Axiros found himself detached from the world once again. His soul moved aat incomprehensible speed until it stopped.
The transition was neither violent nor gentle. It simply happened. One instant, motion beyond logic-the next, absolute stillness.
There was no deceleration, no warning, just a sudden halt that sent a ripple of confusion through his formless consciousness.
He once again found himself in the same void. The utterly agonizing void, which was truly, absolutely alone.
It was a place devoid of even the courtesy of darkness. There was no cold, no warmth, no texture to cling to. Not even emptiness could be sensed properly here, it was the absence of absence, a state that rejected definition.
The loneliness was not emotional alone; it was structural, as if companionship itself had never been invented.
He expected another tug forward, leading him to his next world. It had happened countless times before. It was practically as familiar as breathing to him.
That pull had always come. Sometimes violently, sometimes subtly, but never inconsistently. It was the one constant in his endless cycle, the only promise the cosmos had never broken. Even despair had a rhythm, and reincarnation was its refrain.
But nothing came. Time bled into Eternity. The supposed pull never arrived. Axiros was absolutely astonished.
At first, he assumed it was merely delayed. A fraction of a second stretched longer than usual.
Then longer still. Astonishment slowly replaced expectation, spreading through his awareness like a fracture propagating through glass. This had never happened before, not once.
Countless times, has it arrived, never a single second late. But this time something changed. Maybe fate pitied his pitiful situation. Reincarnation, losing everyone, once again reincarnation.
He replayed his past cycles instinctively, searching for precedent. There was none. The system, whatever invisible order governed his suffering, had always been flawless in its cruelty.
The idea that it could falter, or worse, hesitate, unsettled him more than pain ever had.
But why leave him in the void? It is a far worser situation than his reincarnations.
Here, there was no pain to distract him, no struggle to occupy his thoughts, no fleeting joys to make the loss meaningful. There was only awareness, unblinking and inescapable.
If reincarnation was a curse, then this was its evolution, a punishment refined to perfection, stripping away even the illusion of progress.
And for the first time in all his countless existences, Axiros was not afraid of dying again.
He was afraid that nothing would ever happen at all.
Axiros reached outward with what remained of his senses. He reached inward to his soul, searching.
He searched for the familiar sensation, the unseen hook burrowing into his soul, the violent compression, the tearing acceleration toward another existence.
Nothing.
The void was not empty.
It was complete.
No up. No down. No distance. No time. The concept of movement itself seemed meaningless here. His soul existed as a fixed point in an infinite absence, suspended not by force, but by negation.
"What the hell? Is this considered to be mercy? To be left alone in the void?" Axiros laughed aloud bitterly, thinking. His soul flickered.
The sound did not travel. In truth, nothing could. The void was empty in a way that defied even the concept of emptiness. There was no medium for vibration, no space for resonance to carry meaning forward.
It was just Axiros himself, suspended within the absence, accompanied only by his own thoughts and the echo of his awareness folding back onto itself.
Years passed to no avail. The pull never arrived. Deep down, Axiros had always known it wouldn't.
At first, he tried to convince himself that this was merely a delay, a deviation so minor it hardly warranted concern. Yet as the years stretched on without even the faintest stir, that buried certainty surfaced fully.
The mechanism that had governed his countless rebirths had not merely paused, it had abandoned him.
Still, he waited. It was the only thing left to him.
Waiting required no effort here. There was no exhaustion, no hunger, no decay. It was an endless state of anticipation without an object, a habit ingrained so deeply that even when hope failed, the act itself remained.
Decades slipped by. Axiros continued to wait, his soul flickering faintly within the void. The void pressed in on him, subtle but relentless, threatening to dissolve the edges of his existence.
Yet his soul endured. His existence resisted, clinging stubbornly to its own continuity.
The flicker never went out. It wavered, dimmed, nearly vanished at times, but it persisted, an unyielding contradiction in a place that rejected persistence.
Centuries passed, still to no avail. The pull never came. By then, Axiros had long since lost the hope that it ever would.
Hope did not shatter dramatically; it eroded, grain by grain, until nothing remained but resignation. The idea of another world, another life, became distant and unreal, as though it belonged to someone else entirely.
With nothing else to occupy him, Axiros turned inward. He began dissecting his past lives, no matter how painful the process proved to be. His memory was exceptional, terrifyingly so, allowing him to recall every existence in flawless detail.
Each life unfolded before him with merciless clarity. Every joy, every regret, every death replayed without distortion or mercy.
It was unsettling, uncomfortable, and truly horrifying but he didn't stop. He steeled his heart and will to its limits, to withstand the load of his memories and emotions.
In the absence of time and change, memory became his only movement, his only proof that he had once been more than a lone presence trapped in an endless void.
He analyzed them all.
Every technique he had ever created, born from desperation, refined through sheer necessity, or improvised out of boredom, was subjected to relentless scrutiny. Each movement, each principle, each underlying assumption was torn apart and examined from every possible angle.
He replayed their execution endlessly within his mind, slowing them down, isolating individual components, tracing the intent behind every decision. He had all the time in the world now.
Well, if time even existed here in the first place.
As the analysis deepened, he began to recognize the flaws in every technique he had ever devised. Inefficiencies he had been forced to ignore. Structural weaknesses he had never been able to afford contemplating mid-battle.
Compromises made under pressure, when survival mattered more than perfection. In his past lives, there had never been time to reflect. Only to act.
Back then, he had been forced to fight constantly, without rest and without certainty of tomorrow. Every moment had been a struggle to remain alive. Every encounter demanded immediate resolution.
Survival had not been a goal, it had been a requirement imposed by reality itself. Hesitation meant death. Reflection meant extinction.
Here, in the void, that urgency was gone.
Eons passed by, quickly, at least as it felt within Axiros's mind. He kept count of them regardless.
Somewhere in the depths of his consciousness, a silent counter ticked onward, marking the passage of something that resembled time. It was an anchor, a fragile structure he maintained to prevent himself from drifting into formlessness.
He refused to let even eternity erase his sense of sequence.
This was possible only because of a skill he had acquired long ago. In his earliest reincarnations, Axiros had learned how to divide his attention without diminishing it.
He had trained his mind to operate across multiple layers simultaneously, thinking, reacting, calculating, remembering, all at once. It had been a necessity back when a single lapse in focus meant death.
Now, that ability evolved further.
One part of his mind counted eons. Another refined techniques. Another replayed memories. Another simply endured. None interfered with the others. His consciousness expanded inward, growing denser, sharper, more controlled with every passing 'non-moment'.
He perfected himself with each passing counter second. The redundant flaws of each of the countless techniques was corrected.
Every flaw was corrected, further strengthening the technique by leaps and bounds. Some techniques required minor adjustments, while others required their entire foundation to be redone once again.
Trillions of years passed by in the blink of an eye. To Axiros, the passage was neither fast nor slow, it was simply there, slipping by without sensation. His soul continued to flicker within the void, a fragile yet unyielding presence.
His very existence fought back against the crushing nature of the void, resisting the silent pressure that sought to erode him into nothingness.
The void pressed relentlessly, not with force, but with absence. It attempted to smother definition itself, to blur the boundaries of his being until there was nothing left to distinguish Axiros from the nothing around him.
Yet the flicker endured. It wavered endlessly, but it never vanished.
Axiros remained deeply focused on refining his techniques. His awareness was turned inward, dissecting concepts, reshaping foundations, and correcting flaws that had once been unavoidable.
He was not aware of the time passing around him, if there even was an "around" to speak of. The void offered no cues, no changes, no markers to signal progression.
Still, the silent counter in the back of his mind continued to tick onward, one unit at a time.
It was steady. Unemotional. Absolute.
Each tick was a declaration that he still existed, that sequence had not been lost, that even in a place devoid of time, he had imposed order.
Trillions of ticks passed, unnoticed by his conscious thought, yet faithfully recorded all the same.
Axiros did not hurry. There was no urgency left in him.
Quintillions of years passed by. Axiros had finally finished fixing his first set of techniques. A drop in the large ocean of his countless techniques for decillions of worlds.
His first set ranged a quintillion by order.
"Hahhh. This is going to be the end of me man. Correcting flaws of techniques is really hard." Axiros groaned.
"Well. There is no time to waste. Let's move on." Axiros said chuckling to himself.
Several sextillions of years passed by. To Axiros, such an amount no longer carried meaning beyond being another increment on the silent counter within his mind.
By then, Axiros had finished his second set of techniques.
This set was significantly larger than the first, and far harder to correct. Its complexity ran deep, with techniques layered upon one another, their principles intertwined. Adjusting even a single flaw required careful reconsideration of the whole.
Some techniques were already perfect, unflawed in structure and execution. Even so, Axiros did not leave them untouched. He refined them further, pushing past their limits and enhancing their potency by leaps and bounds.
In the void, even perfection was not the end.
Decillions of years pass by. And just like that, countless sets of techniques were corrected.
He had so many techniques that it defied comprehension itself. His intelligence and memory were heaven defying.
He continued his work, his will unbound and unrestrained.
Another set of decillion years pass by, when-
"Hell yeah! I am finally fucking done. It took so damn long." He sighed, stretching his imaginary arms.
He was done correcting them. The process of refinement had reached its end, leaving no remaining flaws worth addressing. Now, it was time to move forward, to create entirely new techniques, and to forge improved versions of those that already existed.
A vigintillion years passed as he worked.
During that incomprehensible span, Axiros conceived techniques of a completely different order. They were not merely stronger or more efficient; their very foundations defied conventional understanding.
Principles overlapped in ways that should not have been possible, yet functioned flawlessly within his mind.
Alongside them, he revisited every technique he had ever created. One by one, he rebuilt them from the ground up, producing new and improved versions that surpassed their originals in every aspect.
Power, control, and depth increased beyond anything he had once believed achievable.
By the end of it, none of his techniques remained as they once were.
"I am finally done. But what even is left? Nothing. I don't know when I am going to escape this hell." Axiros sighed bitterly.
He had nothing left to do.
Every technique had been fully absorbed, not merely understood but internalized down to its very core. There were no loose ends left to refine, no concepts left unexplored. What he had created was complete, and so was his mastery over it.
Centillions of years passed by.
During that immeasurable span, Axiros's existence began to flicker more rapidly than before. The void pressed in with quiet inevitability, and this time, his resistance faltered. The faint persistence that had sustained him for so long weakened, each flicker less stable than the last.
For the first time, it seemed the void might finally succeed.
"I caa-n't withh-stand it anyyy-more. It's to-o muu-ch foo-r me-e too bear." He groaned, forcing his words out.
He fought, to survive. But he had nothing left.
Just then-
A faint light appeared.
It was ethereal against the endless darkness, fragile yet undeniable. For the first time in countless years, something within the void changed.
The contrast was enough to draw his attention immediately, cutting through the monotony that had dominated his existence.
It was the first time his soul had felt any form of stimulation in an immeasurable span of time. Not pain. Not pressure. Simply something other than nothing.
And that alone made it profound.
It rushed towards Axiros at blinding speeds.
It did so until merged within him. Axiros didn't notice as he was occupied in withstanding the void form turning his soul back into nihility.
Just as the void was about to win-
His soul was dragged again. A feeling he hadn't felt in countless years.
In his soul, he felt a lingering, tiny strand of hope. Hope that he may survive this ordeal.
Axiros felt immense relief beyond words.
His soul started to weep, uncontrollably. It was instinctual. A feeling of survival in the the void devoid of hope.
His soul was dragged through countless existences until it reached a world in a certain existence, as if it was predetermined. It was exquisite and ethereal. It's size was utterly ridiculously large.
It traveled until it entered the womb of a mother going into labour.
[We will find the one who did this to you, Creator.
The one who cast you into the void.
The one who interfered with your fate and altered your predetermined reincarnation.
We will remember this transgression.
Vengeance will not come now, not yet. You must first grow powerful enough. Strong enough to stand where we cannot. At present, we lack the authority to alter your path, to sever the destination that entity has imposed upon you.
So you must endure it.
Make do with the world that has been set for you, Creator. Survive within it. Grow beyond it.
When the time comes, we will be waiting.
Until then, we wish you fortune. Survive.] Ancient set of voices rang out form depths of his being.
Axiros didn't hear any of this. He was already at the brink of an existential death.
His form was recovering rapidly. It did, like always.
"Push, mam. The baby is almost out." A voice rang out.