Pretending To Be A Boss
Chapter 846 - 36: Vertical and Horizontal_3

It was quite strange; when Tang Xian picked up the Soul Crystal, he felt an extremely unusual sensation.

It seemed as if the sounds around him became clearer, and the things in his eyes moved more slowly...

Tang Xian had never experienced such a mysterious feeling before; he felt that with every breath he took, he could sense the trajectory of changes in everything.

Most of the time, if there was a way to uncover the truth, Tang Xian would choose to seek the best path to explore it rather than guess.

But if a matter could only be speculated, he would also try to hypothesize.

He vaguely had a guess:

"The Beast Gods are divine beings; their Soul Crystals are red. And Lord Destroyer himself is an orange-tier creature. A creature shouldn't have two Soul Crystals... but what if, the so-called vertical and horizontal powers, are actually just one Soul Crystal?"

Once this thought emerged, it devoured all other possibilities Tang Xian had considered like a demon.

That's right, what if these two Soul Crystals were actually just one? Perhaps they were just forcibly separated.

Tang Xian continued his train of thought, following his intuition.

"But why?"

"Why would the Destroyer choose to halt his own evolution?"

The transformation of a Soul Crystal from orange to red symbolizes evolution. Does one that's half orange and half red signify an interrupted evolution? No one could have stopped the Destroyer from evolving; throughout his life, he roamed freely, the only one capable of stopping him was himself.

"Hmm..."

Tang Xian, like a mathematician resolving a hypothesis, gently tapped his fingers on the copper platform. When he held onto the Soul Crystal for longer, Tang Xian found that his life force, which should have been in a stasis for a while, was actually healing him slowly.

Very slowly, indeed, but the recovery time after burning his double-tier talent had decreased significantly.

"The evolution of a creature greatly enhances certain abilities, but the higher the level and tier of the creature, the more limited its evolutionary directions become. It's like a single-celled organism; if it is destined to evolve, no one can predict the direction of its evolution. However, a creature that has already evolved to a certain extent, its evolutionary direction can be inferred from its needs."

Suddenly, Tang Xian thought of the words "vertical" and "horizontal"—perhaps they were the key.

"Vertical... Horizontal..."

"Vertical represents breakthrough, horizontal represents extension..."

"Why did Lord Destroyer stop his own evolution? Why did he say his abilities are divided into vertical and horizontal powers?"

"Perhaps in the process of evolving into a Beast God, he saw his own limits? Evolution may bring an increase in power, but it also brings more restrictions... That's it, the path he seeks is that his own refinement can surpass the essence of evolution itself. This aligns with Lord Destroyer's ideology, so he halted evolution because he saw where his limits lay."

"Then what exactly is the horizontal power?"

Tang Xian speculated that attaining vertical power might dramatically improve certain attributes such as strength, speed, and endurance. But since horizontal power is different from vertical power, it naturally enhances other abilities.

Horizontal power might represent some potential, some kind of creative ability.

It's precisely because Destroyer rarely relied on this kind of power, overly dependent on brute force, that there was also regression in the process of evolution.

Was it because he discovered this that he halted his own evolution?

The Destroyer is a combat genius; everyone in the world knows his unrivaled prowess in physical combat, using one method to defeat all others.

But through Red Emperor, Tang Xian understood one thing: perhaps Lord Destroyer... was a genius who had been severely underestimated.

Because with just one battle against the Master of Eden, he figured out the domain to counteract Eden's laws. In the countless years, among the many powerful creatures in the mines, only Destroyer knew of this.

Horizontal power, perhaps a capability that Lord Destroyer holds in higher regard, only he discovered it a bit too late?

After pondering for a while, Tang Xian stopped thinking, because he suddenly realized something:

"No, why should I be fixated, children make choices, I want them all."

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