A sharp flat thunder clapped across the skies, and boomed into the area, causing even Soren to stagger several steps backward, his face paling a sheet whiter.
But before the visage of the Mimic Drakon could be fully revealed, its bloodline shadow suddenly vanished, snuffing out the rebirth flame and leaving only the blob of blood behind.
'I did it....' Soren thought to himself as he collapsed, totally drained.
But just as his body was about to touch the ground, it suddenly vanished from view as the voice of the Cosmic Vagrant fleeted into the area.
"This debt will surely be settled." It said, with a casualness that struck the dragon with even greater terror that of the blob of inky black blood.
---
"This can be counted as a pass, right?" Soren asked, having been resuscitated by the Cosmic Vagrant.
"Impressive, Ryujin Soren. Your understanding of balance is indeed profound." It remarked, scrutinizing the blob of blood hovering before its brows.
One would be impressed to imagine how it managed to see something so tiny, despite being nigh-infinitely large.
"Hmph!" Soren snorted in disgust as the image of the dragon flashed through his mind. 'Such shamelessness!'
Not that it wasn't to be expected; after all, the bastard did indeed have an impossibly thick skin.
"I didn't really do much, the Origin Pupils and Codex did the heavy lifting." Soren humbled himself, feeling he had cheated his way through the test.
"Though greedy, you now have a clear understanding of your limits." The Cosmic Being remarked once again.
"You may feel you have cheated your way out of this one, but it wouldn't have been possible if you had failed your previous trials. So, they could also be counted as part of your capabilities.
But I must warn you; though you have created something mystical; impossible even, ensure no one asides you know about its existence; otherwise, it might become a curse rather than a blessing.
There are lots of greedy, power-hungry beings out there that would go to any length to obtain more power; even if it meant destroying an innocent life."
"I'll sure etch that onto my heart." Soren vowed, gratitude oozing from his very pores.
"You have once again proven my decision, correct." It acknowledged.
"We should head back; the time has come for you to set out on your quest."
"I've been looking forward to it." Soren replied, both excited and anxious.
"Good. And alongside that, why don't you greet the guest who survived the God-Eater's wrath to find refuge in your ruins."
The Vagrant's words had barely ended when he and Soren phased through a ripple and reappeared within his Soul World.
However, the duo had barely taken in the transformed scenery of Soren's Soul World when the space behind them suddenly warped.
The starlight didn't just bend this time; it shrieked, tearing open like a physical wound in the dimension.
Then a cloying, intoxicating, yet lethally sharp aroma bled into the Soul World, carrying the scent of burning ozone, crushed nightshade, and the ancient aura of unadulterated sin.
Soren's newly formed Origin Pupils instantly locked onto the tear.
His instincts and intuitions rapidly flagging the arrival of an immediate, catastrophic level threat.
"There are some who have managed to survive the shattering of the Fate Well, Soren, and it seems one of them has sought refuge in your ruins."
A slender, impossibly pale hand reached out from the tear in reality, its fingernails sharpened into perfect, obsidian points.
"Meet your tenant, Ryujin Soren," the Vagrant announced. "A Renegade Primal Goddess. The survivor of a slaughter, who is now looking for a home."
The dimensional tear shrieked, sounding like tearing silk amplified to the volume of a dying star.
The cloying scent of ozone and crushed nightshade thickened, taking on a physical weight that pressed against the newly established laws of Soren's Soul World.
Then From the abyss of the cosmic wound, the rest of the figure emerged.
Reality did not just accommodate her; it submitted to her.
She did not walk; Soren's Soul World simply rearranged itself to accommodate her entry.
She was an entity of terrifying, absolute contradictions.
Her silhouette possessed the lethal, fluid grace of an apex predator, yet radiated a magnetic, inescapable allure that bypassed physical attraction and struck directly at one's core conviction or for lack of better word, Dao.
Her skin was the color of polished alabaster under moonlight, draped in gossamer shadows that writhed and whispered like living silk.
Two curved, obsidian horns, inscribed with microscopic, burning runes of a dead language, swept back from her crown.
Her eyes were pools of liquid amethyst, burning with the ancient, exhausting trauma of a survivor who had watched pantheons fall through the chaos of the merging dimensions.
She was a Primal Succubus.
To be in her mere presence was to invite immediate psychological subjugation.
Soren's cold, analytical mind; the fortress that had kept him alive for seven agonizing years had long begun to teeter on the verge of collapse.
He was only seven years old after all.
His new conviction was nothing more than a freshly planted seed; against a deity who had lived for eons, it was less than dust.
His phantom knees buckled.
The suffocating, seductive gravity of her aura bypassed his logic entirely, striking directly at his primal instincts.
He couldn't move.
He couldn't speak.
He was entirely paralyzed, his mind drowning in the terrifying, intoxicating weight of her existence.
"My host," Ji Min purred, her voice a silken ribbon laced with a venomous intent that wrapped around Soren's throat.
She didn't even look at the broader Soul World; her desperate, hunted eyes were locked solely on the boy.
"A nascent dimension.
A blank vessel to hide my signature from Valen's hounds.
Perfect!"
Then she drifted forward in absolute glee, her obsidian nails extending to pierce Soren's consciousness and claim his Soul World for herself.
But then a voice suddenly drifted into the atmosphere.
"I would reconsider that trajectory, little survivor," the voice said.
It was the Cosmic Vagrant.
It didn't raise his voice.
He hadn't moved either.
But the moment the words left his swirling, galaxy of a mouth, the temperature in the Soul World dropped to absolute, metaphysical zero.
Ji Min froze. Her outstretched hand halting mere inches from Soren's face.
Slowly and agonizingly, the Primal Goddess turned her head.
Her amethyst eyes landed on the silhouette of starlight, the chaotic gold and mystic blue eyes, and the sheer, unfathomable void radiating from the its form.
The intoxicating aroma of nightshade instantly turned to stale ash.
The writhing shadows around her body went rigidly still.
She was a Primal Goddess, an entity capable of running circles around mortal logic, but in this moment, she realized with catastrophic clarity that she was a minnow who had just aggressively swum into the jaws of a leviathan.
She hadn't just trespassed; she had attempted to hijack a vessel claimed by an entity so powerful that even her divine perception had completely bypassed.
Someone who could hide from an entity of her calibre is definitely very much stronger than the one who had forced her to miserably flee for her dear life.
The power strata of the cosmos violently asserted itself as she realized that she barely possessed a fraction of a fraction of the power standing before her.
Her knees hit the invisible floor of the Soul World. The elegant, apex predator instantly folding into a posture of absolute, trembling deference.
"I... I was ignorant," Ji Min whispered, her voice stripped of all its venom, leaving only raw, ancient terror. "Forgive me, Supreme One. I was blind to your claim. I beg your mercy."
The Vagrant looked down at her, his mystic blue eye phasing with a cold, terrifying indifference.
"You seek to tinge a Canvas I just wiped clean," the Vagrant rumbled, the heavy, baritone undertone vibrating with enough latent force to shatter her divine core.
"I am a fugitive," she pleaded, her forehead touching the void, not daring to look up. "If I step back into the tear, the God-Killer's hounds will tear my soul apart.
I have nowhere else to hide."
Soren remained on the floor, gasping as the pressure of her aura receded, replaced by the suffocating weight of the Vagrant's authority.
He watched on in absolute awe and reverence, his Origin Pupils slowly recovering as it bore witness to the absolute hierarchy of the universe in HD.
The Vagrant remained silent for a long, agonizing moment.
"You may not have this vessel," the Vagrant finally decreed. "But... your presence presents an efficient variable.
My Herald is an Anvil, and he requires a Shadow."
The Vagrant waved its hands as the atmosphere of Soren's Soul World rippled like the surface of a well, revealing the endless void, riddled with innumerable spatial cracks and drifting fate threads.
However, amidst all of that carnage, was a single, glowing thread of silver fate thread; newly formed and gleaming, tethered to Soren's Soul World as if its existence was at the whim of Soren's life or death.
"There is another," the Vagrant stated. "A mortal girl, bleeding out in the physical ruins beside him. Her thread is tethered to his survival."
Ji Min dared to lift her head a fraction, her eyes following the karmic link.
"A mortal tainted by the rotten Qi of a 3rd Plane?" she asked, her voice trembling. "Supreme One, a mortal shell cannot contain my—"
"Do not call what i call clean, unclean.
Do you presume to tell me what a shell can or cannot contain," the Vagrant cut her off, the gold in his eye flaring.
"Look deeper, Refugee. Look at the foundation forced into dormancy."
Ji Min focused her divine perception down the thread, and she instantly gasped, her terror momentarily warring against genuine shock.
"Shadow Fairy... and... Dark Elf? Woven into a single, suppressed bloodline?"
"She is an empty vessel of supreme stealth and adaptability," the Vagrant confirmed coldly.
"A natural with the beasts who lacks only a guide.
You require sanctuary. I require my Herald to have an apex ally who operates where his strengths may waver.
You will tether yourself to her. You will pour your millennia of legacy, deception, and Primal truths into her foundation.
You will forge her into the perfect vessel you would salivate at possessing." The Vagrant commanded as it took a single step forward, the universe bending around him.
"Refuse, and I will wipe you from existence right now and spare Valen the effort.
Accept, and you shall live to see the God-Killer bleed."
It wasn't a negotiation. It was an absolute mandate from a being of unfathomable scale.
Ji Min didn't hesitate.
The awkward, terrifying realization that she had almost signed her own death warrant propelled her forward.
"I accept," she breathed fervently.
"I will be her shadow.
I will forge her into a masterpiece."
She reached out, her obsidian nails lightly touching the silver thread, and instantly, the link to Soren's Soul World, and before it could pull taut into the endless void, she tethered it to her soul.
She didn't dare look back at the Vagrant.
With a flash of amethyst light, her divine form dissolved, surging violently down the karmic tether and escaping the Soul World before the Vagrant could change its mind.
"I have kept my word to you. Your little lover now lives, with a path to a much brighter future laid before her." The Vagrant said as the dimensional tear sealed shut behind the Primal Goddess and Soren's Soul World returned to its cold, perfect stillness.
The silence that followed the Renegade Goddess's departure was absolute.
The cloying scent of nightshade and the suffocating pressure of her divine aura were gone, sucked down the silver karmic thread and into the physical ruins of the world below.
Soren stood in the center of his simulated cosmos, his phantom chest rising and falling.
His newly formed Origin Pupils, though aching from the sheer density of what they had just witnessed, were already compartmentalizing the terror.
The profound, instinctive fear of a Primal deity had breached his defenses, but his analytical mind was rapidly sealing the breach, converting the trauma into raw, usable data.
He realized he had survived an encounter with an entity that could slaughter pantheons, and that he had only survived it because the fragment of the Primordial Mind standing before him was infinitely worse.