Chapter 1173: Three colors The importance of Aetherium for Rowan could not be overstated, for although he had an infinite pool of powerful Primordial Aether in his dimension, Aetherium was the next step for this power, but it was gate-keep by the Primordial forces who used the seeds of Aetherium as a bargaining chip to draw geniuses to their side. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮 The act of gathering Aetherium from the ocean was two-fold, the first was to give him a potent source of energy as he wondered the sort of power he might be able to wield if he used Aetherium instead of Aether to power them, and the second was to learn how to forge his personal Aetherium using the degraded Aetherium of Doom Star as a guide. If he could succeed, then his act of rejecting the offer of the Aetherium Seed from Elura would not sting as much, and as a hidden hand he could play, Aetherium would be a very potent weapon. Despite the fact that he could observe every single aspect of the Aetherium being organized inside his Hollow Forge, he could not just replicate them with his Aether, because the Aetherium of Doom Star has unique attributes that were different from Rowan's. He could however use it as a tool to guide his journey towards creating Aetherium. The tapping of the Shiik was the only sound that could be heard inside this underground chamber for the next month until Rowan who had been sitting with his eyes closed, shuddered and opened them. There was a calamitous rumbling ongoing inside Hollow Forge as the final portion of the Aetherium unit was created. Inside Hollow Forge, a stupendous amount of water was rushing to a single point in the air and vanishing seemingly without a trace. That point had been slowly growing over the last few years until it was now the size of an apple, and the terrifying rumbling that was ongoing inside hollow Forge had been building up over the last two years and now it was at a crescendo. With a loud pop and a crackle like lightning, the unit of Aetherium was created. It resembled a crystal that was doubly terminated. The crystal at first appeared pitch black, but looking closer at its center would display three colors, red, blue, and green. Rowan manifested a copy of the Aetherium in his left hand, he could not bring out the real deal outside, because he was sure that no Ascendant in this realm had access to Aetherium, and the emanation of power that would arise if he brought it out would resound all through the realm. The Shiik stirred, looking around she frowned and went back to tapping her nails on her throne. Rowan sighed again and looked back at the Aetherium Crystal. Holding it in his hands, he could see something that particularly interested him, which was the colors emerging from it. Not interested in the power of the Aetherium Crystal for the moment, the swirling red, blue, and green color that emerged from the pitch blackness of the crystal was fascinating, and it was a picture of the hidden secrets of this realm. When Rowan entered Doom Star and crushed an entire continent, something strange happened, he came across two sources of Aura, the red Aura of Calamity and the Blue Aura of Ascendancy. Due to the restrictions imposed on him by the World's Will, he was not able to choose either of these paths, and he was doomed to be swallowed by a Calamity God when his Primordial Ouroboros consumed both of these Auras and combined them into a new and strange purple Aura. This Aura was the reason he could survive against the forces of the Ascendants and the Calamity God who would have consumed him, and despite the setbacks from the World's Will, Rowan would have won this fight, that was until Berrion came and finished him off. However this incident had shown him a chink in the armor of this realm, and he had not forgotten this purple Aura, and the entire basis of the creation of the Shiik was to create a potent source of pure Calamity Aura and he kept his Ascendant body pure too, because when the time was right, he would be combining both of these Aura to be used as a weapon against the realm. This was one of Rowan's trump cards and his ace in the oncoming battle, however, if this was the case, what was this third green color swirling alongside Ascendancy and Calamity? Was there a third hidden force in this realm that he knew nothing about? Rowan felt his soul shiver, and the feeling made him pause. He was still slowly getting used again to the concept of having a soul and the certain quirks that came with it, one of them being intuition. He knew he might have just cracked one of the most important secrets of this realm. His memory returned to the moment he had first laid his eyes on Doom Star, the thing that had grabbed his attention the most at that time were two things, the first was the intense feeling that this place was alive, and the second was the intense negative emotions that bombarded his mind, nearly making him gag in disgust. Old Man Seed's voice still rang strong in his memory of that event, when Rowan had asked him if this star was alive, "In a manner," he had said, "But the devastation that heralded its birth fractured the Will it contained, and so it could never take a singular Will. It is a good thing that happened, or else this entity would be at least at the eighth-dimensional level... a truly frightening thought." For a while he had been sensing Doom Star as a colossal threat; he had missed one very important clue staring at him, the face and that was the color of this realm. From above it was a green and black star. The green of it was like intense flames and the blackness was like an ocean of tar. When Rowan had fallen into Doom Star it was not with his power, wrapped by the power of Old Man Seed, he had been unable to understand the sensation of passing through Doom Star. Rowan frowned and looked at the heavens, analyzing the power structure of Doom Star. If the blackness he saw on the surface of Doom Star was the Pure Darkness that was a part of this realm and therefore the hidden power source of the Calamity Gods and not the red Aura they utilized, then was the Green Aura the hidden power of Ascendants or was it a separate power entirely? Also if he looked at the entire structure of Doom Star from a distance, the Calamity Gods inhabited the depths of the earth, and in the sky was the home of the Ascendants, what was above the Ascendants? Could the answer be that simple? He only needed to go upwards, passing all the higher continents, passing both the Ascendant and Calamity Suns, and reaching above it to the power that supervised everything in this realm. Rowan sat there in thought for a long while. The more he knew about the realm, the more questions arose.