Chapter 1856: A Necessary Struggle Rowan felt like he was in hell… How long had he been here and fighting this unending battle? “BOOM!!! CRASH…. ROAR!!!” Terrifying waves of power erupted from his body and spirit, shredding through billions of tonnes of skeletons that were directly falling over his head. He was only defending himself, and that meant with his talent and battle arts, he could technically last forever, but his mind was rapidly nearing its limit. ‘How long had he been battling beneath the rain of bones?!” A part of Rowan had been keeping the time at the beginning. He thought the rain of bones would not last for long, but after a million years, he began to rethink this position. A hundred billion years passed, and Rowan was still struggling to fly higher into the sky. With the fall of bones, the ground was beginning to rise to meet him slowly, and if he did not want to be buried forever, he could only push on. Ten trillion years passed, and Rowan was still fighting. A hundred trillion years… Two hundred trillion… Eighth hundred trillion… Five septillion years… One hundred septillion years… It was around this time that Rowan believed that a part of him stopped counting the years, and the thought that this rain of bones would have an ending vanished. The immortal energy that had been entering his body had vanished a long time ago; it had barely lasted for a hundred years before they were exhausted. If Rowan did not have access to the techniques he had created in the past on a whim, and had depended on passively absorbing the immortal strength bestowed by this place, he would not have been able to live more than a century before he perished. Now, he had fought for so many years to survive that time had become truly meaningless to him. All he knew was that he must never stop fighting to survive. He needed answers, and he would get them one way or the other. What else was there to do? As Rowan battled, over time something amazing began to happen… cut off from his main body Eos, and forced to rely on techniques that he had created for frankly lesser beings than him, he had been reduced to a state where he could no longer hold on to his past majesty. Everything had a sense of balance, even a being as innately broken as Eos had to have the basic standards in place that could shake the laws of creation, or any of his miracles would be impossible. With that in mind, Rowan, in this state, had lost many of his gifts that made him special… he was a limitless being forced into a body filled with nothing but limits. Even though his stubbornness and Will had preserved him for so long, Rowan knew that he was rapidly nearing his limits, but then, he began to improve! The nameless techniques that Rowan had made were all truly peak-level, reaching the realms of Origin, and it would be impossible for anyone who practiced them to ever think of improving them, even Rowan could not further improve them, and the only improvement they would ever have was quantitative, and only in the far future would he have the ability to enhance them further. And this was only because his main body had limitless prospects for growth, making it possible for him to forcibly improve perfection. So, this came as a surprise to Rowan that in his hands, these two techniques began not just to improve, but to evolve. In this place, Rowan had to be concerned with three things. The first was the attractive force from the fields of bones beneath him, which was potent enough that if he were an ordinary Old One, maybe even an Old One that was at the peak of their level, only a step from being called a Nascent Primordial, he would have barely lasted a few million years before perishing. The second and third challenge was burning his way through the rain of bones and surviving the impact of being grazed by any of them. The falling bones did not have much mass, but the speed of their descent was dozens of times faster than light, and so such speed gave each bone the strength to tear through worlds. Such a level of assault was nothing to an Old One who could move and fight with speeds exceeding that of light, but in this realm, there was no outside source of replenishment for any of the resources lost during battle. In time, such unrelenting struggles would drain even those with vast energy stores to the point of nothingness, but Rowan persevered. His skills were considered perfect, meaning it was in a fully self-contained loop. He appeared to be affecting his surroundings, yet none of his energy was lost. His only challenge was to survive the endless years and ensure that he did not make a single mistake to disrupt the harmony he had created over the countless years of struggle. This improvement in his skills defied all expectations, as his perfected techniques began to touch new realms. What he created was at the limits of Origin, so this meant that the improvement in these two techniques was touching the realm beyond Origin! Rowan’s expression did not change, even as new insights began to fill his mind. Directions he was not aware of were taking shape, as the layer beyond Origin began to open up for him. Yet if he factored in the speed of his comprehension, it meant he would spend countless years to make meaningful progress. “What else am I to do? To avoid the fate of madness that is slowly creeping into this mind, an improvement in my spirit and body would allow me to hold on for as long as it would take… even if it means I have to remain here forever. I hope… No, I don’t need to hope, my Will is eternal, even if it is only a fragment that remains in this body.” Focusing on his endless battle, Rowan continued his motions of channeling annihilating flames overhead to destroy the falling bones, while refining the shield around his body to tackle those that slipped through the flames. A lot of these bones came from mortal beings, but a vast number were also immortals, and their bones could survive the flames of annihilation long enough to slam into his body. This was the true danger, as Rowan had nearly been crushed under some powerful bone countless times now and had stopped counting when his near-death experience surpassed a trillion. Normally, his mind would be wandering, bringing forth various possibilities of where he was and the reason he was stuck here for so long, or even if this flow of time affected his main body, but there was no space for that, other than survival and improvement. Suddenly, Rowan made an unexpected move, and instead of pointing the flames of annihilation upward, he thrust them to the side, and they were not just flames; he had woven them into chains. It initially appeared as though he had just thrown these flaming chains across a space filled with nothing but falling bones, but they snagged something that was not bone, and the chains wrapped around it. A series of shockwaves mixed with an unknown purple element erupted from Rowan’s body that vaporized the bones falling above him for hundreds of light-years. This should give him enough time to tackle the entity that had been observing him all this time.