In the end, the sun also felt cold.'
Kaelen did not scream as his divinity was systematically dismantled. He
watched with the detached exhaustion of a man witnessing his own history
turn to ash as the thirteen figures of the Greater Heavens tore his celestial
vessel into shimmering stardust. These entities, who ruled from the highest
peaks of existence, had deemed him a "Glitch in the Creator's Design." To
them, he was a being whose soul had grown too dense, too heavy, and too
"wrong" for the fabric of reality to support.
But it wasn
't just the Deities who demanded his end. As his essence
flickered in the dark, he felt the very laws of his home dimension shudder
and push back. His own world rejected his existence. It wasn't an accident
or a cruel twist of fate; it was a cosmic eviction. He was not merely dying;
he was being exhaled into the void like a toxin that the universe could no
longer stomach.
Once again, the "Cursed Soul" plunged into the Great Void.
Most souls fear the Void as a finality, but for Kaelen, it was a familiar,
lonely hallway. He stood before the four gargantuan gates that served as
the primary arteries to the mortal realms: The Rectified, The Neutral, The
Pure, and The Evil.
He look
ed toward the Pure Realm. It hummed with a blinding, celestial
frequency that promised a peace he knew he could never claim. Kaelen's
lips thinned into a line of weary bitterness. "Too fragile," he thought, his
mind echoing with the cold wisdom gathered over a thousand years. "A
realm built on glass and prayers cannot stabilize a soul that carries the
density of the Beginning. I would shatter it just by stepping inside."
He knew from painful experience that his presence was a burden. As he
turned his back on the light, the gate of the Evil Realm groaned open on
rusted, celestial hinges. It didn't just open; it bled. It released a silence so
profound it was deafening—a graveyard of shadows that had waited an
eternity for a soul heavy enough to anchor them.
Kaelen'
s voice vibrated through the emptiness, deep and final: "Maybe...
just maybe this darkness is deep enough to contain me."
High Above: The Outer Sanctum of the Greater Heavens
In a realm of white marble and eternal light, a Celestial Being—the Arbiter
—suddenly flinched. His crystalline skin hummed with a violent vibration,
a sympathetic resonance with a power that shouldn't exist anymore. He
pointed a trembling, shimmering finger down toward the swirling rot of
the Evil Realm.
"Did you feel it? The
flinch in the void... as if reality itself just buckled
under a new, impossible weight."
Beside him, another figure remained motionless in deep meditation, his
eyes stitched shut by choice. He represented the absolute arrogance of the
Greater Heavens. "The Evil Route is a gutter for discarded spirits, Arbiter,"
he replied, his voice dripping with cold indifference. "A mundane flicker of
a dying spark. We have far more important matters than the trash of the
lower realms. Do not let a ghost distract you from our reign."
"You are right," the Arbiter whispered, though his hand continued to shake
until the ripple vanished. He did not know that a legacy they thought they
had buried—the younger of the two shadows—had just slipped through
their fingers.
The East Region: The Outskirts
Kaelen opened his eyes.
His
first sensation wasn't sight—it was the brutal, physical assault of
Gravity. For the first time in a millennium, the feeling of a physical form
was an agonizing novelty. He felt the cold grit of the dirt against his cheek,
the smell of damp rot in his nostrils, and the agonizing, rhythmic thrum of
a heart that shouldn't be beating.
"I am stable..." he r
asped. Each word felt like pulling a serrated blade
through a throat made of glass. "I am... finally stable."
He la
y in a dusty graveyard, his new vessel—a "Rank 10" boy—a map of
absolute misery. This body was pathetic: ribs snapped like dry twigs, skin a
sickly, pale gray, and a posture twisted by a violent end. This boy had died
abandoned by the world, a nameless scavenger in a nameless field.
But Kaelen did not shatter. The name Kaelen had been given to him on his
very first birth on Earth. Since that day, he had wandered for a thousand
years in search of Salvation, often moving in the wake of a legend he could
never quite outrun. He had attempted this reincarnation many times
before. He had tried to inhabit the bodies of Humans, Gods, and even the
most ancient Demons. But there were no exceptions: every vessel that
inherited his soul had turned to dust under the atmospheric pressure of his
spirit. The "Weight" was simply too much.
Y
et, here in the "Evil Route," the density of the shadows acted as a sponge.
The "Glitch" had found a hiding place where the darkness was thick enough
to hold him together.
A shadow blotted out the moon. A low-life scavenger, eyes gleaming with
the predatory greed common to this region, stood over him. He held a
rusted knife, looking at the broken boy as if he were a discarded coin to be
collected.
"Didn't your parents teach you?" the man sneered, his voice wet with
malice. "Don't wander the graveyard at night. But since you're just a child...
I'll give you an easy death."
The man saw a victim. He did not realize that the child in front of him had,
not once, but many times destroyed entire universes simply by existing
within them. To Kaelen, this man was less than a speck of dust on the boots
of time.
Kaelen didn't even look at him. He simply raised a hand, his fingers
trembling with the effort of existing in this fragile reality. His internal
injuries began to knit together instantly—a miracle of divine regeneration
fueled by a soul that refused to die. He didn't strike. He didn't use a
technique. He simply stopped holding back.
He released 0.001% of his soul's actual weight.
The world screamed.
In a localized r
adius, the air turned to liquid under the sudden, massive
pressure. The earth didn't just crack; it collapsed into a perfect, silent 100-
meter crater that erased half the graveyard in a single heartbeat. The
scavenger didn't have time to beg. His bones didn't break; they turned to
powder. His blood was pressurized into a red vapor that vanished
instantly. Where a man stood, there was now only a vacuum.
But the victory was a heavy burden. The mortal vessel reached its limit
almost immediately. Kaelen's skin began to spider-web with glowing,
golden cracks as the "Existence Rejection" began to flare up. His heart
hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird trying to escape a cage.
He was a being whose lineage the Gods feared, now tr
apped in a frame that
could handle his soul but could not maintain his power. As his vision
clouded, Kaelen collapsed into the center of the ruins.
In the shadows, a light emerged—a sign of Hope. A man, a survivor from
the outskirts who had seen the impossible descent of power, stumbled
toward the edge of the crater. He was a Teacher who had seen much of the
world's cruelty, and he looked at the boy in the center of the debris with
eyes full of terror and wonder.
The T
eacher gathered the broken child into his arms, running toward a
small cabin on the horizon. He knew he had to hide him. He knew he had
to anchor him before the Greater Heavens noticed that a piece of the
forbidden past was still alive.
"What will happen to him?" the wind seemed to whisper across the
flattened earth.
"Is it his fate... or his destiny as the Cursed Soul?"