he had first devised this strategy before tabling his decrees to Limitless, Finn had not been entirely sure that it would work.

As he continued to force the foreign divinity onto her, Althea’s eyes instantly glazed over into glowing white orbs. The raw energy of the goddess Ananke’s aspect of inevitability surged into her body like a violent torrent, attempting to forcefully combine with her soul.

Finn felt a terrifying conceptual pushback that threatened to shatter his own divine reserves, but he gritted his teeth and pushed onward regardless, refusing to stop what he’d already started.

High above the mountain peaks, the vast, unfeeling presence of the Great Dao seemed to observe the sequence with a trace of reservation.

It did not actively move to strike Finn down, as the act did not violate the baseline logic of his identity as the Errant Heretic, but the unprecedented reality of grafting such a power onto a third party made the heavens hesitate.

Down below, the possessed vessel of Ailin stared with absolute focus, waiting to see if Althea’s mortal frame would collapse under the weight of the divine.

The world seemed to have gone completely silent, hanging in a tense, breathless suspension. Even Sage Limitless, who stood as the recipient of the brewing cataclysm, could only look on with an intense trepidation.

The Great Dao’s watchful presence froze him completely in place; until his side of the binding vow was fulfilled, he was totally forbidden from executing a single spell or manipulating a single thread of mana at all.

He had fallen totally into the trap of the Errant Heretic. Finn had demanded three paces, and in Limitless’s total haughtiness, secure in his own infallibility and blinded by his greed for immortality, he had granted them without a second thought.

Now, those exact terms were what bound him from actualizing any bit of his limitless mana.

As he watched Finn continue to embed the divine adaptation into Althea, he hoped with every fiber of his being that the process would fail, either from the sheer strain on Finn’s end or from Althea’s complete lack of compatibility.

Even without fully understanding the nuances of divine authority, Limitless could see for himself that the Errant was struggling, and he could see that Althea’s mortal soul was on the verge of tearing itself apart. In her peak of power, she had only ever been a Transcendent. She had never possessed the capacity to sense divine energy, let alone control it.

Just as the Sage’s desperation reached its peak, a sudden, devastating shift occurred within his own perception: the authority of Order he had just inherited slipped out of his grasp entirely.

The Great Dao was actively enforcing the legal terms of the binding vow. Until Limitless paid the price and stabilized the entropic state of the billions of vengeful souls tied to the plane’s mana, the authority of Order was temporarily confiscated and handed back to its original owner.

And the moment that authority was ceded back over to Althea, the change was immediate.

It was like a lifeline had been thrown into the deep recesses of her mind, which had been nearly overwritten by the surge of foreign energy.

She latched onto it instantly, spreading the concepts of structure and order throughout her body to balance out the overwhelming power.

The blinding white glow in her eyes dimmed slightly, and her pupils reappeared, proving that her consciousness was still in the fight and gaining ground rapidly.

As she became fully aware of her internal state, she felt the deep, terrifying nature of the divine. It was a power vastly superior to mana, possessing subtle nuances and an unyielding logic that she had never touched before.

She could feel the unfeeling gaze of the Great Dao pressing down on her like a bug to be rectified, threatening to end her existence in an instant. But the only reason she was spared from immediate erasure was because the divine power wasn’t originating from her own authority…

Rather, it was being fueled by Finn. Under the gaze of the heavens, this output was entirely in line with the Errant’s capabilities, rendering it legal within the truth of his existence.

Realizing she had a brief window, Althea decided to take things a step further.

Hesitantly, she pushed forward with her returned authority of Order, attempting to channel the floodgate of divine power surging through her veins.

Up until now, her mana-based Order had only sufficed to provide a basic equilibrium, preventing her from running mad from the strain. It could do nothing more; standard mana was simply too insufficient to force structure upon a divine concept.

If mana is too weak, she reasoned through the static of her mind, then I will use the overflowing power of the divine itself as the source.