The moment Alaric activated the scar and felt the familiar twisting sensation, he knew he had returned. He reappeared behind the glass container. Judging by the light, it was late morning — the ceremony hadn't taken much longer than an hour.
He exhaled slowly.
It had worked again. Perfectly. He was back from the Douluo Dalu world.
Instantly he returned to the orphanage, after all now equipped with martial souls and down from his adrenaline spike, he felt hungry.
Returning to the cafeteria he grabbed a plate of food. Of course, there just had to be a thing to ruin the day. Spinach Lasagna, and he hated spinach. After finishing his meal of picking apart his food for anything without spinach and a lesson from miss Evans about how a kid needs to eat his vegetables if it wants to grow up, he returned to his room.
Then called it.
There was no fanfare, no rumble of power. It simply appeared in his hand like a half-broken relic of war. The same jagged cracks glowed faintly, the fractured weapon humming with latent chaos. He looked at it in silence.
"Shattered Hammer, huh?" he muttered, almost amused.
With a flick of his will, it vanished.
And then, he turned his gaze to his left hand.
No one in the Douluo Dalu world had seen it. No one in this one had either. Maybe they would never, but that was thinking material for later.
He opened his left palm slowly, and the faint outline began to glow. Lines traced themselves into existence, angular and shifting, until the shape of a floating cube formed—hovering just above his skin, ever changing to other forms, never staying much the same.
The Axiom Vault.
As he glazed upon it, he subtly muttered:
"I am the will to comprehend — the voice of order in a world carved by chaos."
If the hammer was raw chaos, a bastion of nothing being repeaten, of absolute unpredictability, then the vault was refined order. A bastion of finesse, of perfection, of Order that shall withstand till the end of time and space.
Where the hammer roared, the vault whispered. And yet, in their own way, both were terrifying.
He didn't fully understand the Vault's capabilities. Not yet. But he had felt its presence growing more active each time he stepped between worlds. It recorded. It learned. It responded. Just like an ai, now he would just need to learn how to correctly read it.
He would unlock its secrets. In time.
But first, he needed to begin with the obvious.
First, he felt through his body, after all he needed to check what level he was.
He closed his eyes and focused inward, sensing the whirl of spirit power in his body.
It pulsed, steady and solid.
Rank 7.
Not bad, but not good either. That was the thing that made Alaric wonder what was going on. After all he was a twin martial soul cultivator, with 2 incredibly high-end martial souls.
The only somewhat logical conclusion to which he could come himself was that his martial souls probably slightly cannibalized on his inner spirit power. After all, that would at the very least make sense.
Then he thought of himself.
His body was still that of a child, but now he had two martial souls. And with them came responsibility—expectation—from himself, if from no one else.
He reached under his bed and pulled out a still packaged notebook and a cheap pen. Gifts from Miss Leila, the soft-spoken vice director of the orphanage. Inside he wrote the cultivation notes down that he had received as well as possible conjunctions of power he may attain in the future that he had seen and read in Douluo Dalu, and modified based on Earth's physics, his own observations, and sheer intuition.
"Eight Extraordinary meridians," he whispered, sketching quickly while writing annotations next to the sketches.
"Two to three soul cores – this is set on ice till I have deeper insights into spiritpower,
Spirit Bones – hunt, much later, after all I can't ruin myself with below average dregs,
Ultimate Attributes – I need to do a deep dive on beast physiology later on,
Cultivation of the Spirit – I will probably find something in Hogwarts, and it is probably connected to Occlumency and Legilimency,
The hidden techniques of the Clear Sky Sects main family:
the Chaotic Cloak Hammer Technique,
the Clear Sky Nine Absolutes,
the Spirit Ring Explosion Technique – each one strong and probably somewhat fits his Hammer of Ruin, even if he needs to slightly modify it,
The Axiom Vault responds to ambient logic structures, be it in a systematic school of thought or the laws of nature? Needs to be thought more of.
Potentially Geometrical spell matrices? After all it constantly changes shapes."
He didn't know how long he worked. Hours passed. He only stopped when his stomach grumbled and the last light of the day cast darkness over the room.
Alaric stood and stretched.
Then, sitting cross-legged on the floor, he began.
Breath in. Draw the flow inward. Let it move.
He reached. Not physically, but spiritually. He pulled at the residue of the chaotic energy he had felt in Douluo Dalu. Although the energy here was different it still fused into his body and mixed with the one already contained inside as if it were the same. More things to explore later on.
Then, something shifted.
The Vault moved - this time not random. No - calculated, like a computer where you typed a certain sequence into it.
Just slightly—barely perceptible. One of its surfaces rotated, clicking softly into place. A new symbol glowed on one of its faces, combining with the rest that sometimes flashed up. Like the pulse of a heart. While he felt like he suddenly understood something. He didn't know what, but he knew that there was now something new in his mind to be researched.
Alaric opened his eyes and smiled.
"Hmm, it's a start." He whispered with a smirk before his stomach growled like the stomach of a dragon that hadn't eaten for a hundred years.
"Welp, let's get some food." He thought until he realized that it was already past 7pm. In other words – no more food for the night.
"How can such a monumental day in my life get ruined by banal things like not getting food." He sighed.
"Sleep it is." And sleep he did after realizing how terribly tired he was after such a full day, full of unique experiences.