"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And suppose that reaction fails to meet your expectations, it is only because you were not vigilant enough to account for the ripples carried through countless unseen mediums." Attributed to a Broken-Soul who chose sanity over infinity, hailed by the wisdom stream as the greatest mind of their kind.
Take one step forward, and a mortal may believe the motion godly; an action without reaction. A scientist would tear it apart with numbers: surface area, impact, applied force, and gravitational resistance. Ascend one layer higher, and a madman would speak of atoms rebelling through raw energy to lift flesh from stone.
Yet beyond even the soul's horizon—through a Broken-Soul's gaze—existence itself stops behaving.
Have you ever wondered how monks reach enlightenment, while everyone else, be it the poor or the obscenely rich, keep drowning in the same cycle of thrill and fear?
Everyone seeks happiness, yet it only seems to reveal itself after we have tasted despair.
We proclaim our hunger for love, yet surrender to appearances before sincerity.
Peace fades as a dream, while pride and prejudice bloom—because ego has always ruled.
Boredom is the price of the righteous path.
Thrill is the detour we take, hoping it leads us back to meaning, back to the righteous path.
We must fall to earn the right to fly.
We must hunger to remember desire.
We must kill to justify injustice.
And worst of all, we must learn to hate before we are allowed to love.
Someone set these laws into motion, and we follow them blindly, calling it freedom.
This system hasn't changed since the beginning of time… well, at least one version of it.
Yash was the forbidden fruit their experiments were never meant to witness, much less crave. Thrill carried them upward on a borrowed promise, blinding them to their creator's caution. They reached for infinity and beyond, only to earn a fleeting glimpse of free will, born in the shadow of freedom itself.
"No!" Zack recoiled at the thought that free will, the most sacred of rights, had cost humanity everything.
"Really?" Yash chuckled. "Then define it for me. What is free will?"
"The freedom to—" Zack froze, the truth crashing into him before the words could form.
Ignorance was bliss in its purest form. The first men lived without knowing free will, and in that unknowing, they lived freely until their choices carried them to the apple. Yash could not bring himself to deny his children the only desire they had ever reached for. And with that mercy, the cycle of humanity was born.
A world unchained by rules, governed by one sacred warning alone: touch not the forbidden fruit, for thrill is the debt no soul, god, or monster can survive.
If you are a Broken-Soul, imprisoned in a self-contained reality of endless dreams, then you are safe from consequence.
But if you exist on a plane where one person's free will to kill directly opposes another's free will to survive… which freedom wins?
God is benevolent and omnipotent in equal measure; Chaos and paradise are born from the same divine hand. He offers both the chains of coexistence and the doors of escape. By His mercy, you retain the free will to create chaos. By His power, others are given the means to shape paradise.
"Benevolent enough to let free will burn the world, and omnipotent enough to ensure that another may always rise to rebuild it." Zack kept the thought sealed within his shield… but in Yash's mind, it echoed like a scream.
Yash moved to adjust Zack's revelation through simple, powerless words. But before his will could rewrite Zack's conclusion by accident, Zack formed another thought that made Yash hesitate:
All evil is the echo of a free will unleashed. And all salvation is the response of another free will, rising to silence it before the world turns into Hell.
Good and evil are not truths of the universe; they are human stories. You cannot ask a psychopath to live by your values, any more than you could live by his.
Power rots politicians; call it ambition, or call it influence.
Borders harden minds into prejudice; call it justice, or call it division.
Language was born to erase disparity, yet now it fuels the pride that sunders us.
A single person's hate — their act of free will — whether it comes from a parent or a friend, teaches you to despise your neighbor. Then your hatred moves on through another, and another, until hate itself becomes immortal.
Zack watched humanity crawl from caveman to modern man, driven only by choice and reaction. Choice after choice. Consequence after consequence. And in the end, it would take only one step, one greedy will placed above all others, to erase the world itself.
"Never thought a single step could lead to all of this…" Zack's voice died before the sentence could.
"Now you see the true purpose behind meditation," Yash mused with a chuckle.
'How—w… why are you still watching over us?'
"You might not feel any connection to me," Yash said softly, "but your eon-old grandparents were born of my design. That makes every one of you partly mine."
He drew back the veil, showing Zack the black orb that contained his universe. "They asked for only one gift—"
"—Free will," Zack murmured, the answer already heavy on his chest.
"How could I refuse a wish that lay within my power?" Yash's voice dipped, sorrow bleeding into every word. "A parent's role is to guide — not to command — even when they understand the price of mercy."
His sight cut through Zack's being, ignoring every barrier as he stared directly at the artifacts nested in his soul.
"Children never listen. So we violate our own laws and design contingencies, knowing those same precautions will unleash greater destruction. Love and free will are unstable elements. One misstep can overturn existence, and it takes endless rewrites to repair it. But when those rewrites require the death of your own children…" His jaw tightened. "We redefine wrong as necessity."
After a long silence, he added, "Perhaps some souls are brave enough to truly correct their sins. I've never met such a one. But I believe they exist. And I wish I shared their yizh."
It shook Zack to learn that even a being like Yash—a god who could conjure reality with a snap—still carried wishes of his own. Zack had always underestimated the power of will. Yet without it, a being like himself would have ceased to exist long ago. Not the kind of end that feeds the cycle of reincarnation, but the kind that vanishes forever, reduced to fuel for another miscreant's desires.
"Wait… there's a way to undo the damage?"
"There's always a way." Yash's smile flickered and vanished. "No one ever chooses it."
"Why not?" Zack blurted, stunned.
"Would you accept a life bound by absolute rules?"
"Why would that—" Zack went still. "—Free will."
"The Garden of Everstone—the Stone Age of peace—is always within reach," Yash whispered. "But it offers no exhilaration. And a world without thrill is a world no one ever chooses."
Zack stood at the age when Yash's creations no longer obeyed; the point of divergence that became his era. Only the trees had listened, choosing eternal life over the burden of willpower, existing like Broken-Souls without suffering the price.
Yash traced along an invisible current. An all-knowing, all-powerful will, leaving behind subtle markers toward moksh.
"Where there is will, there shall always be a way"—a slot born directly of his power.
Mortals heard only one message in that truth: We can become gods too.
And in that assumption… they touched the edge of truth.
A few souls broke far enough to taste infinity, and the chain reaction began. Others followed. Myths woke. Legends learned to breathe. Gods learned to rule. And Yash was forced to answer with the creation of the Soul Snatchers.
But when the cries of the lesser beings grew too loud to ignore, Yash knelt once more… and unleashed the Soul Hunters.
"Benevolence twisted into blasphemy," Zack murmured with a broken chuckle. "Broken indeed."
"I am obligated to sustain my creation," Yash said, his voice cold. "But you… You still have a choice. To choose benevolence."
"Abandon the only world I know?" Zack scoffed, then sighed—deep, steady. The weight didn't vanish, but it settled. "I'm staying. Call it selfishness. Call it kindness. Call it greed... This is my home, and I won't let some free-willed jack—sorry, a Broken-Soul's free will, shatter it for someone innocent."
"So you'll interfere with mortal matters after all?"
"Well-l-l…" Zack hesitated, rolling the thought around. "I won't just stand by and watch."
"And if your free will ends up causing more harm than good?"
Zack assumed the question was aimed at him. But beneath it, he felt Yash wrestling with the answer too.
"Something to think about. No rush." Yash forced a thin smile and motioned them away. "We've worn out our welcome."
"We're eternal," Wiz teased. "Why not let the kid relive all of existence from every point of view?"
"We already did that." Yash shrugged, casually throwing Wiz's own indifference back at him.
"Yeah!" Zack echoed, mimicking Yash.
"Your yùn is infuriating," Psycho snarled. "First the boss studies you. Now the boss's boss is…"
Zack let the words fade into noise as his mind chased the future. Hopefully a future that still had a world in it.
"Luck, fate, and time," he muttered. "I still can't wrap my head around those concepts."
"They're simple," Pinky whispered, lacing her fingers around Zack's arm. "Here… see for yourself."
The gates to her life peeled open, and Zack was dragged through her memories (every doubt asked and answered in an instant through first-hand experience).
"Don't flatter yourself," she warned before guiding him toward the backlash notes shaped like flowers. "This isn't because you're special enough to wield these ideas."
Her grip tightened, making Zack's bones groan in protest. "It's because I know you'd ruin everything if you tried alone. And undoing that kind of disaster is exhausting."
"That's coming from someone who can't even feel pain," Bazuka reminded.
"Hey-wow-hey, don't pin this on me!" DJ protested. "All I wanna do is rhyme, rhyme, rhyme my life away. Ya'dig?"
"Crystal." Zack adjusted his tone. "So when you said 'might,' you actually meant 'never,' didn't you?"
"That's Solgrave-grade Sub–Space," Psycho cackles. "And I can reach it."
"And die in the process," Zack shot back.
Psycho leaned forward, his wild grin stretching wider—too wide—warping into something unmistakably sinister.
"While taking you along for the ride. Never forget…"
The air around him cackled as if it were alive, vibrating with unseen laughter. Overhead, the sun sagged lower in the sky, as though even it feared what was about to unfold.
"I'm more broken than you," Psycho whispered, delight curling around every word, "and that's never gonna change."
Zack reached out—desperate, searching for something human in him—but his fingers met only the hollow resistance of nothing.
"I realized that long ago."
Psycho seized his wrist and yanked him forward. Darkness surged at his back, shadows climbing over his frame, stretching him taller, broader, making him look impossibly larger than Zack.
"Don't flex your Sub-Space," Psycho sneered. "You're no king. And neither is your new friend."
His voice splintered, fracturing into something uglier. Something wrong.
"You want to know how dangerous free will really is?" he said softly. "Push a Broken-Soul far enough—"
His grin split wider.
"—and you'll watch the king tremble."
———<>||<>——— End of Chapter Thirty-four. ———<>||<>———