Eventually, Axiros ran out of methods. Every path he could think of had been tested. Every law, every perfection, every fragment of insight he had gathered across countless lifetimes had been pushed to its absolute limit.
He had dismantled his understanding again and again, rebuilding it in different ways, hoping that somewhere within those changes, he would find a flaw in the void. Yet no matter how many times he tried, nothing worked.
The void remained unchanged, indifferent to his struggles.
What he desired was not power, nor authority, nor enlightenment. He wanted freedom. He wanted to leave this place. When there was nothing left to rely on, he did what he had always done in moments of desperation.
He created something new. Using Absolute Non-Being as his foundation and the one hundred and twenty-eight perfections as his framework, he began to design entirely new techniques born from the void itself.
These were not inherited, learned, or borrowed. They were created through his own will and understanding.
One of his greatest achievements during this era was the Sword Style of the One Hundred and Twenty-Eight Perfections of the Void. It was not merely a sword art, but a manifestation of everything he had comprehended. It had twelve phases and one last, supreme phase.
Each stance embodied a major perfection, and each movement carried layers of emptiness, stillness, and nonexistence. It was heavenly or hellish.
Every strike erased more than flesh and matter. It erased presence, meaning, and causality. It was a flawless system, refined to absolute perfection.
What made this sword style truly terrifying was its flexibility. Its power could be suppressed to the level of an ordinary mortal or amplified to rival the collapse of entire realities. It did not depend on external energy or cultivation.
As long as Axiros existed, the sword style existed. Even when stripped of all power, reduced to nothing but will and memory, he could still wield it. In that sense, it was his final safeguard against helplessness.
Encouraged by this success, Axiros continued creating. He developed techniques born from absence, arts shaped by silence, and domains forged from stillness.
Some focused on survival, others on preservation, and some on resisting decay, madness, and erosion.
One of the most significant things Axiros accomplished during this endless confinement was the creation of an energy seal imprinted directly into the void itself. It was not something formed within his soul, nor something anchored to his existence.
It was carved into nonexistence, engraved upon nothingness itself. To create it, he fused together the essence of every perfection he had comprehended, weaving them into a single, unified structure that could not be erased by time, decay, or oblivion.
This seal was not simple. It was a culmination of his entire journey through emptiness. Every fragment of understanding, every shard of insight, every refinement of will was poured into its formation. He invested everything he still had access to, his energy, his consciousness, his memories, and even fragments of his identity. Layer by layer, he reinforced it until it became something the void itself could not reject.
Strangely, even Axiros did not fully understand its ultimate purpose.
At first, he had created it out of instinct, driven by a vague sense that he needed to leave something behind. A safeguard. A key. A seed. Or perhaps a final testament to his existence. He could not say. He only knew that it felt necessary, as if some deeper part of him was guiding his hands while his conscious mind struggled to keep up.
The process of creating this seal was unimaginably slow and exhausting. Each line of energy had to be etched with absolute precision. Each layer had to harmonize perfectly with all one hundred and twenty-eight perfections.
A single flaw would cause the entire structure to collapse into nothingness. More than once, he had to dismantle centuries of work and begin again from the beginning.
By the time it was finally complete, an entire epoch had passed.
When he looked upon it, suspended silently within the void, he felt no pride. No satisfaction. Only a quiet sense of finality. It was a masterpiece born from solitude and desperation, shaped by countless ages of suffering and perseverance.
It existed.
And in a place where nothing should exist…
That alone made it extraordinary.
Each creation was born from both desperation and brilliance. Each one was another attempt to carve an exit where none existed.
Epochs passed, then more, and then more still. Entire eras dissolved into indistinguishable stretches of time. Yet nothing changed. No matter how refined his creations became, the void remained absolute.
It did not bend. It did not weaken. It did not respond. There was still no crack, no passage, no sign of escape.
Slowly, Axiros was forced to accept a bitter truth. For now, escape was impossible. If he could not leave, then he would endure. If he could not break free, then he would outlast.
If death was destined to come for him eventually, then he would resist it for as long as existence itself allowed.
He shifted his focus toward survival, toward prolonging his existence, toward strengthening his resistance against decay and oblivion. Not because he had given up, but because he refused to lose.
Not yet.
Not ever.
Centillions of years slipped by in silent succession, each one eroding Axiros a little more. He was losing the battle, slowly, relentlessly, inevitably. His existence was fading, fragment by fragment, thought by thought, memory by memory.
There was no sudden collapse, no dramatic end. It was a quiet disintegration, the kind that came from enduring eternity without rest, without form, without anchor.
He was fighting against entropy itself. Against decay, against dissolution, against death in its purest and most merciless form. Any ordinary being would have vanished long ago.
Even the strongest souls would have shattered under such endless pressure. To exist without a vessel, without a body, without even a stable reality to cling to, was enough to erase all meaning.
Yet Axiros endured.
Through sheer will and stubborn defiance, he held himself together far longer than should have been possible. His mind did not collapse. His soul did not scatter. His being did not dissolve completely.
But endurance was not immortality.
He was dying.
And he was dying quickly.
With each passing age, more of him was lost to the void. His thoughts grew sluggish. His awareness dulled. Even his once-infinite determination began to waver. He knew it now with terrible clarity, he stood at the edge of oblivion.
Either a miracle would appear…
Or he would vanish forever in this desolate, forgotten abyss.
A few more centillions of years passed.
By then, almost nothing remained.
His consciousness flickered like a dying ember. His identity was barely intact. The countless perfections, the immeasurable comprehension, the boundless will he once possessed, all of it had been reduced to faint echoes within a collapsing soul.
He could no longer maintain himself.
"I… can't hold on any longer," he thought weakly. "Looks like… this is the end…"
His awareness began to unravel.
His existence started to disperse.
And then-
Light.
Not seen with eyes. Not felt with senses. It simply appeared within the last remnants of his perception. A serene, gentle radiance, utterly out of place within the endless darkness of the void. It was warm. Calm. Pure.
Real.
For the first time in ages, something existed before him.
He could not think clearly anymore. His thoughts were fragmented, scattered, barely coherent. But he recognized it instinctively. Deeper than logic. Deeper than reason. Something within his soul screamed that this light was his only chance.
Without hesitation, without thought, his fading consciousness reached out.
His soul moved.
Drawn by instinct alone.
At the same time, the light responded.
It moved.
Swift. Purposeful. Direct.
Its trajectory was aimed at him.
Like a comet cutting through nothingness, it surged toward his crumbling existence. It was the last thing Axiros perceived clearly before his awareness threatened to collapse completely.
Then-
It engulfed him.
Radiance flooded his being.
Fragments were gathered. Shattered pieces were restored. Torn strands of existence were woven back together. His soul, once on the verge of annihilation, was seized and reforged in a process beyond comprehension.
Pain and comfort merged into one.
Destruction and creation intertwined.
He was being repaired.
Completely.
Thoroughly.
Relentlessly.
His being regenerated from the inside out. His consciousness stabilized. His identity reassembled. His essence, once scattered across eternity, was pulled back into a coherent whole. It even enhanced him beyond his original limits.
Before he could even comprehend what was happening, the light seized him.
And pulled.
Space folded.
Reality bent.
The void loosened its grip.
By means unknown to him, by laws he had never studied, by principles beyond his comprehension, the light tore him free from his eternal prison.
It carried him away.
Out of nothingness.
Out of despair.
Out of endless isolation.
And into something new.
Worlds flashed, dimensions passed by, exitsences, realities, overlapped together in a blurry of light.
Finally, the light slowed.
It searched.
Scanning countless realms, countless planes, countless realities in an instant. It was looking for something. A host. A person or a body Axiros could inhabit.
A place where Axiros could live once more.