Shang finished explaining the World Connection to Queen Primordium, but instead of continuing to explain Void Break, Shang paused.
"Do you have any thoughts of a natural progression from that point onward?" he asked.
Queen Primordium absentmindedly played with her hair. "It's difficult," she said. "There is a certain feeling to World Connection, but I am uncertain of the normal route to get there."
"I'm also trying to think of a good way by taking your Path into account."
"There are two things I am thinking about here."
"One, increase the potential of your strongest weapon, which is your World Connection."
"Two, allow you to use your Sword States all at once."
"The problem is that the solutions to both problems are at opposite ends."
"Increasing the power of your World Connection requires a step forward, but fusing your Sword States requires a solidifying step that widens your foundation."
"Also, the additional complexity makes it much harder to come up with a good way forward."
"I would ask you to give me some time to think about these things in peace since this will solidify and deepen my knowledge of warriors and your power," Queen Primordium said.
Shang nodded.
The two of them fell silent, and Shang waited.
At the moment, Shang felt like he was wasting his time by just sitting here and waiting, but he knew that he wouldn't have enough time to do anything useful.
Additionally, all of this would result in Shang's power increasing even more in the future, and he knew that.
So, he just waited.
After around 30 minutes, Queen Primordium asked a couple of questions.
The more questions Shang answered, the more the questions started to focus on the Weapon Master Path Shang had mentioned.
And four hours later…
"I think I got it," she said.
Shang nodded.
"There's a way to do both things, combine your Sword States and also increase your power by a lot."
Shang was quite interested in her answer. After all, he still hadn't found a solution to that yet. At the moment, he still had two Sword States, even though he wanted to reduce them to only one.
"Weapon Masters use a similar way to manipulate the world to World Connection. Their souls are giving an order, and the world answers by handing them a certain level of control over small parts of it."
Naturally, four hours was more than enough for Queen Primordium to create the entire Weapon Master Path from scratch up to the Sixth Stage.
"I would classify World Connection as an ability of the Sixth Realm, which means that it would normally be enough to reach the Sixth Realm."
"You already had that, which means that you need to comprehend an ability of the Seventh Realm if you want to keep your fivefold Spirit Sense."
"If we view this like Concepts, it would be like you've comprehended a level three Concept at the High Mage Realm, and if you want to keep your powerful Spirit Sense, you would need a level four Concept."
"However, in order to comprehend a level four Concept, you need a couple of level three Concepts, assuming you want to comprehend a Complex one. That is the key to uniting both things."
When Shang heard that, his mind quickly started to analyze several things.
What Queen Primordium had just said opened an entirely new direction for Shang.
However, Queen Primordium continued explaining.
"What you could have done was to comprehend this manipulation ability of the Weapon Masters and deepen it by meditating and fusing with the world. That would push your Weapon Master Path to the Fifth Stage."
"After that, you need to comprehend the level one Concept of Space, Warping. This would allow you to create a small pocket of space for your weapons."
"This pocket would be under your control, and all your weapons would be under your control in there."
"After that, you need to comprehend something that I'm going to call Gathering."
"I've never tried it, but based on my theories, Gathering refines the wide control that Weapon Masters have and gathers everything in a small point. For a normal Weapon Master, this means that all of their weapons could gather all the power of their other weapons and unleash one powerful attack with one of them."
"By comprehending Gathering and Warping, you can keep three of your swords in essentially a tiny space on the back of your hand. The speed at which you could flip your Sword States would be instantaneous, basically making it irrelevant which sword you are currently holding in your hand."
"After that, you need to further focus on World Connection and fuse it with Gathering. Eventually, you should be able to borrow even more power from the world around you."
"Lastly, you need to reach a level of fusion with the world that allows you to attack from anywhere in your Spirit Sense. Gathering would essentially be able to show its full power from anywhere inside your World Gathering domain."
"You could unleash every attack from every Sword State from anywhere in your Spirit Sense while also increasing the overall quality of your Spirit Sense."
"And you would still retain your fivefold Spirit Sense."
Silence.
Queen Primordium's solution was basically perfect.
At least for the information she had access to.
Sadly, there was a piece of information she didn't know, but that wasn't her fault.
Shang purposely kept that piece of information to himself.
Shang only had two weapons.
Queen Primordium didn't know about Shang's two Apex Companion Weapons. At least, that was what the Lightning Emperor had called them.
In her mind, Shang was just using four different weapons he had probably commissioned from the Temple of Blood.
But the two Apex Companion Weapons were something special and specific that couldn't be applied to any other physi in existence.
So, Queen Primordium's solution had essentially been perfect.
It just wasn't possible for Shang due to his limited arsenal.
"That would solve both issues," Shang said. "However, there is now a new problem."
"By making my peak power available to be used anywhere in my Spirit Sense, I would abandon the power of my body. All the power would come from my being, but the powerful body I have created wouldn't find itself being adequately used."
"You essentially outsourced my physical power."
Queen Primordium nodded. "That's the best I could come up with that fulfilled both criteria."
Shang also nodded. "Sadly, that is probably really the best. After all, I only reduced my States to two, while your solution reduced them to only one. I have to take a step between four and one States, while you managed to accomplish that in only one."
The two of them continued talking about the validity of what Queen Primordium came up with for a while.
Then, Shang explained Void Break to her.
It took a while to go over all the intricacies and how Void Break worked, but eventually, Shang managed to tell Queen Primordium everything.
And then, Queen Primordium fell silent again as she tried to think of a way to continue forward.
Shang waited patiently while also trying to think of a good way forward.
He wondered what Queen Primordium would be able to come up with.
