Chapter 1227 – A Fundamental Evolutionary Difference

Jake let out a loud yawn as he finally awoke. Still feeling a little groggy, he sat up in the bed and stretched, the movement not really doing anything as he wasn’t actually sore or anything like that. He just liked how it felt.

Through his sphere, he saw that the house was empty, which disappointed him a little. He’d kind of hoped to wake up to a sleeping Artemis lying beside him, but in her defense, she definitely had better things to do with her avatars than pretend to sleep beside him for however long his recovery would take.

On the topic of recovery, Jake felt he was back in top form. He tried moving his energies and found no issues whatsoever. While the damage his soul had suffered wasn’t even close to how he’d been after breaking Palate, this recovery still felt faster than it had any right to be.

Seeing as he was alone, Jake also couldn’t resist the temptation to actually try out his new Meditate skill real quick. Closing his eyes, Jake instantly appeared in his Soulspace, whereupon he immediately felt the difference.

Raising his hand, Jake felt his control over his Soulspace had grown to an even higher level, allowing him to more easily express his Path and inner thoughts. He also noticed something else as he felt around his Soulspace.

Usually, it was dominated primarily by the sky of arcane energy and the ground of lush plants everywhere he’d created after his training with the First Sage. Visually, it still looked the same, but when he felt for it, he detected the faint presence of more than his arcane affinity filling the area.

There were faint whispers of the wind, and the space seemed more stable. He vaguely got a better feeling for the passing of time, and when he inspected the ground, he found faint traces of the earth affinity there. It was all incredibly minor, and it wasn’t hard to figure out the source as he looked toward the portal close to the book left by the First Sage.

Jake’s exposure to all those concepts during his interaction with the Gate of Enlightenment had given him an incredibly rudimentary understanding of many different concepts, and seeing as concepts related to the elements were some of the most common, it wasn’t surprising that many of the insights he’d gained were related to them.

Now, these concepts had begun to express themselves within his Soulspace in subtle ways. Even combined, they were nothing compared to his arcane affinity, but it was a clear sign of growth and also further made Jake lean into a theory he’d held for a long time.

The Soulspace is definitely related to the Divine Realm of the gods.

He just couldn’t see them not having anything to do with one another, and the more he learned about his Soulspace, the more assured he became. Not that such a realization had much effect now, as Jake still had a long way to go before he should even begin to consider the divine. He’d only just touched upon the sacred, after all.

After his brief inspection of his Soulspace, Jake approached the portal leading to the Gate of Enlightenment. He only hesitated for a moment before stepping through, and upon doing so, he felt his entire mental state switch. Despite knowing that everything in the Soulspace was just representations of Records and that the portal wasn’t actually a portal. Instead, it was just a way to trigger Jake into entering a deeper state of meditation, using his Truesoul as a conduit to make contact with the Gate of Enlightenment. Jake still felt like he was teleported when he walked through, but that was probably also all in his own mind.

At least he found himself standing in front of the massive Gate of Enlightenment in the very next moment. However, rather than find himself standing in the middle of nothingness or a golden road of pages, he instead stood in a gazebo nearly identical to the one in his Soulspace. The only difference was that the table where the tome left by the First Sage usually sat had been removed, making the gazebo entirely barren.

Another minor difference Jake quickly realized was that the gazebo wasn’t just floating there in nothingness. Instead, it was on a small island that seemed to be made out of Jake’s stable arcane mana, and as he looked toward the Gate of Enlightenment, he also felt that the concepts leaking from there were far less noticeable than they were last time.

This honestly made Jake a little worried, but upon walking down the steps of the gazebo and closer to the Gate of Enlightenment, he quickly felt the pressure mounting. It seemed that when he was close to the portal, the concepts were more muted and suppressed, and if he walked only a few dozen steps away from it, he would be fully exposed once more.

Jake also took note that while he was in this state of meditation, he indeed lost connection with his outside body entirely, making him unable to passively feel his aura despite being able to normally while meditating or chilling in his Soulspace… except the moment he thought about being unable to feel his sphere, he also unconsciously tried to feel it, suddenly allowing him to be fully aware of the outside world once more.

Something that proved to be a bad idea, as the mental load of standing in front of the Gate of Enlightenment while perceiving the outside world put a lot of mental pressure on him all at once. He also partly felt himself lose his connection to the Gate of Enlightenment, and in the very next second, he was back standing in front of the portal within his Soulspace.

“So, I can’t do that,” Jake muttered to himself. It seemed that splitting his attention like that wouldn’t work. The stimuli and information from his Sphere of Perception clashed with the metaphysical and nomological nature of understanding concepts, causing Jake to lose the state of mind needed to experience the Gate of Enlightenment.

He wasn’t disappointed, though. In fact, Jake was relieved more than anything. When he first accessed the Gate of Enlightenment, he’d been entirely cut off from the real world, which was the first time Jake remembered that happening. He had been as vulnerable as he could be, and if Jake was being honest, the thought of not being able to detect nearby dangers while meditating made him feel very uncomfortable.

However, it seemed that Jake’s Bloodline-empowered instincts were still active even when Jake was in a state of meditation that cut him off from them. That should also mean that his danger sense was fully active, making meditation a far less precarious activity.

Not that Jake planned on going for long meditation sessions to comprehend concepts while in hostile territory. He also understood why most gods seemed to meditate only on concepts within their Divine Realms. Alright, it was possible they actually needed to be in their Divine Realms, assuming Jake’s theory that Divine Realms were just Soulspaces with a divine flavor was correct, but Jake reckoned that even if they could meditate outside, they would prefer to do it in the safety of their realms.

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Pretty satisfied with this discovery, Jake considered going through the portal again to revisit the Gate of Enlightenment, but ultimately stopped himself. While it was certainly tempting to sit down and have a nice little meditation session and learn a bit more about why the wind goes whoosh, Jake had a few things he wanted to do first.

Exiting his state of meditation, Jake decided it was high time to have a conversation with the Malefic Viper about his most recent vision. He had a few questions and definitely also a few points of criticism he would love to bring up.

“Hey Villy, I know you’re watching, but I’m fully healed up now, and seeing as Artemis isn’t around, this seems like a good opportunity for us to have a little chat about my most recent use of Path of the Heretic-Chosen,” Jake reached out to the Primordial.

As expected, he got a response near-instantly as a figure appeared out of thin air, standing in the doorway to the bedroom. “Now, that does sound a bit ominous. Let me guess, I acted in a fashion you find questionable?”