## Thoughts creeping in
The spectral form of Alioth dominated the horizon, a roaring tempest of devouring mist. But the true destination ~ the Citadel at the End of Time ~ still felt a world away. As Tao moved, his mind operated on dual tracks. One part processed the flood of cosmic data, while another engaged in a constant, internal critique. This divided attention was a new feature of his enhanced mental architecture, and it was both a blessing and a curse.
See, is there any right way to do this? he thought, his eyes fixed on the chaotic void. I had my fill of energy through theft. With all this knowledge of narrative, are my interactions just a grand experiment now? A way to satisfy my own desire for control and amusement? Is this really what my predecessor meant by 'experience reality and grow'?
A quieter, more profound thought surfaced. Creation is the thought born by 'Him'. For the inheritor, is it ever really theft? Maybe I need to move on from wanting to know and judge everything at once. That time hasn't come.
The rapid ascension of his power was sandblasting away the last vestiges of his humanity, leaving him questioning his core. Seeing Alioth's form swell before him, he forcibly shut down the distracting internal dialogue and focussed on the surroundings.
Speaking of the location itself, high in the sky beyond the violet and grey clouds, he could sense energy fields arranged in seemingly array formations. The location itself was a fortress. High above, those fields woven from both science and sorcery formed layered defensive arrays.
••••••••••••••••••
## Mapping Chaos of Void
An hour or so passed enjoying the walk.
His Divine senses had already mapped this desolate junkyard of reality long before his body moved. Voices carried across the wastes ~ 'Asgardian', 'human', 'mutant', 'Kree' ~ each name a thread of identity his new pattern-recognition abilities automatically translated. He hadn't acquired Allspeak, but his mind now worked as a perfect universal translator.
The biology here is simultaneously weird and familiar, he noted, cataloging the survivors huddled in distant pockets. Weird because my own makeup is different, familiar because... well, past-life memories.
Communities had nested themselves in distant pockets and underground hollows scattered across the wasteland. Just the survivors who had managed to outrun Alioth and lived to tell the tales.
Observing the scattered survivors, Tao found his enhanced mind turning inward, the external desolation once again trapping him in an internal dialogue about the most fundamental of questions.
## Dao of Life
A three-dimensional universe really does seem to be the minimum requirement for understanding truth, he mused, his gaze sweeping across the huddled forms in the distance.
" It's the smallest canvas big enough to paint a consciousness that can actually look up and wonder about the artist. True back in all the worlds I've visited, and true here too."
He could feel it here more acutely than anywhere else - consciousness itself felt like an ever-present field, a potential thrumming beneath the skin of reality. It was a force that seemed to push small pockets of chaos towards order, all for the purpose of housing a single, self-aware thought.
But what is Life, really? The question surfaced, not as an exercise to define, but as a genuine point of self-reflection. What actually constitutes the shell these beings have? Is it a construct, like mine? Or just an emergent property of complex materials?
My own physique provides the first answer differently, he thought, a wave of alien uncertainty rising within him.
" It is a construct. Forged from the top down. A concept given rule-bound substance."
In his cultivation world, life didn't evolve. It was decreed.
A divine Dao, a constellation of three thousand cosmic rules, condensing into the smallest unit of being. It was serene but unalive. Still purposeful. A single note in a grand, pre-composed symphony.
The form - the humanoid shape, the beastial forms, the meridian channels, the very potential of a bloodline - was the blueprint that existed first. The flesh was merely the reality that rushed in to fill that sacred, conceptual space. There is no possible patterns. It was Meaning given Matter, which houses incorporeal soul, which itself protects and stabilizes consciousness.
Being a mortal in cultivation world, there is no way to analyze those units themselves critically by function. There is not even a point to start but only to learn its actions.
But the higher order systems arising from these units function as a frail mechanism that is subjected to life energy leaking; meaning aging, energy intake; as in base state as food to just maintain itself.
Cultivation unravels it, but it is refinement, ascension of life form and state. Body cultivation just refines those units: rule structures later; he dismissed, pulling his focus back to the present.
But that's not what's happening here.
These beings huddled in the void,… they were different. They felt assembled.
So which is it? he wondered, his mind effortlessly holding both perspectives. The natural order of things - what they'd call science or better term: Alchemy? - or the intervention of powers-that-be - what they'd call magic or even my cultivation?
The scientific lens revealed a stark truth: their life was a rebellion against chaos, not an edict from above. It was a bottom-up struggle.
Scanning a human survivor in dinosaur costume ~ fleeing Alioth's shadow screaming past me, while I moved untouched - I saw: random molecules stumbling into self-copying patterns.
I see it now, Tao realized, the patterns clicking into place. Here, a swirl of random molecules, driven by that same conscious field to become better in projecting order, just… stumbled. It stumbled into a pattern that could copy itself.
The field itself induces a direction to develop. That blueprint, a complex sequence of five or six molecules that were themselves just intricate another lower field interactions, was the spark.
From that chaotic spark, complexity emerged. Cells, then creatures, all fighting to impose a fleeting, local order against the universe's tireless pull towards dissolution of chaos.
I didn't find a single cellular life form in previous cultivation worlds for the same reason. They are not made of same or even designed to exist.
The restraint, the price for this order in scientific perspective, was what his past-life physics called entropy. He saw it as the Truth of Dissipation. The total disorder would always increase with emerging complexity.
To create a pocket of order - a living body, a civilization, a sun - you had to pay. You had to create a far greater mess elsewhere.
A star is the perfect example, he thought, watching the distant, chaotic energy of Alioth. It burns pure, low-entropy elements into wild, highly disordered radiation and heat just to maintain its own magnificent, ordered core.
A quiet appreciation settled over him. So life here isn't a defiance of the law. It's the law's most beautiful and desperate expression. A whirlpool in a river. A temporary, intricate pattern that exists only by churning the water around it into greater chaos.
Of course, the omniverse was infinite. Worlds of different building blocks, mirror-life and anti-matter beings and whatever that could exist, exists. Not finding consistent biology wasn't a contradiction; it was a fascination.
***
Chaos can sometimes just fit into pockets of order, with seemingly versatile abilities. But from the other perspective, the magic or chaos I know… it can be designed.
Just like my body was before fusion, his thoughts wove back to his own spiritual nature of physique. Form precedes function. A construct of energies can house a thought. And a thought can give form, and form can give rise to existence itself.
He tested the concept in mind. Take one of these mutants from the void to a magical dimension. Will one like Magneto find charged particles to manipulate? No. But will his power lose all effect? Not completely. This Reality has its own translation layer. It makes it seamless, letting definitive logic and pure magic coexist. When reality is formed by a will, definitions only arise if an observer needs them to.
" Okay I am getting distracted again...Focus focus."
And yet… the result was eerily similar. These bottom-up beings also had flesh that felt hunger, that leaked life energy and called it aging, that sought to reproduce just like the mortals in his top-down world .
A great way to dissipate more energy and create lower order is to make more copies of yourself. Isn't it? Stopping aging at normal life level also doesn't help as it disrupt the pace of such exchange.
He chuckled to himself, amused by the cynical efficiency of it all. The surface function converged, even if the origin could not be more opposite.
That's the true marvel, Tao reflected, a sense of intellectual wonder momentarily eclipsing his existential dread.
My world understands life because we are born knowing the score to the symphony - Dao. We feel the rules that compose us. Here, they have to discover the rules through painstaking science, reverse-engineering the music from the noise.
His own body, a top-down construct, was simply more efficient, more chaotic by design but it was designed. The flesh he had merged with was a testament to that top-down resilience.
And my talent… he focused inward, on the relentless curiosity to understand. My soul. LoHP itself is chaos and order coming together.
My sight for flaws lets me see the threads of both. I can look at their chaotically-evolved helix and perceive what small, deliberate permutation ot change could make it stronger, could help this fragile, emergent order endure a little longer against the tide.
***
***
Without a second thought, he segmented a part of his consciousness, feeding it the scientific perspective on molecular interactions and setting the LoHP to work upon it to find the alchemy of physics interactions. The analytical engine of his being whirred to life, comparing, contrasting, and seeking permutations across the vast expanse of his knowledge.
So much so that he feels he was back to lower thought capacity before the enhancement or even current cultivation. A lot of creativity is needed to analyze through science, he realized, appreciating the novel challenge.
This deep dive into the fabric of this reality had served its purpose; it had grounded him, transforming abstract cosmic data into a tangible understanding.
His gaze lifted from the survivor that is now some sparks in Alioth's saliva, past the desolation, and locked onto the tempest ahead. The Citadel awaited.
## Alioth
With his transformations stabilizing and his control over the local rules solidifying, Tao saw no reason to linger.
The internal debate was over, for now.
He quickened his pace. The distance was vast, so he simply folded the space between them and stepped across.
The first obstacle was the devouring mist itself ~ Alioth. Part of it, anyway. The entity was preoccupied, feeding on recently pruned temporal fragments. Seizing the opportunity, Tao extended a few, thin threads of his divine dao energy as an experiment. The energy held firm, resisting the nullifying effect, which naturally pricked Alioth's interest.
But Tao remained a ghost in the machine, his existence nullified. Alioth swept through his position, sensing nothing tangible.
I've never actually met a devouring beast from the Source World records, Tao mused. This thing has potential. What if I gave it an upgrade? Allowed it to consume other laws? A moment later, a tiny, roaring replica of the beast was contained within the absolute space of his creation energy. Satisfied, he retracted his energy threads and continued on.
Alioth, was larger than any description had implied. Not merely visible bulk, but an encircling presence that claimed ownership of the entire plane. The trans-dimensional void had a single exit point. Alioth served as the guard, forbidding casual transit.
I did not ask permission. I simply walked through his domain.
Past Alioth's sphere of influence lay a thin membrane. Boundary. Cross it, and linear time unmade itself into something else entirely.
♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣
## The Citadel
The Citadel was a stark marriage of tech and magic. How to distinguish? just look for support systems. If there is none, it is magic. If there is, then that is tech.
A modest fortress carved into a massive asteroid, its black stone veined with what looked like liquid gold.
Now seeing it with my own eyes... I've seen this place before, Tao thought. A quick rifling through his past-life memories provided the answer: the Latverian Castle of Doom. Doomstadt. The resemblance was uncanny.
His divine sense had already enveloped the entire structure, reading the records embedded in its very stones. "So this really is Doom's castle. At least part of it," he murmured. "There's much more to the story of He Who Remains than I knew."
He phased through the colossal main doors into a vast, dusty atrium. Cathedral windows slashed beams of light across obsidian floors. He moved past a row of silent, thirteen-foot sentinel statues, their makeup distinct from the older castle stone.
For an isolationist, the grandeur is a bit much. So much symbolism. This definitely belongs to a narcissist. And the mystical elements are totally uncharacteristic for a scientist. But hey, could it be that HWR just has a thing for gothic architecture and pruned the whole castle to be here? I'm not judging. Yet.
Signs of decay were everywhere ~ cracked columns, dulled mosaics, the slow erosion of a place left to outlast its keeper. Yet, one doorway high above glowed with preserved energy. He phased upward. The Citadel had surrendered much, but it had protected this.
The throne room. Ofcourse. Now in office style.
Inside, the atmosphere was almost domestic. A nebula of chaotic space churned silently beyond a tall window. A fireplace cast a steady, orange glow. A chalkboard, a potted tree, and a cluster of artifacts ~ the life's work of an ancient organizer. The shelves sagged with treatises and trinkets gathered across realities.
He could perceive the weird, non-linear dynamics of time here more clearly. But explaining it was still best summarized as 'weird' for someone from a lower temporal curve.
****
And there he was. A silhouette against the dim light, dressed in purplish-dark robes. He Who Remains. Not a conquering warlord, but an older, comfortable figure with his legs on the table, present in the way only someone on an eternal throne with no one to answer to can be.
Tao paused at the threshold, cataloging him as he did everything: his posture, his breathing, the slow, deliberate mechanics of a man who had learned time's soft edges.