Klaus stared blankly at the sky, quiet resignation and exhaustion reflected in the deep, dark purple of his eyes.
His appearance had changed. Well, at least his soul had. Physically, the only visible difference was the color of his eyes, now a deeper shade of purple, almost black.
And his spirit sea… was it even a spirit sea anymore? Klaus didn't know what to make of it. It felt unfamiliar and distant. No longer something he could fully understand.
Fortunately, one of his soldiers had found him lying in the ruins and pulled him out. If not for that, he might have ended up as some random beast's next meal. That was the only reason he was still breathing.
He sighed, closing his eyes for a moment and then opened them again, this time within his inner world.
The cosmos-like spirit sea was gone.
Now, there was only a vast tapestry of dark purple mist, nebula-like and ever-shifting, with fiery golden orbs suspended in a boundless void.
Klaus felt dazed, disoriented, as streams of unfamiliar information flooded his mind. He clutched his head in a mix of disbelief and pain, his eyes fixed on the surreal landscape of his new soul sea.
It felt... unstable. As if every dimensional anchor had failed to triangulate space.
He didn't know why but he had theories. Maybe it was the recursive layering, collapsing onto itself in a loop without center. Or maybe… it had become something akin to a singularity. Dense, paradoxical, and incomprehensible.
Whatever it was, he could barely grasp it which further irritated him.
But what surprised him even more wasn't just the void or the mist. It was the strange, elegant structures floating within it.
Clusters of spherical formations drifted gently in the dark, some smooth and softly glowing, others encased in intricate, honeycomb-like membranes. They pulsed faintly, as if alive, as if dreaming. It felt like he was witnessing someone's subconscious or perhaps his own. And yet… he knew it wasn't.
Klaus felt awkward in this space, a foreigner in his own soul. But at the same time, it felt right. Like this was his place of power.
Reaching out, Klaus brushed his fingers against a trail of golden particles drifting through the void. They shimmered like burning embers, casting a soft, golden glow of divinity across the dark, fluid mist. A smoke-like vapor of deep purple that pulsed with every beat of the space around him.
He stepped forward and found footing on a vast network of dendritic branches. They resembled neurons, sprawling in intricate fractal patterns that stretched into the distance. As his foot touched one, it pulsed beneath him.
Bioluminescent light surged at the points of contact, spreading in rippling bursts of dark purple and gold. The signals moved like electrical impulses or perhaps data packets, carrying some unknown message across this surreal soulscape.
He kept walking, though every step made him feel more like a stranger in his own soul sea. There was something wrong about this place, something unnatural that sent an instinctive chill through his spine. A quiet, creeping fear began to grow in him.
He blinked.... Something wasn't right.
Summoning the Omnitool, Klaus watched as the liquid metal solidified into the shape of a shovel. He hurled it forward with a flick of his wrist yet it didn't fly.
It simply hung there, motionless in the air, suspended mid-arc as if time or force had no meaning. As if inertia itself had abandoned this realm.
Klaus narrowed his eyes.
Then, without warning, the shovel accelerated forward violently and stopped again. Not because of resistance or any touch of his will. It just did.
He frowned, deeply disturbed.
"There's no link between force and motion…"
His voice was low, disbelieving. But he was right. The laws of motion... fundamental, once unbreakable law, newtonian or otherwise, no longer applied here. His soul sea had divorced itself from reality's most basic truths.
He reached out mentally, intending to summon the Omnitool back to his hand but before he could even finish the thought, it was already there, resting in his palm.
His frown deepened.
"What the hell…"
He blinked, feeling a cold grip of dread tighten around his heart.
Klaus was smart. Intelligent, calculating, and deeply analytical. And because of that, he was always wary of things he couldn't explain. And right now? Nothing made sense.
Cause no longer preceded effect. Time existed in fractured splinters, stripped of meaning. Events were happening in reverse… or entirely out of order.
"So what now? Normally, I'd think about summoning the Omnitool, and then it would appear…" He glanced down at his hand. "But it was already there before I even thought of it. What a chaotic environment."
He ran a hand through his hair, breathing slowly through the rising panic. Everything he'd witnessed, everything he'd survived was weighing on him. But this?
This was different.
The arrow of time had broken in this place.
"If what I'm seeing is true… this breaks the principle of causality. And that's fundamental to all known science." His voice was low, almost breathless. "But then… why am I not being affected by any of it?"
He paused, eyes narrowing.
Indeed... somehow, he stood outside the influence of this chaotic environment.
Bewildered, Klaus glanced at his runes. Curious, and just a little wary of what he might see.
Name: ???
True Name: O?d?st Dr?a?
Aspect Name: VoidWalker
Aspect Description:
You are a fool, a defiant spirit who challenges the impossible, knowing that the final outcome may be naught but an illusion.
Klaus frowned, his expression growing more conflicted by the second. What was this? Why were there question marks where his name should be? It didn't make sense.
So what now? Was he nameless?
He had worn many names throughout his life. But the one he had truly accepted was Icarus which he had long buriedand replaced by Klaus.
And now, even that was destroyed.
His frown deepened. Shaking his head, he continued reading.
Aspect Rank: Divine
Flaw: Apple of Eden
[Your desires are amplified.]
Innate Ability:
Divine Eyes of Void
Rank: Ascended
Class: Tyrant
Chaos Cores: [5/7]
Chaos Fragments: [1234/5000]
Nothing seemed off at first. His aspect rank, flaw, and innate ability had remained the same. There was nothing unusual about those.
But… Chaos Cores?
He stared at the term, confused.
There were supposed to be spirit cores and spirit fragments. Not Chaos Cores and Chaos Fragments...
What the hell was going on?
Everything he read only deepened the fog in his mind. And yet, as he looked around at his spirit sea… or whatever it had become. it almost made sense.
No longer a spirit sea, but a Chaos Sea.
The collapse of fundamental laws, the disjointed time, the paradoxes... It was really chaotic, uncontrollable and unpredictable.
Endless Chaos...
That phrase echoed in his thoughts. It felt disturbingly familiar, like a whisper from someone he couldn't remember.
Someone who had once spoken those words into his ear.
Strange...
But that wasn't all. When had he become a Tyrant?
He was still supposed to be a Devil. his core hadn't even reached saturation. Technically, he should have advanced already, but he had held himself back, sealing away every spirit fragment he collected. He'd planned to absorb them later, carefully, without wasting a single drop.
But maybe… during the assimilation of the Drop of Ichor, the seal had weakened. Maybe all the fragments had been pulled in and devoured along with the Ichor itself.
That… that was another possibility.
Attributes: [Flame of Divinity], [Mentor of Deceit], [Wisdom of Uriel], [Law of Original Sin], [Cold-blooded], [Narrator]
At least his attributes remained the same. That was a small comfort. Klaus didn't want to dig deeper into secrets he wasn't ready for. there were already too many questions and no damn answers. Sure, he had theories, but at the end of the day, those were just that: theories, not facts.
He sighed and then froze. Wait, could he even sigh here? Probably not. Bloody hell, everything was so disorienting and confusing. Klaus grimaced, trying to steady himself, then continued reading the runes.
…Wait, what the hell?
[Chaos]
There it was... a new attribute. So not everything had stayed the same, after all.
Klaus focused on the runes, intrigued by the new attribute. If it came from his lineage memory, then it had to mean something... enhancing his physical capabilities or maybe a boost to existing abilities. Whatever it was, he assumed it was beneficial. And at this point, he didn't care much for the why, only the what.
[Chaos]
Attribute Description: [Chaos is the personification of everything that cannot be understood, of the relative and always changing. It is the pillar of the unknown, the unexplored, and the unseen.]
He stared at the glowing runes, dumbfounded.
"…That's it?" he muttered under his breath.
No abilities. No numbers. No effects. Just a vague, poetic line that told him absolutely nothing useful.
What was this supposed to mean?
Is my Aspect not tied to space-time and change, but Chaos itself?
The idea struck him like a whisper. Slowly, it started to make sense.
Space-time was structured... governed by laws, anchored in constants. Even "change" followed patterns: progression, evolution, cause and effect.
But Chaos?
Chaos was the opposite. It was the breakdown of pattern, the rejection of order. A state of becoming and unbecoming at once. Shifting, unstable and infinite.
Maybe that's why everything felt so wrong now. Why motion, time, even cause and effect had stopped making sense. Maybe this wasn't a side effect… but dormant side of his aspect.
"How intriguing…" Klaus muttered, eyes narrowing as he stared into the runes, their glow reflecting in his darkened gaze. "It makes sense… in some twisted way."
He paced slowly through the fractured tendrils of his Chaos Sea, speaking more to himself than to anything else.
"There is no one-sided coin. If there's Chaos, there must be Order. Space-time and Change... those are the pillars of existence. Absolute laws that shape our reality. But if I remove those laws… what's left?"
His voice dropped to a whisper.
"Madness. Senseless, mindless chaos. A world with no axis, no logic, no way to grasp or predict anything."
Klaus analyzed the new attribute with a frown, trying to map meaning onto it. He understood what it symbolizedz he even sensed how it resonated within him but he couldn't grasp what it actually did. There was no clear ability, no defined parameters. Just a presence. A state.
"It's like when the Shadow God cursed Eurys and Azarax…" he continued, eyes narrowing as he recalled the story of his master and that annoying slave. "The Shadow is the god of death, yet he banished them from death itself. Stripped them of its mercy. In a twisted irony, Shadow made them immortal. Deathless."
Klaus exhaled slowly, then groaned in frustration.
"It makes sense... but there's no logical framework to explain it."
For someone like Klaus, a scientist who liked patterns, rules, and structure. Things without logic were more than unsettling. They were anathema. Vile and hateful.
After all, logic is foundation of clear thinking. It helps us know what follows from what and whatever beliefs makes sense or not. Without logic, we can be easily tripped, confused and mislead... But was he truly supposed to follow it?
Klaus remained motionless. The flicker of curiosity in his eyes faded, replaced by a deep, hollow weariness. With a heavy sigh, he sat down on one of the glowing, dendritic branches beneath him.
For once, he didn't try to solve the unsolvable. He didn't chase the patterns in the chaos, or attempt to impose order where none could exist.
He simply accepted, both logic and illogic.
His gaze drifted across the dark sea of purple mist and golden firelight. It was beautiful… and terrifying.
"Hmm... I am tired, Void," he murmured, his voice soft and distant. "Do you hear me?"
He leaned back slightly, letting the strange, bioluminescent pulses wash over his skin.
"Everything is born from you. You are the origin of existence… the first whisper before the universe breathed. But I wonder..."
His eyes narrowed slightly, haunted and thoughtful.
"Why me?"
His gaze lowered.
"Maybe... maybe I do understand you a little more than the others. But even so…"
A sigh escaped him, almost soundless in the vast silence of his Chaos Sea.
"Why do you love me?"
***
Alright guys, I'm a little drunk right now, so I won't say much. If you've got any questions, feel free to ask. I'll try to answer when I can.
That's it for now. Enjoy the chapter.
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