The sand wouldn't stop falling from Eiden's hair.
He'd climbed out of the buried temple expecting relief—fresh air, open sky, a break from the oppressive weight of concentrated faith. Instead, he found himself sitting at the temple's entrance, methodically shaking dust from his head while trying to process what had just happened.
He'd consumed a dead god's corpse.
Well, not consumed exactly. Converted. Transformed residual worship into something that had no business existing in a world built on divine polarity. And now that energy hummed beneath his skin, colorless and hungry, waiting for direction he didn't know how to give.
"The throne was never meant to stay empty," he muttered, repeating the ghost's final words.
What throne? The Neutral God's? Did that even exist, or was it metaphorical? And if it was real, why would a dead deity care whether Eiden—a powerless transmigrator who'd been alive in this world for maybe six hours—sat on it?
Too many questions. Not enough answers.
Eiden stood, dusting off his legs and immediately regretting it when he remembered he was still completely naked. The twin suns beat down mercilessly, and while his body no longer felt like it was actively disintegrating, he wasn't exactly comfortable either.
"First priority," he said aloud, because talking to himself felt less insane than silence, "find clothes. Second priority, find water. Third priority, figure out what the hell I'm—"
The sand beneath his feet moved.
Not shifted. Moved. With purpose.
Eiden jumped back, the Neutral Essence responding instantly to his alarm. It pooled at his fingertips again, that strange pressure-without-form, and he held his hands up defensively as the sand continued to writhe and gather.
It was forming something. A shape. Rising from the desert floor like a sculpture being pulled from clay.
Within seconds, a figure stood before him.
It was roughly humanoid—seven feet tall, broad-shouldered, with proportions that suggested immense physical power. But instead of flesh, it was made entirely of compressed sand, each grain locked together with such precision that the surface appeared almost smooth. Where a face should have been, there was only a featureless oval.
No eyes. No mouth. Nothing.
Just emptiness.
"Okay," Eiden said slowly, keeping his hands raised. "So that's new."
The figure tilted its head, the motion oddly birdlike for something without features. Then it raised one hand—and in its palm, light began to bloom.
Not the colorless light of Neutral Essence. This was golden, warm, and sickeningly familiar. Divine light. Faith made manifest.
When the figure spoke, its voice came from everywhere and nowhere—not sound exactly, but meaning pressed directly into Eiden's consciousness.
"VESSEL WITHOUT ALIGNMENT. ANOMALY. ERROR."
"Yeah, yeah, I've heard this speech already," Eiden said, though his heart was hammering. The energy in his fingertips pulsed harder, responding to the threat. "You're either here to kill me or convert me. Which is it?"
"NEITHER."
That made Eiden pause. "What?"
The figure lowered its hand, and the golden light dimmed but didn't disappear. It drifted closer, moving with an eerie smoothness that suggested it wasn't actually walking so much as existing across the space between them.
"I AM THE HOLLOW SAINT. GUARDIAN OF LOST FAITH. ARBITER OF FORGOTTEN WORSHIP." The sand-body gestured back toward the buried temple. "YOU ENTERED MY DOMAIN. CONSUMED MY RESIDUE. BY LAW OF DIVINE EXCHANGE, YOU OWE DEBT."
"Debt." Eiden's laugh was sharp and humorless. "Of course. Even dead gods want payment."
"NOT PAYMENT. CHOICE."
The Hollow Saint raised both hands, and suddenly the air between them split—not violently, but with surgical precision. A rift opened, revealing something beyond the desert. Eiden caught glimpses of impossible architecture, cities built vertically into clouds, rivers that flowed upward, mountains that floated inverted in violet skies.
"ACCEPT MY BLESSING," the Saint said, "AND I WILL GRANT YOU PASSAGE TO THE FIRST REALM. POWER. PURPOSE. A PLACE IN THE DIVINE HIERARCHY. YOU WILL ASCEND AS MY CHOSEN VESSEL, CARRYING MY NAME INTO REVIVAL."
In the vision, Eiden saw himself—or a version of himself. Clad in radiant armor, standing atop a mountain peak while thousands of voices chanted in worship. His body was strong, perfect, unmarked by weakness or doubt. His eyes blazed with golden light, and in his hands he held a sword that could split mountains.
He looked powerful.
He looked certain.
He looked completely hollow.
"And if I refuse?" Eiden asked quietly.
The vision shattered like glass.
The rift closed. The Hollow Saint's featureless face somehow conveyed disappointment despite having no features to convey it with.
"THEN YOU REMAIN FAITHLESS. MARKED. HUNTED." It paused, and when it spoke again, there was something almost like concern in its tone. "THE DIVINE CENSUS DOES NOT TOLERATE ERRORS. THEY WILL SEND ERASERS. BEINGS WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO REMOVE ANOMALIES FROM EXISTENCE. YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE ALONE."
"So my options are worship you or die," Eiden said flatly.
"YOUR OPTIONS ARE EXIST WITHIN THE SYSTEM OR BE DELETED BY IT."
Eiden looked down at his hands. The colorless energy still pulsed there, waiting. He thought about the godling's dissolution, about the ghost in the temple laughing as it faded, about Earth burning under divine indifference.
He thought about what the Hollow Saint was really offering: safety in exchange for dependency. A place in the hierarchy, but only if he knelt. Power, but only if he worshipped.
The same deal humanity had been making with gods since the first frightened primate looked at the sky and imagined something watching back.
"I have a counteroffer," Eiden said.
The Hollow Saint went perfectly still.
"You're dead, right? Forgotten. Your worshippers are dust, your name is erased, and all that's left is residue so old it barely remembers what it used to be." Eiden took a step forward, and the Neutral Essence responded, spreading from his hands to envelop his entire body in that strange colorless pressure. "But you're still here. Still trying to bargain. Still offering deals like you've got something I need."
"I OFFER SURVIVAL."
"No," Eiden said. "You offer submission dressed up as protection. You want me to be your vessel because you're desperate for relevance. You want to use my anomaly to bootstrap yourself back into existence."
The sand-body's shoulders stiffened. The golden light in its palm flared brighter.
"CAREFUL, MORTAL. YOU SPEAK TO A DIVINE BEING."
"I speak to a dead divine being," Eiden corrected. "And here's what I understand about death: it's terrifying. Even for gods. Maybe especially for gods. You've tasted oblivion, and you're so desperate to avoid going back that you'll offer anything to anyone who wanders into your graveyard."
"YOU—"
"I'm not finished." Eiden's voice was cold now, clinical. The philosopher in him—the part that had spent years dissecting belief systems and finding them wanting—was fully awake. "You said I owe you debt for consuming your residue. But that's not how it works, is it? I didn't steal your faith. It was abandoned. Unwanted. You couldn't use it anymore, so it just... sat there. Rotting. I did you a favor by converting it instead of letting it dissipate completely."
The Hollow Saint was trembling now. Fine cracks appeared in its sand-body, golden light bleeding through like lava through stone.
"YOU DARE—"
"Yeah, I dare." Eiden took another step forward. "Because I've already watched one omnipotent being admit it was just playing games with mortal lives. I've already died once. So what are you going to do? Kill me? Erase me? Go ahead. But you can't offer me anything I want, because what I want is to never, ever be dependent on divine approval again."
He spread his arms wide, and the Neutral Essence exploded outward—not violently, but absolutely. It filled the space around him, creating a sphere of colorless pressure that pushed against reality itself.
"I refuse your blessing," Eiden said. "I refuse your hierarchy. I refuse your system. And I refuse to be scared of erasure by beings who need me more than I need them."
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the Hollow Saint began to laugh.
It wasn't the gentle, knowing laugh of the temple ghost. This was something else—wild, unhinged, the sound of a being who'd forgotten what joy felt like suddenly remembering.
"OH," it said, "OH, YOU MAGNIFICENT FOOL."
The sand-body started to collapse, but not like the temple statue had. This was controlled. Deliberate. The Hollow Saint was choosing to unmake itself, pulling its form apart grain by grain.
"YOU THINK I WANTED A VESSEL? THAT I SOUGHT REVIVAL?" The laugh continued as the figure crumbled. "I HAVE BEEN DEAD FOR THREE THOUSAND YEARS, CHILD. I KNOW WHAT PEACE TASTES LIKE. I KNOW THE RELIEF OF SILENCE."
"Then why—"
"BECAUSE THE SYSTEM DEMANDS IT." The Saint's voice was fading now, losing cohesion as its form scattered. "EVEN DEAD GODS MUST PERFORM THEIR FUNCTION. I AM GUARDIAN. I MUST OFFER. I MUST TEST. I MUST JUDGE WHETHER THOSE WHO ENTER HAVE THE STRENGTH TO REJECT DIVINITY ITSELF."
Eiden's arms dropped. "This was a test?"
"EVERYTHING IS A TEST. EVERY MOMENT, EVERY CHOICE. THE SYSTEM TESTS. THE GODS TEST. EXISTENCE ITSELF IS ONE LONG EXAMINATION TO SEE WHO BREAKS AND WHO BENDS AND WHO—" The laugh turned into something that might have been a sigh. "—WHO REFUSES TO TAKE THE TEST AT ALL."
The Hollow Saint's form was almost completely gone now, just a vague outline of compressed sand against the desert floor. But before it vanished entirely, it reached out one last time.
The golden light in its palm—the divine blessing Eiden had rejected—inverted. The color drained away, leaving something else. Something that hurt to look at because it existed in active opposition to the divine.
"YOU PASSED," the Saint whispered. "SO TAKE YOUR PRIZE, VESSEL OF NEGATION. TAKE THE WEAPON FORGED FROM REFUSED FAITH. THE BLADE THAT CUTS BELIEF ITSELF."
The light touched the ground, and the sand responded.
It surged upward in a column, black as void, cold as absolute zero. The grains compressed with impossible force, crystallizing into something solid. Something sharp.
A sword materialized in the air before Eiden and fell point-first into the sand at his feet.
It was beautiful in the way a scalpel is beautiful—functional, precise, and utterly without mercy. The blade was perfectly straight, three feet long, and made of what looked like black glass. But it wasn't glass. It was crystallized faith—or rather, the absence of faith. The anti-matter to belief's matter.
The hilt was wrapped in strips of gray cloth that might have once been white but had been stained colorless by exposure to Neutral Essence. And along the blade's length, symbols were etched—not divine script, but something simpler. Mathematical. The kind of elegant equations that described fundamental forces.
"THE MIRROR BLADE," the Hollow Saint said, its voice barely a whisper now. "IT REFLECTS WHAT IS OFFERED AND RETURNS NOTHING. USE IT WELL, FAITHLESS ONE. USE IT TO CUT THE CHAINS THAT BIND EVEN GODS."
"Wait—" Eiden started, but the Saint was already gone.
Nothing remained but scattered sand and the sword waiting at his feet.
And something else. Something wrong.
The air was vibrating. Not with sound, but with pressure—the kind of pressure that comes before an explosion. Eiden looked up and saw the sky beginning to crack.
Not like it had when Earth died. This was different. Smaller, more localized. A fracture in reality directly above him, and through it, something was looking down.
Multiple somethings.
He felt their attention like physical weight—cold, analytical, utterly without emotion. They were evaluating him. Measuring. Calculating whether his existence was a threat that needed immediate correction.
The Divine Census had noticed him.
A voice echoed through the desert, sterile and mechanical:
"ANOMALY CONFIRMED. FAITHLESS DESIGNATION APPLIED. INITIATING CORRECTION PROTOCOL."
Eiden grabbed the Mirror Blade.
The moment his fingers closed around the hilt, sensation exploded through him. The weapon wasn't just a tool—it was an extension of his Neutral Essence, a physical manifestation of his rejection. He could feel its hunger, its purpose. It wanted to cut, to sever, to unmake the bonds between mortals and divine.
The crack in the sky widened. Something began to emerge—not descending, but manifesting, just like the Hollow Saint had.
But this was no guardian offering tests. This was an Eraser.
Eiden looked at the blade in his hand, then at the thing taking shape above him. His body was still weak. He had no training, no experience, no real understanding of how to fight in this world.
But he had something else.
He had a weapon forged from refusal. He had energy that consumed belief itself. And he had the absolute certainty that if he died here, it would be on his own terms—not kneeling, not begging, and definitely not worshipping.
"Alright," he said to the descending Eraser, to the watching Census, to whatever gods were monitoring this particular corner of their experimental sandbox. "Let's see if anomalies can bleed."
He raised the Mirror Blade.
The black glass caught the light of twin suns and reflected nothing back.
And somewhere in the distance, a fallen angel impaled by her own halo felt an impossible shift in the fabric of divine order and whispered a single word:
"Interesting."