The day came.
There were no trumpets, no meteors, no divine proclamations to mortals. The human world woke to alarm clocks, school bells, and commuter trains as usual.
But for those who could feel such things, the world… held its breath.
In a sealed, warded pocket of space attached to the Underworld, a viewing field unfolded like the opening of a massive eye.
Magic circles and divine constructs meshed together—devil, angel, Fallen, Shinto, Norse, and others all woven into a single structure.
At its center stood Sirzechs, aura suppressed to the point of discomfort, like a volcano capped by delicate glass. Grayfia stood just behind him, as always.
Nearby, Ajuka's emerald circles spun in tight orbits, formulas updating in real time. Falbium yawned once out of habit, then straightened, expression serious.
Odin leaned casually on his staff, single eye gleaming with sharp curiosity beneath his hat. Amaterasu stood to one side, shining like contained dawn. Michael and Gabriel waited with a cluster of high-ranked angels, their wings half-unfurled.
Azazel and his top cadre of Fallen lounged near the edge of the platform, though the way their wings twitched and folded gave away their tension. Yasaka and Kunou stood together, foxfire tails flicking behind them.
Other god-kings and queens—Norse, Hindu, Celtic, Egyptian, and more—watched from their respective zones, each encircled by their own guards and attendant deities.
A little behind them, on a slightly raised platform, were Ren's people.
Rias and her peerage. Sona and hers. The Church trio—Irina, Xenovia, Asia. Griselda and other Church representatives. Penemue. Rossweisse. Ravel. Le Fay. Shigune. Natsume. Tiamat in human form, leaning against the railing with arms folded, expression vague and annoyed but eyes too focused to match her fake disinterest. Issei and Vali, their respective teams gathered around them.
In front of them all, suspended in the air, hung a vast, clear window into unreality.
The Heavenly Mirror.
Ren had handed Sirzechs and a handful of other leaders a way to link it to the Gap—an externalized, safer version of the projection he'd used weeks before. Now it showed a churning, colorless void, turbulence rippling through it like slow-motion waves.
"Kuoh's ward network is linked," Sona reported, fingers dancing over a floating magic circle console. Lines of data scrolled across her glasses. "If anything disturbs the town's dimensional stability, we'll know immediately."
"Heaven's anchors are ready," Michael added quietly. "If there is a breach into the human world, we can reinforce the barrier from our side."
"Grigori's sensors are green," Azazel said. "For whatever that's worth when we're about to watch a cultivator and several gods punch the laws of physics in the face."
"Language," Penemue murmured automatically.
He didn't apologize.
Rias gripped the railing with both hands, knuckles white, eyes fixed on the Mirror.
Asia stood beside her, rosary clutched so tightly the beads dug into her palms. Koneko and Kuroka flanked them like mismatched guardian cats—one small and white, Touki held tight, the other languid and black-haired, tails swaying but eyes sharp.
Serafall had an arm hooked through Sona's, her usual bubbly aura damped down into unusually focused silence. Akeno's wings were half-open, black and white feathers trembling faintly, violet eyes locked on the shifting void.
Le Fay held her notebook ready, pen hovering over the page. Her hand shook slightly, but she didn't retreat.
Shigune and Natsume stood shoulder to shoulder, Taotie and Qiongqi rumbling faintly in the depths of their Soul Palaces. Issei swallowed hard, Boosted Gear already formed on his arm, the gauntlet's jewel dim but present.
"Ren…" Asia whispered.
As if responding, the center of the Mirror twisted.
The colorless void warped, folding inward like an eye dilating. A crack opened in the Dimensional Gap—no light, no darkness, just a slit in unreality spilling out a cascade of non-color.
In the center of that distortion, a single figure appeared.
Ren Ming.
He stood alone on invisible "ground" in the Gap, coat fluttering in a wind that did not exist. Behind him, nine Fate Palaces turned slowly, like half-seen suns, each one etched with alien Dao-script and layered worlds. The weight of them bent the nothingness around him, as if reality itself remembered gravity for his sake.
His Ancient Ming bloodline seethed under his skin, an invisible current ready to devour and refine any energy that touched him, while the Immortal Soul Bone at his core pulsed with calm, ruthless comprehension.
To most of the watchers, it was just… pressure. A heaviness that made their lungs want to stop.
To Ren, it was a comfortable coat.
"Ren…" Rias breathed, fingers tightening.
"He went first," Sona muttered, almost resigned. "Of course he did."
"Show-off," Azazel said under his breath, though his eyes never left the Mirror.
Then, in the Mirror, the Gap shook.
Not with light.
With presence.
One after another, blades of distortion sliced open around Ren, resolving into figures and shapes.
Hades stepped through first, body still bearing the invisible scar of Ren's earlier strike, draped in black and iron, aura like a cold grave.
Rizevim Livan Lucifer followed, grin ragged, half his chest wrapped in hastily patched seals that hummed with stolen concepts.
Cao Cao and what remained of the Hero Faction arrived next—Georg pale but steady, Jeanne battle-worn but resolute, Heracles armored and scarred, eyes burning.
Aten descended in a corona of sunlight, his presence radiating like a contained star. Typhon towered, storms coiling around his serpentine lower half. Ares materialized in full war-armor, spear in hand and bloodlust simmering. Set appeared wrapped in storm and desert shadow, knives of sand and lightning orbiting like vultures. Indra arrived last among them, gaudy aloha shirt replaced by armor, sunglasses gone, thunder piled up behind his shoulders.
Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva appeared not with dramatic flashes but with a simple bending of the Gap around them. Their layered divinities were so dense the Mirror's sensors screamed in protest.
Apophis coiled nearby, Eclipse Dragon aura eating chunks of the colorless void. Crom Cruach stood alone, Crescent Circle Dragon, eyes sharp, presence coiled like a spring.
And then—
The void folded like a curtain, and two titanic dragon forms slid into view.
Great Red, the True Red Dragon God, a massive western dragon nearly a hundred meters long, each movement making the Gap itself ripple like disturbed water. His horned head turned lazily, crimson scales catching the non-light.
Ophis, in her dragon shape, coils of endless black etched with symbols that hurt mortal eyes to look at—an embodiment of infinity that made the Gap feel small.
From a far horizon that wasn't truly "far", something roared.
The Mirror's image trembled.
A shape larger than continents forced its way closer, a mass of heads and claws and eyes and mouths, a body that refused to resolve into a single clear form. Seven heads, necks and tails all different, ten horns, countless limbs; every part of it radiated the number 666 like a curse.
Trihexa, the Beast of the Apocalypse.
Even those without aura-sensing felt a primal part of their being recoil.
The line-up in the Mirror looked like something out of every religion's worst fever dream.
On one side: a single man, hands loose at his sides, coat fluttering, nine Fate Palaces turning behind him like muted suns.
On the other: gods.
From the viewing field, more than one pair of knees went weak.
"…This is insane," Issei whispered, voice thin.
No one disagreed.
...
Out in the Gap, surrounded by enough hostile divinity to sterilize worlds, Ren tilted his head and smiled.
From the outside, he looked like he was staring down the apocalypse and grinning.
From his perspective… it was just crowded.
"Man," he drawled lightly. "Didn't know I had this many fans."
Several gods twitched.
Brahma stepped forward, all four faces grave. His voice carried through the Gap like a temple bell, every word heavy with authority.
"Cultivator," he said, "this can still end without the collapse of order. You have overreached. Stand down. We will—"
Ren's gaze slid past him like water over stone.
"Huh," he said. "Where's the Beast? I know one of you idiots unsealed that larger idiot."
Shiva's brows rose. "You ignore a god of creation to ask after a monster?"
"Creation, destruction, balance—all important," Ren replied, unbothered. "But there's only one thing in this neighborhood that can really test what I want to try."
He turned his head, eyes searching the blank distance beyond the assembled host.
"Come on," he murmured, almost amused. "I heard you earlier…"
As if answering his call, the Dimensional Gap roared.
The sound wasn't just noise. It was pressure—raw, crushing—that punched through the Mirror and into the viewing field, making angelic halos flicker, devil wings seize, and lesser beings clutch at their chests.
In Kyoto, Yasaka's tails fluffed out involuntarily, foxfire sparking at their tips.
In Takamagahara, attendants dropped to their knees, hands over their ears, without knowing why.
In Heaven, sensor circles spiked so hard that several shattered, shards of light dissolving in the air.
On the field, even gods flinched.
Trihexa's full form came into view.
It was not merely "large."
It was a moving catastrophe of flesh and concept: countless heads, each with different jaws and eyes and horns; countless claws, each dragging invisible wounds in the Gap; maws that opened not onto throats but onto swirling voids. Each step chewed through the nonexistent "ground" of the Gap and forced it to exist just long enough to be destroyed.
The only coherent thing about it was the number 666, stamped into each gaze, each roar, like a cosmic brand.
Ren's smile deepened, slow and sharp.
"There you are," he said. "You show up in person… that means you've made your choice."
He rolled his shoulders once, like a man limbering up for a morning jog rather than a fight that could erase pantheons.
"All right then," he added, eyes brightening. "Let's have some fun."
Trihexa did not answer with words.
It answered with annihilation.
...
The first attack wasn't a beam or a blast.
It was absence.
From Trihexa's central mass, a wall of un-color screamed toward Ren, not so much erasing the Dimensional Gap as declaring that it had never existed. The space it passed simply stopped having properties.
No distance.
No time.
No anything.
The instant Trihexa moved, everyone else did.
Aten's corona flared, a miniature sun vomiting lances of condensed starfire. The beams burned through the Gap, each one hot enough to make divine observers wince just from the sight.
Indra's Vajra thundered, a pillar of lightning that tore its own path through the void, etching laws of thunder into a place that was supposed to have none.
Typhon's storms coiled, blue-scaled arms hurling mountains of hurricane and magma, each blow carrying the weight of countless ancient disasters.
Brahma's hands traced a multi-layered mandala, a conceptual bomb of "unmaking" blooming at Ren's coordinates, aiming not at flesh but at identity.
Vishnu's chakra spun—a wheel of law that tried to decapitate existence itself, cutting along the axis of cause and effect.
Shiva's trishula thrust forward, wrapped in the first steps of a cosmic dance—Mahapralaya folded into its prongs, promising dissolution and rebirth in a single strike.
Behind them, Hades' spear of death, Set's storm of sand and plague, Ares' domain of war, Apophis' eclipse, Crom Cruach's crescent-dragon blast, Cao Cao's True Longinus thrust, Rizevim's twisted seals—every god and monster who had come to kill Ren put something into the storm.
The Gap lit up without light, layers of concept and energy grinding over one another as they converged on a single human figure.
In the viewing field, Gabriel's hands flew to her mouth. Asia's rosary bit into her fingers hard enough to draw blood. Kuroka's tails fluffed, eyes wide, ears flat against her head.
"Ren—!" Rias screamed, voice cracking.
"Wait," Sirzechs said sharply. "The Mirror is holding. Interference will—"
"Ren!" Asia sobbed.
Azazel's fingers dug into the railing hard enough to bend metal. "If he mistimes that by a tenth of a second…"
"He won't," Sona whispered, not sure if she was reassuring them or herself.
...
Out in the Gap, as the storm of destruction approached, Ren moved.
Not outward.
Inward.
His Dao flared—not as flashy light, but as an order imposed upon himself.
The nine Fate Palaces behind him, previously a quiet, oppressive presence, blazed to full life.
Nine suns turned.
Each Palace radiated a different flavor of existence: the heavy, ancient stability of the Nine Worlds; the flexible, shifting chaos of the Tenth; the introspective clarity of the Three Immortals World; the ferocious wildness and towering ambition of the Eight Desolates. Dao essence crawled over their surfaces like living constellations, each character not just a symbol but a law.
To anyone with enough sensitivity to feel it, it was like nine worlds had opened their eyes.
His Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique rumbled awake beneath his skin.
To lesser beings, he still looked like a man. But the "weight" of him—of his existence—spiked. The Dimensional Gap's nothingness struggled to support him, reality bending down as if under a mountain chain being set in place.
Behind him, a shadow reared up.
Not Trihexa. Not a dragon.
An Ancient Ming silhouette towering from the back of his soul—horned, crowned, eyes like twin abysses—roared without sound. Its presence warped the oncoming attacks, tugging on them as if they were threads being drawn into a vast loom.
And at that moment, the first wave hit.
Ren wasn't there.
To outside eyes it looked like teleportation—one frame he was standing in front of the apocalyptic barrage, the next frame he was simply gone, the gods' attacks tearing through empty space and smashing into each other, filling entire swathes of the Dimensional Gap with a storm meant to erase concepts.
But to the ones who actually understood what they were seeing—Ajuka, Amaterasu, the older gods and dragons—it was something else.
He hadn't moved through space.
He'd tilted his Fate Palaces.
For an instant, his nine inner worlds had turned like great, unseen gears, yawing along an axis the Dimensional Gap didn't have a name for. The full force of the first wave hammered into the "sky" of his inner cosmos instead, their destructive authority biting into his own Dao… and then he just changed the vector.
The energy didn't stop.
It slid.
The tide of godly judgments hit the boundary of his inner world and was quietly bent, redirected along a different line of reality entirely. What should have been a point-blank execution became a glancing blow across the surface of a world only he could see.
Ajuka's face went sheet-white.
"He just…" His voice came out thin. "He just routed that much energy through his own inner cosmos. Like a living calculator. That's… that's not—"
"Possible?" Amaterasu finished softly, golden eyes narrowed. "Apparently, it is."
On the viewing platform, even the more stoic gods had frozen mid-breath. The dimensional projection wavered under the strain of trying to depict what had just happened—and then, before anyone could fully process it, Ren countered.
He flicked his hand.
It was casual. Almost lazy. The kind of movement a man might make brushing dust off a table.
Dao essence erupted.
It came out as thin lines of light that didn't quite behave like light. Each line carried the condensed force of an Immortal Physique strike braided together with layers of Myriad Epoch True Self Canon—sentences of Dao written directly into reality, each stroke a statement of what the world should be.
They didn't look like beams.
They looked like script.
The result wasn't pretty.
Rizevim didn't even get to finish his curse.
One line of Dao essence sliced straight through his layered seals, cutting them apart as if they'd always been made to break along that seam. Another line slammed into his chest from a direction that geometry didn't recognize, carrying the full "weight" of Ren's Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique condensed into a single point.
Armor, flesh, and stolen authorities crumpled in the same instant.
Rizevim went tumbling back end-over-end, body mangled, demonic blood and hijacked divinity spilling out of him in messy, flaking streams—like the paint of a fake god peeling off in strips.
Cao Cao's eyes flared wide as his spear arm simply buckled under an invisible burden. For a heartbeat the True Longinus flared in warning, its own divinity screaming as the Dao essence brushed it aside, refusing to be judged by that spear. Pressure slammed into his body from every direction at once.
Bones snapped.
Ligaments tore.
His remaining arm dangled uselessly, armor buckling inward like foil crushed in a fist.
Georg, Jeanne, Heracles, and the rest of the Hero Faction caught the edges of that same invisible hammer. Their strongest defenses didn't shatter so much as fold under a crushing decree: you do not get to stand here. Ribs broke, organs screamed, their bodies hurled backward like dolls caught in the backwash of something aimed far above them.
Apophis and Crom Cruach roared, Eclipse Dragon and Crescent Circle Dragon unleashing their own devastation—corrosive darkness, reality-shearing dragon breath, enchanted fists like worlds crashing together. Their counterattacks bit into the lines of light, trying to graft dragon authority onto them.
The Dao essence ignored their claims.
Lines threaded through their blasts, curled around their defenses, and struck their bodies directly. Dragon-scale that had shrugged off gods cracked like pottery dropped on stone. Plates dented inward, blood sprayed in raw arcs across the void. Their roars broke into ragged coughs.
Further back, several lesser gods who'd assumed "standing behind stronger people" counted as strategy discovered it wasn't. A set of blades made of meaning carved through their divine mantles, shearing the connection that tied them to their distant god-seats. One instant they felt the warm, arrogant weight of worship and domain.
The next, they were just bodies with power and no throne.
Their screams echoed through the projection.
The viewing field went silent.
Azazel, who had seen too many wars and too many monsters, actually let his jaw hang open.
"That wasn't his full power," he managed hoarsely. "He just—that was—he did all that with a probe."
He heard how ridiculous he sounded and couldn't correct it, because it was simply true.
...
Out in the Gap, Ren came to a stop again, a shade closer to the enemy line.
His eyes were still relaxed. His smile was still easy, the same lazy, almost friendly curve it had been when he'd been helping Asia with homework.
Inside, his blood burned like molten metal.
"Not bad," he murmured, flexing his fingers as the last threads of stolen authority bled into his circulation. "You almost scratched the paint."
Ancient Ming bloodline seethed in his veins.
Corrupted, devoured, refined—every impact, every shard of godly law his techniques had touched was already being broken down, reduced to fuel. Domain-claims, blessings, conceptual tricks: his blood treated them like strange spices dumped into a pot, testing, tasting, and then folding them into its own flavor.
"Phase change," he said softly.
His aura flipped.
The human-looking form blurred at the edges. Thin lines of light ran up his limbs, sketching a second, deeper image over his skin. Across his torso, his back, his face, patterns surfaced that didn't belong to this universe's theology.
The nine Fate Palaces behind him brightened.
Their light twisted and overlapped, like nine suns sliding behind one another to form an eclipse. For just an instant, the projection caught a second silhouette overlaid atop Ren's frame:
An Ancient Ming.
Not an illusion. Not a possession. Just a truth showing through.
His body lengthened by a fraction, proportions sharpening to something just slightly too regal for a mortal frame. His hair darkened at the roots, tipped with slender streaks of luminous silver that caught no external light. His eyes, always calm, deepened into pits that made gods feel like they were standing at the lip of a black hole.
Imperial bloodline bloom.
Ren's Perfect Ancient Ming bloodline ignited fully, smearing his presence across the line between "mortal" and "progenitor."
On the viewing platform, more than one deity swallowed without realizing it.
"This…" a Norse god whispered. "What is he?"
No one had an answer.
Ren clenched his fist.
The Immortal Soul Bone responded.
Light didn't burst outward. It compressed inward around his knuckles, layers of law folding down and simplifying, simplicity stacking on simplicity until what remained looked almost plain. Hell Suppressing weight coiled around his arm, like a chain of invisible mountains wrapped from shoulder to wrist.
The Dimensional Gap creaked.
Not metaphorically.
The nothingness around his fist was forced to admit it had structure so it could carry that weight. For a breath, the undefined space had to pretend it was a proper world, with vectors and strain and limits.
"Let's see how you like this," Ren said.
He stepped.
By the standards of the beings present, the step wasn't even especially fast. There was no sonic boom, no flashy teleportation effect. He just chose the shortest line between "here" and "in front of Trihexa" and took it.
One heartbeat he was an arm's length in front of the forward gods.
The next, he stood at the center of Trihexa's central mass, fist already in motion.
The punch landed.
The Dimensional Gap shook.
The impact didn't make sound; it made definitions.
For a fraction of a fraction of a second, the blankness around Trihexa turned crystalline. Up/down, force/mass, origin/destination—concepts the Gap usually didn't bother with slammed into place so the universe could calculate what had just happened.
Infinite destruction.
Conceptual weight.
Perfect Immortal Physique.
Ancient Ming bloodline bloom.
Trihexa roared, dozens of draconic, beastlike heads snapping toward Ren. Its enormous body rocked backwards, yes—but only slightly. It looked less like something staggered and more like something mildly inconvenienced.
Ren's arm trembled once, muscles and bone singing from the strain of forcing that much authority into a single blow.
"Hah." He blew out a slow breath, amused. "Yeah. That tracks."
Watching gods felt their skin crawl.
He had just thrown a punch that would have erased all of them so completely their names would only exist as faint afterimages in prayer—and he was treating Trihexa shrugging it off like a satisfying bit of data.
Behind Ren, Great Red and Ophis still hadn't moved.
The Apocalypse Dragon cut lazy loops through the Gap, titanic body sliding in and out of the projection's frame, gold eyes bright with something between boredom and curiosity. Ophis' draconic form hung motionless in the void, like a wound in existence, Infinity's aura perfectly level—no rise, no fall, simply there.
Ren's gaze flicked toward them.
"You two just here to watch?" he called, voice carrying easily, conversational, like he was calling across a gym rather than a battlefield. "Or are you planning to actually fight?"
Great Red snorted, a sound that came out as a ripple through the Gap itself. Space flexed around him like a sheet shaken by a giant. Ophis' eyes narrowed by a millimeter.
"You invited us," she said, tone perfectly flat. "You did not specify when to move."
Ren laughed under his breath.
"I said bring your A game," he replied. "Here. Let me help with that."
He vanished again.
This time, when he reappeared, he was standing at the tip of Great Red's snout, like a human who'd decided to step onto the hood of a moving starship.
Up close, the Apocalypse Dragon was big—every scale its own landscape, every breath a tidal event. Dream authority bled off him in waves, reality flickering through possible versions of itself wherever his presence brushed it.
Ren tilted his head.
"I always thought you were too loud," he said lightly.
He drove his punch into the dragon's nose.
For one instant, nothing happened.
Then the shockwave landed.
Great Red's head snapped sideways, his entire body forced into a roll, titanic form carving a visible spiral through the Gap. Layers of dream-based authority rippled outward—shards of half-formed worlds, daydreams, nightmares, hypothetical futures—exploding like glass illusions.
Then the weight of the Hell Suppressing Physique asserted itself.
Those dreams buckled.
Conceptual landscapes—worlds of "what if" and "maybe"—imploded into dust under a physique designed to sit on hell itself and make it stay down.
Far away, on the viewing platform, several people flinched purely from the afterimage.
Ophis' eyes widened a fraction.
Ren turned on her next, the movement smooth, unhurried.
"You too," he said. "Call it tough love. If you stay detached, you won't learn anything."
He thrust his open palm into the broad plate of her dragon chest.
Infinity resisted.
Where Great Red's dream had rippled and shattered under his blow, Ophis' Infinity simply refused to acknowledge the concept of "enough force". Power rolled over her, around her, into her, but not through her. For a heartbeat the Gap itself seemed to decide this collision did not have a meaningful upper limit.
Even so, something gave.
For the first time in… perhaps ever, Ophis staggered.
Not far. Just a step back—massive dragon body tilting, claws dragging faint grooves into the fabric of the Gap. Her form rippled like oil disturbed by a stone. Deep inside that endless black coil, something small and ancient twitched.
Not intellect.
Instinct.
A draconic nerve, buried under Infinity, shivered awake and took notice of this human who had dared to shove her.
On the projection, Shiva's lips pulled back from his teeth.
"Arrogant," he said quietly. "Interesting… but arrogant."
His fingers tightened around his trishula. Power began to build at the spear's three tips—destruction, creation, and preservation spinning in a dance that had once ended eras.
Around him, more gods rallied.
Indra's thunder flared white-blue, crackling along his body as he drew on the full depth of his storm authority. Brahma and Vishnu aligned their aspects, annihilation and preservation spiraling together into a paradoxical spear that could erase or sustain with equal ease. Aten brightened into a miniature, murderous sun, his solar divinity sharpening into a blade of light.
Typhon's storm-wrath coalesced, wild and poisonous. Set's desert and chaos wrapped around it like a sandstorm. Ares' war-fired divinity ignited, battle-lust turning into a tangible edge that could sever resolve.
On the front line, Trihexa's many heads turned fully toward Ren now, sixes burning in every eye, an animal judgment older than most pantheons rising.
Behind them, Great Red shook off the roll, the sting on his nose already fading into simmering irritation.
Ophis' gaze sharpened.
Ren watched all of them pull deeper.
He watched how they wove their authorities, where their domains overlapped, where their protections thinned when they reached for power. He watched Trihexa's hunger lock onto him, saw Great Red's ire wash away his previous disinterest, felt Ophis' Infinity shift by a tiny, telling fraction.
The calm inside him remembered the promises he'd made.
The pragmatic part of him ran through risk calculations, pathways, contingencies.
Then the other part of him—the one that had read cultivators walking into impossible odds just to prove that "impossible" was a suggestion—smiled. Sharp. Unafraid.
"One cultivator," he said, voice carrying across the Gap, clear and conversational. "Against all of you. Chief gods. Dragon gods. Your supposed ultimate Beast."
His eyes hardened.
"That really all you've got?"
Even watching through a projection, the temperature on the viewing platform seemed to drop.
Michael shut his eyes for half a second, as if in silent prayer.
"He's goading them," he murmured.
"Of course he is," Sirzechs answered, a wry edge in his tone that didn't quite hide the tension. "He has some kind of plan."
"That doesn't make it any less suicidal," Sona hissed, hands white-knuckled on the railing, eyes locked on Ren's tiny figure in the roaring chaos.
Down on a lower platform, Koneko's tail was a stiff, bristling line. Asia shook her head over and over, lips moving in soundless prayer.
Serafall clutched Sona's arm, all pretense of silliness gone, her usual bouncy aura pressed flat by a very adult, very real fear.
"Ren," Rias whispered, fingers twisting in her skirt. "Come back. Come back, you idiot…"
No one heard her in the roar that followed.
...
The universe tried to end him.
Indra hurled down his full power—a thunder that could tear divine weapons to dust, every bolt a decree that said: break.
Brahma and Vishnu's combined spear twisted annihilation and preservation together, a paradox that could erase or rewrite whatever it touched.
Shiva's Mahapralaya surged, a dance of all-ending destruction, the concept of "cycle complete" turned into a tidal wave.
Aten unleashed a column of solar death, condensed starfire that didn't just burn—it judged. Typhon, Set, and Ares vomited out storm, desert, and war, their domains snarling into a stormfront of chaos.
Great Red roared, weaponizing Dream itself. A mass of collapsing realities plummeted toward Ren—shards of possible worlds and discarded futures mashed into a single, crushing tide.
Ophis poured raw Infinity into one point—a denial of limitation so absolute it could erase rules rather than just matter.
Trihexa lunged.
Every head, every claw, every mouth unleashed oblivion—breaths that eroded anything defined enough to exist, bites that chewed on concepts instead of flesh. The number 666 burned in its eyes, not just a mark, but a formula for ruin.
The combined attack collapsed the Gap around him.
From the viewing Mirror, it looked like the entire segment of space Ren occupied turned into a bright, screaming sphere of contradictions—
Light and darkness.
Destruction and preservation.
War and stillness.
Infinite expansion and total erasure.
All of it slammed toward a single, stubborn point.
Ren didn't dodge.
He stepped forward into it.
..
Inside that impossible storm, the cultivator stood with his hands spread, Ancient Ming Bloodline, Immortal Soul Bone and Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique working in tandem.
Most beings, touched by even a fraction of one of those attacks, would have been erased in ways the mind couldn't put into words—smeared across eternity, their names reduced to faint smudges in divine memory.
Ren's body cracked.
Bone split.
Skin tore.
Blood flashed into vapor as heat and conceptual friction tore at him. His nine Fate Palaces groaned like old mountains under an avalanche; their structures shivered, strained under the corrosive weight of foreign laws trying to overwrite their foundations.
It hurt.
He didn't flinch.
"Good," he thought, the word cool and precise in the middle of the screaming chaos. "More."
The Immortal Soul Bone devoured structure.
Every law that touched him—every godly authority, every fragment of Infinity or Dream or Apocalypse—it grabbed. It didn't block them. It didn't reflect them. It pulled them apart.
Divine systems that had taken pantheons ages to polish were reduced to principles—bare axioms about direction, continuity, destruction, borders and the lack of borders. A storm god's power became: change in state. A sun god's blaze became: radiation along gradients. Infinity became: the refusal of an upper bound.
The Myriad Origin Scripture caught the waste.
Energy that should have leaked, that should have been shrugged off as heat or raw damage—wild flares from Indra's bolts, loose radiation from Aten's star, the messy edges of dream-shards and apocalypse—was scooped up and spun into loops. Instead of bleeding out of him, it was recycled along paths carved into his meridians, fed back toward his core, refined, folded into his own circulation. His Ancient Ming Bloodline absorption properties making it all possible.
The art that had once stopped simple devils from wasting demonic power now worked on godfire, dragon dream, apocalyptic entropy.
Inside his Soul Palace, the loops of Myriad Origin whirled.
Cycle after cycle, waste turned to fuel. Fuel turned to stability. Stability turned to leverage.
In the center of it all, Myriad Epoch True Self Canon turned.
Nine Worlds solidity gave him the raw backbone to carry it.
Tenth World flexibility let him twist impossible flows, bending and rerouting the rush of hostile concepts like a reed splitting a river.
Three Immortals introspection anchored everything to his Anima, his True Self, refusing to let foreign laws define who he was at the root.
His Fate Palaces burned.
They weren't just reservoirs of power now; they were filters. Each one caught a different flavor of incoming law and stripped it, digging out the parts that could be turned to his use.
One dragged down everything related to distance and travel—the way Dream jumped between possible worlds, the way Infinity erased "far" and "near," the way Trihexa's presence bridged separate phases of reality. Another chewed on destruction and preservation, on cycles and endings, on how gods decided "start" and "finish."
His Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique wrapped around all of it like a net made of gravity.
The storm tried to expand.
His physique said, sit.
Pressure that should have blown him apart turned inward, compressed around him. The Gap, forced to treat his body as an anchor, began to define itself relative to him.
Up there: collapsing universes.
Down here: one human, refusing to move.
Between Fate Palaces and Physique, a new pattern unfolded.