Closing his third-eye back up, Minos sat back in his bed as he considered his entire journey, this new ability the culmination of all his years of suffering.
But the journey wasn't over, and similarly his third-eye still had room to grow, so sitting back up with determination, Minos began cultivating once more.
He still had a few pills left, not to mention now that he had his Divine Sense, he could officially enter the Aperture Opening Realm.
With everything in place, Minos was about to swallow another Nine-Stripped Golden Pill, but he suddenly remembered something.
Re-opening his third-eye, he activated his True Vision, looking down on the Nine-Stripped Golden Pill and all the information held within it.
Despite its small size, the information held within it was incredibly dense, so Minos had to look around a bit before finding what he wanted.
But soon enough he found what he wanted, the information regarding the pills' medicinal power.
Thinking a bit, he decided to raise it by another 10%, immediately noticing an equivalent amount of Nux had vanished from within him.
In fact it was even worse than that, after all the efficiency of his True Vision exchange was 100%, whereas his own absorption was nearly perfect, but wasn't quite there, so he actually still lost energy.
'Like I thought, I can't just abuse this power to generate infinite Nux. It seems to function on the notion of equivalent exchange.'
Realizing that, Minos decided to test further, this time only temporarily enhancing the pills efficiency by 10% before quickly swallowing it.
Not unexpectedly, not long after he absorbed the pill, 10% of the Nux he had generated disappeared completely, Minos a bit disappointed to find there were no loopholes.
Shaking his head slightly, he put away the idea of 'cheating,' regathering his focus on his apertures.
The order of filling one's apertures didn't actually matter, and people would just fill the ones they had access to.
While aperture's were much smaller compared to one's Inner Heaven, they won out in pure numbers, about a hundred of them equalling an average person's Inner Heaven at completion.
This rule typically persisted for everyone given that the size of one's apertures was correlated to the size of their Inner Heaven, those who had given birth to larger Inner Heaven's would have equally larger apertures in turn.
With thousands of such apertures, it was only a matter of time before their Nux reached completely new levels, though similar it meant that in the early stages, they wouldn't be much stronger than advanced Inner Heaven Cultivators.
Fortunately Minos had these powerful pills on hand, combined with his Heaven Forsaken Furnace Technique, he could rapidly advance past this moment of weakness.
With the seven pills still left, Minos managed to fill up 110 apertures, allowing his Nux to go even further.
Combined with his Divine Sense that allowed him to use his Nux far more efficiently than before, his power had easily gone up multiple steps.
Not to mention Divine Sense could allow one to also control the Nux within its domain, giving them access to not only their Nux, but the Nux around them as well.
How could the body compare to the entire world? The stronger and larger one's Divine Sense was, the more they could manipulate the environment's Nux, allowing them access to incredibly destructive powers, far beyond the understanding of those without Divine Sense.
Once again extending his Divine Sense, this time Minos took control of the Nux around him, gathering it into a small storm.
Just this alone was comparable to his strength from before his breakthrough, not to mention when he combined his own Nux into the mix.
Of course this wasn't the place to test out his new strength, not to mention the night was late, so despite his excitement, Minos decided not to annoy the neighborhood, spending the rest of the night in silent cultivation.
…
Opening his eyes as the light entered his room, the first thing Minos did was look down towards the two little ants that he had blessed.
Closing his eyes once more, Minos opened his third-eye, the golden pupil revealing itself to the world, causing the everything's soul flames to reappear around him.
With a tug from his golden eye, a random insect's soul flew up into his hand, though this time he didn't 'baptize' it.
Instead he just 'peeked' into it, causing his vision to pull into the soul, reappearing in a vast white space.
Looking around, Minos found all sorts of images floating around, these being all the memories the small ant had gathered throughout its life.
Raising his hand, he beckoned towards an image at random, causing it to quickly fly into his hands.
Tapping the picture, it began playing, showcasing an entire day in the small ants life, from scavenging, to resting, to eating.
Instinctively, Minos could instantly tell exactly what period this image belonged, and exactly how old the ant was when it happened.
Tossing the image back into the sky, he grabbed another one, though this time instead of playing anything, he just flicked the image, causing it to shatter into thousands of pieces, which the white space began slowly absorbing.
Just like that, a day in the ants life was permanently gone, having been destroyed by Minos.
But luckily for the ant, Minos wasn't so malicious, so with another wave of his hand he regathered the thousands of pieces and easily put them back together, restoring the memory completely.
Though he wasn't done yet, this time directly ripping a chunk of the white space from the floor, proceeding to knead it into a thin frame.
Raising his finger, he began drawing on the frame, his tremendous art skills allowing him to create photorealistic drawings with no problems.
After drawing on one frame, he drew on another, and then another, finally drawing thousands of such frames.
Controlling them with his mind, he had the thousands of frames fly up before controlling them to fuse into one another.
Despite rejecting each other at first, they eventually came together in the end, snapping into a single image that was similar to the others floating around it.
Bringing it back down into his hands, Minos tapped on it, revealing another ordinary day in an ant's life, though this day was completely fake, a figment of Minos's imagination.
Of course the ant would never be able to tell the difference, though that wasn't the ant's fault, after all it was unlikely even a human could tell the difference with how skilled Minos was.
Tossing the image back up into the sky, Minos's vision snapped back into his body, promptly tossing the ants soul back into its place.
As he did that, he noticed a large and energetic soul flame head towards him from behind the door, Minos immediately recognizing Tylia's soul signature.
Just as he expected, as he closed his Soul Vision, a knock came at the door, Tylia's voice from beyond.
"Minos, you awake?"
"I'm up, come in." He replied.
Opening the door, Tylia was about to say something, but she suddenly froze as she looked at Minos, her heart telling her something was off.
"Something wrong?" Minos asked the frozen Tylia.
"You look different, but also the same… Did something happen to you last night?" She asked.
"Does a breakthrough count?"
"Breakthrough, really! Great, and the timing is perfect!" Tylia said excitedly, not even bothered to ask what his strength was right now.
After all they had already fought before, and while Tylia had held back pretty hard, not even using her Divine Sense, a loss was a loss.
Not to mention Minos hadn't used Divine Sense either, so she couldn't exactly complain on that front.
"Speaking of timing, so is yours. I've wanted to test out my new strength, so how about a little spar?"
"So you can humiliate me again? No thank you."
"No humiliation, it's just for me to get an understanding of my new strength. Besides, let's not bet this time, we'll just do it for fun."
"... Fine, but only so you don't blame me if you perform poorly during the Battle of Strength."
Like that, the two headed towards the backyard, which thanks to Suki's generosity, was extremely large.
"On your go." Tylia shouted from across the field.
"Go." Minos said, though neither attacked right away, just looking at each other.
Though what Tylia didn't realize was that Minos had already activated his Soul Vision secretly, having long realized he could still still use his abilities without revealing his third-eye.
Of course this didn't come at no cost, and his power's were slightly weakened in this state, though it was still plenty.