Chapter 115: Wrath
Beyond the outer membranes of known space past the drifting wrecks of shattered divine fortresses and the echoes of battles long buried he returned.
The Emperor.
His presence didn't announce itself with fanfare or cataclysm. There was no celestial trumpet, no storm of light. Only a deep stillness a silence so ancient, so absolute, that it stretched across constellations. It froze the flow of mana in distant star systems, silenced the hum of divine territories, and caused astral trade routes to fall into a quiet, uneasy standstill.
In the absence of his voice, the universe remembered.
And those who didn't… would soon learn why they should have.
He walked through space as if it were dust. Not flying. Not teleporting. Just moving a being beyond the need for such trivial mechanics. Each step rippled across planes of existence, brushing through matter, soul, and time alike.
He began his journey by scanning the seed-worlds planets he had forged over twenty millennia ago, drawn from shattered fragments of the Origin Plane. They had been the beginning of healing after the Great Battle, where time itself split and the cosmic laws were mangled by divine ego and greed.
He did not expect perfection.
But what he found...
Was desecration.
A gray wasteland greeted him. Once lush with forests and rivers glowing with Origin Threads, it was now an ash plain. The trees had been uprooted to fuel divine furnaces. Mana wells were dug like mines, bled dry of their essence. What oceans remained were nothing more than bitter salt scars.
Even ghosts usually the last remnants of consciousness had abandoned it.
He knelt, touched the soil. It did not respond.
He stood and raised one hand. The air shimmered. Invisible structures that had once funneled origin mana to distant Divine Territories were revealed delicate and parasitic. With a flex of will, he unspooled them. The constructs unwove into fine golden threads, then compressed into a single black crystal, which he sealed into a sliver of warped time.
Those who built it?
He cursed them.
Bound now to reincarnate endlessly on a collapsing moon nearby forever attempting to restore what they ruined, forever failing, for eternity itself bent against their efforts.
Worse.
It had been converted into a divine farm. Fields of artificial soul-beasts bred for faith-harvesting. The planet's leyline grid had been hijacked and funneled directly into three minor Divine Territories. Above, its moon was shattered, and the fragments forged into a floating battle monastery with cannons that extracted astral energy from passing comets.
A lesser god noticed his arrival and dared to laugh.
"Your era has ended, Old One. These worlds are ours now."
He didn't argue.
He simply sealed the god turned him into a living battery, buried beneath the planet's surface. Now, that god's eternal scream powered the storms that scourged its skies.
For the next five centuries, he hunted.
He became the shadow of law itself moving through veils and planes, judging silently, relentlessly.
There were no announcements. No court. No trial.
Just arrival.
Judgment.
And departure.
One goddess was unraveled, her domain shattered and scattered into six time-locked gardens each one reflecting a distorted version of her once-pristine realm.
Another was folded into a scroll his memories burned into divine ink.
One particularly arrogant god, who called himself the "All-Father" of his seed-world, had forged an empire and enslaved his followers to harvest faith directly from their agony. The Emperor found him seated on a throne carved from the bones of demi-planes.
He said nothing.
He rewound the god's existence to a soulseed and cast him into the Soulforge to be reborn, nameless, powerless, into silence.
Not all were destroyed. Some gods were powerful enough to be… useful.
He redesigned them into what would later be known as Everlasting Batteries beings locked into crystal prisons, used to stabilize broken planetary cores, mana-drained atmospheres, or poisoned dimensional rifts.
Their bodies became power sources.
Their minds? Still awake.
Screaming.
But the worlds healed.
And the Emperor continued.
Eventually, his gaze turned toward a cluster of worlds long thought lost.
The last Gaias.
They had hidden well. Cloaked in ancient spells built from forbidden alignments, wrapped in pyramid arrays so precise they could fool even higher-dimensional scans. These were seed-worlds left untouched by divine conquest. Not because of luck but because of loyalty.
Their people had remembered.
The pyramids there were intact. Their mana spirals still whispered in the Emperor's design. Divine Beasts still roamed freely. Sacred metals grew like vines in the heart of mountains. Mana, unfiltered and untainted, bathed the land and sky in gentle pulses.
These worlds were his hope untouched, alive, pure.
But not all had been spared.
Across other worlds Earth among them the situation was different.
There, gods had returned. Not the original ones many Primodial Gods were dead, their descendants unworthy but parasites. Opportunists. Weaker gods who had mastered the laws of space and access, who now worked in alliances to forge false domains across the multiverse.
They had infiltrated the hidden Gaias by merging themselves with the very laws of the planets masking themselves as "natural divinity" or "ancestral spirits." With the Divine Order scattered, there had been no one to stop them.
Their aim?
Resources.
Origin mana.
Faith.
They fought over pyramids, searching desperately for artifacts and fragments of thegoods that had fallen during the great battle. With surviving Primodial Gods either asleep, the newer gods believed the time had come to rise, to reshape the cosmic hierarchy.
To conquer what they never helped build.
No longer would sacred knowledge stay in the hands of the ancient families. No longer would the resources be locked by law and legacy. It was a new age, and to them, the Emperor's memory was nothing more than myth.
Until now.
As the Emperor hovered in the veil between star systems, he whispered the first words he had spoken in millennia:
"So this… is what they've done."
The stars dimmed.
A pulse spread across the multiverse. The pyramids across the remaining Gaias resonated, their cores glowing brighter, reacting to his presence. The Earth itself stirred.
On some worlds, divine shrines crumbled.
On others, artifacts awoke emitting light for the first time in over ten thousand years.
And across the scattered divine factions, panic began to spread.