Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Ryu's frown deepened, a look of deep contemplation on his face.

He realized now that even using his mind in this place had quite some effect on him, but for him to not have noticed the vertigo meant that his mind was already working on a scale of near perfection. That was at least some good news. He didn't know how he would fair if he couldn't even think straight without being sent into a tailspin.

Even so, that didn't really help him with his situation. If anything, the fact his mind was so close to perfection just meant that he had even less room to make improvements to the rest of his body. It was no wonder he had entered the threshold so quickly. He had only barely just begun to fix his gait, and yet the energies of the world already began to resonate with him.

"Wait a moment...'

Ryu frowned. There was a very obvious question here. How was his mind so close to perfection? No, more accurately, how was it that it had come so close to perfection without him noticing first?

Just subtle changes to his gait had made it so that he could feel the energies of the universe swirling around to his cadence, to his own rhythm... How many times had he improved his mind through thought and action that had gone....

Completely unnoticed?

One answer was that it was a combination of the two that had managed to cross the necessary threshold, but that felt incorrect. No, it felt, rather, that it was missing something very important.

Ryu trembled.

How much power did names hold? And how could he have possibly missed something so obvious?

Mysteries of Heaven and Earth.

The answer was within his eyes.

How was it that pupils had such a large impact on his comprehension ability? The obvious answer was that his eyes acted like some sort of filter, almost like a translator of the Heavens that made things that would usually be too difficult to comprehend, simple.

But Ryu knew that this wasn't the exact truth, or rather, it wasn't the whole truth.

The eye wasn't some separate organ, it was part of the body. And the so- called pupil was just a hole with extra steps, allowing things into it. The actual eye had countless little fibers that extended into the brain, connecting with it, and then the brain would make its own interpretations of the information brought forth.

It could be said that a pair of Heavenly Pupils weren't just the pupils themselves, but also the alterations it made to the mind. As for why pupils could be stolen without also swapping out your brain, it was because once a connection was made through those fibers, the changes would naturally progress.

This was why after stealing a pair of Heavenly Pupils, those thieves would often spend months to even years, keeping their eyes covered in darkness as those changes took place. At that point in the process, unless you were paired with some sort of Heavenly Healer, the eyes were far too fragile to process anything.

It could be said that the reason why Ryu's thought was so in tune with the Heavens was precisely because of his eyes. And the only reason the attunement wasn't perfect wasn't because of something he was lacking, but rather because his eyes were still sealed.

If he had to guess, if his eyes were unsealed right this moment, he would be able to perceive the change immediately and everything would snap into place.

But that led back to the very first question...

Why was it that he couldn't perceive this?

And he knew the answer. The answer to this question was the very same as his first.

All of the subtleties of the word around him, the moving shapes of universal energies and the gorgeous tapestry that they laid out... They had always been there. They had been there for so long that he hadn't even been able to tell a difference between the real world and what he could see of it.

All of it was being filtered through his eyes from the very beginning, or more accurately, they were his eyes, like a perpetual transmit that was cast over the world.

His eyes were akin to a Child of Order constitution concentrated into his pupils.

But then what did that mean for him? In this situation he was currently stuck in, what good were his eyes that were still sealed away?

Well, why was it that his eyes seemed to advance every time he made a cultivation breakthrough? In fact, why was it that after his breakthrough into the Cosmic Seed Realm, and then the World Sea Realm beyond that that he was finally able to enter his Inner World again and notice that his wives had vanished?

It was because his eyes needed this attunement, they needed this sort of Harmony with the Heavens to finally complete their evolution, to take that final step and finally be unsealed.

And he bet that once he completed this, the moment he stepped into the Sky God Realms once more, his eyes would return to him.

And right then... Ryu Tatsuya would well and truly be back.

That just left one last question, a new one that he had formulated as he finally came to this conclusion.

How could he take that step? How exactly could he take this comprehension and transmit it into his eyes instead?

Ryu thought for a long while, not quite having an answer. In theory, everything lined up. But how was he supposed to transmit something that his body was doing into something his eyes? They weren't even quite connected.

The only way he seemed to feel that this was possible would be if he rewired his entire brain such that what was filtered through his eyes could be conveyed directly into his muscle memory as well.

But there was no precedent for such a thing, and he even had a feeling that it bordered on ridiculous pseudo science that would sooner get him killed than give him a solution.

"Wait... Muscle Memory...!"