Dimensional Descent

Many minutes later, Leonel finally managed to calm down.

This matter was far more complex than he had expected and it felt like the world was playing a practical joke on him. So close and yet so far away, just a single step away and yet miles away.

He suddenly heard the echo of a familiar laughter in his mind. He didn't remember having laughed like this in the past, but for some reason he was certain that it was his own laughter. The laughter sounded quite heroic, and yet there was an undertone of sadness and helplessness hidden within, an echo that grew louder and louder until his vision suddenly went white.

When Leonel came to, he was still standing in the same spot. His body was drenched in sweat, but other than that, he seemed like the same person he had always been.

Taking a breath, he returned to the Living Setting and entered his and Aina's personal bath. He had already reached a state of cleanliness where he could spend months, even years, without a shower and still be fresh, but right now, he felt like he really needed one.

He slipped into the Cleansing Waters after stripping down his clothes and lowered himself into the water. The water slid around him until he had submerged even his head, sinking to the bottom of the large pool.

He breathed deeply, ignoring the waters around him. When the Cleansing Waters entered his lungs, rather than flooding them and leaving him gasping like one might expect, it immediately became vapor, dispersing into his body.

Leonel hadn't expected this. In truth, he had just made a mistake. He had wanted to do what he had recently begun to do in the water, filtering out Wind Force from the Water Force and inhaling that. But in his absentminded and somewhat fatigued state, he had forgotten that Cleansing Waters were the purest form of Water Force. There was no Wind Force within it at all to filter out and breathe.

by his own foolishness and was prepared to rush up to the surface to expel

and hidden imperfections

speechless. He hadn't expected that things would actually end up like this. He had been thinking about how to help his body approach perfection, and he

realize that this wasn't a natural state of Cleansing Waters, or

Cleansing Waters he inhaled was a result of his new Lineage. Or rather, a result of

four components of the Metal

component was the one all Morales had access to, and that was the ability

received, was the reverse. To take one's life and

that was the ability to swallow flames and gain endless Life

family and it

own, and the second was to bestow it

of techniques that could branch from

Even if he tried to refine all of these Cleansing Waters, he wasn't sure if it would truly

far more imperfections than he had thought. What was being expelled from him wasn't impurities, per se, but was rather like foul Force. This Force would be the kind that stopped normal Force Crystals

was precisely