The shockwave from the second Dao Core’s detonation rippled across the air, the trees still left standing, creaking and swaying before it. Sam landed a moment later, his feet slamming against the rocky ground. It was charred and melted in places by the battle just moments before, but the world was quieter now, devoid of the intrusion of the two D Rank cultivators. Sam had gotten used to the rhythmic thumping of the golems’ feet on the ground, his D Rank body filtering out the sounds after a while. It simply sounded like distant thunder, of little concern.

  Looking out at the legion of titans stampeding across the seemingly endless expanse of the dungeon, Sam wondered just how many more incredible sights he would witness as he traveled through the Boundless Expanse. This was just a corner of a minor dungeon made entirely by the System. What would the domain of the gods, the A Rankers that sat at the top of the Multiverse, be like? What then of realms beyond even that, of the elusive S Rank that the System had hinted at during the Tower?

  Assuming that Ranking up followed the same Dao conventions, each Rank would require a Dao of a stage higher than the previous. Sam wasn’t sure of the exact names for the Daos between his own and the peak, but he did know that A Rank most likely corresponded with the twelve elemental Daos, and that S Rank matched the Supreme Daos of Zenith, Nadir and Nil. How much power would a being at that level possess? To wield the potency of an entire third of Existence itself? A Rankers were supposed to be able to destroy and create universes, so how powerful would an S Ranker be? Would their dominion spread across Multiverses? Across the entire Boundless Expanse? Sam shivered just thinking about it.

  He scanned the horizon as he pondered his future, searching for any hint of a world beyond the legion of Worldback Golems. The two cultivators he had just slain had hinted at the existence of multiple layers within the dungeon. To clear it, he would likely have to find Aphrodite and kill her. While the System liked to teach lessons with its challenges, modeling them after myths and legends, the end goal was to facilitate slaughter to better gorge itself on the essence of its users.

  Sam teleported into the distance, millions of miles in a single leap. The dungeon was so large that all he found were more of the gargantuan elementals. Out of reluctant curiosity, he finally scanned one of them.

  Worldback Golem

  Level 400

  Its level was surprisingly high, far beyond that of Torg and Alana. Still, it radiated the power of a D Ranker, though closer to the higher end. Sam didn’t know what the cut off point for the end of D Rank was, but all the evidence he had seen was pointing at it being level 500. That made sense given the way that his Trials worked. Ascending to D Rank had allowed him to go through a fifth trial on top of the four that he would normally be able to undergo, each of which was spaced out by fifty levels. The first would normally be at level 300, and the last at 450. Level 500 would be the Trial of Ascension itself, where he would take a step into the mythical realm of C Rank.

  A thought came to Sam. What if he tried to kill the Worldback Golems? The amount of essence received from kills increased exponentially with the level of one’s foes. Killing just one of these monsters would easily bring him up to the next level, and probably a good way into it at that. Killing more would only increase the gains.

  Sam teleported onto the nearest Worldback Golem’s shoulder, less than a speck next to its impossible bulk. This one was volcanic in nature, veins of molten rock criss-crossing its obsidian body. The ground beneath was hot to the touch, but not unpleasantly so. Rather than being the temperature of the magically enhanced flames that cultivators used, this was closer to the temperature of actual lava.

  The monster’s head loomed over Sam, the size of a small planet. It was craggy, but mostly featureless, with two glowing eyes of magma the size of seas positioned over a long slit of a mouth that looked more like a canyon than anything else.

  Sam considered his options as he took in the monster. Killing it in a single strike would be impossible, even for him. It would take dedicated and consistent work to even injure a monster of this size. Sam’s only saving grace was that the elemental nature of the Golem meant that he would simply have to find its core and break it, rather than reducing the entire monster to rubble. With the way that the heat was distributed across the Worldback Golem, the core was either located in its neck or the base of its head.

  Sam teleported to the monster’s cheek, alighting on a piece of stone that could have held an entire city with ease. Compared to the rest of the Golem, it was barely more than a blemish on its skin.

  “Right…” he said. “Here goes nothing.”

  Sam raised his hammer and lengthened it, opting to forgo width. For a monster of this size, it didn’t make much difference whether his hammer was the size of him or the size of a mountain. It would barely help in breaking through the Golem’s defences. Instead Sam turned it into a spear nearly a mile long, sending waves of Dao energy pulsing up and down its length. Without the karmic ties to use Descent of the Heavenly Judge, Sam instead used raw Dao energy, attempting to create a new skill that drew the power from his Sapling, but the concept from his Seed.

  Grey fire spread across the spear as the energy of his Dao Sapling of Karmic Retribution was forcibly aspected to that of his Dao Seed of Travel. The spear began to shake, phasing in and out of reality like a ghost.

  Sam thrust it into the Worldback Golem, only to find that his reserves of Dao energy attuned to Travel dropped by half in an instant. The high D Rank monster was so durable that even with its exaggerated size, the stone making it up was harder than diamond. Hard enough to make tunneling through it an exercise in futility.

  Sam withdrew Worldbreaker and instead drew upon his Dao Sapling. While it wouldn’t be as effective against an elemental, who was separate from the cycle of Karma, it would still be more effective. He had thousands of times more available Dao Energy to draw upon as compared to from a Dao Seed.

  The spear form of Worldbreaker glistened with red light as Sam focused upon the more violent and rage filled aspects of Retribution, pushing past the Karmic inconsistency with the golem he was trying to kill. Within his mind, Sam framed the struggle as a battle not just for the present, but for the future. Without the power from new levels, Sam wouldn’t be able to defend his people from the threats to come. It was a weak argument to make, but considering that the Worldback Golem had no Karmic authority at all, it worked well enough for this situation.

  This time when Sam stabbed the hammer into the Golem’s cheek, a fault line spread out from the impact point and a rumbling boom sounded out as a wave of energy hollowed out the monster’s insides for a hundred miles in every direction.

  Whereas Sam’s previous attack had been like a gnat trying and failing to bite an elephant, this one succeeded in drawing its attention. The craggy head of the volcanic monster shifted with the noise of a mountain being ground to dust, though Sam wasn’t sure what it was trying to accomplish by doing so, given that he was currently attached to that same head.

  Sam withdrew Worldbreaker, shrinking it down to its usual size, and found himself facing a small ocean of lava gushing out towards him. The heat of the molten rock radiated in every direction, searing his flesh. Dao energy suffused the lava, reflecting its status as a part of the Worldback Golem. As an elemental, its entire body was its Dao and elemental energy fused into a single cohesive form.

  Sam teleported out of the way, landing on the top of the monster’s head. While even its body could be used like a weapon, the Golem had few ways to match Sam’s speed. He could flit around it like a mosquito, stinging whenever he landed.

  Then the ground beneath him started to rumble, and the entire monster froze in place, rooting its feet in the ground far below. The surface of its head glowed a bright orange as a legion of magmatic monsters pushed their way free, facing off against Sam. They came in three different forms, each looking to have been created to counter an aspect of Sam’s power.

  The army was roughly divided into thirds, tens of thousands of D Rank lava elementals arrayed in a loose formation. The first third was made up of thickset, fifteen foot tall behemoths that were almost as wide as they were tall. Their fists were covered in spiked orbs of solidified obsidian.

  The second set of monsters were thin and wiry, looking like the thorn elementals from earlier in the dungeon. The only difference was the material that made them up, wires of flexible obsidian serving as a scaffold for lava to collect around. Their hands ended in long whips of fiery rock, trailing across the ground.

  The elementals making up the final set were about the size of Sam, holding obsidian staffs. The tips of the staffs were surrounded by a heat haze, a tiny crystal of white hot flame hovering in the center.

  Sam took this all in over a single moment before the monsters exploded into motion. The spellcasters pointed their staffs at the sky, globs of lava arcing towards Sam from their ends. The lava orbs were the size of buses, and so hot that they looked like they were made out of plasma.

  The earth underneath Sam’s feet quivered as the heavier elementals charged, while the light footsteps of the faster monsters had little to no effect. They sped ahead of the rest, closing in on Sam so quickly that they looked like streaks of red and orange lightning.

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  Sam knew that he couldn’t meet every incoming strike, even with his speed. Instead, he summoned a dome of conceptual energy around himself, setting up a karmic feedback that would strengthen it as the monsters hit it. The whip-like claws of the elementals scored lines of molten heat across the shimmering hemisphere, but they were quickly erased as Sam pumped more power into it.

  What he was quickly discovering was that his Dao Sapling was quite specific in the ways that it could be used. While he was able to create a feedback loop that strengthened his shield based on actions taken against it, Sam was only able to use the fragment of his Dao Sapling that directly related to Revenge, which had come from his Dao Seed. As a result, he was using a Seed tier concept with the raw power of a Sapling, enough to match these elementals, but not for long.

  Instead, Sam gathered the energy for an actual attack, weaving together parts of his Dao Seed of Travel and his Dao Sapling. Unlike with his earlier, failed attack against the Worldback Golem, Sam was sure that brute force was enough here.

  Worldbreaker swelled within Sam’s hands as he raised it above his head, popping out through his energy shield. The hammer blazed with the glory of Sam’s Daos, grey and crimson light mingling around it. Sam stopped the hammer’s expansion once it was about a mile long, focusing on the center of the enemy formation nearby. He brought it down, summoning a portal beneath it. The hammer passed through and emerged from the ether directly above the elementals, giving them no time to escape.

  As the red tinged metallic meteor smashed the lava creatures into the surface of their progenitor, the lava orbs from the spellcaster elementals reached him. Sam took apart his energy shield and reused the power, compressing it into a disc above his head. He thrust the energy construct towards the incoming rain of white hot rock, and pushed a segment out of the way. The lava bolts splattered down around Sam, but none actually reached him.

  Sam clenched his fists around his hammer and leaped into the air, aiming for the enemy backlines. The sheer strength imbued within his legs sent him hurtling into the sky, before a quick kick off of a plate of Dao energy redirected him towards his foes.

  Sam hit like a wrecking ball, cratering the ground as he landed. His hammer smashed through thousands of elementals in a single blow, turning them into glowing red pancakes.

  A searing bolt of pain tore at Sam’s as a thorn of superheated rock sliced into his back, coming from one of the wiry elementals that he had missed. All of its lava had been condensed into a single, desperate strike, leaving only a skeletal frame of obsidian standing where it had once been.

  Sam frowned, then his eyes widened as he watched hundreds of the elementals rising from the ground, all glowing like furnaces as they directed their power towards kamikaze strikes. To make matters worse, Sam felt the full attention of the Worldback Golem locking down onto him, and its higher stage Dao Sapling closing down space. There was no way out save through brute force.

  Blades of compressed lava shot through the air as the elementals came apart, leaving their statue-like skeletons behind. Sam found himself a few moments from death. Only quick thinking saved him. He dug down into the ground with a pulse of Dao energy and held Worldbreaker above himself, using it to block off the top of the hole.

  Sam felt his hammer shudder as the thousands of lava blades slammed into it above. While they were individually small, together they represented a truly immense amount of force. Sam almost found his hammer being torn out of his grasp, but he managed to hold on for long enough to weather the barrage.

  Sam leaped out of the hole a moment later, landing by its side. It looked as if he were standing in a garden of lonely sculptures, surrounded by heat hazes. Further afield, the other elementals were coming his way, the mages gathering their power for another wave of spells, and the brutish monsters thundering across the ground. Without the thinner and faster elementals to worry about, though, Sam was confident in his ability to head off the rest.

  “I Am My Vengeance!” Sam barked, using his enhancement skill to surround himself in Dao armor. With the power of his Sapling, it was far stronger than it ever had been during E Rank. He grinned, before speaking one last time. “Dao Juggernaut.”

  Sam’s body became the foundation for a hundred pillars of pure white light, representing the very nature of Existence itself. His stats increased further and further until his every step shook the ground beneath him. At his level of power, his strength was not just physical in nature. Normally, having so much raw power in such a small form would result in the complete destruction of pretty much anything Sam tried to interact with. The System allowed him to use any amount of his strength that he wanted, and in a way where he could achieve his goals. For example, lifting a mountain with one hand might have been possible with his brute strength, but in reality it would simply act like a tree balanced on a single nail and fold in over Sam. With Sam’s Authority, that was no longer the case. He could extend his full strength over six miles in every direction, and as such achieve great feats of power. Feats of power such as lifting a hammer the size of a skyscraper and bringing it down with so much force that he carved a canyon into the surface of the Worldback Golem’s head.

  The rift raced in both directions so fast that the tremor caused by it hit after it reached its maximum size. Beneath was an ocean of lava, lit from within by a glimmering orb of power the size of a moon. Sam had no doubt about what he was looking at. The Worldback Golem’s core.

  The rift almost immediately started to close, even as elementals fell into it like rain, returning to the magma from which they had been born. To have created them in the first place, the Worldback Golem had needed to create a conduit to its core, which meant reducing the amount of space between its core and the surface of its body. That gave Sam the opportunity to descend into the depths of the monster’s titanic form and directly strike at its core.

  Sam wasted no time in doing so, rocketing down towards the flaming sea below. He sped into the inferno, feeling the heat rising by the second. Insulated as he was by his Dao armor and Dao Juggernaut skill, Sam didn’t start to feel uncomfortable until he was well into the massive cavern that made up the Worldback Golem’s corespace. At that point he started using his Authority to filter out the heat, unimpeded by the Golem on account of its size. No matter how large a being was, their Authority was still linked to their Rank. The golem’s authority could only reach out for a few miles from the surface of its body, while its interior was too distant. It was the downside of such immense size, though most of the monsters who went down that route lacked the intelligence to understand that.

  At later ranks, it would no doubt even out, but at D Rank, it was a poor choice to make in Sam’s opinion. The gap above him finally closed up, leaving the only light to illuminate his surroundings as the lava below. A few of the elementals were already beginning to strike it, vanishing into the depths.

  Sam raised his hammer and started his meteoric descent, attempting to create a new skill on the fly. None of his Karmic skills were especially useful against the Worldback Golem, so instead he started experimenting with his Dao Seed of Travel. Momentum was a powerful thing, especially when one wielded a hammer the size of a mountain. If Sam could increase his rate of descent beyond the norm, he could do some serious damage.

  Other than his portals, Sam hadn’t really used his Dao Seed of Travel. His conception of Travel was of getting from one point to another, but there was so much more to it. What he needed here was the aspect of Travel that purely dealt with its middle part, between the beginning and the destination.

  Just thinking about it allowed Sam to focus his Dao, surrounding his body and hammer with a thin sheen of power. He quickly found that he didn't have enough energy to cover his hammer in its full size, so he shrunk it down until it was about a thousand feet long.

  Sam thickened the level of Dao seed energy surrounding himself and his hammer until he was left with just enough in the tank to teleport to safety if he needed to.

  Sam narrowed his eyes and focused on his target beneath. Reality stretched as Sam focused on the inverse of his Dao, trying to lengthen the distance between himself and the monster. The more time he had, the greater Sam could make his acceleration.

  While space had stretched, time had not, and Sam passed through it at a greater rate than he had expected. As the gap turned from hundreds of miles into thousands, Sam picked up speed until, just before impact, he was moving so fast that the air around him had turned into a soup of plasma.

  The core beneath Sam flashed with a sudden light and a beam exploded upwards, dozens of miles wide. Sam had no time to avoid it, so he instead phased through it, glad that he had saved the last fragment of Dao energy for making a portal.

  He slid through space until he was just outside the beam, though the heat was enough to tear through his defences in moments and turn his skin to ash. Having had this happen to him many times before, Sam ignored the pain and continued his descent, maintaining most of his momentum.

  Sam hit home a split second later, transferring all of his power into his hammer. It struck the Worldback Golem’s core with the power of a falling star, cracking it down the middle. A cry rose up from the air around Sam, a keening, wailing howl of rage and dismay. One final moment of consciousness after a life of meaninglessness.

  Sam had a moment to himself before the world tore apart, the detonation of the Golem’s core like a supernova as it blasted Sam backwards and out. Luckily, most of the power was now in the form of mundane heat, not causing too much damage to Sam.

  The essence from the Golem condensed around Sam and sank into his flesh. For the first time since reaching D Rank, Sam was about to level up. In E Rank, leveling up had sent power through his entire being. Now, at D Rank, it would empower his Dao as well.

  Sam’s Dao core began to shine within him, heat spreading across his body. Power spread out like ripples in a pond, moving through both the physical world and that of the Dao.

  Images flashed by of people and places foreign to Sam, but all of them had a common theme. They were either representative of the concept of Travel, or of Karmic Retribution. Sam could feel his mastery of his Dao increasing by a small amount with the level up, which was a welcome development. It seemed like his Dao was learning from the information that his body could provide it, using his subconscious insights to upgrade itself. While it wouldn’t be enough to max out his Daos from leveling alone, it was still a noticeable amount of insight. His Dao Seed went almost fifty percent closer to the next stage, while his Dao Sapling increased by about 2 percent.

  As Sam contemplated this, he realized that it was time for him to take on a new Dao, or maybe more. His threshold for holding Daos had increased upon reaching D Rank, and he felt like he could fit at least three more Saplings, and many more Seeds. While most cultivators were forced to limit new Dao acquisitions to paths that followed their dominant Dao, Sam didn’t have this problem. If he wanted to, he could walk the path of the villain in tandem with that of the hero, though doing so would require a very involved balancing act. Most importantly, Sam had no wish to become a villain.

  While he would end up amassing every Dao by the time he ascended to being the true Dao incarnation of Existence, he could bypass concepts by grasping those above them. For example, each of the elements had ‘evil’ aspects, but none of them were inherently evil in nature. At the very top of the Dao hierarchy, there was no good and evil. Just power and the will to use it.