Chapter 764: Wheel of Time

No one had ever seen the uncovered body of a black spirit. When a black spirit died, they would dissipate in a cloud of black smoke, leaving nothing but black cloth behind.

Fang Yi shot forward with a low grunt. Hurled forward by wind and storm, he launched his spear with incredible force.

Fang Yi's spear sent wind howling and lightning flashing through the skies. It moved so quickly it left dozens of afterimages in all directions. Fang Yi struck a black spirit with every strike, piercing their bodies through. The wind- and thunder-attuned energy on the spear destroyed the black spirits from the inside out.

The black spirits cried out in agony as they dissipated into mist, and a flurry of black cloth filled the air.

"[Heaven's Judgment]! [Tiger's Howl, Dragon's Bellow]!" Fang Yi's spear took on the aspect of a dragon of the winds and a storm tiger.

He struck the heart of the black spirits, generating a storm of wind and lightning so strong it reached all the way to the wall and sent flying the humans and draconians guarding it.

Wind and storm combined and crackled at the tip of Fang Yi's spear, and a dragon's howl echoed resoundingly in the air. The combination generated a frightening force that seemed to be able to penetrate space.

The black spirits were torn apart, barely able to muster any resistance. Suddenly, however, a number of black bandages shot out of the ground and tangled Fang Yi up.

Fang Yi sneered. He twisted his spear, crackling with lightning, and tore apart those bandages. Even more appeared and shot toward him like serpents.

"[Shadow and Light]!" At that very moment, Fang Yi morphed into countless clones, each of which moved independently through the battlefield. Black smoke bloomed where his clones passed by as the black spirits' heads were pierced through.

.

Countless black spirits suddenly appeared behind Fang Yi, daggers in their hands.

As though he had predicted their appearance, Fang Yi swept his spear behind him. Crackling with lightning, the spearhead snapped the black spirits at the waists.

"There really are too many of them—it looks like I'll have to show off some of my new skills." Fang Yi wiped at the sweat on his forehead.

He recalled what Zhang Lie had told him back in the second realm. "Your [Heaven's Judgment] is about as strong as you can get it within this realm, but your attacks are still more rigid than I'd like. I recommend that you try to develop its speed instead—you can try to augment it with the power of time that you intuited, advancing it to another level entirely."

"[Heaven's Judgment: Wheel of Time]!" Fang Yi's spear took on the aspect of a dragon of the winds and a storm tiger. Temporal winds buffeted the spear, and a mysterious light began to circle the spear like lightning.

A wheel of light appeared behind him, seemingly taking on the form of a clock.

Fang Yi spun the spear in his hand as he charged up his attack with genetic energy. The wind and lightning tore apart the black cloth covering up the black spirits, but more and more black bandages spawned from thin air to replace them.

As Fang Yi attacked, the wheel of time behind him suddenly began to glow. As it did so, Fang Yi's movement and attack speed began to grow faster. As he attacked, another wheel manifested behind him, increasing his attack speed even further. As the skill activated once and again, his speed rose to an astonishing crescendo, as though his attacks were being played on fast forward at an ever-increasing clip.

As Zhang Lie had suggested, Fang Yi worked hard on developing his intuition with time before incorporating it into his attacks. His temporal ability manifested as a wheel of time.

Fang Yi subsequently engrossed himself in research in order to master this new ability. In the world federation's archives, he found a huge quantity of material related to time.

The aliens of the Milky Way were superior to the indigenous races of the dimensional world in two respects: their ability to absorb gene fragments, and their advanced technology and scientific development.

The aliens of the Milky Way had a technical and nuanced understanding of space and time, which provided a firm foundation for applying such abstruse concepts in the dimensional world.

Fang Yi researched these materials, considered them in the context of the monarch of stars' twelve stelae, and cultivated his technique into the wheel of time that he now demonstrated.

The principle that he took advantage of was the differing passage of time in different realms.

By storing up his wind- and lightning-attuned genetic energy and continuously circulating it, he was able to produce a speed boost that was active on himself and could stack indefinitely using this principle.

The fact that time progressed simultaneously and at varying rates in different realms allowed for the possibility that they could be added together—just like how the passage of time differed between Earth and the dimensional world, and even between the second and third realms.

In developing his technique, Fang Yi used superstring theory as a basis: there was a hierarchy between worlds, and time progressed faster the lower you went within this hierarchy.

Those hunters who existed and traveled between Earth and the dimensional world were subject to different rates at which time passed. Each dimension, each world, had its own rate at which time passed, and the total rate at which time passed was additive between each layer of time.

In other words, by establishing more and more discrete dimensions, each with its own rate of time, Fang Yi was able to combine them all together into an augmentation effect applied on himself.

More abstractly, this was the same principle at work when hunters ascended between realms—they were fundamentally changed by their progress into another dimension. That was why third-realm hunters were naturally more advanced than second-realm ones, though that disparity didn't necessarily translate into actual strength.

Sufficient quantities of genetic energy could overcome quality—that was how Zhang Lie, as a second-realm hunter, had managed to defeat the third-realm warlord Musi Yu.

Fang Yi repeatedly went between Earth and the second realm and sensed the minute changes in time, from which he finally identified the crucial features of his new technique.

Thanks to the ability to teleport between dimensions so readily, Fang Yi was able to glean a deeper understanding of his wheel of time, which was actually rather poorly named.

Instead of stacking temporal energy on himself, Fang Yi was really compressing the boost afforded by his wind- and thunder-attuned genetic energy. He combined it with his understanding of time to layer these boosts on top of each other in a perpetual cycle; the temporal energy simply served as a conduit for his genetic energy to manifest such a multi-layered boosting effect.