People looked up at the sky and asked, what is a star?

People looked into the mountains and asked, what is inside?

People looked under the water and asked, what lies beneath?

Curiosity is humanity's greatest gift.

That is why some people prefer to keep it in a cage rather than let it run free.

Some knowledge is branded forbidden.

Do you know how many heads were cut just to prove that the law of gravity existed?

Even in a different world, it seemed to be the same.

Only four elements and a few outliers were known, but no one bothered to research and discover what truly formed the baseline of this so-called reality.

But he did.

What people knew as the four elements was nothing more than a fraction of one true fundamental called matter.

Matter is everything.

Someone once asked him, "If it is everything, then how can it be only a fraction?"

He laughed.

Because reality is not just about everything and anything.

It is everything plus what carries it, what governs it, what moves it, and what controls it.

Matter, time, space, and force.

The true four elements of foundation.

And right here, right now, in the lowest realm on the weakest continent of some outskirt world,

He bloomed a Dao seed of force, the greatest force of them all, the one force that controlled the entire universe at its whim.

Gravity.

"This should be enough," Wu Han said as he grabbed a knife from his storage ring and carved himself open. He placed the forged black hole into his dantian and healed the wound.

The moment it settled inside him, the erratic pulling finally stopped.

Luo Lan was freed from the gravity well at last, but her mind was confused and scrambled as she tried to understand what it was and what it could do.

"You're curious? Good." Wu Han smirked and extended his hand toward her.

"Gravitational Pull."

Her body suddenly became weightless for no reason and was flung toward his palm. She fell into his arms in surprise.

"Pretty cool, huh?" Wu Han said, setting her down and laughing as he closed his eyes to check his condition.

The horizon is stabilized, and my Qi has already been absorbed. Nice.

The Qi inside his body, instead of flowing freely as before, was sucked into the black hole and merged with it. Now, if someone examined him, he would appear no different from an ordinary person.

So, what was the benefit of this?

Simple, but it needed an explanation.

Qi could be stored in the dantian, in the body, or in special artifacts. But Qi, as energy, required storage with capacity.

The key word was capacity.

No matter how much of a genius one was, they could only hold as much Qi as their body allowed.

That was why becoming stronger meant refining Qi into denser forms so more could be stored in the same space, and refining the body to higher purity so one could control and endure that heavier Qi.

That was cultivation.

That was why a Dao seed was needed for control, a foundation was needed for output, and cultivation was needed for denser Qi. Lacking any one of the three would limit one's future.

And that was the advantage cultivators had over mages.

Mages relied on the mana around them and their tiny magic circuits to hold energy.

They had to be creative with what they could achieve by manipulating what was outside their bodies, not within.

But now, as he had said, things had changed.

And for the better. He combined magecraft with the method of creating a Dao seed, turning his magic circuit into one and skipping the long process of slowly growing it inside himself.

A magic circuit could not evolve once implanted.

The only way to improve it was to create a new one.

Not anymore.

He had surpassed that limitation by making it capable of evolving, cultivating.

With the black hole growing inside him and his mastery over it, he could control it at will.

He could store an unlimited amount of energy, as long as he could supply it.

Wu Han poured out his entire storage of spirit stones, flooding the room with sparkling light.

Luo Lan, even in her life as a genius, had never seen so many spirit stones gathered in one place.

"Let me show you the ultimate form of energy control!"

All the spirit stones shattered at once, sparkling and illuminating the cave into a sea of stars, filled with Qi in its crude form.

Wu Han's dantian could normally consume only one spirit stone per day. If he wanted to cheat out stronger spells, he had to use them as sacrifices.

But now, he could use them all for training.

He thrust his arm forward, and the black hole inside him began to spin. The pulling force seized every inch and particle of energy in the air and dragged it into his body.

Normally, absorbing this amount would result in bodily explosion.

But a black hole was the greatest energy vault in the universe, as far as he knew.

This amount did not even make it expand in the slightest.

Its size remained the same, so small that no word had yet been invented to describe how tiny it was.

Because it was not a normal black hole formed from the collapse of a star. What he worked with was only a bucket of condensed Qi. He mimicked the death of a star with the amount of energy he had and, through careful refining, managed to create a black hole of his own.

Normally, a black hole of this size would disperse in an instant. That was why he needed layers of magic to isolate it from outside space, or it would vanish the moment it formed.

A black hole required mass to survive, and even more energy to sustain it.

That is why he could not use it as a weapon yet.

But as an energy storage and a Dao seed to control gravity, it was more than enough.

Bang!

He reached the seventh stage of Qi Condensation instantly.

"Huh?" Luo Lan asked after her amazement faded. "Seventh? Only?"

The amount of energy the man before her had just absorbed should have propelled someone to the ninth stage, or at least the eighth, not the seventh.

"Looks like it has some kinks," Wu Han assured her.

He would reach Foundation Establishment soon, once he found a worthy vessel for this seed.

Wu Han's body was nowhere near strong enough to use or sustain this level of energy.

The seventh stage only showed the limit of his current output, not his true potential as a cultivator. If he had a better vessel, he would already be at Foundation Establishment.

But this was the problem he had foreseen and had already begun to work on.

"You… what exactly are you?"

Luo Lan was nothing short of terrified. She had met many geniuses and many old monsters during her long journey to become the strongest. Yet no one, not even the outside elders whose strength surpassed her father, had ever radiated danger like the man before her.

"I'm just a stranger passing by. Don't think too much about it," Wu Han said.

He gently patted her head. "It's not like you have much choice in this matter. Either you follow me, or you die… Or maybe you do have a choice. If you can figure out what I just did, then perhaps you can suppress your cold on your own."

Wu Han had high hopes for Luo Lan. Among all the flesh sacks he had spoken to, she was the only one worth sparing for now. Not because her condition resembled a comrade from his past, and not because her determination to live reminded him of himself.

That kind of pity had been discarded long ago.

What truly interested him was what lay inside her. The root cause of her extreme Yin physique.

It looked different from what he once knew. It worked differently.

But within her, something unmistakable existed.

A trace of divinity.

She was what his people would call a demigod.

A very weak and faint one, but a demigod nonetheless.

Would he tell her how to use it?

No.

Because in the end, his true goal was to gain a slave.

Not some leftover like Haoyu or Hui Lian, but a proper one.

The strongest and most profound slave of them all.

A slave worth cultivating.

There were levels to such things. To make it truly secure, he would refrain from using cheap methods like the so-called sex magic those lowly incubuses relied on, or even a forced curse placed upon her.

No, that would be too crude and unrefined.

There was one method so absolute that even the mightiest archbishop would willingly betray their god to follow his instead.

Wu Han dusted his hands.

"Since we're finished," he said, "how about a date?"

Luo Lan could only look at him in disbelief.

"Huh?"

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