Location: The Inter-Dimensional Maw (The Yin-Yang Threshold).
Status: Soul-Trial in Progress.
The transition was not a movement through space, but a violent erasure of the self. One moment, Null was on the obsidian plains of the Wonder World; the next, he was falling through a medium that was neither air nor water. It was Raw Data. The Blood Sea was here, but it wasn't a sea of liquid—it was a sea of screaming crimson concepts.
"What... what is this place?" Null gasped.
His voice didn't just echo; it splintered. Each word he spoke appeared in the air as a glowing, fractured line of code before dissolving into the red mist.
"My powers are sometimes alive, Null," Umbros's voice drifted from everywhere and nowhere. The child-God appeared for a fleeting second, his white hair flowing upward as if he were underwater. "To prove me wrong on using my stone... control it. Prove you aren't just a vessel, but the master. Don't let the machine eat the man."
Before Null could scream, a dark, gravitational force—a hand made of concentrated gravity—slammed into his chest. He was shoved backward into the Yin-Yang Door. The massive gates, etched with the balance of the universe, groaned open like the jaws of a titan.
"Aye bru, if you need help, just call my name!" Umbros's playful voice was the last thing Null heard before the doors slammed shut with a finality that suggested they might never open again.
I. The Deep Sea of the Soul
Null was suspended. There was no gravity, only a heavy, crushing pressure that forced the air from his lungs. He was floating in a vertical abyss. He looked down.
A single Red Eye opened at the bottom of the infinite shaft. It was not an eye of flesh; it was a cosmic aperture, a rift in the fabric of the Void. Its gaze was so heavy that Null felt his skin beginning to crack under the weight of being seen. Then, the swarm arrived.
From the walls of the abyss, thousands of dark, slime-like entities emerged. They were viscous, ink-black, and filled with thousands of needle-thin teeth. They didn't swim; they glitched through the space, appearing closer with every blink. They latched onto him.
It didn't hurt like a sword wound. It was worse. It felt like a leech on his history. One entity bit into his shoulder, and suddenly, Null couldn't remember the color of the sky in the human world. Another bit his leg, and his memory of Fang's voice became a dull, static hum.
"Get... off!" Null roared, flaring his silver aura. He blasted them, but they were the Void itself. They didn't die; they simply absorbed the energy and grew larger. They began to merge, flowing over his body like a living shroud of tar.
Accept us, the chorus whispered. The voices weren't external; they were coming from inside his own bone marrow. The 50% is a lie. The brother is a ghost. Let us take the wheel. We can kill the King of Stone. We can end the pain. Just... stop... being... Null.
He resisted. Through the Blessing of the Path, his core remained a solid, unyielding diamond of light, but the outer layers of his soul were being stripped away. The slime entities merged into a singular, colossal mass, forming a throat that swallowed him whole.
II. The Internal Horizon
Inside the "stomach" of the beast, the screaming stopped. Null floated in a silent, grey limbo. The physics of the world were broken here. He saw his own memories floating by like shattered glass images of Sophie building the marble towers, of Sooji's emerald light, of the bloody rain.
Then, the Light appeared. In the center of this digestive dimension was a single, flickering flame of Yin-Yang energy—half white, half black, spinning in a perfect circle. Standing by the flame was a man who looked like he had been standing there since the beginning of time.
Null felt his heart stop.
The man was tall, dressed in a tattered silver robe that seemed to be made of frozen starlight. He wore a blindfold, identical to Umbros's, but his hair was the snowy, jagged white of Null's own head. He didn't look like a stranger. He looked like a Conclusion.
"Who are you?" Null whispered, his eyes glowing with a frantic, cross-shaped black light.
The man didn't move. He stood with his back to Null, staring into the flickering flame. "You are looking for the 50%, Little King. You are looking for the power to undo a death."
"How do you know that?"
"Because," the man said, his voice a deep, haunting resonance that vibrated through the floor. "I am the one who had to live with the consequences of that choice."
The man turned his head. Even through the blindfold, Null could feel a gaze that pierced through his Godhood and into the very spark of his existence.
"You think the 50% is a milestone. It is a Weight. To reach it, you must acknowledge that the Void is not your enemy—it is your twin. You have been fighting the dark, trying to suppress it with the Grace. That is why you are stuck at 48%."
"What do I do?" Null asked, his voice trembling.
The man pointed to the flame. "Stop trying to be the King of Silver. Stop trying to be the King of Void. Be the Balance."
III. The Paradox of 49%
The beast's stomach began to contract. The walls of shadow turned into jagged, obsidian teeth, closing in to grind Null into dust. The slime entities returned, but now they were carrying shards of White Code—the opposite of their nature. They were trying to force a "Corruption of Light" onto Null.
Null looked at the blindfolded man one last time.
"If I give in... will I lose myself?"
The man smiled, a sad, knowing expression. "You will lose the boy. You will find the God."
Null closed his eyes. He stopped pushing the slime away. He stopped flaring his silver aura. Instead, he reached out and pulled the slime in.
[God-Skill: Yin-Yang Paradox]
The darkness entered his veins. The white light entered his lungs. Null became a living circuit for the two most powerful forces in the universe. His cross-shaped pupils began to spin, the black and silver lines weaving together until they formed a new, third color: a Translucent Grey that hummed with the sound of a thousand bells.
The "stomach" of the beast didn't just break—it surrendered. The Red Eye at the bottom of the abyss shattered into a billion pieces of inert data. The darkness that had been trying to eat Null was suddenly absorbed into his black arm, fueling the white veins until they glowed with a blinding, divine intensity.
49.1%... 49.5%... 49.9%...
The numbers flickered in the corner of his vision, written in the ancient script of the Axiom. Null felt a sudden, sharp pain in his soul—the final 0.1% was the hardest. It was the memory of his brother's face. To move forward, he had to tuck that memory into a place where it couldn't be used against him. A massive pillar of balanced light erupted, tearing through the Yin-Yang Door and blasting back into the reality of the Wonder World.
IV. The Return
Null opened his eyes. He was lying in a crater on the obsidian plains. The sky was still red, but the air around him was different. It didn't smell like blood anymore; it smelled like Stillness.
Umbros was sitting on a nearby shard of obsidian, looking like a bored child. He was fiddling with the silver keychains on his robe, his blindfold glowing softly.
"You're late," Umbros said, not looking up. "The girls were worried. Fang almost jumped into the Void to find you. Stupid dog."
Null sat up. He looked at his hands. They weren't shaking anymore. He felt... Calculated. Every movement felt like it was being guided by a thousand years of experience he didn't remember having.
"I saw him," Null said, his voice sounding different—older. "The man with the blindfold."
Umbros froze. For the first time, the child-God looked genuinely disturbed. He stopped swinging his legs. "You saw the Ouroboros? The Future Echo?"
"He told me I was trying too hard to be a King."
Umbros sighed, his small hand gripping the spectral chain around his chest. "If you saw him, it means the 50% is no longer a goal. It's an inevitability. But be careful, Null. When you hit 50, the King of Stone won't be your biggest problem."
"What will be?"
Umbros stood up, his white robes fluttering in a wind that only he could feel. "The Axiom itself. The universe doesn't like things that are perfectly balanced. It tries to tip them over."
In the distance, the marble city Sophie had built was shining under the blood-sun. Null stood up, his cross-shaped pupils glowing with that new, translucent grey light. The trial was over. The 49% was achieved. But as Null looked at his reflection in a pool of red water, he didn't see a boy. He saw the faint, shimmering outline of the man in the silver cloak, standing right behind him.
"Let's go," Null said. "The Executioner is waiting."
End of chapter 79
See you later