So close, and yet so very far. Concepts that seed to perfectly mirror what he was chasing after, and yet felt so very foreign at the sa ti. It felt like he was looking at the Laws he wanted through a mirror, touching the glossy barrier, but feeling a separation between his fingers that he couldn’t close in on, no matter how hard he pushed.
Theron rembered reading about concepts like this...
It was said that life was started with what was nothing more than the very sa atoms and chemical processes that made up dirt. There was no fundantal difference other than the fact that the chemicals that made up his body had co together to create the life that was him.
It was a truly magical thing.
However... atoms and molecules were quite fascinating things. They could have mirror images of themselves, that looked the sa and fundantally acted the sa, but in practice were entirely different from one another.
One of the biology books he had read warned that ssing around with mirrored serums, bacteriums, and other things of the like could be very dangerous. That was because, for one reason or another, life tended to appear around the focus of just one of the mirrored images. aning, everything from his bowel movents to his immune system was crafted on one side of this mirrored world.
If a pathogen of the other mirrored world appeared in this one... no one’s immune system would be able to fight back against it.
It would be just like Theron now, standing before a mirrored window, trying to reach the other side and yet being completely unable to.
Theron vaguely recalled this concept from his reading, and he rembered thinking that if a Poison Mancer took advantage of such a thing, they could probably beco the strongest existence across all the universe.
But now, he felt like he was facing the very sa situation.
Had he made a mistake?
Because he had comprehended Absolute Chaos and Unrestrained Order instead of Absolute Calm and Unrestrained Fury, it felt like his mind was permanently reworked to view the world in a way different from what his Mandates expected of him.
In fact, his Mandates no longer worked, and that feeling of closeness he had had with Absolute Calm and Unrestrained Fury slipped away as though it was permanently locked away in another world.
Theron had experienced this on a lesser scale before. He rembered having trouble grasping Laws a while ago because he thought he had accidentally taken the wrong step.
A comprehension wasn’t just sothing you gained and could toss away at any ti you felt like. It was ingrained into your very being. It was you, and you were it.
You couldn’t just toss it away and start over.
The human mind was far too easy to trick and manipulate. Theron had read psychological books as well—things like Stockholm Syndro or Group Think... when soone made up their mind, it was incredibly difficult to change it without a slow, thodical approach.
In one case study Theron read, he was given an example about a very religious person who had given up a great deal in their life before experiencing sothing that made them question the existence of their God.
This person had given up on love, had cut themselves off from enjoying their life—maybe they had even done quite a number of cultish things in their life all for the sake of pleasing their God.
If you placed before this person an option at the end of their life to admit that their God never existed...
Would they take it?
After building up so much, sacrificing so much, giving up so much of their youth and life to this belief...
How could anyone so easily change their minds?
Theron found that this perfectly mapped onto his current situation.
He had built up his Mandates to conclude one way, but had suddenly switched at the final mont to sothing else.
The difference was that although this was sothing that had only happened recently, it was built upon extrely powerful Laws.
All of the books in his library mostly spoke about things from the lens of a mortal. When things were scaled up to concepts only cultivators like him could comprehend, they were even more impossible to undo.
Now, Theron wasn’t even sure if his Mandate would work properly anymore, now that he had taken a misstep.
’No... it’s not truly a misstep... but... it will be incredibly difficult to undo this... unless—!’
A solution ca to Theron’s mind.
The reason this wasn’t a true misstep was because these two Laws had been mapped onto his Dark Mana, not his Water Mana. In fact, right now, the thrumming of the Dark Mana around these veins had grown so wild around Theron that his body was still undergoing changes.
A new Resonance was being mapped right onto his body as he underwent a baptism. He should have been extraordinarily happy with his success, but he was still thinking about his own failure too much.
He didn’t want to lose everything his parents had left behind for him, but a mistake made it look like he would.
Until he grasped an opportunity.
While his body was in this state of hyper-Resonance with Dark Mana, and he was gaining maybe the most powerful Resonance he had ever felt until now, there was a chance.
What if he expanded his Mandates from two to four? If he worked backward, reconstructing a new pair of Mandates from Absolute Chaos and Unrestrained Order, he could build up sothing truly powerful.
This sounded counterintuitive, but the more Theron thought about it, the more logical he felt it was.
If he could take advantage of his elevated senses for Dark Mana in this acute setting, he could construct the perfect mirror image of his Chilling Mandate and Heated Mandate. If he could rebuild the foundation of his Bronze and Silver Laws for Dark Mana, then he might be able to forcefully reconstruct the Gold Laws he was missing.
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