With Black Marcus's support—or perhaps manipulation would be a more accurate term—karl's actions became far more aggressive than they'd been in millennia.
He had the backing of a Void Lord now. An actual entity from beyond reality, offering power and knowledge that karl had spent his entire existence seeking. Combined with his own research, his position as one of the known universe's foremost scholars, and the computational might of the Big Clock, karl's influence could reshape the cosmic order.
And he wasted no time demonstrating that fact.
Attacks began appearing across the known universe. Not random chaos—coordinated strikes against specific targets, executed with precision that suggested advanced intelligence and planning. None of the victims could identify where the attackers came from, but everyone agreed on one thing: these assailants possessed terrifying power.
Outposts belonging to angel civilization were hit. Demon strongholds were struck. Even neutral civilizations that had carefully avoided taking sides in any conflict found themselves targeted. The attacks varied in intensity—some were simple raids, others were devastatingly thorough—but the pattern was clear.
Someone was destabilizing the entire cosmic order, and they had the capability to do it.
In Melo Heaven, heart of angel civilization and symbol of divine justice throughout the known universe, Kesha sat upon her throne listening to reports with an expression that grew increasingly cold.
The angel delivering the briefing—a warrior named Leng, one of the younger generation but already distinguished in combat—spoke with professional precision despite obvious concern.
"Multiple border systems have reported incursions, my Queen. The attackers employ technology we don't fully recognize, combined with... with something else. Energy signatures that our sensors can barely register. Three outposts have fallen completely. Seven more are under siege."
Kesha's fingers drummed once against the armrest of her throne. A small gesture, but those who knew her recognized it as a sign of deep thought.
"And the attackers' identities?"
"Unknown, my Queen. They don't match any known civilization's signatures. But..." Leng hesitated, clearly uncertain whether to continue.
"Speak freely," Kesha commanded, her voice gentle despite the authority behind it.
"Some of the survivors reported seeing male angels among the attackers. Specifically, they identified—"
"Hua Ye." Kesha's voice could have frozen hydrogen. "The Scum King has returned."
The temperature in the throne room seemed to drop several degrees. Angels who'd been standing in respectful attendance shifted uncomfortably, ancient memories rising unbidden.
When Kesha mentioned Hua Ye, even she—the Angel King who'd maintained perfect composure through thirty thousand years of rule—couldn't completely hide her reaction. Her jaw tightened. Her eyes, usually warm with the conviction of justice, turned hard as diamond.
The angel civilization wasn't, and had never been, exclusively female. Tens of thousands of years ago, male angels had ruled their species with absolute authority. They'd been the civilization's architects, its warriors, its voice in the cosmic community.
And female angels? They'd been decorations. Possessions. Playthings that could be used, abused, and discarded whenever their male owners grew bored.
If not for the revolution—if not for Kesha and Liang Bing and He Xi and countless other brave females who'd finally united to resist—female angels would still be crawling at male feet, their potential wasted, their voices silenced.
They'd driven Hua Ye and his followers out of angel civilization through blood and fire and unwavering will. It had taken centuries of conflict, countless lives lost, but they'd succeeded. Built something better from the ashes.
And now, after all this time, he was back.
What Marcus showed me in that spiritual world was true, Kesha realized, remembering those blurred faces that had sharpened into specific individuals when her thoughts had focused on them. The threat is real. Immediate.
"Strengthen all patrols," Kesha commanded, her voice carrying across the throne room with absolute authority. "Every border system, every outpost, every gateway station. I want maximum alert status implemented immediately. And issue new standing orders: any confirmed sightings of Hua Ye or his scum followers are to be met with lethal force. No negotiations. No mercy. Execute on sight."
The assembled angels saluted in perfect synchronization, fists over hearts. "Yes, my Queen!"
As they dispersed to carry out her orders, Kesha rose from her throne and disappeared in a shimmer of light.
She reappeared in a private chamber deep within Melo Heaven's central spire—a room that few angels even knew existed, let alone had access to. The walls were inscribed with ancient defensive runes, and the ceiling displayed a real-time map of known space, countless stars glittering like diamonds on black velvet.
But Kesha wasn't interested in the view.
"Activate secondary bio-engine," she said aloud, triggering systems woven into her divine body at the quantum level. "Mobilize void power reserves."
The response was immediate and dramatic.
Void energy surged outward from Kesha's core, flooding through her body like a tidal wave of liquid darkness. Her wings—those six magnificent white pinions that were the mark of her authority—suddenly snapped open with enough force to create a pressure wave.
And they'd changed. Metallic luster flowed across the feathers, silver and gold threads weaving through pristine white. They looked more like works of art than biological structures now, beautiful and terrible in equal measure.
Her armor transformed similarly. What had been elegant became majestic, gold filigree spreading across white plate like lightning frozen in metal. She looked more than regal—she looked transcendent, a warrior-goddess from mythology made real.
At this moment, Kesha appeared infinitely more noble and gorgeous than she ever had before. The gold decoration made her armor splendid beyond description, and the power radiating from her carried a weight that made reality itself seem to bow in acknowledgment.
With her secondary bio-engine fully engaged, void energy began condensing in Kesha's palm. A small sphere of absolute darkness, edged with purple light, hovering above her skin like a miniature black hole.
This was the power Marcus had given her. After merging it with her secondary bio-engine through careful integration over weeks of meditation and experimentation, it had truly become hers. No longer a foreign element but a fundamental aspect of her being.
She held the void sphere for several seconds, studying it with the intensity of someone examining a dangerous weapon. Then, with deliberate care, she raised her hand and dispersed it.
The energy vanished instantly, bleeding back into the quantum structures of her body.
Although the void manifestation had lasted only briefly, Kesha had sensed enough to understand its horrifying potential. This was force that could drag everything in the material world into an abyss of nothingness. Power that didn't just destroy but unmade, erasing things from reality on a conceptual level.
She didn't want to use this ability lightly. Couldn't afford to become comfortable with something so fundamentally destructive.
But she had a terrible premonition about what was coming.
Hua Ye's return wasn't coincidence or desperation. The Scum King hadn't possessed even a first-generation divine body when they'd driven him out of the Angel Galaxy thirty thousand years ago. He'd been powerful by normal standards but completely outmatched by the female angels who'd developed their strength through necessity and determination.
If he'd maintained that power level, he would never dare show his face again. The risk would be suicidal.
So his current boldness, his apparent confidence, could only mean one thing: he'd gained something new. Some advantage that made him believe he could threaten or even defeat the angel forces that had once crushed him.
And the most likely source of that advantage was karl.
"Heaven's scum," Kesha muttered, voice low and cold enough to frost the air itself. "No matter whether karl is truly backing you or not, you will never succeed. You escaped last time through luck and our mercy. This time, I will crush you completely. Grind you into dust so fine that not even the concept of you remains."
She took several deep breaths, forcing the emotional turbulence to subside. Strong feelings were natural—even necessary—but a good ruler couldn't let them dictate strategic decisions.
Once she'd regained her composure, Kesha left the private chamber and moved through Melo Heaven's gleaming corridors with purpose. She had a specific destination in mind: the research wing where He Xi, King of Tianji, maintained her laboratories.
He Xi was one of the Three Angel Kings, equal in authority to Kesha herself though different in focus. Where Kesha was the face of angel civilization—the warrior-queen who promoted justice and order across the known universe—He Xi was its mind. The brilliant researcher whose innovations had elevated angels from merely powerful to genuinely divine.
"What wind blew you here?" He Xi's voice called out before Kesha even reached the laboratory entrance. "I didn't expect a personal visit from the famous Holy Kesha. Should I be honored or concerned?"
Kesha entered to find He Xi exactly where she'd expected: bent over a holographic display showing particle interactions at scales so small they barely qualified as existing at all. The King of Tianji didn't look up from her work immediately, silver hair falling forward to partially obscure her face.
He Xi's tone carried no particular deference despite Kesha's higher profile among the general angel population. After all, she'd been instrumental in Kesha's rise to power. She'd helped develop the fourth-generation divine body that made Kesha functionally immortal by conventional standards. Their relationship was complex—part colleagues, part friends, part rivals who pushed each other toward excellence.
"Kesha, why are you..." He Xi finally glanced up, and her words died mid-sentence.
Her eyes widened fractionally—a massive emotional display by her reserved standards. She was seeing something in Kesha that hadn't been there before, some quality that set off every analytical instinct she possessed.
"You have a very strange feeling about you now," He Xi said slowly, already beginning to run scanning protocols through the sensors embedded in her laboratory. "It's subtle, but definitely present. You feel... layered. Like there are aspects of you operating on frequencies I can't quite perceive. What happened?"
"You'll remember why I returned from Earth so abruptly," Kesha said, settling into a chair without waiting for invitation. They were past such formalities. "The situation there required immediate attention, but not in the way I'd originally anticipated."
Understanding dawned in He Xi's expression. She straightened, giving Kesha her full attention now.
Although He Xi hadn't witnessed events on Earth personally, she'd reviewed every data upload from the angels who had been present. Had spent days analyzing the fragmentary sensor readings and eyewitness accounts, trying to reconstruct what had actually occurred.
The mysterious figure who'd appeared on that aircraft carrier—Marcus, they called him—was the real reason Kesha had abandoned her Earth observation and returned to Angel Nebula. He Xi knew that much with certainty.
And the restored data, fragmentary as it was, had shown her enough to understand: this Marcus wasn't just powerful. He represented something categorically beyond normal power scaling. Even the vague holographic reconstruction made He Xi's instincts scream warnings.
"So your change..." He Xi gestured vaguely at Kesha, encompassing the subtle wrongness her sensors were detecting. "This transformation was given to you by that man? By Marcus?"
"Yes." Kesha's voice turned even colder, carrying the kind of ice that burned rather than froze. "karl's schemes are accelerating. I could feel them brewing even before I had concrete evidence. I needed to be prepared for what's coming. And more immediately... Hua Ye has returned."
The name landed like a physical blow.
He Xi went very still. Not with fear—she'd faced and overcome too much to fear any individual—but with the kind of focused intensity that preceded violent action.
"The Scum King," she said flatly. "After thirty thousand years of exile, he finally grew the spine to come back. How disappointing. I'd hoped he'd died choking on his own cowardice in some forgotten corner of space."
Despite the gravity of the situation, Kesha felt a smile tug at her lips. This was why she'd always valued He Xi's friendship—the woman had a gift for cutting straight to the heart of matters with absolutely no patience for pretense.
"He's allied with karl, or more likely chosen to be karl's pawn," Kesha continued. "The God of Death has been suspiciously quiet recently, which means he's planning something significant. And now Hua Ye appears with enough confidence to attack angel outposts directly?"
"karl provided him with technology," He Xi finished, nodding along. "Probably divine body upgrades at minimum, possibly more exotic capabilities. Hua Ye and his scum followers never developed their own advancement techniques—they relied on subjugating female angels who had the actual innovative capacity. So if they want to return as a credible threat, they need external support."
She paused, silver eyes glinting with analytical intensity.
"And karl is precisely the sort of chaos-loving troublemaker who would arm our worst enemies just to see what happens. He's probably treating this as some grand experiment, gathering data on divine combat while destabilizing the cosmic order as a side benefit."
"Exactly my assessment," Kesha confirmed. "Which is why I accepted the power Marcus offered. Since Hua Ye is confident in dealing with us, he must have countermeasures—something he believes can suppress or overcome angel advantages. I couldn't afford to face that unprepared."
She stood, and void power began flowing through her body.
Her eyes changed, silver irises becoming edged with purple-black energy. Void light leaked from them like tears made of darkness, and her entire presence shifted. The gold-and-white armor transformed again, becoming even more elaborate as void energy traced new patterns across its surface.
Already proud and noble, Kesha became something more. Something that straddled the line between divine and eldritch, beautiful and terrible, salvation and annihilation.
He Xi stumbled backward a step—pure instinct overriding conscious thought.
Her laboratory's sensors went absolutely berserk. Alarms she'd installed to warn about dangerous energy buildups began screaming warnings at volumes that would have deafened normal hearing. Holographic displays flickered and distorted, unable to properly process what they were detecting.
"Is this..." He Xi's voice came out rougher than normal, scientific curiosity warring with genuine alarm. "Is this the power he gave you? You've become a void creature? Or at least something that can interface with void forces?"
"No," Kesha said gently, though the void light in her eyes didn't diminish. "I'm still the King of Angels. Still myself, with all my memories and convictions and responsibilities intact. But I can use void power now. Channel it. And my secondary bio-engine has been... improved by the integration. Enhanced in ways I'm still discovering."
She smiled—a slight expression that somehow looked predatory with those void-touched eyes.
"Do you feel it, He Xi? The pull?"
He Xi did feel it. Her own engine—a prototype secondary bio-engine she'd installed for testing purposes—was throwing warnings about anomalous attraction forces. Looking at Kesha now felt like staring at a star, something so bright and overwhelming that you couldn't help but want to move closer even as your survival instincts screamed retreat.
The brilliance spreading from Kesha carried a quality that made He Xi want to follow her. Serve her. Surrender completely to that magnificent presence.
It was wrong. Mind-affecting effects like this shouldn't be possible against someone of He Xi's caliber, someone with extensive mental defenses and sovereign will.
"It's the void power," He Xi said, forcing herself to analyze rather than simply react. "It's affecting me on a conceptual level, trying to create subordination patterns in my cognitive architecture. Even you, the King of Angels, shouldn't be able to control power like this without extensive training and safeguards."
Understanding crystallized. "It's him. Marcus gave you more than raw power—he gave you the capacity to control void force safely. That's the only explanation. Without his modifications, attempting to channel void energy would have corrupted or destroyed you."
"Such power is indeed not something I could control through my own capabilities alone," Kesha acknowledged, and the void manifestation faded. Her eyes returned to normal silver, the overwhelming presence receding until she was simply Kesha again—still powerful, still commanding, but no longer reality-warping.
The laboratory's alarms gradually quieted.
He Xi found she could breathe normally again, though her mind was racing with questions. Her scientific curiosity had gone from interested to obsessed in the span of seconds.
"Who is he?" she asked, already moving to one of her terminals and pulling up every data fragment related to Marcus. "This mysterious figure who can gift void control like he's handing out party favors. What did he discover when he appeared on Earth? And more importantly—why did he give you such dangerous power? What's his purpose? His goal?"
Questions poured out faster than Kesha could possibly answer them. He Xi's fingers flew across holographic interfaces, compiling information, cross-referencing data, building profiles and models.
"I need to understand him," He Xi muttered, half to herself. "Someone who can manipulate the void itself, who can bestow that capability on others safely, who makes both you and Morgana back down without apparent effort... he's operating on principles I don't comprehend yet. And I hate not comprehending things."
Kesha watched her friend descend into research fugue with fond exasperation. This was He Xi at her most driven—brilliant and focused and absolutely relentless in pursuit of knowledge.
"When you figure him out," Kesha said dryly, "do let me know. I've been wondering the same things."
Marcus remained completely unaware of these cosmic developments. His consciousness was turned inward, focused entirely on the work of fusing various powers within the black hole cocoon that had become both cradle and crucible.
Time had lost meaning. The black hole's intense gravity warped space-time so severely that subjective experience bore no relation to external reality. What might have been seconds outside could feel like millennia within, each moment stretched and compressed simultaneously.
As different forces merged—Warframe abilities, void manipulation, conceptual understanding, planar energies—Marcus's comprehension of the void's fundamental nature deepened.
And he began to understand something profound.
The void is both beginning and ending, he realized, the knowledge rising from the fusion itself like bubbles from deep water. Origin and terminus. The canvas upon which reality is painted and the solvent that washes it clean.
Images formed in his mind, metaphors that helped translate impossible concepts into something approaching comprehension.
The void was an endless sea—infinite in all directions, with no boundaries or shores. And like any ocean, it had currents. Tides. Waves that rose and fell according to forces beyond easy understanding.
When the void surged, when those primordial waves built and crested, they created turbulence. Disturbances in that infinite medium. And in the turbulence, at the peaks of waves, bubbles appeared.
Countless bubbles. Each one a pocket of space separate from the void, sealed by surface tension between existence and non-existence. Each bubble was a new plane—a reality with its own rules and properties, born from chaos but distinct from it.
And like all bubbles, they were temporary.
Most burst quickly, their contents dissolving back into the void after brief existence. The plane would flicker into being, exist for some tiny span, and then pop like soap film touching a sharp edge. Everything that had developed within that bubble—matter, energy, consciousness, civilization—would scatter back into the primordial chaos.
But sometimes, bubbles merged. Two planes colliding, their surface boundaries touching and then dissolving, contents mixing until they became a single larger bubble. More stable. Harder to pop.
Do this enough times—hundreds of collisions, thousands—and you could get something truly substantial. A complete world, vast and complex and resilient. The Marvel world. The DC universe. Other realities that had endured long enough to develop intricate histories and powerful entities.
Even these would eventually burst. After enough epochs, after time stretched beyond reckoning, even the greatest bubbles would touch some cosmic sharp edge and dissolve. Everything ended, eventually. That was the nature of the void—it gave birth to all things and ultimately reclaimed them.
But I changed that, Marcus understood. My presence stabilized the bubbles I touched.
The worlds he'd traveled through, the realities he'd visited—they were no longer aimlessly drifting in the void-sea. He'd reinforced their boundaries, made them permanent. They'd become the only worlds he knew of that had been elevated from temporary bubble to eternal fixture.
They would follow him now. Bound to his existence, sharing his protection from the void's dissolving properties.
"And I control a third of this," Marcus murmured, voice echoing strangely in the space-time distortion of the black hole. "One-third of the void's fundamental authority. The remaining two-thirds is divided between two others."
The knowledge settled into him with absolute certainty. He'd suspected, but now he knew.
"If I can obtain the remaining control—absorb or merge with the other two-thirds—I can completely integrate with and master the void itself."
The implications were staggering. Total control over the force that birthed and killed realities. The ability to create planes, destroy them, stabilize them, merge them. He could become more than just a powerful being in the universe—he could become a force operating at the level of the universe's underlying architecture.
"Though I don't yet know what specific permissions I've lost by having only one-third," Marcus admitted. "The void is too vast, too complex. There are capabilities I should have that I can't access, limitations I'm operating under that I don't fully understand."
He fell silent, returning his focus to the fusion work. This wasn't time for speculation. This was time for refinement.
Only by mastering the void completely can I see the ultimate answer I've been seeking. The final truth that's always remained just beyond my grasp.
As Marcus spoke—voice resonating across dimensions despite the black hole's isolating properties—the gravitational anomaly became more distorted. Space folded in on itself in increasingly complex patterns. The power to devour grew more terrifying, reaching out with invisible fingers to seize nearby stars.
Countless suns across multiple star systems suddenly found themselves being torn apart. Matter streamed away from their surfaces in great arcs, pulled inexorably toward the black hole's center. Some stars fought against the attraction for days, their fusion cores working overtime to generate enough outward pressure to resist. Others simply gave up, collapsing into compressed density before being dragged across light-years to feed Marcus's transformation.
But for Marcus at the black hole's heart, none of this registered as significant. Time dilation was so extreme at the event horizon that what seemed like instantaneous stellar consumption in the outside universe was stretched into billions of subjective years from his perspective.
An instant in the known universe became longer than the age of galaxies for him.
Time passed—or didn't, depending on reference frame.
And then Marcus felt something unusual. A disturbance in the void's texture, a ripple that cut across the natural flow.
Another void crack has opened, he realized with sharp interest. Someone in the material world is calling on void power strongly enough to thin the barriers.
He focused his perception outward, following the signature back to its source. This wasn't a crack he'd opened. Wasn't even connected to his own void manipulation. This was something—someone—else.
The power felt strange yet familiar. Like recognizing your reflection in a distorted mirror. Definitely void-based, definitely working with similar principles to his own abilities, but the flavor was wrong. The technique was different.
"One of the other two void controllers," Marcus concluded, satisfaction coloring his mental voice. "Drawn by the thinning barriers that my own work creates. Or perhaps by karl's clumsy attempts at void manipulation. Either way..."
He smiled, even though he had no physical face at the moment—just a point of consciousness suspended in the black hole's infinite gradient.
"That leaves only one more to reveal themselves. And then the show can truly begin."
The black hole fell into silence again, its hungry rotation continuing undisturbed. Though Marcus's power had already reached extreme heights—levels that would let him crush most civilizations with casual effort—he pushed for more. Every fractional increase in his void control mattered. Every additional percentage point could be the difference between victory and defeat when he finally confronted the other void lords.
Even one more point of control could tip the balance. He couldn't afford to stop refining until he'd achieved absolute mastery within his current limits.
In a distant corner of the universe—far from Melo Heaven, far from Earth, far from the Styx Galaxy and all the familiar centers of cosmic power—a prosperous planet hung in space like a jewel.
It was beautiful in ways that most inhabited worlds weren't. The continents were arranged in aesthetically pleasing patterns, as though designed by an artist rather than geological happenstance. The oceans gleamed like polished sapphire. Even the clouds seemed to form shapes that were somehow more perfect than random vapor had any right to achieve.
And dominating the planet's largest continent, rising thousands of meters into the atmosphere, was a mountain that shone with inner light.
This wasn't reflected sunlight. The mountain itself glowed, radiant with power that had nothing to do with physics and everything to do with faith made manifest.
At the base of that shining peak, across vast plains and through carefully cultivated valleys, countless beings prostrated themselves. Multiple species—some humanoid, others decidedly not—all pressed their foreheads to the ground in gestures of absolute reverence.
"God loves the world," a melodious voice echoed across the entire planet, somehow audible everywhere at once without losing clarity or becoming overwhelming. "God has mercy on all living things. We are all sinners, born in transgression, walking in shadow. But God has forgiven our sins and granted us divine power..."
The words continued, a sermon or prayer or perhaps simple statement of truth—the beings listening couldn't quite distinguish which and didn't particularly care. What mattered was that the voice belonged to God, and God's words were sacred by definition.
As the voice spread across the world, the faithful's response was immediate and visceral. They didn't just listen—they felt the words resonating in their cores, touching something fundamental about their existence.
Their worship intensified. Prayers became desperate proclamations. Faith hardened into absolute conviction that nothing could shake.
And that faith became visible.
Streams of milky-white energy rose from the prostrated masses like smoke from incense. Individual threads at first, they quickly merged into rivers, then torrents, flowing upward against gravity's pull. The faith-energy wove through the air in complex patterns, beautiful and eerie, before converging on the mountain's peak.
On the palace that crowned that sacred summit, where God resided.
"The faith of all beings truly is powerful," a figure of white light whispered within the palace's innermost sanctum. "My integration with the void has improved again. The correlation between faith and void resonance is even stronger than I'd calculated."
The light shifted, coalescing into a more defined form. Someone who looked exactly like Marcus—same features, same general proportions—but composed of radiance rather than normal matter. White Marcus. An entity that seemed to be made of concentrated light with only enough substance to maintain cohesive form.
He stood at the center of a circular chamber whose walls were inscribed with countless names—the faithful, immortalized in holy scripture. The faith-energy flowing from the planet below passed through these walls, filtered through the names, and condensed into increasingly pure essence before reaching him.
"When I first emerged from the void and discovered this planet, it was primitive," White Marcus mused, memories rising unbidden. "Ignorant tribes fighting over territory and resources, wasting their potential on petty conflicts. They didn't even have organized religion—just shamanic practices and superstition."
He'd changed that. Arrived as a god among mortals, demonstrating powers that seemed miraculous to beings who barely understood fire. And he'd taught them a simple truth: faith was power. Devotion was currency. Worship could be transformed into tangible force.
"Once I understood that faith could improve my void integration—that belief itself resonates with void frequencies in useful ways—I began my expansion in earnest."
He'd led his earliest followers on campaigns of unification, bringing disparate tribes under a single banner. Not through pure conquest, though violence had played its role. Mostly through demonstration. Showing them what faith could accomplish. Granting miracles to the devoted while those who resisted found their efforts mysteriously failing.
Within a few generations, the planet was unified. Within a few more, neighboring worlds began hearing stories. The faithful spread across the star system, then to adjacent systems, carrying their God's message to any who would listen.
Now White Marcus ruled this entire galaxy as its supreme deity. The God of Creation, they called him. Every sentient species within dozens of light-years regarded him as the divine power that had raised them from ignorance to enlightenment.
And continuously, endlessly, they contributed their faith.
The prosperous planet beneath him—this jewel world—had become the galaxy's center. The holiest site. The hub where all faith converged. Only the most devout believers earned the right to live here, to walk the same ground their God had first touched when descending from heaven.
But White Marcus wasn't stingy with his power. He understood the principle of investment—you had to spend faith to generate more faith.
When his priests and devoted followers contributed sufficient worship, he granted them blessings. Healing for the sick. Strength for the weak. Knowledge for those seeking enlightenment. These became his miracles, proof of divine favor that inspired even greater devotion.
The cycle was self-sustaining and exponentially growing. More faith meant more power to distribute. More distributed power meant more followers. More followers meant more faith.
"Sure enough," White Marcus said softly, void power swirling in eyes that glowed like miniature suns, "the void is the origin of creation."
He could see it now—literally see creation happening as he channeled void power. Matter manifesting from nothing. Energy patterns self-organizing into increasingly complex structures. Even consciousness emerging from void-stuff when the conditions were precisely right.
Everything born from the void. Everything returning to the void. And he, standing at the intersection between nothing and everything, could manipulate that fundamental process.
His smile widened, beatific and terrible.