I remained standing silently upon the endless gray plains while the pale mist drifted around us in slow currents, the strange realm feeling emptier with every passing second as though existence itself had thinned here to the bare minimum required for reality to continue functioning.
Defender Aurora stood several meters away from me without interrupting my thoughts again, allowing the silence to settle naturally while her golden soul force moved calmly around her body like flowing liquid sunlight.
Her words continued echoing inside my mind.
Your soul is not power. It is you.
At first the concept had honestly sounded almost meaningless to me, because all my life strength had always been tied to power, laws, Essence, control, destruction, dominance. Even the system itself had reduced existence into measurable numbers and visible progression, and somewhere along the way I had unconsciously begun treating my soul the same way.
