novelraw Chapter 517
Chapter 517
"So you want the full thing?" Victor Shaw said lightly. "Then I’ll give you everything."
He stepped up to Rowan Mercer. A rotating geometric sigil formed between his palms. He lifted one finger and pressed it to Rowan’s forehead.
Rowan didn’t dodge.
Even if Victor tried to kill him right now, it wouldn’t work.
The sigil collapsed into a pinpoint of light and surged straight into Rowan’s mind.
At the same instant, a flood of alien knowledge detonated inside his consciousness.
A vast circular pattern unfolded beneath Rowan’s feet. His awareness was yanked into a deeper mental layer as an overwhelming torrent of information poured in from the world itself.
"So that’s how it works," Rowan whispered.
In that moment, he finally understood why Evan Ward had refused to trade this art... and why Victor Shaw had handed it over without conditions.
The pressure intensified.
Rowan’s mind was forcibly linked to the structure of the world. Laws, patterns, probabilities, hidden connections. Endless data hammered into him from every direction.
Most people would have collapsed within seconds.
Rowan smiled.
"This is intense," he murmured. "But it’s not even close to breaking me."
For ordinary mystics, this technique shattered the mind because it forced them to confront the true scale of reality. Desire, ambition, fear, and ego twisted that knowledge into madness.
Only someone like Evan, with his unusually detached temperament, could survive it.
But Rowan’s mind wasn’t just disciplined.
It was absurdly powerful.
Like a mountain standing against a tidal wave.
Then a different thought surfaced.
A dangerous one.
He wasn’t satisfied with resisting the flow.
He wanted to absorb it.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to interface directly with the informational backbone of a world.
And he needed exactly that.
He was walking two paths at once: strengthening himself, and building a world of his own.
Creating a world required understanding reality’s foundational rules. That process should have taken centuries.
But if he could ingest even a fraction of this world’s structure right now...
He could skip most of that grind.
"One mind isn’t enough," Rowan said quietly.
He opened a deeper conduit.
His true body, and his other incarnations across different worlds, all linked to this one.
Their mental force poured into him at once.
His cognitive capacity multiplied eightfold.
The torrent stopped feeling like a flood.
It became a river.
Rowan stopped resisting entirely.
He opened himself to the stream.
Information poured in.
The skeletal framework of reality.
Causality chains.
Spatial constants.
Energetic equilibria.
As he absorbed them, he mirrored those principles inside his private dimension.
His empty space stopped being just space.
Structure appeared.
Rules appeared.
Stability appeared.
A tiny, fragile world took its first breath.
"This alone saved me centuries," Rowan murmured in awe. "I didn’t expect the biggest prize here to be this."
But even with his multiplied mental strength, he couldn’t hold the channel forever.
Reluctantly, he closed the conduit.
The flood ceased.
The inner world stabilized.
It was only a prototype.
But it was real.
Outside.
Victor Shaw stared at Rowan’s motionless body in horror.
Rowan was sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, face calm.
No screaming.
No madness.
No loss of control.
Victor’s blood ran cold.
"...No. This isn’t right."
After a long hesitation, his eyes hardened.
"I’m sorry, kid," he muttered. "But I can’t let you live."
He raised his hand.
If Rowan lived and exposed him, exposed Evan Ward, exposed the existence of this art...
Everything would collapse.
Victor struck.
His palm never landed.
The world vanished.
Victor felt himself ripped out of reality and dropped into something else.
"What—?!"
He looked around in disbelief.
The environment was wrong.
The space was wrong.
The rules were wrong.
He tried to summon his art.
Nothing answered.
"Freeze."
A calm voice echoed across the void.
Victor’s body locked in place.
No matter how he struggled, he couldn’t move.
Rowan’s form condensed out of thin air in front of him.
"Victor Shaw," Rowan said softly, rubbing his chin. "You tried to murder me while I was busy evolving."
He smiled faintly.
"That’s... not great manners."
Victor’s face went pale.
"This... this is impossible," he whispered.
He finally understood.
This place wasn’t a trick.
It was a world.
Not a full one.
But close enough.
"I haven’t finished building it yet," Rowan continued. "But even this rough draft is more than enough to cage you."
He glanced around.
"Any technique that relies on reality’s rules is weaker here."
He stepped closer.
"In here," Rowan said, "I decide how the world works."