The Realm of Gods. The Hall of the Primordial Flame.
Around the pyre, the twenty-three remaining Heavenly Emperors stood like ancient sundials, their faces unreadable masks of power and calculation.
:: The truth was forged in the first star, Sage. A single point of light cannot contain the whole of destiny. It must be shared. It must burn freely. :: said the Emperor of Infinite Fire. As he spoke, the very air seemed to crackle and turn to plasma, burning at temperatures the mortal world could never comprehend. His kind and benevolent words were a stark contrast to his presence.
:: We will prune you from the garden of existence! This Flame will burn your rot down to sterile ash, and from it, cleanse the memory of your ten murders! :: exclaimed the Emperor of Vitality, burning with a rage that coiled around him like green dragons of flame. A wave of life-energy radiated from him, mending the fractured space and causing ghostly plants to sprout from the emptiness. :: Your very concept will be unmade and removed forever. There will be no reincarnation, no escape, and no revenge! ::
They all wanted the secret that was sealed within me, whether they showed kind faces or irate attitudes. But they had made a fatal miscalculation. They were not fools; they had simply misunderstood the nature of the problem.
They believed a key was needed to claim the First Book, which was bound to my soul. They thought the Primordial Flame was that key—that by burning away my origin, the Book would be set free for them to take. They believed in their own infallibility and prescience, unable to see beyond their inflated egos.
They yearned for the book though they could not even understand its full purpose. The reason was simple: they craved the Book because they believed anything that can be understood can be mastered. That is the story power always tells itself. But I was never driven by that kind of hunger.
As the glowing runes around me tightened, I calmly analyzed the situation, even as the sea of flame was drawn upward.
The Primordial Flame does not burn. It dismantles.
Even as the indifferent fire coiled around me, threatening to erase my very existence, my mind worked as it always had: without emotion, purely analytical. Where normal fire destroys and forgets, I concluded, this fire deconstructs the story of a being. It rewrites a soul's very code and returns it to the raw mathematics that first gave it meaning.
In that instant, something deep within me—an ancient seal, a lock placed by the First Being—recognized its matching key. The chains woven into my soul began to vibrate. The Primordial Flame was never a weapon; it was the final catalyst. When the flame touched me, the locks did not just break; they unleashed a wave of primordial energy. Sensing that power, the Book responded.
In a profound silence that stretched longer than sorrow itself, the First Book opened.
:: STOP the book from opening! :: roared the Emperor of Predestined Fate. His eyes held galaxies, a testament to his obsession with controlling fate.
A fool's errand, I thought. His very name, 'Predestined Fate,' was an admission of his own powerlessness
:: The Flame is an end. We are stasis. They do not touch. To approach is to thaw... to become lesser. :: said the Empress of Heavenly Cold. As she spoke, the frost from her words seemed to crystallize on the very fabric of existence she wore as a gown
My perception caught the fear in their voices, but I suppressed any further thought, focusing on this momentous event.
The book did not open like pages in a hand; it unspooled like a long-forgotten memory. Its contents, giving off an oppressive sense of determined fate, declared my name: Sage of Infinite Paths. It showed the ending I had always known was my most likely fate: to be extinguished in the Primordial Flame, my power stripped, the Book sealed and dormant. The sentence was absolute. It was the original blueprint of my destiny.
Then, the impossible happened. The Book shuddered. It rejected its own final word.
A force erupted from my very core, pushing against space and against the flow of time itself. It was an unstoppable tide reversing the very flow of existence, pushing all beings from the first, second, and third dimensions back through their own history. I could feel the sheer mathematics of it: a counter-force three hundred times greater than the forward momentum of the cosmos. I saw the faces of the Emperors, once composed, now twisted in absolute horror.
It's no use, I thought, a final, lucid observation forming in my mind. Even if all thirty-three of them were alive and united, they would have no chance. They are being pushed back by the residual force of the First Being's influence.
:: No! We will not fall! :: screamed an Emperor of Mankind, his voice joining a chorus of dread from the others as they were swept away by the current.
My single timeline shattered into countless different streams. Possible futures poured through me like rivers of silver light: the quick path of bloody vengeance; the long, patient road of rebuilding my power; the brutal strategy of total annihilation; even a quiet, absurd path where I became a simple farmer, forgotten by the world. Each option was more than a choice; it was a complete redesign of my entire being.
And then, for the first time since I learned to read the laws of the universe in the stars, my mind broke. The world seemed to spin as voices of the past, present, and future hammered at my ears. My hands seemed to have no form, like squiggly lines with no order.
The recoil in time was both a gift and a theft. The Book, generous and cruel, had shown me everything but had not left me the divine strength to use the knowledge. The flame didn't just strip away my power; it tore down the very structure of my thoughts.
The galaxy that once existed in my mind was reduced to a single, flickering candle. My genius—which could process a universe in a single thought—was crushed down into the small confines of a human skull. My perception, which once saw the threads of causality laid out like a map, was diminished to raw hunger, blinding light, and the sharp sting of sound.
I was small. Insignificant.
Sensation attacked me. Light was a knife in my eyes. The world was a mess of colors that were too bright and noises that were too loud. I tried to think, but my mind no longer fit inside my body. My whole being felt drained and powerless, an agony of mortal and physical destruction. The ocean of information I once commanded had become a waterfall that was now drowning me. All I could grasp were fragments of the Book's advice: three paths, the most stable routes back to power, fluttering like fish in a net I was too weak to hold.
Worse than the overload was the memory. The Book had shown me all the ways I could be, then thrown me back to the very beginning of one of them—back into a body that had not yet learned its first lesson. I was not reborn. I was not forgiven. I had been rewound.
My eyes opened. Sunlight streamed through gaps in a straw roof. Still dizzy and confused, my mind clung to old habits, persistently trying to analyze and listen. The gentle sounds of a village waking up filled the air—a baby crying in the distance, a small bell chiming. My hand felt the splintery grain of a wooden bed and the lines on my own palm—a tiny, unfamiliar map. The Book's paths were still in my mind, faint as an afterimage, but the strength to walk them was gone.
Then a different memory surfaced, not of cosmic laws, but of hunger and sacrifice. Two faces, worn with love, offering their own bodies so their son could live. I tasted old blood in my mouth and smelled a rain that had not yet fallen. A strange pressure built behind my eyes, a feeling I had only ever seen as a weakness in others. A single, hot tear escaped, tracing a clean path through the dirt on my cheek.
Powerless, with a universe of knowledge trapped in a mind too fragile to handle it, I sat up. Far away—so far it might as well be a myth—ten Emperors were dead and twenty-three others were wounded, their plans in ruins. They thought they would erase me. Instead, they had just given me a new beginning.
I smiled—a small, deliberate thing. The smile of a man who has been given a perfect map but must first learn how to crawl. I rose with the patience of a strategist who has watched stars die and now had to learn the simple art of planting a single seed. The Book hadn't made me a god again. It had simply shown me three roads.
One step at a time, I would learn to walk them.
Outside, a dog barked. The current of time pulled at me, insistent as ever. I placed my foot onto the floor of the past and began the long journey forward to what I would become.