Chapter 1041: Vanishing Acts The Shiik buried itself in the earth and Rowan agitated the energy of Ascension inside his cells, the blue Aura that dwelled deep in the depths of his cells surged and painted the entirety of his internal organs blue and his body launched into the skies like a spirit being, and he appeared fifty thousand feet in the air nearly instantaneously. Still naked, but his long and thick red hair now merely reaching his knees moved around him like a shroud, concealing his figure as Rowan hung in the sky, and waited, even as he analyzed the warships getting closer to the continent. Since this facility was close to the ocean, and the prevalence of the green smoke surrounding it, there was no way the incoming ships did not know this was the area of interest. The continent was large after all and the explosion had happened a while back, Rowan needed to ensure a swift and efficient hunt. There were twenty-three warships in total heading towards him, a majority of them were like the Falcon Class Frigate that had just been destroyed, but two of the ships that stayed a little behind the fleet were massive, more than five times the size of the normal frigate and held an emblazoned silver ax on their hull, but they all still generally maintained the triangular shapes that Doom Star warships preferred. Rowan now understood that these shapes were not a coincidence, Trithon, the essential components by which every ship was built had a propensity of taking a triangular shape when more than a few molecules of itself were placed side by side, and the entirety of the ship were mostly made from this metal. It was what made the ships both durable and easy to repair as Trithon could eat other materials to make copies of itself, not counting the fact that it consumed so little energy to operate as a functional airship. From the signs on the two massive ships, the Silver Alliance were here, or at least part of their forces, Rowan had expected other players to reach here first before them, so either it was luck or the Alliance ran a tight ship. Either way, it made no difference, their biggest chance to win against Rowan was when he was still a mortal, as an Enlightened Explorer, his powers had exploded to new heights, and he could utilize more of his methods to solve these conflicts. He began moving towards the ships until he hovered over the ocean a few miles from land, and he stretched his hands to the side and closed his eyes, his fingers making tapping motions in the air as if he was playing an invisible chord. Seemingly unaware of his presence the ships all zoomed past him, his existence could as well be invisible, and only a few Explorers who were born with unnaturally high perception could have sensed a bit of his presence, but they would have most likely not believed their senses. Rowan could feel the touch of those individuals with high perception wash over him but they could not stick, and he knew that those people were dead. Except they were Ascendant Explorers with the power of Will, then touching the consciousness of Rowan with their own had corrupted their bodies, in any moment from now, they would wish they were dead. Sometimes, excellence was not a good thing. The twenty-three ships that made it past him did not stay long in the air, as if a switch inside them had suddenly been shut down, they all began to crash to the earth. The light of the three suns above cut across Rowan's hands and it was possible to see many fine tendrils that he had spread out like a web, and caught in the ends of this web were hundreds of tiny components in the ships that had just zoomed past him. Rowan's parasitic tendrils when empowered with the Ascendant Aura turned out to be the best pairs of scalpels he would need while in this state. He was not yet strong enough to tear all the ships from the air, but he could totally find the flaws in their design and pick out essential components that were related to mobility and communication. The former to ground the ship in this place, and the latter to stop any form of communication from leaving. The ships were not seamless, and there were many ports Rowan could access with his microscopic fine tendrils, and although the ships had brushed past him at high speeds when Rowan focused all his consciousness nodes on a singular task, the world would slow to a crawl and he could pick out everything he needed from the ships nearly instantaneously. With a flick of his fingers he destroyed everything he had pulled from these ships, and turning around he launched himself towards the ships below. Trithon was a material that could essentially self-heal, those ships would not be grounded forever. Rowan felt a breath of excitement pulse in his chest, for in the moments when he grounded the ships and launched himself towards them, he had finalized the technique he would be using for his Ascension. He was going to be the sun. Rowan had come to understand that there were two forces guiding this world, and on the surface, they appeared to be simple, but he knew that they just took various forms to disguise their true nature; light and darkness, death and life, Ascendancy and Calamity, Red Aura and Blue Aura... no matter the shape it took, there were always two principal forces and their nature was anathema to each other. The three suns overhead were not suns, although he had no proof yet, Rowan's state of being was so profound, that he could detect 'life' and so much of its complexities, making him easily discern that the multiple suns overhead were Explorers, Ascendant Explorers. These must be Explorers that had reached a rather high dimensional state, perhaps even equal to Elura or Old Man Seed. Doom Star was a world that should have been at least an eight- dimensional entity and had existed far before this Supreme Era, Rowan had not forgotten that fact, there were always layers beneath layers when it comes to a world like this one. He had been effortlessly killed by that creature who should be part of the World's Will, and that being could easily be a seventh-dimensional being. These suns overhead were also creatures like that, although they were Ascendant. As if his thought had acted as a Primer, the suns in the skies suddenly vanished. One moment they were there and the next they were gone, leaving the world in darkness. What replaced them were another seven suns, but this one did not emit light, only darkness. Rowan felt a weight on his body that began to slowly drive him down to the earth. Then a shrill scream caught his attention. The sound came from below, near where the twenty-three warships had crashed; it was in the location that he had battled Roael, the Blood Bound. In the air surrounding the small battlefield, pale white mist began to rise, and it was from the mist that the shrill screaming sounds emerged. Rowan focused on that position and traced the patterns of the mist, quickly realizing that it followed the pattern of attacks made by Roael. Every move he had made, every spell he had cast using the silver orbs, even the long trails of silver light left by the Halberd, bled mist, and from that mist, monsters emerged.