As Marivelle lunged toward him once again, Adrian saw the familiar afterimages forming around her. At first, everything appeared normal. Even with his full concentration and his Source Eyes active, nothing seemed unusual. These were still afterimages created by extreme speed, and he could clearly identify which one was real.
The spear thrust forward, cutting through the air. Marivelle's divine essence flared around the weapon's tip, condensing into a point that could pierce even a rule stage being easily.
It was only when Marivelle closed the distance to the point where an attack could land that Adrian finally saw it.
She used her authority and began modifying the rules of reality itself.
A tremor rippled through the fabric of space around her body, invisible to normal perception but blazing like script before Adrian's Source vision. Rules rewrote themselves in real-time, symbols flickering and rearranging as her authority imposed its will.
What she altered was not time, nor was it a broad manipulation of space. Instead, she targeted a very specific sub-rule within the Rule of Space itself: the Rule of Spatial Vacancy.
Under normal circumstances, when an object moves from one coordinate to another, reality instantly updates the previous location, marking it as empty. The space vacated by the object is immediately recognized as unoccupied. Marivelle, however, interfered with this process. She modified the decay rate of spatial occupancy.
By doing so, she forced reality to believe that her mass, momentum, and divine essence still occupied her previous coordinate even as she physically moved to a new one. For a brief fraction of a second, reality was compelled to accept two identical truths simultaneously: she is here, and she is still there.
This created a forced redundancy error within the laws of physics.
The afterimages solidified. Where empty space should have existed, mass persisted. Momentum that should have dissipated remained active. Divine essence that should have moved forward lingered behind, trapped in coordinates reality refused to mark as vacant.
The afterimages were not duplicates or illusions. They were spatial echoes, regions of space that refused to release her existence. Because reality still considered those coordinates to be filled with high-density matter, the echoes struck with real mass, real momentum, and real force.
"She isn't duplicating herself," Adrian realized as his eyes traced the trembling distortions in space, "She's creating a lag in reality itself."
Marivelle's spear thrust multiplied. Three identical strikes converged on Adrian from different angles, each one backed by her full strength.
This time, Adrian did not attempt to block the attacks. Instead, he dodged them all cleanly and retreated backward, creating distance between them.
The spear tips passed through empty air where he had stood moments before. The spatial echoes collapsed immediately after, reality finally updating to mark those coordinates as vacant.
Adrian studied her from across the space separating them. His wounds had already stopped bleeding, he had simply used the breath of life to take care of that. What mattered now was what he had witnessed.
He had understood what she was doing and how she was achieving it. Now, it was time to replicate it.
He surged forward to counterattack, but unlike Marivelle, he did not rely on raw speed to generate afterimages. Instead, he used his arcane Space concept to teleport rapidly between multiple positions around her. His form blinked in and out of existence, appearing first to her left, then her right, then behind her, then above.
He repeated this again and again in rapid succession, creating several afterimages encircling Marivelle from all directions.
For a brief moment, she found herself standing at the centre of a ring of Adrians.
Marivelle's eyes widened. Her spear swept around her in a defensive arc, divine essence flaring outward to cover all angles. She knew what was coming.
Now came the crucial step.
Adrian prepared to modify the rules of reality in the same way she had. His authority gathered, ready to impose his will upon the Rule of Spatial Vacancy. The symbols floated before his Source Eyes, waiting for his command.
However, as he began to act, something he had read in the forums surfaced in his mind. It was often stated that directly commanding reality was considered a simple but inefficient method. Manual interpretation and precise modification of rules were always described as superior.
At the time, Adrian had never fully understood why. Even with Commercial UNI-Authority access, he had found no satisfactory explanation. The forums spoke in vague terms about efficiency and control, but never provided concrete examples. He also had never truly practiced authority techniques, as he lacked a structured method to do so.
Now, he wondered what the actual difference was.
Adrian decided to test it.
Rather than carefully modifying the Rule of Spatial Vacancy as Marivelle had done, Adrian made a different choice. He issued a direct command to reality itself, ordering that all of his afterimages become real for a single instant when the attack landed.
It was a crude and simple command, identical in nature to how he had used Erase in the past.
His will pressed outward. The symbols flickered before his Source Eyes, and his authority surged through the fabric of space around him.
Become real.
Reality responded immediately.
All of Adrian's afterimages slashed at Marivelle simultaneously, their blades tearing into her body from multiple directions. The afterimages had become real.
Blood sprayed across the air. Marivelle's body jerked violently as six separate strikes landed at once: shoulder, ribs, thigh, back, arm, side. Her divine domain flared desperately, trying to shield her, but the attacks came from too many angles.
This worked, however, Adrian immediately sensed something was different.
Reality was not using the Rule of Spatial Vacancy to accomplish this.
Instead, because his command lacked specificity, reality brute-forced a solution. It used an entirely different Rule: the Rule of Spontaneous Manifestation.
Rather than preserving Adrian's existing mass across multiple coordinates like Marivelle had done, reality forcibly siphoned enormous amounts of mana from Adrian and condensed it instantaneously into each afterimage. It reconstructed temporary bodies from nothing, assigning them mass, density, blade sharpness, and momentum individually in order to satisfy his command.
It was not a subtle lag in space. It was a violent reconstruction.
To accomplish this, reality had to calculate the density of each afterimage, the sharpness of each blade, and the momentum of every strike, then pay the full energy cost to materialize them from nothing.
Adrian felt the drain immediately. His mana and Willforce plummeted far faster than he had anticipated. What should have cost perhaps five hundred Mana Units consumed nearly two thousand.
Only then did he truly understand why manual rule modification was considered efficient.
Marivelle had adjusted a single sub-rule and paid only the cost of that modification. Her afterimages became real due to the aftereffects of that modification.
She hadn't asked reality to build anything. She'd simply delayed its natural cleanup process, forcing it to acknowledge her presence in multiple places at once. The cost was minimal because reality was already doing most of the work, it just needed a small nudge to behave differently.
But Adrian had delegated the problem entirely to reality itself.
Reality, possessing its own internal logic, did all the heavy construction work in a crude and different way and charged Adrian the full energy cost for that labor.
One approach was a surgeon's precise incision. The other was a hammer strike. Both achieved results, but one was catastrophically more exhausting.
Adrian's afterimages vanished as quickly as they had appeared, dissolving into mist. The temporary bodies collapsed, their mass returning to raw mana that scattered into the chaotic atmosphere.
Marivelle staggered backward, a pained grunt escaping her lips as she created distance between them in the air.
Her hand pressed against her ribs, blood seeping through her fingers. Her robes were soaked with blood, deep slashes crisscrossing her body. One shoulder hung lower than the other.
She had created only three afterimages earlier, yet Adrian had produced far more. Six. Maybe seven. She'd lost count in the chaos.
She had expected nothing less.
Someone like Adrian would naturally possess more mana and Willforce than her, and his authority techniques would inevitably differ from hers. She could not perceive the rules of reality he had used, since Adrian's authority naturally blocked her perception, and she lacked Source Eyes to see through it.
So from her perspective, Adrian was simply using a similar technique, or perhaps an even more refined version of her own, expending greater energy to create more afterimages.
Lara, Torvain, and the others watching from a distance felt the same way. To them, everything appeared natural. None of them realized that Adrian had just executed a proper authority technique used in the universe for the first time in his life, aside from Erase.
To their eyes, he simply looked like an experienced and terrifyingly capable cultivator.
Only Adrian knew the truth.