Dimensional Descent

Leonel's palm flipped over, revealing a snowglobe. Within, the half dead body of Monkey, the third Savant, lay. A sort of Internal struggle took hold of him, but he eventually shook his head.

'Little Blackstar still hasn't woken up yet… This is a decision I'll be forced to make later.'

Shaking his head, Leonel pushed this thought away. He knew that there would be a lot of tough decisions he had to make on his road into the future and he had to be mentally prepared to make them. For now, though, he still had time to think about this one.

Instead, he focused on the less morally existential issues.

'Energy Purification will make things much easier on me.'

Energy Purification was exactly what it sounded like, it was the process of cleansing Force into a higher form. This pure Force was not only easier to absorb, it was marginally more powerful than Force of normal kind.

To understand how this worked, one needed to understand how Force worked normally.

After a Metamorphosis descended, physics would gain a new law not present within the Third Dimension and those new laws would revolve around Force. This new law was why Leonel had gotten so lost in the weeds when he was comprehending his first offensive technique back in the Joan Zone.

When Leonel learned more about the Dimensional Verse, he eventually allowed these overly complicated and verbose explanations fall into the background. He used his understanding of these intricacies to understand the nuances of techniques, but it was no longer at the forefront of his mind.

What was key to understand was only that in addition to atoms, Force also made up the existence of everything. Everything in existence beyond the Third Dimension had Force attached to it and the characteristics of this Force was what changed the fundamental laws that governed the world.

This truth was why the concentration of Water Force was so great on the ocean and why James was so shocked that Leonel was able to gather up Earth Force so quickly in a region it shouldn't have been so easy.

However, it was exactly this that made most Force impure. The fact Leonel could gather up so much Earth Force in an environment that wasn't conducive to it at all spoke volumes. Often, in nature, it was impossible to find a single pure Force of a singular kind without influence of other Force.

Just taking the ocean as a continued example, were there not countless particulates that made up its being? Setting aside the most obvious in salt, there was oxygen content within water, countless other gases, and that didn't even mention the numerous microscopic organisms.

This was all to say that there was never any true 'Pure' Force and this was exactly why Neutral Force was the most abundant of any kind. This was because Neutral Force represented the amalgamation and balance of countless different Forces into one.

The natural inclination of Force was to amalgamate and enter this balanced form and it took effort, affinity and power to separate this Neutral Force into its individual parts.

And this was where the abilities of the golden scale koi fish truly began to shine. Not only could it separate out Neutral Force into its individual parts, but it was also capable of producing Pure Neutral Force, the pinnacle Force that all Force tended toward.

The individual parts of Neutral Force were easy enough to understand, but Pure Neutral Force was a somewhat novel concept but it didn't take much explanation to grasp either.

While all Force tended toward fusion, there would, of course, be less stable and less perfect fusions. These forms of Neutral Force were everywhere, they had reached a 'good enough' balance, but there would definitely be clashes within its structure that would lower its power. This imperfect Neutral Force could be akin to regular gas at a gas station while Pure Neutral Force could be akin to premium gas.

The gold koi fish was able to gather up this Force and help it to enter a perfectly balanced state. This was the shocking ability of its Energy Purification.

But why was this useful? What good was this Pure Neutral Force?

The answer to that was simple. Pure Neutral Force went further in the energy it could produce. A single Unit of impure Neutral Force was worth maybe a hundredth of Pure Neutral Force, and that was at the lowest Third Dimension. The higher the Dimension, the wider the gap became because the formation of Pure Neutral Force also became more difficult.

In addition to this, the energy that Invalids released upon their deaths was actually a form of Neutral Force a step above impure Neutral Force but a step below Pure Neutral Force. It had already been seen by Leonel long ago that this Force was able to loosen and undo bottlenecks one might experience in the future… So just how much better would Pure Neutral Force be at this?

In truth, Leonel knew the answer to this because Pure Neutral Force was exactly what the Puppet Master Variant Invalid had released upon its death! Thanks to that single Variant Invalid and single absorption of Pure Neutral Force, Leonel's bottlenecks in his Metal Body had loosened by three or four stages.

By now, the prowess of the little koi fish should be obvious. If Pure Neutral Force was worth so much more, and this little one was actually able to produce Fifth Dimensional Pure Neutral Force, then wouldn't that cut down the amount of Force Leonel needed to awaken his former army?

Rather than allowing the Silver Tablet to absorb the Force directly, why not allow the koi fish to do so instead? Upon creating the Pure Neutral Force, Leonel would allow the Silver Tablet to absorb it and the benefits would be even greater.

On top of this, this was the high level Force that the Silver Tablet needed to awaken Normand's former fiancée, the very young woman whose blood had fed and awakened the Silver Tablet to begin with!

Objectively, when it came to undoing bottlenecks, the Silver Tablet was better than even Pure Neutral Force was. But, if the abilities of the koi fish and the Silver Tablet were synergized, just what kind of impact would that have?

The best part was that this was just the tip of the iceberg.

To now, Leonel had only been following a single train of thought, one that followed the benefits of Pure Neutral Force. However, what he hadn't yet touched upon was the opposite path.

Just what were the benefits of the dissection of Neutral Force to form other Pure Forces?