Chapter 357: A Stable Breakthrough

Once more, Wang Yu was hurled through the air by the Machine God's iron fist. His bloodforged armor spiderwebbed with cracks, but he rolled back to his feet. Blood and fighting spirit surged up within him to mend the damage inflicted by that crushing strike.

He dropped low, chest snapping downward as both his palms slapped the floor. His body pressed flat against the ground just as the Machine God's sweeping leg scythed through the space above him, rending the air with a shrill hiss.

The titan's follow-up blow smashed into the arena floor, gouging out a crater in the reinforced stone. Using the traction of his Chariot, Wang Yu twisted aside. His body rolled clear of the attack.

"Clear!"

He coiled. With a burst of momentum, he flipped upright—only to meet the Machine God's next relentless attack.

"I can deflect this one..."

Countless clashes had honed his instincts to a razor's edge. The instant the Chariot sensed the telltale motion of a strike, his body reacted. Arms crossed before him, he caught the steel fist in a desperate guard.

"Clang! Crack!"

The impact was as sharp and forceful as he expected. His bloodforged armor splintered under the blow. But Wang Yu's intent had never been to endure it head-on. He guided the force away, deflecting it with technique rather than brute strength. Against all odds, he stopped the punch.

The shockwave rattled his frame and slowed him down for a heartbeat. The Machine God slammed forward, tearing apart his guard to drive a follow-up strike into his chest.

"Move!"

Wang Yu roared inwardly to himself, flooding his body with fighting spirit. This was his greatest flaw at present: his weak muscles and tendons were too fragile to keep pace with his bone and blood, and too slow to regain control once he was staggered.

Then, as if some unseen cord had snapped, he felt a force keeping his body bound suddenly dissipate. Muscles that had seized under forceful impact came alive again, flush with power from a torrent of fighting spirit. His body, once made up of individual, disparate components, now seemed to be a cohesive whole.

He managed to guard his chest with both arms, just in time. Even so, the Machine God's punch still struck home, wrenching joints out of place and crushing flesh. He was blasted across the arena and crashed once more into the wall.

Yet the Machine God did not pursue him. As agreed, Astartes' role was to beat Wang Yu until his body collapsed entirely, every muscle shredded beyond resistance.

The aftermath was always gruesome—there were bloodied scraps all over the floor, and Wang Yu looked indistinguishable from a mangled corpse. But Astartes knew better. The man was far from dead. Still, he disliked the sight of it all.

"You've succeeded."

Astartes' voice rumbled through the machine's frame as Wang Yu dragged himself upright.

"Yes," Wang Yu agreed, a faint smile on his face. "Just a small step forward, but progress is progress."

He flexed his newly reshaped muscles, savoring the faint but definite increase in strength, before staggering toward a supply chest at the arena's edge. He tore open a bundle of vials and downed them one after another.

That fleeting instant of release, of overcoming an invisible constraint, was the fruit of his labor. His muscles had developed further. A strike once beyond reach had been deflected, however awkwardly.

"Then let's call it here," Astartes said, inclining his head. "To consolidate your gains, as you put it. An apt word."

There was no point in attacking Wang Yu further. The purpose of such brutality was to reforge flesh in the heat of battle. Since Wang Yu had already broken through, continuing now would serve no purpose.

And besides, Astartes had no desire to discover some strange... taste for these one-sided massacres.

"We've done enough this time," Wang Yu muttered between gulps of potion. "Thanks for your help. You've gotten much better at maneuvering this body, too."

Wang Yu's potions were his main supplement for nutrients. Essentially concentrated liquid food, they were vital for healing his body and replenishing his bloodpool.

He waved his thanks at Astartes, shrugged into his shirt, and left the training ground. He was curious as to how Avia and Sieg's research was progressing. They had even sent him a message.

"It's incredible how quickly he can advance as a result of his inhuman training..."

Astartes, still inhabiting the colossal Machine God, watched Wang Yu's retreating figure with a quiet stir of emotion. As Wang Yu had said, it was gradually attuning to this vessel. At this point, it was almost like an extension of its own limbs.

Yet what struck Astartes most was not its own attunement, but rather Wang Yu's astonishing growth. He was reaching the point of being able to trade blows with the Machine God despite the latter's overwhelming strength. Being able to learn and advance at this pace—just who was Wang Yu, really?

"Still," Astartes mused with a faint shake of the Machine God's head, "for one who subjects himself to such inhuman torment, his progress feels almost... slow."

Astartes withdrew from the steel colossus and returned his will to the greater whole of Skyborne City. Given Wang Yu's brutal training, perhaps stagnation would be the true anomaly.

Meanwhile, as he made his way toward Avia and Sieg, Wang Yu clenched his left hand around his right and studied the subtle shift beneath his skin and sinew. There was a faint, elusive difference in his physique that he could not yet unravel.

The most obvious gain was in terms of strength: his muscles, broken down and reforged countless times, had risen to match the fortitude of his blood and bone. But there was something else—something tied to the Chariot.

The Chariot naturally grew alongside his physique. That was normal. This time, however, there seemed to be an additional evolution, one that he couldn't put his finger on just yet. Still, there was no need to rush. It would appear naturally during training.

Instead of returning home, Wang Yu made his way to the newly rebuilt headquarters of the Council of the Arcane. Its facilities had been fully modernized, though its members remained the same. As Icarus had said, swelling their ranks with strangers would only sow needless friction.

Despite holding a seat in the Central Assembly, the Council of the Arcane had gained no real governance over Skyborne City. Wang Yu suspected the disciples' earlier liberties were permitted only because of their unusual identities.

Perhaps Astartes himself had since curbed the scope of that authority. Still, the position bore immense benefits—for example, direct access to alchemical materials from Skyborne City at a mere fifth of market cost.

The results were dramatic. No longer constrained by resource needs, the Council's researchers worked with wild abandon, flooding their laboratories with reagents and metals. At such negligible prices, even selling the crude byproducts of their experiments would more than make back the cost of their research.

And given these extravagant conditions, discoveries sprouted like mushrooms after a bout of rain. Foremost among them was their recent triumph in hypermagic research. Working together, Avia and Sieg had at last brought into reality what Wang Yu and Avia had long since envisioned: a magitech microchip.

Through the principles of hypermagic, Avia had succeeded in compressing impossibly intricate magical circuits into a miniature mana core. The circuits were arranged in three dimensions on a substrate no larger than a nail.

Traditional spell models, of course, also focused on miniaturization. But nothing could compare to the integration allowed by a microchip, which was feasible only because hypermagic nullified all interference between concurrent flows of power.

And building on that foundation, Avia's imagination conjured marvels that had once been unthinkable.

As Wang Yu entered her research laboratory, he found Avia absorbed in her craft refining a sliver of enchanted alloy. A small mountain of unfinished materials lay by her side.

Wang Yu headed over to her side, handling the materials that she had set aside for him with the Chariot. Avia guided him through the more delicate tasks that needed her supervision. Just as he crushed and tempered the most finicky of the reagents, Avia applied the finishing touches to the new component she had been working on.

"Look," she said with a smile, holding up a wafer-thin shard no larger than a fingernail. "This is one of the foundational circuits for a second-tier spell—the last piece we needed. Once it's set like this... the page is whole. For now, we can consider this a success."

The fingernail-sized microchip didn't look particularly impressive at first glance, but Wang Yu's Chariot allowed him to sense the dense magical circuitry embedded all over it. And though a second-tier spell's circuitry wasn't all that complex, even this was only possible thanks to the theory of hypermagic.

He handed her the tome that lay open on the desk, which he had noticed the moment he entered. His chest stirred with quiet anticipation. Superficially, the tome was identical to his long-lost Spellweaver's Tome, which had been shattered during his desperate attempt to resist capture back in Aleisterre.

Avia turned to the second page of this newborn book, whose structure was by now very different from its predecessor, and pressed the chip into its inset.

With a pulse of mana, the page came alive. Circuits flared in tandem, intricate lines gleaming across parchment in a beauty too profound for words.

"Thanks to hypermagic," Avia said, her eyes bright, "the magitech microchip we envisioned has finally been realized. And with it, I've created a new Spellweaver's Tome.

"The old prototype's name wasn't all that appropriate, really—it could only cast spells. This one, on the other hand, can truly weave magic."

The page before them, laced with various second-tier spell circuits, glowed as Avia traced the embedded chips with tendrils of mental energy. Mana flowed from the core, coursing through the paths she designated.

A fireball blossomed in her palm, blazing brilliantly.

"With these circuits, you can combine and invoke any existing second-tier spell. You can even attempt configurations that no one has ever conceived. Modular spellcraft is finally feasible."

Avia's gaze shone with fevered excitement. Dismissing the fireball, she pressed on the chip again and again, eighteen times in succession, a pattern she was certain no one had ever tried before.

The air trembled, then exploded.