The third bolt formed like a promise unkept.
It wasn't lightning. Not anymore. Not truly. It was something older than storm, older than law—older, perhaps, than even sin. A verdict in waiting, a celestial finality braided from starlight, the wrath of disappointed ancestors, and the sheer fury of a cycle interrupted too cleanly.
It did not crackle—it groaned. The heavens strained to contain it, stretching from the storm's convulsing center outwards like an inverted tower that swallowed constellations. Its presence alone dimmed the world. Clouds scattered. Suns blinked. Light itself forgot how to bend.
A pillar of judgment had been born.
And it cast a shadow so wide, it touched oceans omniverses away.
Sevven looked up.
No defense. No shield. No tricks. Just his soul, raw and unraveling, and his will—bared like an altar.
He didn't flinch.
He didn't beg.
He didn't whisper prayers to a heaven that already hated him.
He opened his arms.
"I accept," he said. Not with arrogance. With completion.
And heaven—punched.
Punched him not.
The bolt descended with the sound of a planet's heartbeat halting mid-beat.
No thunder. No crescendo.
Just finality, abrupt and omniscient.
Time didn't slow.
It shattered.
The mountain, ancient and stubborn, exploded.
Not collapsed—ceased.
The entire peak Varka's base stood on vaporized in one godless instant, transmuting to nothingness as if it had offended the concept of existence.
Stone didn't break. It dissolved.
A valley once lush with sacred beasts, herbs and divine flora was reduced to molten memory. The shockwave that followed was not a wave—it was a wave goodbye. It raced across the horizon with the force of a goodbye scream, flattening ancient forests, bending rivers backwards, and obliterating every breath within ten miles.
A golden phoenix—mid-flight—caught fire from awe alone. No flame touched it. It burned from understanding.
A divine tortoise, older than kings, dug into the earth—not for safety, but to pretend it was never born.
The sky itself changed shade, a color unseen since the first god bled.
And still the bolt burned.
It wasn't done. It wasn't satisfied with contact. It wanted erasure.
It wasn't vengeance.
It was example.
It would never be defied. Not even by other Dao's.
{Changing complaints? Switching to Varka now? What a Karen. Anyways, NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!}
Inside the vortex, Sevven screamed with Intent.
Not from the pain of flame which grazed him—but from truth.
His brother was next.
The one who made this possible.
His soul convulsed as layers of self were torn—not by force, but by exposure.
Every lie he'd whispered into the mirror. Every gentle illusion he'd cradled to sleep at night. Every righteous justification for every monstrous act.
All of it was pulled into the open—and set alight, by that flame.
{{You think purpose makes you worthy?}}
{{You think cleverness earns eternity?}}
{{You think pain is permission?}}
The voice was not spoken.
It was inscribed. Directly into the marrow of his essence.
The heavens weren't angry.
They were disappointed.
And disappointment—true, cosmic, eternal disappointment—cuts deeper than hate ever could.
The berated one had stopped listening. Time followed him.
Sevven clutched his chest as time slowed down, soul-light flickering, as something inside him gave way.
Not a bone.
Not a spell.
Not even the alchemical binder.
Something deeper.
His will—
cracked.
A fracture ran deep, where resolve once stood unshaken.
For the first time in eons…
he hesitated.
The secret he swore to bury.
The one Varka was never meant to know.
No one was meant to know.
The truth sealed beyond time, behind a lock only madness could turn.
He had long comprehended madness, and now…
he had decided.
To break the seal.
To unleash it.
To use the very thing that should never exist.
The Eternity Shard
The stars would feel this.
And reality would never recover.
If Sevven was fortunate enough to have a system…
he'd probably see something like:
[Artifact Detected: The Eternity Shard]
[Type: Forbidden-Class Temporal Relic]
[Origin]
Forged in the ruins of the Fractured Aeon, from the crystallized remnants of a dead Time Deity's heart. Sealed away before the Great Collapse. Location: [*&^%)($#@!!].
[Functions]
[Chrono Shift - Past]: Traverse to any moment in recorded history.
• [Chrono Shift - Future]: Leap across uncharted futures.
• [Temporal Lockdown]: Freeze the current timeline completely.
• [Heaven's Veil]: Conceal all actions from the Eyes of the Heavens, Celestials, and Reality Watchers.
[Activation Cost]
1 Googol Omniversal Spirit Stones.
• 50% of the User's Will — permanently lost, unrecoverable across all lifelines.
[Restrictions]
Can only be activated once per user.
• Cannot be used on the same timeline more than once.
• Every use increases the entropy of reality by an exponential factor. User is unable to interact freely while active.
[Duration: 0.1 nanosecond]
With the remainder of his will, he rushed to take on Varka's tribulation for himself.
Time flowed again.
For the first time since this insane, impossible ritual had begun—he faltered. Not for long.
Just for a second. His will was that strong, even with half gone… Forever.
But one second… was enough.
The bolt pushed deeper. Harder.
Not like an attack.
Like an inhalation—as if heaven itself was trying to suck the soul from the wound.
The binder ruptured.
The lattice collapsed.
The soul-structure groaned as the reincarnation matrix folded like crumpled paper, screaming in radiant red runes that bled fire instead of light.
His essence flickered—ghostlike, fractured, no longer luminous.
He was breaking.
Far away—so far even sound feared the distance—Varka dropped the glowing beaker mid-incantation.
It shattered against obsidian stone, not releasing smoke, but silence.
His body froze, the air thick with the absence of sound, as if the universe itself had stopped in recognition. He didn't clutch his chest. He didn't fall to his knees. He just… paused.
The stillness of a man who had heard a sound without ears. Felt a fracture without pain.
His hand hung in the air, sigil half-formed—an unfinished spell, an incomplete thought.
"He didn't fight back," Varka murmured, the words hollow, as though the language itself had no weight to them.
For a long moment, there was nothing. Not grief. Not rage. Just the bitter silence of realization, slowly gnawing at him.
But then, slowly—like a distant storm, the memories began to pour in.
Trillions of years.
The first time they met. Sevven, still young, stubborn, brash—his brother-in-arms, charging into battle with a smile, dragging Varka along with that relentless energy. The wild laughter that echoed across battlefields. The secrets they shared in the quiet of the night, away from the prying eyes of gods and mortals alike.
The times they argued. The thousand moments of anger, the insults traded, the pushes and shoves. But always—always, there was understanding, the unsaid promise that no matter how far they drifted, they'd always find their way back to each other.
The loss of innocence. The night they watched civilizations burn, hands stained with more than blood. The endless war between light and dark that had shaped them into what they were—both of them broken, but still whole because they had each other.
The quiet moments. When nothing else mattered. Their conversations that ran so deep, they forgot the passage of time. The look Sevven would give when they didn't need to speak—just knowing, in the deepest part of their souls, that they were unbreakable together.
A flood of memories crashed through his mind like waves crashing against the shore. Trillions of years—all of it falling apart in an instant, and for the first time in countless eons, Varka couldn't push them away.
The overwhelming weight of the bond they shared began to crush him.
He stood there, unmoving. Unfeeling.
But then it happened. Something so small, so human, that it felt foreign to him. A tremor.
He didn't even remember how to cry anymore. It was like a distant memory of a skill forgotten over the ages, a human trait he'd abandoned for the sake of power and control. But now, with the weight of those memories bearing down on him, he felt it.
A single tear.
It slid down his face, slow and uncertain. Not for the loss of his brother—but for what he had allowed to die between them. The unspoken promise that had shattered, the connection that had once been so strong, now irreparably broken.
He stood there, face cold, but inside—a storm raged.
A bond forged over eons had finally been broken.
In the Southern Empire, in a throne room adorned with prophetic jade and cursed scripture, the Oracle-King turned from his scrying pool with serene conviction.
"It's done," he whispered. "The heretic is gone… life will be so much dimmer now…"
The court erupted. Laughter. Praise. Joy.
But they all had one thing in common. Their hearts held deep respect.
The heavens had spoken.
Their greatest fear—exorcised by karma itself.
On a floating mountain within the Tower of Frozen Dreams, Master Linx opened his fourfold eyes.
He exhaled once, eyes glowing dimly.
"Retrieve his vaults. Burn his sect. Slay the legacy."
Then, colder still:
"His disciples are now orphans."
No one questioned him.
They simply moved.
None of them knew how Sevven had protected his junior brother.
They never really understood how he did anything anyways.
Back on the mountain—if it could still be called that—there was nothing left.
Not rubble. Not ruin. Absence.
Where the Ritual Platform had once stood, anchored by runes and ancient divinity, now there was only a crater.
Perfect. Circular. Bottomless.
At its center?
A single burning mote of soul-light.
No shape. No name.
Just… will. The last of it.
It pulsed once—like a heartbeat too tired to continue.
And then—Whoosh.
Nothing.
It was gone. Sevven was dead.
The world felt it. His allies. His enemies. The trees he once climbed. The beasts who once spared him.
The sword he forged with his soul and sealed beneath the First Lake—shattered, blade first, in its sheath.
Across the continent, spirit stones dimmed for a breath.
Temples felt hollow. Even the air changed weight.
In the far north, in a monastery sculpted from moonlight and frost, a blind girl paused mid-prayer. Her hand trembled. Her voice fell to a whisper.
"...he failed?"
No one answered.
But the wind turned.
And yet.
Deep within the crater, unseen by god, ghost, or the hungry mouth of fate—something flickered.
It wasn't light. Not exactly.
It possessed the memory of a flame. A flame once tied to it.
Barely there. A shimmer. A breath. A secret.
Something too stubborn to stop existing.
Too purpose-driven to dissolve completely.
Not a soul.
Not a ghost.
Not a spark of vengeance.
Just… something.
It looked like… A Shard.
The eye of the storm was long gone.
But the silence left behind?
It "watched".