Outside and far away...
Still hovering an inch above the jagged cliff overlooking the graveyard, the Patriarch of the Eden Clan watched as his only Grandson experience gradual systematic shutdown.
He had thought of interfering multiple times already, however, he understood that the fate of Soren didn't rely on himself alone.
Also, he might be powerful and even be considered some sort of God to those of this lower plane, but the people who have vested interest in Soren, are figures and entities even he didn't dare offend.
Furthermore, due to the nature and the sensitivity of all that was happening and the grand scheme of things, it was to their benefit if no one and nothing interfered with the entire process.
But just as he clenched in hands into a restraining fist, he suddenly felt a shift in the atmosphere.
Instantly, he unclenched his hands and used his thumbs to rapidly touch the rest of his fingers as if calculating something.
However, just when it seemed like he was reaching a conclusion, an invisible wave of energy suddenly rippled across from nowhere and barged into him.
Soren's Grandfather's figure abruptly burst apart, disintegrating into motes of light that was then blown off into the unknown.
"A Failure?" Despite having been blown into oblivion, Soren's Grandfather's voice still seemed to ripple in its ephemeral cadence across the area.
"No... an Interference!" This time however, the calm in his tone disappeared, replaced by shock and an unending fury.
However, there was nothing he could do at the moment as he had been rebuffed, and who knew even if he would have been able to do anything otherwise.
---
The concept of 'zero' was a mathematical absolute Soren had always understood.
It was the baseline. The starting point of an equation.
But as his consciousness drifted in the pitch-black expanse, he realized he had never truly experienced absolute zero.
In here, there was no up or down, no heat or cold.
It didn't seem like time existed here either.
The violent, cataclysmic explosion of the Sentient Emerald Core that had ruptured his Star-Iron plates and pulverized his Jade-Alloy bones was gone.
The agonizing sensation of his internal fluids turning to plasma, the frantic shrieking of the Tranquil Poison as it was annihilated, the frantic overloading of the Master Builder Gene—all of it had been erased.
What was left felt like an endless, suffocating stillness, that also simultaneously felt like he was nothing, drifting within an endless expanse of emptiness.
He was dead.
The logic was undeniable.
The physical vessel known as Ryujin Soren, a seven-year-old anomaly built on desperate biomechanical failsafes, had sustained damage that vastly exceeded all parameters of biological or spiritual recovery.
Yet, the only thing going well for him was that he could still think, and even that seemed to constantly remind him of his Master Builder Gene's absence.
'I am dead, but my perceptions remain,' Soren concluded, his thoughts echoing in the endless dark without a mouth to speak them. 'This means perception is not bound to any physical shell.'
"An astute observation, Sojourner," a voice boomed.
It was a terrifying type of sound.
It vibrated with a baritone resonance that felt heavy enough to crush a mountain.
It didn't just enter what was left of Soren's hearing; it bypassed his auditory nerves entirely and manifested directly within the core of his being, vibrating and blurring his consciousness to the verge of collapse.
It seemed to have originated from nowhere and everywhere all at once.
Then a single drop of liquid materialized in the absolute darkness.
Soren's phantom senses locked onto it. It was not water.
It looked as though the sheer weight of all existing matter—every star, every planetary crust, every dying breath of a mortal—had been condensed into a sphere no larger than a teardrop.
Despite that, it seemed to descend with a nigh-absolute weightlessness but carried a pervading aura of a suffocating and boundless omnipresence.
As he watched it fall over, and for a fraction of a second, the primal, cold logic that governed Soren's mind screamed that if this drop fell on him, his soul would be obliterated.
He felt his non-existent heart skip a bit, as the thought of absolute death flashed past his mind briefly.
Then just when he thought the weight of all that ever existed would fall and crush him, the liquid drop suddenly came to an abrupt halt.
Then it began to send out metaphysical ripples across the emptiness, like that of a leaf falling on the surface of a tranquil water.
Like ink bleeding into clear water, the drop violently expanded. In the span of a single breath, the absolute zero of the void was violently overwritten.
A boundless sky erupted above him, painted with a dense, infinite cluster of stars that bled with every color conceivable.
It invaded the emptiness like ink in water, and in the span of a few breaths, Soren found himself encompassed within a boundless world.
Beneath his incorporeal feet, an invisible foundation settled, and from its depths, two gargantuan, blazing orbs of gas rose into the heavens, flanked by a sun and a moon that cast an ethereal, twilight glow across the expanse.
'Unbelievable!' Soren marvelled at the sight.
'How's this even possible?' He thought to himself, oblivious that his very thoughts were echoing across the area.
Then he looked up and realize that a Sun had indeed rose into the skies right above him, and then the whole picture clicked in his mind.
Soren realized that he had once found himself in a boundless expanse of the void, and the cosmos was created from within it, and from this boundless cosmos these three planets were born.
"Oh my, aren't you one curious traveler." The voice said once again, and Soren was stunned by the meaning of that statement.
'Wait. Can he read my mind?' He thought to himself once again, still oblivious that his voice was still echoing across the area.
The space in front of Soren warped; the ambient starlight bending as a figure stepped through a ripple in reality.
Soren's phantom eyes narrowed.
The entity defied all logical architecture.
It was a silhouette that looked like someone took a human shaped bottle and poured the milky way into it.
Though shaped like a human male, asides the two arms, legs, and head there was nothing else humane that one could use to describe the figure whose 'flesh' was a swirling, dynamic tapestry of the cosmos.
Where eyes should have been, two terrifying spheres hovered: one a chaotic, flaming gold, the other a phasing, mystic blue.
Where a mouth should have been, a swirling galaxy now rotated, and as his spoke, the swirling galaxy seemed to glow and settle.
But that's where it all ended, everything else was just a human shape bottle filled with the milky way.
"Isn't it beautiful..." the figure spoke, the galaxy-mouth pulsing with violet light.
"...that the one who is to herald my return would be a little human child, so captivated by the mechanics of his own Soul World that he ignores the very source of everything in existence.
The Paradox of it all sure is timeless." It chuckled as Soren snapped out of his reverie.
Soren maintained his silence. In the Ignis Tribe, speaking without measuring the weight of the listener was a quick way to invite death.
Soren tried to scrutinize the figure's appearance further, but no matter how hard he tried, the man was totally obscured from his senses, leaving him speechless.
His mind attempted to apply the analytic frameworks of the Master Builder Gene to the entity's structure.
But the gene was silent. Overloaded. Dead.
Every time Soren tried to focus on a definitive trait of the figure, his perception will blur and his mind violently slide off the entity as if trying to grasp frictionless ice.
Then out of sheer frustration, he subconsciously blurted. "My apologies... But who are you?" He asked, his voice frustrated but steady, stripped of the terror a normal seven-year-old should possess.
The figure chuckled, its swirling mouthpiece glowing as if to mock Soren's serious demeanor.
"I am the draft discarded so the universe could be written," the entity replied, stepping closer.
The gravity around it was immense, yet Soren felt no pressure.
"I am the rest between the notes of the Great Song.
You may call me the Cosmic Vagrant.
But what I am matters far less than what you are about to become."
Soren froze upon hearing this. If there was one thing he could literally sacrifice almost anything for; it is knowledge, and when it came to knowledge about what he had become, it was even greater.
The Master Builder Gene might have been telling him he needed every single phase of body tempering he had undergone, but Soren was still a seven-year-old.
He'd be lying if he claimed he had read about everything in the tribe scrolls; after all, isn't the Ignis Tribe so weak that he had managed to defeat its Chieftain, and the Envoy they claimed to be a God.
His eventual loss to the Sentient Emerald Core however, stung his pride a little, and as such, he was able to humble himself and listen to what the figure had to tell him about all of it.
'Could he be influencing...' Soren had completed his train of thoughts before he realized that it would have been echoing across the area all along.
He chuckled in defeat, raising his hands in surrender, and in response, the figure only chuckled in response, utterly amused by Soren for some mysterious reasons.
"Now that you're ready why don't we start from where we are; one of the most basic foundational knowledge you need to have before leaving."
"Leavi..." Soren cut off his own words and paid rapt attention. This wasn't the time to be distracted.
The Vagrant pointed a finger made of clustered stardust toward the simulated heavens above them.
"Millennia ago..." the Vagrant's tone shifted, the amusement vanishing, replaced by a cold, historical absolute,
"...there was only the Primordial Mind. A unified totality of existence.
But in time, it fractured into two halves: Thought, the mysterious and infinite potential, and Action, the chaotic and violent manifestation.
The friction between these halves held creation in a delicate, ungoverned balance."
Soren listened, his mind categorizing the data. Thought and Action. Theory and Execution. The fundamental laws of progress.
"Then came Marduk, the God-Eater..." the Vagrant spat, the name causing the very stars in Soren's Soul World to flicker and dim.
"...in its quest to attain absolute supremacy, he destroyed the very foundation of reality itself.
He shattered the Fate Well—the cosmic anchor of all karmic flows, seeking to fuse Thought and Action himself, consume the Primordial Mind, and remake creation in his own twisted image."
A horrific image flashed into Soren's mind, violently forcefully implanted by the Vagrant's words.
He saw dimensions tearing like wet paper. He saw ancient gods falling from the sky, and even the bodies of some of them shredding apart and dissolving into soup.
Then he saw the dead clawing out of the earth as the fundamental laws of life and death inverted.
"The dimensions fractured. The realms spilled into one another, and reality began its slow, but inevitable acceleration towards absolute oblivion," the Vagrant continued, his flaming gold eye locking onto Soren.
"And in the center of this cosmic bleeding, Valen, the God of Riddles, gazed into the madness and found his own path.
He began to seek out the Fallen Gods in order to destroy them and assimilate their Godhoods into himself and with that propel himself to become the Supreme God."
Soren's incorporeal fists clenched.
He recognized the pattern. It was the same as the Oman House.
The strong devouring the weak to maintain control. The scale was just infinitely larger.
"Where do I fit into this equation?" Soren demanded, cutting through the cosmic history.
He wasn't a god. He was an anomaly born in the dirt.
"You were a variable no one accounted for," the Vagrant whispered, leaning in so close that the swirling galaxy of his mouth filled Soren's vision.
"The Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. A 'Void Soul' to the ignorant shamans of your tribe. A failure to be discarded on a cold altar.
But your death... your betrayal at the hands of your kindred... coincided with the exact, infinitesimally brief moment the Fate Well shattered."
The Vagrant revealed as it reached out and placed its hand made of starlight against Soren's phantom chest.