[CHAPTER 37- XORATH AND ZOKRAKS BECOME FRIENDS, UNIVERSE 0 ENTRY]
Silence settled like a lid over the torn earth, a silence that tasted of iron and unfinished sentences. Where Xorath and Zokraks had stood there were two piles of ragged things—armor, bone, sigils smoldering like burnt letters. Their breaths had stopped; their chests were empty pages.
Wukong stepped through the haze, the smirk still crooked on his face even as his boots crushed fragments of nebula into dust. He crouched beside them, eyes flicking like someone reading the last line of a stubborn poem.
(To Xorath) "When I first met you, I didn't trust you," he said softly, almost private. "When you became my friend, I still didn't trust you. Now… I think I can."
He let the words hang, then turned and spat the rest with cheerful brutality.
(To Zokraks) "Yeah, pork's also good. I think we should take him too."
Wukong's grin widened. He slapped Xorath's frozen shoulder and then pointed with a thumb. "Xorath, you're number two of our group."
Without further ceremony he summoned the cloud beneath his feet; it bloomed like a living thought. The cloud coiled, waiting, humming with simple loyalty. Wukong lifted both bodies—careful, efficient—laid them atop the cloud like trophies and like mistakes, and the world slid away beneath them as they rode upward, away from the battlefield, away from the chapter's last debts.
They crossed fractures in the sky and slipped past the ruined constellations until the cloud broke the horizon of nothing and turned toward a place whose name tasted like law: Universe 0.
Xorath's eyes opened first. He did not gasp. He blinked slow, like a man checking the fit of a new wound. The first sight he registered was Wukong's sun-bright face and the curve of the cloud under them. He flexed a hand and stared at it as if confirming the existence of a miracle.
"Where—" he croaked, then recognition sharpened him. "Ohh. It's Wukong. We're going to Universe 0."
He sat up and took inventory with a surgeon's calm. The missing hand, the torn leg, the rents in his chest—none of it was there. Flesh knitted into flesh, bones clicked themselves back into place, and the sigils that had been carved into him lay whole and unscarred as if someone had smoothed the pages of a book.
He laughed once, a small, incredulous sound. "What—my hands. My body…all recovered, regenerated." He looked to his side, and his expression curled into a sour curiosity when he noticed the other passenger. "What's this piggy doing here?"
Zokraks' eyelids fluttered. He opened them like a god waking into a debt. For a moment his gaze was adrift, puzzled, as if trying to read a map upside down.
"Wait—where am I?" he demanded, voice ragged and immediate. Then his sight locked on Xorath and on the monkey who had taken them both. "Wait—hey, monkey—why am I here?"
"Don't shout here," Wukong scolded with mock sternness, because even in the small mercies of transport he kept his humor. He reached over and laid a palm on Zokraks' arm, not gentled but steady. "I healed you."
Zokraks blinked at the touch as if the sensation was impolite. "So what, huh? I didn't want to ally with a monkey," he spat, the venom familiar even in his confusion. He looked away, searching for old indignities to ground him.
Wukong shrugged as if the alignment of alliances were clothing he'd shrugged into for warmth. "See, there is Universe 0," he said plainly, eyes already half on the distant horizon where laws and thrones waited. "But first we have to take the confirmation card from Universe 2 to get into Universe 0, as it is the place of gods."
The cloud hummed beneath them, carrying two newly mended warriors and one irreverent conductor toward a threshold that demanded paper and permission. The three of them sat in the soft convulsion of that movement—Wukong calm and decisive, Xorath testing his recovered limbs, Zokraks flaring between fury and curiosity.
No more words were offered; the mission was stated and set. The cloud swept them forward, toward Universe 2 and the confirmation card they would need, and then onto the place where gods kept their offices: Universe 0.
The chapter closed on the ride—bones made whole, grudges still warm, and the bureaucracy of divinity waiting like a damnable appointment.