Chapter 156: You Gain A Mystic Art

Elias opened his eyes, feeling different. He looked at his arm, and his stone skin was darker, and he knew that the durability of his body had increased, and he had become more indestructible. He did not need to check his Status Screen to know that his Stone Skin ability had evolved or was upgraded, but that did not concern him as much as the possibility that this Art may have been unsealed.

Calming his excited heart, Elias pulled up his vibrating Status Screen, and his sight zoomed to his active legacies, and indeed, his Art of Stone had changed.

Mystic-Grade Art: The Art of Stone (Endurance / Growth-Type)

Grade: Mystic-Grade (Evolved from the Common Grade using Kaeltha’s ribs.)

True Origin: Forged in secret by Kaeltha the Unbroken, personal body-slave and honor guard to the God-King #*&^% and unveiled during the final millennia of the God-Death War. Kaeltha had been forced to wear the God-King’s living-stone armor as a punishment and symbol of ownership for 3,000,000 years without removal. The armor was enchanted to grow heavier with every act of defiance or survival, designed to eventually crush the wearer into dust. Kaeltha survived by turning the torment into cultivation. He never removed the armor. He died inside it, still standing, when God-King %^#*_ fell. The art was etched into the armor’s inner plates and passed down through escaped slaves and forgotten lineages.

Core Concept:

Endure the weight of a god’s cruelty until your body becomes unbreakable stone. Every moment of suffering is fuel. Every step under an impossible burden is evolution. The art does not forgive weakness; it punishes it with death. Only those who refuse to break can evolve beyond mortality.

Powers & Abilities:

Stone Skin (Advanced):

Skin hardens to living granite density while armored. Reduces physical damage by 55%.

Crushing Endurance(Initial): Every day spent bearing full armor with a weight of at least 5,000kg permanently increases Durability by 0.4 points (compounds indefinitely). At higher weights (15,000+ kg), Durability passively begins to resist all conceptual attacks (fate alteration, soul erasure…) at low percentages.

Iron Will Anchor (Sealed) [Requirement to Unseal not met.]

Rebellious Burden (Sealed) [Requirement to Unseal not met.]

God-Slayer’s Shatter (Sealed) [Requirement to Unseal not met.]

Requirementsto Unseal Iron Will Achor/Evolve the Art of Stone to Earth-Grade Art:

User must wear full-body rigid stone/metal armor at all times (minimum starting weight: 25,000 kg).

Armor must be completely sealed—no joints, no flexibility, no removal allowed after first equipping.

Weight must be increased by 2500 kg every 30 days of continuous wear (no exceptions). There would be a single day in thirty days when the armor can be removed.

Removal of armor in less than thirty days after it is worn would result in instant death.

This state must be endured for seven years for the Art of Stone to evolve to the Earth Grade.

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The first word that Elias read made him grin, but because he was still under the effect of Stone Skin as he was armored, his face that had fused with his armor did not change, but he thought it would be a scary sight to see his faceless stone helm tearing itself open to reveal stone teeth.

Art of Stone was no longer a Common-grade art; it had evolved to a Mystic-grade art, and it not only strengthened the first ability, Stone Skin, from 45% damage reduction to 55% damage reduction, but it also unsealed the second ability of the art while giving him the direction to unseal the remaining abilities of this art.

Elias also noted the tag beside each ability that was at Initial and Advanced, and when he glanced over at his other Active Legacies, he noted that all of the abilities that had been unlocked by his other legacies were all at the initial level, and only his Stone Skin had grown to Advanced.

This growth may have just given him a ten percent growth to the Stone Skin ability, but as his first advanced ability, Elias did not look down on any percentile growth, because he knew that the power of such growth could not be calculated using common sense. This ten percent growth may very well be the difference between life and death many times over.

However, the more that Elias read through the evolved Art of Stone, the sooner that the smile on his face began to vanish.

The first surprise that shook him came from the revelation that what he thought of as a stone blade turned out to be one of the ribs of Kaeltha, the first user and creator of this art.

Fusing with the body parts of others were not a strange event for a Siphon, since the Ascendants themselves were wearing the bodies of the gods and daemons, and Elias knew that part of his spine which was the Pillar of Sorrow came from a fragment of a goddess, and it was not strange that he would get stronger from using one of Kaeltha’s ribs.

Inside his body, there was still a remnant shell of the Fate-Erasing strike given to him by his master through the drop of blood he had swallowed, and Elias was beginning to understand how precious the body could become, especially when the Siphon was at a higher level.

The process of growth for a Siphon was one of transformation, from a mortal shell to the divine, until their very bodies become miracles or walking damnation.

Reading about the true Origin of this art, Elias understood that the Art of Stone was never meant for power; it was used as a form of punishment to suppress a single man for more than three million years!

Elias’s mind returned to the voices he had been able to hear from the wave of power that had erupted inside his Lumina Space, and he saw the connection between Kaeltha, that unknown woman, and this so-called God-King, whose name had been greyed out.

This was the first time Elias had heard the term God-King, and he although he did not understand the distinction among the gods, to be called a God-King, a king among gods could only mean that this figure was extremely distinguished, even among divinities, perhaps it was no wonder that what he used as an act of punishment could be made into an Art that Elias suspected was at the peak of Heavenly Grade.

Still, issues of the past had nothing to do with him at this time, and with the destruction of the gods, many of the matters that concerned them no longer mattered, but their echoes still remained and would most likely never fade.

Elias frowned at this thought when he thought about his experience with the power of the divine since he became an Ascendant Candidate, and he sighed and pushed these worries to the side. No matter the true state of reality, he did not have any way to affect it or even understand it.

He may be embroiled in matters that scaled globally, but Elias would not forget he was still a very small fry. His potential may even be approaching the top of this world, but that was just potential; he was a Fury Forge, and the road ahead of him was still very far.

However, he would not be able to survive to see the true state of reality if he did not focus on what was important at this present moment, and for him, that was understanding the ability he had just unlocked and knowing his path forward with what Elias believed could be one of his most important art and abilities.

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