Mathias Calypses now had nearly absorbed enough aether from the soul core to ascend to Ascetic.

Only a small portion of the Ascetic's soul core remained. He observed the movements of the other clans from the inside. Seeing everyone at peace he was happy, relieved that they didn't discover the abnormality and raid this place.

This was mostly due to Mathias Calypses replacing everyone who came into contact with the Hua Tai clan, but he knew this wouldn't last forever. Eventually, one of the remaining elders or leaders would notice something truly wrong.

Eventually, Mathias would make a slight mistake with the construction of the personalities, getting something wrong. It might even be something as small such as an allergy or disposition that is rarely seen.

One small mistake and it's over for the newly established secret empire of Mathias Calypses. He actually believed he had already made the mistake. Mathias assumed he did because he is not perfect. He is a sorcerer and sorcerers are first and foremost, still human, after all.

12 hours.

That was Mathias' estimated time to ascension, he just had to wait 12 hours. He felt the same foreboding feeling he felt when he ascended to an Adept.

When sorcerers ascend to a higher ranking, fate tends to become erratic, it fluctuates in their presence. Situations become strange and events gain an inclination to be more improbable. Previously ridiculous things become normal and these occurrences tend to go against the will of the ascender.

This was the reason why Mathias Calypses was so scared going into the half a day mark. This is known as when it truly starts.

In this realm such a thing is known as a heavenly tribulation but in Mathias' original realm it was known as the devil's gamble.

Mathias Calypses' power relies on tricks, not strength. Tricks rely on situations. When Mathias can't rely on tricks, he is not strong, he is weak. He relies on tricks because he has always been weak.

Too weak to save his sister from killing herself, too weak to save his father from Julien's trap and too weak to save a pair of orphans he had promised wholeheartedly to help.

Mathias knows that he is not to blame but he also knows that you can only blame yourself. He admitted proudly that he had some level of survivor's guilt. This was because he wanted to fully resolve it.

Above Mathias Calypses in the Hua Tai clan pavilion one of the guests asked a specific question that Mathias knew he didn't program in the body double's knowledge.

At first he took control of the body double through a specific switch he had implanted previously and said through the clone that he 'didn't remember what he was talking about.'

The guest pressed further before becoming suspicious and then had a crazy thought, a ridiculous thought and an insane thought, 'what if I'm not talking to the real Hua Tai Xi Liang?'

It was absolutely ridiculous and completely irrational for the guest to make this correct leap in logic, under no circumstance could this be explained with cognitive thought,

The Devil’s Gamble’s probability manipulation!

Grasping the problem, Mathias Calypses teleported this Initiate to the marble jade sanctum above him by using the body double he was talking to as a point of reference.

Shocked and exasperated, the Initiate looked around frantically in confusion. In the next second his chest was pierced by a beam of starlight.

Mathias had directly teleported an attack onto the Initiate, instantly killing him. Teleporting the dead body to himself, Mathias tried to make a real body double out of his corpse but he committed various calculative mistakes he never did before!

Once more, The Devil's Gamble!

Dropping the body on the cold grey floor, Mathias Calypses then decided to just concentrate fully on absorption, instead of making more preparations. By doing so he could save 10, maybe 20 seconds.

He believed that any attempt to prepare would not work. Mathias understood that some preparations that he made previously may not function as intended but he was also aware that it was much harder for the devil’s gamble to influence something that was already in effect.

In one of the surrounding villages, an Ascetic clan leader noticed something was off with one of his elders. He noticed this when he tried to read the mind of his elder and found that the thoughts he received back ever so slightly didn’t match his actions and disposition.

Mathias Calypses, when replacing this elder found the embedded telepathy sorcery within the Adept’s corpse. He, of course, transplanted the sorcery into the body double and embedded a false psyche into it.

This psyche responded to the telepathy based on thoughts it had sent out in the past, it was essentially a language program that sent out the answer based upon past answers. A workable solution, sure, but one that would occasionally be flawed, maybe even be too perfect. It was for this reason that the Ascetic suspected something.

Under the reasoning that the spell had been tampered with, the Ascetic who implanted the telepathy sorcery performed this check on every elder and initiate in his clan. With limited observation this Ascetic was unable to completely discern if everyone he checked had been compromised.

But he did learn that everyone who was compromised was exhibiting strange, unusually happy behavior. A behavior that he started to realize a few days ago. He checked the telepathy occasionally and therefore doesn't believe that the clansmen who were compromised have been compromised for very long.

Expanding his domain of light, this Ascetic executed an attack on every overly happy person in his clan, clan member or not. Instantly incinerating them to dust.

This was slightly out of character and unreasonable for the Ascetic to do, but he felt a sense of urgency with this situation and more importantly, this went against the plans of a certain sorcerer.

Sensing this course of action, Mathias Calypses understood that the Devil’s Gamble had begun in ernest. 

Sensing a feedback loop, the Ascetic, using the special characteristics of Solaris, traced it at the speed of light. Mathias had encrypted this feedback since he knew he couldn’t completely remove it without sacrificing his ability to properly monitor the situation.

But that mattered little before the Ascetic. He was able to discern that the source of the feedback came from the Hua Tai estate. Changing the shape of his domain, the Ascetic projected a beam of light through the sky directly at the complex.

He believed that this might be a ruse to drag him away from his own estate to steal his treasures, so instead of leaving the estate himself, he opted to project his domain onto the Hua Tai village.

This was an action that didn’t necessarily go against Mathias Calypses. It would be worse for Mathias if the Ascetic had instead descended directly. If this was an Adept instead, he would have rushed Mathias Calypses directly with his full power. The fact that the Ascetic didn’t highlighted the level of control an Adept’s Heavenly Tribulation truly had over an Ascetic. 

Using the light, the Ascetic quickly scanned the entire area and came to two points of relative interest:

Everyone in this place has been compromised and there is an area he couldn’t see through that existed beneath the ground.

He suspected that the culprit of the replacements existed within it, knowing that it would be troublesome for the Solaris Ascetics of the surrounding area to break through it.

At this moment, every person within the Hua Tai complex immediately gazed up at the looming sun with a calculating frown.

One second later, all of them dispersed into starlit dust and concentrated on five seemingly random areas within the compound. 

Suspecting this was a ruse, the Ascetic ignored Mathias’ antics and concentrated directly on the area he couldn’t discern. Moving his thoughts at light speed using the unique traits of Solaris, the Ascetic came to a hole within his logic:

His actions weren’t entirely his own!

He was being manipulated and not only that, manipulated to a favorable outcome for him. Inexperienced sorcerers might suspect this was a third-party’s interference, but as someone who has experienced this phenomenon before, the Ascetic knew it as an Heavenly Tribulation.

Realizing that he could be influenced by yet sense the influence of this Heavenly Tribulation made him come to the conclusion that this was an Adept’s Heavenly Tribulation. If this was a mortal’s Heavenly Tribulation to an Initiate or an Initiate’s Heavenly Tribulation to an Adept it wouldn’t be able to influence him. Inversely, if this was a Heavenly Tribulation of a higher level, such as an Ascetic’s Heavenly Tribulation to an Apostle, he, as an Ascetic, wouldn’t be able to sense it at all. It wouldn’t have mattered how fast his thinking was.

Comprehending this, the Ascetic had an idea of the chain of events that orchestrated this. The Hua Tai Ascetic had been killed, an Adept took his core and attempted to ascend. If the Adept in question killed the Ascetic by himself, it could have satisfied the requirement for explosive progress. Although a cultivator typically needs a bit more feats to achieve ascetichood, gaining asceticship upon this feat alone was still possible. 

With a flash of condensed sunlight, the Ascetic began to burn through the earth directly towards where he couldn't see.

0.3 seconds.

That was all the time it took for the Ascetic to break into the marble jade sanctum. Discovering this place, the Ascetic continued to drill further into the earth towards the point he couldn't see.

Not long after this he reached the golden barrier itself, finding it relatively tough to break through, he suspected it would take close to 30 minutes.

At this point, Mathias Calypses had just hit the nine hour mark. There were still nine more hours until he could ascend.

The other Ascetics, hearing the commotion sent in squads of clansmen led by elders to investigate the source of the conflict.

15 minutes later, they arrived at the main gate of the complex to find no one there. The only thing remaining was a hole dug out by sunlight. There weren't even any buildings left, the Ascetic had already cancelled out those starlit illusions.

They were shocked and appalled by this, this was a place that was fine yesterday now turned to a barren wasteland. Certain smiling members of these squads then suggested that this could happen to their own villages and they should report back the situation.