Book of Duality

*I am Kalo, and my path has taken me to the edge of the Heavens and Earth. In this book, I have left my gathered knowledge and insights on duality. May they assist you in the pursuit of the Terminus.*

A book Zac got from the Lord of Cycles Inheritance on Yrial's advice as it helped him in his cultivation journey and would have helped him avoid pitfalls had he gotten it in E-grade.

It is a normal leatherbound book that you can copy filled with various diagrams and arrays related to the elements, accompanied by mysterious letters that each seemed to contain thousands of words and meanings each. It was a common way to convey a lot of information in a short space, but it required the one who wrote it to have a true understanding of what they were writing. Yrial could probably copy the text, but if Zac tried to do the same, they would lose almost all their meaning.

An encyclopedia containing a powerful Edgewalker’s insights into the specific difficulties of cultivating duality would surely be useful, no matter how different Kalo’s actual path was to his own. **Chapter 854**

It wasn’t that long – just over a hundred pages, and reading it the first time had only taken him a few hours. The readthrough had provided some shallow insights and a brief explanation of the path of dualities. However, on the second readthrough, Zac had started to realize just how much was hidden inside this seemingly simple tome. He’d already noticed the characters contained special impartments when he got the book, but he had underestimated just how much they contained.

He had deciphered the first couple of pages easily enough, but the problems started to arrive when reaching the second chapter. Suddenly, he had realized that he still hadn’t unearthed the true meanings hidden in the first chapter, and he used the second chapter as a reference to delve even deeper.

One plus one didn't equal two when putting the meaning hidden inside the words together. They somehow fused into completely new concepts, seemingly unrelated to the original ones. And with every added character, the interconnected web of hidden truths grew increasingly complex, and it required more and more time to integrate each new character into the tapestry that was slowly forming in his mind.

If he tried to comprehend it all at once, the depth disappeared, and he could only glean the surface-level of meaning. There were no actual Daos or Heavenly Truths hidden into the book, but rather an extremely comprehensive set of information that related to the very essence of energy, patterns, and control. It was not something that related to just cores either – the insights of Kalo, the mysterious author, were universal.

No matter if it was arrays, crafting, or creating skills, the **[Book of Cycles]** covered some of the fundamental underpinnings that made them possible, the process where Dao and some inscrutable patterns turned into magical things like the huge wooden hand of **[Arcadia's Judgement]**, or how it could allow you to turn into something intangible with movement skills or teleportation arrays.

In other words, the book could be considered a whole heritage, as long as you managed to unearth the truths within. **Chapter 863**

Zac expanded the book with an eighth and ninth chapter. **Chapter 968**

## Effects on Zac's Core Blueprint

### **Pendulum**

“It is a viable path, but it doesn’t provide the level of amplification as a true fusion of elements,” Yrial nodded. “There is a chapter about it in the book you bought. In a sense, it keeps the elements separate, and the absence of a fusion becomes the third element. Perhaps it’s worth for you to look into.”

Zac thoughtfully nodded in agreement. That kind of system didn’t seem too bad. He wasn’t swapping between life and death currently when fighting, but his core comprehension when clashing against Alvod’s path had been that Life was Life, Death was Death, forever separate, and always in conflict. Perhaps that kind of system could be useful for a base that he retooled for his purposes. **Chapter 855**

### **Divergence**

He had reached a method Kalo called divergence, and Zac suspected the theories within were the foundation for, or at least related to, **[Rapturous Divide]**.

It detailed how forcibly keeping two opposing forces separate could create a powerful field in-between, like how magnets would create a magnetic field. With the right techniques, this field could be condensed and manipulated in all kinds of ways. This trivia was more interesting than useful, but Zac did wonder if this concept could be somehow used for a life-death core.

It was a bit similar to the marks he had left on the trial wheel in Yrial’s inheritance. The energies of his two attacks had fused back then, which had caused the energies to instantly go haywire and the disk to break apart. But if he kept the two sides separate, would his creation be stabler? Problem was, could you use the theories of a gap or a chasm as a basis for a Cultivator’s Core? Would that leave you with a hollow core? A core with two halves, like a brain?

It seemed possible, but doing so would essentially halve the power it could exhibit, considering he’d only be able to use half the core at any given time. And what would happen if he had a pure miasmic half while staying in his human form? Zac remembered the nauseating feeling of absorbing just a couple of wisps of miasma from a crystal. With a proper core, would he continuously be poisoning himself? Would his Hidden Nodes even let the core stay intact? **Chapter 865**

### **Balance**

The more he had learned from the **[Book of Duality]**, the more he had felt Three Virtues was onto something. The System, and the whole universe for that matter, was based on the concept of balance. **Chapter 867**