~## Reaped Rewards
The benefits, however, were substantial.
A wry thought formed. Well, that was enlightening.
The first and most crucial gain was a working understanding of this reality's base rules. He'd felt them press and shift against his creation energy shield during Oblivion's indirect attacks. A key insight surfaced: the essence of Oblivion was supreme, but the medium through which it expressed its will was not. It was like seeing the difference between pure force and the tools used to apply it ~ the tools could be understood, even if the source remained transcendent.
His divine sense had also evolved. He'd learned to slip it between the seams of local reality, allowing it to function much more as it was originally intended ~ not by brute force, but by clever insinuation.
Then there was his inner world. It was now a sprawling, partitioned cosmos of ninety-three distinct segments, layered and divided by a total of eight luminous Sanskrit walls. From its initial 40 million-mile scope, it had exploded to nearly 482 million miles across. The process was now ingrained: each new segment would absorb chaos energy, grow to its threshold, and then trigger another realm condensation.
Outside, the scope of Creation Energy jumped from 37 miles to 67 miles in one go. The highest jump till date. So all this while, the correlation was also on energy build up and not just life level? He mused while inspecting himself.
The amount of power I can draw out at once is same due to life level associated with cultivation but capacity has increased almost two thousand times.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
Perspective check of internal universe, I mused: larger than four Earth orbits, yet barely half a Source World province~ and those held thousands more.
My existence value climbed, power surging with the exponential faith from trillions of inhabitants. Gods' pleas echoed faintly, their dynasties thriving in the golden age I'd sparked with a jest. Struggle fueled me, but balance reigned ~ no wholesale culls, just endless growth.
His consciousness returned fully to the present, and he stretched his senses outward. Or tried to. He sensed... nothing. An absence so complete it was a presence in itself.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
## Departure
There was no reason to linger. Tao could resume cultivation later, when it served him. What lay around him now was not a world, not even a void ~ only blankness. White without texture, without fluctuation. A space without order, stripped bare of even the rhythms of nothingness. What he observed was similar to the description of 1st globe world of source world reality.
It wasn't Oblivion. The presence of the cosmic entity was gone. This exile-space carried no sense of nihility at all, just emptiness without law or concept. Is this overspace? No somewhere else.
No point staying in a place that, by all rights, shouldn't even be able to exist. His attention turned inward, to the precious fragments of law he had stolen ~ the echoes of nihility copied into his LoHP during his long seclusion. Here, they whispered, waiting for a context to give them meaning.
He raised his hand, and mounting pressure of concept negation bent at his command. A star-shaped aperture blossomed in the void, edges shimmering as though cut from the fabric of unreality.
Tao stepped forward.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
## The Field Test
Now for the practical exam, he thought. With a rudimentary grasp of the local rules, it was time for a field test. His destination: another unique location within Marvel's complex anatomy.
He could have chosen any number of pocket realms or alternate dimensions, but a strange pull ~ a desire for a slightly more familiar environment ~ prompted a direct jump back towards the main temporal stream.
Timing was critical. Before the TVA incident. Before the sacred timeline in the MCU branch began to truly unravel.
He set his coordinates for a place near the Void at the End of Time ~ the TVA's metaphysical junkyard, overflowing with every reality and moment they had pruned from history and cast away.
•°••°•°•°•°•°•°•
It was an unusual choice, but deliberate. The place was a chaotic convergence of broken realities, a patchwork of illusions ~ but from what he could judge of the base rules, it held more coherence than a raw, unstable timeline. It wasn't whole, it wasn't natural, but it was a solid step up from dissolving into pure chaos upon arrival.
"If I'm going to understand this universe," Tao murmured as the portal sealed behind him, "I might as well start where the discarded stories end."
•°••°•°•°•°•°•°•
## The Junkyard of ' Time '
The transition was not clean. He emerged not into a void, nor into any sensible location, but into a state of profound disorientation.
Looks like learning a few laws and immediately jumping to test them was... optimistic. Again. The first, immediate sensation was time, but it was wrong. It felt like a secondary effect, a symptom born from broken causal rules rather than a fundamental force in its own right. Every temporal law he knew from other worlds was absent, replaced by this fractured, sickly echo.
Enclosed in his protective bubble of creation energy, he tried to make sense of his surroundings with his divine sense. The result was a blur ~ a formless smear of something he couldn't resolve. The moment he pushed his consciousness outward, reality recoiled and shifted. Endless lattices of tiny, star-like energy fields materialized, racing along infinite axes, passing through his spiritual form as if he were a ghost.
He felt remote resemblances to familiar laws when they entered his domain, but they were fleeting and distorted. It was all just a chaos of unknown energies... until he saw it. In the distance, a place of sudden, violent disruption, an unnatural scar in the chaotic patterns, marked by the very cluster of rules he had just begun to learn.
•°••°•°•°•°•°•°•
( POV Shift )
## Anchoring
My perspective shifted inward. I had to find a foothold. Selecting a single, drifting fragment of the nihility field, I anchored my divine sense to it as a soul form. Instantly, my perception cleared, and I was presented with a vision - a terrifying one. A giant, smoky head, its maw gaping wide, was about to consume the very point I was sensing.
******
The scenes blurred back into nonsense. But the short, jarring experience had been enough. His LoHP had already analyzed the flaws in his approach and the patterns of the energy fields. Following its intuitive instructions, he began a process of trial and error, duplicating the external energy fields within his own creation power, allowing them to link and synchronize.
He identified some as related to spatial locations, others to nihility, destruction, and forces of symmetry and causality. The blurring slowly resolved into overlapping visions, which grew clearer and more stable with each adjustment. On the seventeenth synchronization point, the world snapped into focus.
The chaotic race of energies settled into a normal flow. He found his spiritual form standing on a grassy plain under a cloudy sky just before time point he wished. And in the distance, he could still see the ghostly head.
## First Observation
First things first, let's not get blown away again. His first action was to secure his presence. He wove the few observable laws of this reality he had managed to duplicate into a circular ring, integrating it into his barrier. This was his anchor, a tether to prevent him from being swept away again by the spatial and temporal streams.
Remove this anchor, and one significant move could send me shifting uncontrollably. Just like my first entry. The principle was frustratingly familiar.
With his footing secure, he tested his divine sense again. It had evolved. Now, it showed him more: a quantum soup of infinite field fluctuations, possibilities and probabilities collapsing and expanding across countless spatial and temporal coordinates. All of it seemed connected to a distant, shimmering crystalline structure existing in a separate dimension entirely.
His divine sense now extended normally and incredibly far in an absolute spatial compass, making everything seem deceptively close yet folded within an n-dimensional space. A maze within a maze within a maze, he observed, an architecture that defied his current logical understanding, save for a few basic universal symmetries. Yet, there was a limit.
Beyond the reach of his creation energy, the stability of his sensing rapidly deteriorated, ceasing entirely after a few million units ~ a range that would need to be twenty times greater to match his perception in a previous world.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
When he restricted himself to the conventional sight of his spiritual body, the overwhelming probability field collapsed back into a few stable, overlapping landscapes.
Utilizing both, he could finally make sense of the rules within his immediate vision. And from this simplified view, he confirmed his suspicion: the ghost face and the realm beyond it existed completely outside the flow of physical time he was feeling. They had no beginning and no end. They were simply a constant, eternal presence, relative only to where he stood.
"Ghost face is Alioth," he noted aloud, the memory clicking into place. "The place outside that dimensional barrier could only be the Citadel at the End of Time."
## Making sense
Now that I was properly anchored, I could finally feel it. The event time I had chosen based on visions is when I wanted to be.
The Citadel wasn't just at the end of time; it occupied every moment at once. Past, present, and future were all smashed together into a single, eternal now.
Standing in this void was a dizzying experience - like trying to walk sideways along the edge of a waterfall, watching the water crash below in a loop that never began and never ended. Nothing here moved through time unless some fundamental law of causality physically forced it onto this bizarre, perpendicular track.
Reduced to normal perception and solid ground, LoHP recognized the symmetry of time - space translation invariance. Since it had virtually no filter for observational limit, it bagan to trace back to laws of reality on its own.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
Good. Within my domain, anything with an energy quality lower than my own is observable. He had no intention of staying idle. His physical senses analyzed the makeup of matter and cosmic ambient energy, while his soul observed the deeper interactions and decay processes.
An unknown amount of time passed like this, until understanding dawned. His eyes opened with new realizations. The rules of this place played by a different logic.
Maybe it makes sense if the whole cosmos started as some kind of primordial consciousness, he theorized. Whatever the reason, reality here responded to pure, focused intent with an almost instinctive precision, more than it did to the structured resonance of laws he was used to.
He decided to test it. I can play it safe as long as I prevent any interaction from leaving my absolute domain.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
## Intent
Tao held out his hand, willing the ambient energy around to condense, it was extremely difficult.
But provide the intent more details : : some techniques like the calculated channeling of a basic Qi manipulation technique through the lens of the new rules perceiving within his domain. A sphere of brilliant, raw golden light - pure, unfiltered cosmic energy - flared to life in his palm.
So, level of detail in intent was the key here. He experimented more focussing on that thought.
When details pulled after forming, some chaotic energy emerges reducing the build-up, but also stabilizing what formed without coherent intent. It collapses when details fall below a threshold. It is like universe saying: Ask properly, I can't understand!
Fascinating. On the whole the process ran on full efficiency. Is this ... Magic?
A sword intent condensed on his fingertip and cut the space as if it were nothing.
I can't perceive the world's 'intent,' but I can convey my own. It's the power of conscious will, acting on an understanding of the Dao. The Will, is the one constant of his own. His identity - a constant he'd sensed in every cultivation world, and it was the same force manipulating his creation domain.
He kept manipulating , sending focused intents of working rules and techniques he learned in cultivation worlds through his thoughts. The stabilizing agent, whatever it is,.. gives him idea of how different the close approximation of same rules are designed around here.
Finally, he felt a click of understanding. There. I've got the hang of it.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
## Appearance
He dispelled the energy sphere. A more immediate concern surfaced: his own appearance. He was completely out of place.
It's funny how your sense of 'normal' shifts, he reflected. When he first woke in the Tales of Demons and Gods world, everything had an artificial, almost cartoonish quality. It grated at first, but he got used to it. Luo Zheng's world was the same ~ a new but similar aesthetic, stylized rules. You just accept the new universe as the baseline.
•°••°•°•°•°•°•°•
His first trip to a random timeline had been magnificent, but cut short. And Oblivion had been... nothing to perceive. But this? This was different. This place felt genuinely real, and the difference hit him like a physical blow.
He used a short-range spatial hop, relying on his eyesight, to move onto solid ground. He moved across the terrain, and for the first time, the world didn't shift into chaos. The space-time rules here are just more stable than random timeline, and I've learned to anchor myself better.
•°••°•°•°•°•°•°•
## Adjusting
The sensory details were overwhelming. Even the grass under his feet, seen through his protective barrier, was packed with an insane level of detail. Every single thing radiated a depth and texture he'd never had to process before.
It wasn't just that the grass was green. It fractured into a dozen different shades, shifting with an unseen light, each hue whispering about its texture, its age, its slow decay. It's an absolute pleasure... and a nightmare, he thought, sensing the sheer information pouring from something so ordinary.
A single leaf wasn't a flat, green shape. Its veins branched in precise, fractal geometry. Shadows fell with a weight that felt deliberate. He saw wood grain that spiraled in infinite, unique variations, stone surfaces rough and complex. Even the shadows were sharp and definite, as if the laws of geometry were being strictly enforced.
•°••°•°•°•°•°•°•
This wasn't nostalgia from his past life. This was new, and unforgiving, thanks to his enhanced sight. When he narrowed his divine sense to stabilize the vision and pushed it deeper, the world didn't stop giving up its secrets. The details just kept going, down to the subatomic level. Each layer refused to simplify. Reality itself was insisting he see it exactly as it was.
No mortal could handle this. I'm not sure the saints from my old worlds could endure such relentless, colorful clarity.
That's when he noticed the light.
It wasn't from any sun he recognized. It just filled the realm, a warmth without a source he could perceive. His senses mapped a dead stellar system orbiting in the distance, entire realities that had been pruned and tossed aside. But the glow didn't come from its dead star. The light here followed its own set of rules.
•°••°•°•°•°•°•°•
Weird distortions kept rippling at the edge of his awareness ~ laws of physics of past life, bending in ways that made no sense. This isn't just a graveyard for timelines, he realized. It's a realm stitched together from rules no normal universe would ever allow.
A half-remembered bit of comic book lore tugged at his mind. Some stories claimed the Void was inside the Microverse. Others called it a fold in the Quantum Realm. Staring out at this impossible place, both guesses suddenly seemed entirely plausible.