A profound silence hung over the ruins of the Celestial Bureaucracy, a silence that was not mere absence of sound, but a tangible force, gnawing at the edges of reality itself. I walked through the grand, shattered archways, my footsteps echoing in the vast, empty halls that once thrummed with the absolute order of the cosmos. This was the heart of the old world, now stilled by the Great Shattering.
The air shimmered with unstable energies. Here, a fragment of the Karmic Balance system flickered, showing glimpses of tangled mortal destinies. There, a tear in the fabric of space revealed a bleeding landscape where the mortal realm intruded upon the divine. The Resonance Cascade had not just broken structures; it had broken the very rules of existence.
My divine senses, still new and unaccustomed to the scale of the desolation, recoiled from the "Silence"—that anti-divinity phenomenon born from lost faith and abandoned altars. It was a void that consumed memory, power, and purpose. I watched as it slowly erased the intricate murals depicting the old pantheon from the walls, leaving behind blank, cold marble.
A whisper, thin and desperate, reached me. It was not a sound, but a tremor in the remnants of the divine energy grid. One of the last functioning communication nodes, a pale jade slate cracked down the middle, was repeating a fragmented distress call from the "Echo Eaters." These entities, born from the Cascade, fed on divine history. The whisper spoke of entire domains forgotten, of gods who no longer remembered their own names or duties, left as hollow, wandering shells.
This was the legacy I had returned to. The Restorers, clinging to their blueprints of a dead age, would call this a problem to be fixed. The Innovators would see it as a canvas for their reckless ambitions. The Mortal Ascensionists, from their fortified enclaves, would label it proof of divine failure.
But as I stood there, feeling the unique resonance of my own power—a power untouched by the old system's prejudices and strangely immune to the creeping Silence—I saw it not as a problem, but as a truth. The old godhood was dead. Its echo was fading.
A purpose, cold and clear, crystallized within me. To simply pick a side was to accept the limits of their warring ideologies. I was not meant to be a restorer or a revolutionary.
I was meant to be something else entirely. The path forward would not be found in these haunted ruins, nor in the councils of the powerful. It lay at the source, the epicenter of the break—the Heart of the Resonance Cascade. It was a journey deemed suicidal by every sane entity in the Three Realms.
But I was the only one who could walk it. Taking one last look at the fading glory around me, I turned my back on the silence and stepped into the bleeding rift, setting my course into the unraveled chaos. The first step of the new genesis had to be taken alone.