Quan Neng Wu Ji Chu Zhi

An Authority is not simply a technique performed within the world: it is a cultivator's soul and core imposed upon part of the world, and keeping that imposition in place demands continuous power and control. The rule's central tension is between the cultivator's will to overwrite reality and the world's effort to return to its original state. Arc's damaged Authority makes that cost visible as a practical crisis: without feng shui and a leyline to stabilize it, her power leaks, disables her, and resumes killing around her when she wakes.

What an Authority requires

To reach the Fifth Coil, a cultivator expands their core beyond the body, overwrites the world's qi, and paints over it with their soul. This grants temporary Authority over a portion of the Dao, a feat described as approaching the divine. The form of that Authority is individual: it reflects both the cultivator's chosen Path and their true self. It is therefore neither a standard technique that another cultivator can simply reproduce nor an ordinary territory that exists independently of its maker. Its distinctiveness is part of what makes it powerful, but also makes its maintenance specific to the person who created it.

The world does not passively accept this alteration. It actively resists and tries to recover its original state, so sustaining an Authority requires immense reserves of qi and concentration. That resistance makes duration a hard limit, not a matter of preference: the longest recorded Authority lasted four hours. The Fifth Coil is consequently treated as a gulf between the great and the legendary. No Elder in the Stoneskin Sect had achieved it; one came close but ruptured their core and died. The possibility of extending one's reach beyond the body thus carries a risk at the level of the core itself.

Arc's damaged Authority

Yuan first interprets the unnatural Ammobog as the physical expression of a Gunsoul's core overwriting the universe. Its existence for years seems impossible under the known limit: even a legendary Gunsoul should not be able to sustain an Authority for that long. His encounter with Arc supplies a different explanation and exposes the weakness in the apparent permanence. Arc identifies the place as Headshot Forge, not the Ammobog, and says that what Yuan sees is not its natural state because she no longer controls her Authority.

Arc explains that she fought a powerful death-worshiping cultivator who also wielded an Authority. Their manifestations clashed, damaging both. Arc defeated her opponent, but he destroyed her body and damaged her soul before going to the Nowhere. Her squire, unaware of the immortality of Gunsouls, planted her bullet-core in the land. Arc's flesh grew back and healed; her bullet-core did not. The distinction matters: bodily recovery did not restore the core that governs her Authority, so survival left her with power she could not reliably command.

Leaking power and the cost to others

Authorities can be restrained behind closed boundaries to concentrate their potency. Arc's, by contrast, has open borders. Her damaged core cannot stop its qi from leaking, and the Authority spreads until it thins, still tainting everything within five kilometers of her. Yuan compares that weakened spread to a puddle, but its reduced concentration does not make it harmless. It remains a domain imposed upon the surrounding world—and one whose effects Arc cannot consistently control.

Feng shui gives Arc a way to draw upon the local leyline and stabilize her Authority. Without that support, the qi continues leaking until she loses consciousness; on waking, her Authority activates again. Headshot Forge then attacks anyone in its premises unless Arc focuses on sparing them. The danger falls especially heavily on Scraps, including the Bullet Church cultists: lacking a strong qi signature for Arc to detect, they may be killed before she can react to their presence. The corpses Yuan finds near her and the cultist killed upon crossing into her territory are not evidence of deliberate targeting; they are consequences of a malfunctioning Authority operating around its injured creator.

Containment, not mastery

Arc's predicament shows that an Authority's duration cannot be understood apart from its condition and support. A maintained domain consumes qi and concentration while the world pushes back; a damaged core, open boundaries, and inadequate stabilization make that burden harder to bear, not easier. The Ammobog's years-long existence initially appears to overturn the four-hour record, but Arc's account reveals a persistently active, unstable Authority rather than proof that the ordinary demands of maintenance have disappeared.

The rule also turns power into a constraint on movement and choice. Arc says that she cannot leave the leyline without her Authority going haywire, and refuses to use a Human Pillar to solve the problem. In her own accounting, the alternatives had been to kill herself, become a mobile disaster, or stay where she was; she chose to remain. Her case makes the practical meaning of maintenance stark: when the core cannot sustain controlled boundaries on its own, dependence on a leyline can confine the cultivator, while everyone nearby bears the cost of the power that continues to escape.