Time seemed to flow once again.
Space unfroze from its eternal stagnation. Reality, having held its breath, finally let it out. Causality resumed its march, laws snapping back into place as if nothing had ever gone wrong.
Life unpaused.
The world moved. Existence repaired itself.
Axiros let out a breath he hadn't even realized he was holding.
His knees gave way immediately.
He collapsed onto the floor, chest heaving as he gasped for air. His vision swam violently, white fractures dancing at the edges of his sight. His eyes burned like hell itself—raw, overworked, screaming in protest.
He had burned through an absurd amount of energy.
All of it… just to satisfy his ego.
A bitter, almost amused thought crossed his mind.
But it wasn't for nothing.
He had memorized it.
The entity's energy signature, vast, alien, terrifying, was carved into his perception. Even though he had only witnessed a manifestation of her aura, even though it was an infinitesimal fraction of her true existence, it was enough.
One day, when he grew strong enough,
He would find her.
That thought anchored him, even as pain wracked his body.
Before he could gather himself, a voice rang out from downstairs, sharp with concern, tinged with barely concealed power.
"Axiros?"
"Axiros, are you okay?" His mother's voice rang out from the hall, once again .
Rachel had seen him perfectly fine just moments ago.
Too fine.
She had been shocked, even unsettled, by how Axiros endured the pain earlier. There had been no scream, no instinctive recoil—not even a flinch. He had stood there, eyes burning, body under strain that should have crippled him, and yet he remained unnervingly calm.
That alone had put her on edge.
And then he collapsed.
Without a word. Without warning.
Her expression hardened instantly.
Space folded.
In the next instant, Rachel was already in his room, kneeling beside him as he struggled to breathe. Her presence flooded the space—controlled, precise, terrifyingly deep.
"Axiros," she said sharply, yet her voice carried unmistakable worry. "Are you okay? What happened?"
She slid an arm under his shoulder and lifted him with ease, stabilizing his body.
Axiros coughed violently, his body convulsing as he forced air back into his lungs. Each cough sent a dull spike of pain through his chest and eyes, but he clenched his teeth and endured it.
He had suffered quite a bit.
Given time, a few weeks at most, his body would recover completely. His foundations were absurdly resilient for someone his age.
It was nothing to worry about.
Rachel's grip tightened just a fraction as she looked at him, her gaze sharpening.
"Nothing ma, just backlash." He lied straight through his teeth.
He couldn't reveal it.
Not a single fragment. Not a hint.
The moment the thought crossed his mind, Axiros suppressed it completely. If an entity of that level had noticed him, then any information tied to it was dangerous by association. Words carried weight. Knowledge carried traces. And his mother, no matter how terrifyingly powerful, did not deserve to become a target because of him.
He would not let that happen.
So he stayed silent.
"I told you to be careful didn't I? It's alright, it happens to the most of us." She said, trying to console him. She was still suspicious.
She proceeded to scan him again, this time with Noevar energy.
It flowed from her fingertips in thin, translucent threads, slipping into Axiros's body with surgical precision. The energy was gentle, almost maternal in nature, yet impossibly deep, probing muscle, bone, meridians, and the far more fragile layers beneath.
Rachel's expression tightened slightly.
Minor internal tears.
Overstrained sensory pathways.
Residual energetic scorching around the eyes and neural channels.
Backlash.
Nothing life-threatening. Nothing permanent.
She let out a quiet breath she hadn't realized she was holding.
"Rest. Whatever you did, you overexerted yourself." She said softly.
Axiros nodded weakly.
It wasn't a lie.
He had overreached, staring into the abyss, daring it to look back. He had paid the price, but not the full one. That alone was a miracle.
As Rachel helped him onto the bed and covered him, Axiros closed his eyes, masking the storm of thoughts within him.
The entity. The system. The heart. The fact that the world itself had paused for him.
All of it would remain buried, for now.
Because some truths weren't meant to be shared.
They were meant to be survived.
----
Weeks passed as he slowly recovered.
Most of that time was spent in stillness, forced rest, measured breaths, and long hours of internal regulation. Yet even in recovery, Axiros did not remain idle. He diverted what little existential energy he could safely access into his eyes, not to push them, but to stabilize them.
Layer by layer, he repaired the fractures in their structure.
The violent overuse had left scars that would never fully fade. Certain perceptual layers were permanently dulled, their sensitivity reduced beyond restoration. Where his vision had once flowed effortlessly through strata of reality, it now encountered resistance, subtle, but unmistakable.
They worked.
But they were no longer whole.
Axiros accepted this without bitterness.
They were enough. For now.
Once his eyes reached a stable, usable state, he stopped. Pushing further would only worsen the damage. Instead, his focus shifted elsewhere, deeper, more ambitious.
He had begun designing a replacement.
Not a mere repair.
Not an enhancement.
A new pair of eyes.
Eyes built from the ground up, forged with the lessons of countless lives, refined by failure, and structured to withstand gazes that should never be returned. Eyes that would not burn themselves out simply by witnessing what lay beyond.
This time, he would not rely solely on refinement of the existing.
He would construct an entirely new framework, one capable of bearing higher truths, higher pressures, higher observers.
The process would be slow. Painfully slow.
Resources were limited. His body was young. His access to existential energy was still restricted. Every step would require precision, patience, and restraint.
But the result,
The result would eclipse what he once possessed.
Axiros closed his eyes, feeling the faint, imperfect hum of his current vision.
"Crippled or not," he thought calmly, "they carried me this far."
And for now, that was enough.
He also had another problem to deal with. The systems. He had been seeing this prompt in front of his eyes for a whole month.
[Prerequisites to be met for activation: Rite of Revelation]
[Status: Not completed]
[Systems status:Locked]
He hadn't figured out this system yet. He didn't trust it, not yet.
Only time would reveal its orgins, its purpose. For now-he had to wait.
---
One day over dinner-
"Mom, what is this world?" He asked curious.
He had been dying to know the answer for a long time. All these strange incidents were only tied with this reincarnation.
"I guess it's time to tell you now. You are old enough to know." She sighed and said softly.
She paused for a second before-
"Listen closely, Axiros. This world is treacherous. This world is called Xandrel." She paused for a bit again before telling-
"It is filled with an energy called Noevar. It has limitless potential. And it is what I use." She said with a smile on her face.
On the other hand Axiros was at the point of breaking down.
His existence felt utterly meaningless right now. Was it staged? Is everything controlled?
Questions rang out in his mind consecutively, one after another.
'Xandrel? As in Xandrel-Xandrel? That world from that novel, the only one i commented on?' His mind in utter turmoil.
'I could dismiss it as a coincidence but Noevar? It is the same fucking energy from that novel. Fuck' His cursed.
"Mom, I will leave now. I am full. Thanks for the dinner." He said in a low voice.
His voice was steady, but distant.
He left half his meal untouched.
Rachel frowned, startled by the sudden shift, but she didn't stop him. She assumed he was simply processing what she had told him.
Axiros was already halfway up the stairs.
His thoughts were in chaos. The walls felt too close, the world too loud.
He reached his room, shut the door, and collapsed onto the bed.
He collapsed onto the bed. He was breaking down.
'How? How? How?' He questioned reality.
His thoughts churned violently, crashing into one another without restraint.
If this truly was that Xandrel, then the implications were suffocating.
Every catastrophe.
Every so-called miracle.
Every rise, every fall, every erased existence,
Scripted.
Not fate.
Authorship.
Axiros clenched his fists, nails biting into his palms.
"No," he whispered hoarsely. "I won't accept that."
He had lived too many lives for his suffering to be reduced to ink on a page. Too many choices, too much blood, too much pain, for all of it to be dismissed as narrative convenience.
Yet the evidence was relentless.
Noevar.
Xandrel.
The Rite of Revelation.
The absurd power hierarchies.
Entities that observed instead of ruled.
It aligned too perfectly.
He sat up slowly, breathing uneven, staring at the wall as if it might fracture and answer him.
"If this is a novel's world," he muttered, voice taut with restrained fury, "then where does the script end?"
Memory surfaced unbidden.
He remembered every arc. Every betrayal engineered for shock. Every character designed to suffer so another could ascend. Entire civilizations erased in single paragraphs, their deaths reduced to spectacle.
And the ending.
His lips twisted in disgust.
Rushed.
Hollow.
Meaning sacrificed for closure.
"Crappy," he murmured.
Reality shuddered.
Not violently, just enough.
The air thickened for a heartbeat. Noevar hesitated, its flow stuttering as if reality itself had flinched. It was fleeting, imperceptible to anyone else.
Axiros noticed.
His eyes narrowed.
He noticed the hesitation in reality itself. His eyes though reduced to a hollow sheel of it former, still caught it.
He exhaled slowly, forcing his pulse to steady. Panic was useless. He had endured worse than existential dread.
"Fine," he whispered, resolve settling cold and sharp. "Assume the worst."
Assume this world obeyed narrative logic.
Assume fixed points existed, events that must happen.
Assume deviation carried consequences.
Then all that remained was simple.
He would break the story.