Chapter 994 Suffering From Success The golden lightning paused as if confused, whatever had happened was not in any of its operational parameters and its luminosity began to fade as if it was about to disappear. However, before it vanished Rowan felt his immediate surrounding space seem to shift as two streams of unknown energy, one colored blue and the other red began to gather around his body, drawn from the shattered and frozen continent, with his diminished consciousness power, Rowan could not trace the origin of the energy but he suspected it was from every dead living being on this continent. 'Fuck, I cannot catch a break.' With his acknowledgment that there might be a hidden power watching over the grand tapestry of reality, most likely Nemesis itself, Rowan now wanted to make sure that his actions were not being weighed on an invisible scale somewhere, and with the advancement in his powers he did not need to slaughter a vast number of living creatures to harvest soul energy when he could passively collect them from his environment. Except for enemies that required his personal attention, he had made up his mind not to create acts of massive destruction, and yet just his descent into this place had led to the extinction of an entire continent and everything living on it. Not a great start to his new arc of self-control. 'Damn, why does everything have to be so fragile. This is supposed to be a domain of an eighth-dimensional entity. At least I hope that Nemesis does not work here, but if it does, it is only a matter of time before its presence is detected and understood, and by then, I will have a new prey to hunt.' Meanwhile, the two streams of energy that resembled an ocean made of lava and ice congregated around his current shell, Rowan was unable to stop their advances. This shell had restricted all his abilities, and he could as well be nothing but a lump of rock. He had not detected any damages done to him by the fall, but if he judged by his present size, the fall from space would not be as devastating, for it appeared that his density even in this rocky form was still extremely high. Yet the fact that he still had access to his consciousness albeit in a much-reduced manner proved that his state of being had been transformed but there was a clear limitation to that transformation. Rowan suspected that his present state was a direct result of this place affecting the nature of everyone who entered into it. Using the old man's words as a clue when he told Rowan he would be seeing his equal inside this place, he had then suspected that everything and everyone that entered this place would be placed under restrictions of some kind, perhaps to create a suitable common ground for all who entered this place. Nevertheless, the old man had underestimated the sort of monster he had just unleashed into this world, Rowan was meant to take the shape of an egg made from rock and descend on this shattered continent. Over time he may find his way out of his shell and slowly gather power by fighting for either the side of the so-called calamity or with its people. His dimensional flesh turned out to be a problem, however, for even though he had been reduced to nothing but rocks, his size was something else, and in one single swoop, his descent that was supposed to be nothing but a blip on the radar, well, no one would be needing radars here anymore. Somehow it seemed that even his present awareness should not be possible, after all, he was nothing but rock, but it was due to the unreasonable nature of his soul and the sheer power that his many consciousness pillars held that he was able to have this limited amount of understanding over his environment. When Old Man Seed told him this place was dangerous, he was not overexaggerating it, perhaps he might have even underestimated it a bit. With everything he had noticed, what Rowan presumed would have happened to him without the nature of his body would be that he would fall into this world as a rocky egg, and he would have no awareness entirely. His powers were so great that in order for his descent to be fair to any of the 'competition' here would be that he would be helpless in that form, unable to understand or interact with his surroundings, and he would have to wait for his luck to create a situation for him that would lead to his awakening. If he was not wrong it was possible that he might have remained a tiny rock for centuries if not millennia, until someone would pick him up and as these things go, use him as a rock to bash someone's head in. The infusion of soul energy might be able to awaken him or not, and he would most likely have to be used as a tool for who knows how many millennia, maybe even millions of years more before he might be awakened. This event might be frighteningly accurate and along the path that Doom Star had intended for his destiny. A shame that it met Rowan really. The twin streams of energy gingerly touched his rocky shell and Rowan felt two distinct sensations flicker against his consciousness, one was hot, and the other cold. With that sensation was information. Yet the information was incomplete and broken, Rowan could feel many attempts for the data stream to become complete, but it was shattered again and again, creating a field of disjointed and chaotic runes that glimmered like sparks from a flame. It did not take long for Rowan to realize that he was a victim of his success. The message the golden lightning revealed was clear. The shattered continent was not at peace, there were two battling sides, and they were both wiped out by his arrival. If his intuition was correct, he was supposed to pick a side and develop himself using a single stream of power, simply put, he could be hot or cold. But his descents had crushed both sides of the equation without catering to their distinctions. It was apparent that these two energy streams were not meant to enter a single individual but he had broken that balance. The chaotic streams of information that were struggling to access his consciousness were like a mixture of fire and ice, they could not be placed together. Rowan sighed, if he had access to his full suite of abilities, managing this energy would be simple. It felt quite complex and powerful, similar to Aetherium but still different, but it was nothing he could not handle if he just wanted to separate the energy to stop them from clashing. Since there was nothing he could do, Rowan became focused on deciphering the broken pieces of information touching his consciousness, but after a few hours of trying to piece them together, he found his efforts to be useless. First, the information was not in any language that he knew, they defied his ability of language comprehension, and he suspected that the chaotic clash between these two streams of energy was not helping him to make any progress in this area. The closest he could glean from the broken data he could collect was that this language resembled runes, and a single rune could hold a vast amount of information, but there were thousands of runes here and all of them were broken and disjointed.