Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Ryu shuttled forward with far less burst speed than he had used previously. After crossing the threshold of the outer Sect and vanishing into the fog, he rooted his actions in caution once again, one hand holding up his Matrix and the other hand holding up his lightning needle. 

His fingers nimbly moved about, his Spiritual Sense scanning through the region religiously. 

The area was too quiet. Although solving the puzzle at the gate was a bit difficult, it wasn't to the point where such a Sect or Clan would deem it to be enough to hand over all of their treasures. This meant that there were most definitely other challenges awaiting ahead, it was just odd that they had yet to appear. 

Ryu came to a stop and turned his attention toward the Matrix. 

The purpose of a Matrix was to calculate. It essentially took a personal input, and an environmental input, to give a holistic output. This could range from anything from noting the safest direction to take in a given Ruin, all the way to helping to decode and decrypt puzzles like the one at the gate. 

Essentially, it had a multiplicative effect on Ryu's intelligence. Without the Matrix, it would have taken Ryu several hours and potentially even days to decipher the pattern at the front of the gate, while with the Matrix it took him little more than a few seconds. 

A Matrix was best scene as a blank canvas and its programming was decided by the Ruin Master making use it. It was a lot like the framework of an operating system, while all the bells and whistles were decided by its user within said framework. 

Cubical Matrices were easier to form and they were the most popular, even existing in Sacrum. However, this Matrix was spherical, allowing it to calculate many more variables at once. 

The best way to describe it was simply this: a cube Matrix was binary while a spherical Matrix was quantum.

Cube Matrices were designed in layers from top to bottom. Each layer allowed an additional calculation to be made. For them, the quality was decided by how many layers there were and how many the user could make use of at once. 

Spherical Matrices, though, were beyond this. They didn't have layers and were more like bulbous amoebas. The calculation was spread evenly across the entire surface and the answer it outputted came back encoded and in bits and pieces. 

This was why Cube Matrices were so much more popular. Spherical Matrices simply had learning curves that were far too steep. 

But why was this important now? Why was Ryu thinking about this matter when he had long since been aware of such things? 

The simple truth was that he had run into a problem. A big one. The royal blue Matrix in his palm was being overwhelmed, and quickly at that. 

If Ryu had a cube Matrix, he wouldn't be surprised by this. But a spherical Matrix was designed such that it should be nigh impossible for such a thing to happen. 

All Ryu was doing was trying to calculate which direction to walk toward through all of this fog, something that should have been relatively simple. The only goal was to head toward where the qi was densest. This was a task so simple that under normal circumstances, Ryu wouldn't even need his Matrix to accomplish it. 

The issue was that this fog was clearly designed to fool the senses, and though Ryu's soul strength was powerful, he wasn't overconfident enough to rely on it in this sort of situation. 

The reason for that was simple. This Sect or Clan most definitely had Sky Gods, if they were deadest on fooling his senses, there was very little he could do. In addition, the further he extended his Void Spiritual Sense, the greater surface area the fog would have to latch onto. The greater the surface area, the harder it would be for Ryu to keep his wits about him. 

Ultimately, his best bet was indeed his Matrix, but now it was only a moment away from being overloaded. 

Another key benefit of the Matrix was in its ability to take pressure off of one's Focus Qi. If one would usually need to apply 10 points of Focus Qi to calculate something, the Matrix would allow you to achieve the same result using up only one point. For a spherical Matrix, it would take even a fraction of that. This was absolutely invaluable to Ryu in his first life back when he only had the focus of a mortal. 

This was to say that this Matrix was designed to handle heavy loads, and yet Ryu could tell that if he kept pushing it, it would slam head first into a solid wall and even burst. 

When a Matrix overheated, its structure would collapse and its reliability, even after it cooled down, would be off. You would either need to recalibrate it or rebuild it from scratch, but considering the grade of his Matrix, the current Ryu didn't have the skill to do either. 

'This… should be related to the odd asymmetrical formation…'

Ryu, who was a bit lost for a moment, suddenly stood as straight as a javelin, his gaze sharpening. 

With a thought, he moved both of his hands toward the Matrix, allowing his lightning needle to zip around him as a form of protection. 

He tapped his fingers several times, the speed of his movement becoming faster and faster with each passing moment. 

The Matrix looked a bit like a galaxy, filled with large numbers of stars that floated about a bit aimlessly. However, the more Ryu tapped at the Matrix, the more these starlight dots shifted. 

After several minutes, although the outer edges of the Matrix remained perfectly spherical, the inner floating dots that had once been evenly distributed began to shift. 

First the formed a highly concentrated blob at the very center, but then that blob shifted to the right and then elongated into a more elliptical shape. In the end, any sort of symmetry vanished. 

If others were here to see this moment, they would have recognized the hovering shapes to be almost identical to what Ryu had seen from the gate's puzzle!