Nicholas did not hesitate.
The multicolored fluid—the origin energy of the universe, bleeding from the cracks like lifeblood from a mortal wound—poured into the void. It was beautiful. It was terrible. It was the raw stuff of creation itself, undiluted, unrefined, untouched by the hands of gods or immortals. And it was trying to repair the damage.
Nicholas could feel it as the fluid spread across the splintering cosmic wall, flowing into the cracks, attempting to seal them, to hold back the void, to preserve the universe that had existed for eons. The origin energy was not conscious—not in any way that could be understood—but it was purposeful. It was the universe's immune response, its desperate struggle against the fate that Nicholas had inflicted upon it.
But it was in vain.
The pentagram continued to spin. The Aeonic runes blazed with incandescent fury. The attendants' song rose to a pitch that made the very fabric of reality vibrate. And the universe, for all its ancient power, for all its primordial defenses, could not resist. The cracks widened. The fluid could not fill them fast enough. The void pressed against the boundaries, hungry and patient, and the cosmic wall began to flake.
The first shard detached.
It was the size of a continent—a fragment of the Crystal Wall, sheared from the inner surface of the universe by the spinning pentagram's infinite saw. It drifted into the void, catching the light of a billion dying stars, and Nicholas saw its true beauty for the first time. Iridescent silver, like moonlight frozen into crystal. Then gold, like the heart of a sun. Then green, like the first spring after an endless winter. Then yellow, like the eyes of a predator in the dark. And then colors that had no names, colors that had never been perceived by mortal eyes, colors that existed only at the boundaries of reality, where the laws of physics dissolved into possibility.
The shard floated in the void, and Nicholas reached for it with his true spirit.
His soul—vast as a black hole, dense as collapsed matter, woven from the threads of Fate and Magic and War—acted as a container. It stretched across the void, enveloping the shard, drawing it toward him. The fluid of the origin energy tried to follow, tried to reclaim the fragment, but Nicholas's authority was absolute. He had waited centuries for this moment. He would not be denied.
More shards followed. The pentagram spun faster, its saw cutting deeper, and the cosmic wall crumbled in chunks. Each fragment was a world unto itself—a piece of the boundary that had defined existence, now freed to be reshaped. Nicholas collected them all, his true spirit expanding to accommodate the growing hoard, his consciousness processing the properties of each piece, cataloging their structures, preparing for the work to come.
But he did not wait for the universe to finish dying.
The void was already flooding the Milky Way. The outer reaches of the galaxy—the spiral arms, the nebulae, the clusters of stars that had burned for billions of years—were being consumed. Not destroyed, not annihilated, but simply... erased. The void did not burn or crush or tear. It unmade. The laws of physics that had governed those regions ceased to apply. Matter became meaningless. Energy dissipated into nothing. The stars that had once been beacons in the darkness simply stopped existing.
And in the center of the galaxy, the solar system floated like an ark adrift in a rising sea.
The Grand Immortals held their positions, their true spirits enveloping every particle, every soul, every spark of life within their array. Time remained frozen. The inhabitants of the Atrium, the cultivators of the grotto heavens, the mortals of Earth and Mars and the lunar colonies—all of them were suspended in a single, eternal instant, unaware that the universe was dying around them.
But Taishang was not blind. Even as he poured his grey truth into the shield that protected the solar system, his ancient eyes watched Nicholas. He watched as the shards of the cosmic wall were collected. He watched as the origin energy bled into the void. He watched as Nicholas's true spirit expanded, preparing for the rebirth.
And he understood.
He did not speak—there was no time for speech, no medium for sound in the chaos of the shattering. But he did not need to. With a glance—a single, piercing glance that carried the weight of eons—he conveyed the implicit threat. The Grand Immortals had agreed to help. They had agreed to protect the living beings of the universe while Nicholas destroyed and rebuilt. But they had not agreed to be left with nothing. They had not agreed to watch as the upstart from the West claimed the fragments of the cosmic wall for himself, using them to build a universe that would belong to him alone.
Nicholas understood. He had expected this. The Grand Immortals were not fools. They had seen the shards. They had seen the origin energy. They knew the value of what was being collected. And they would not allow Nicholas to take it all.
He split the fragments in two.
His true spirit, vast as it was, could have contained everything. But containment was not the goal. The goal was survival—his survival, the survival of his people, the survival of everything he had built. And survival required cooperation. So he divided the collected shards, keeping half for the new universe he was about to create, and sending the other half toward the Grand Immortals. They would have their own fragments. They would build their own realities. They would be partners in the new order, not subjects.
The shards drifted across the void, and the Grand Immortals absorbed them into their true spirits, their expressions unreadable.
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