The spatial tear did not heal. It festered.
The 8th-Dimensional Herald the giant entity born from the highest cosmic planes did not simply recover from having its geometric fingers snapped backward and its eye torn from its socket. It untwisted its fractured, spatial body with a sickening, wet crunch that echoed across the crimson void. Its form dilated, warping past the laws of geometry until its skin turned as black as the absolute void itself. It grew exponentially, expanding beyond solar systems, beyond galaxies, beyond superclusters, until it physically tore through the dimensional fabric housing the realm.
At this exact moment, it became the largest physical mass to ever manifest in the universe second only to the Almighty Christ.
A agonizing, blood-curdling scream pierced the red air.
Inside her localized spatial cage, Aera collapsed. Her spatial mantle shattered like delicate crystal, and blood poured from her eyes and lips as the sheer weight of the Herald's expansion crushed her temporal lifeline. The brand-new universe Null and Aera had lovingly hand-stitched together began to groan, crack, and crumble like a dry cookie turning to dust under a heel.
Null stood alone amid the crumbling starlight. But Null was never a kind person to begin with.
Deep within the silent, white space of his soulscape, a small figure sat curled up. It was a younger version of Null a boy who looked no older than a child, clutching his knees in fear.
"Don't forget me, Soren Asura..."* the kid whispered, his voice trembling within the back of Null's mind. *"No killing... please... no killing..."
That soft, pathetic voice was the absolute last thing Null needed to hear.
Null walked up to the child inside his mind like a dying, dehydrated man crawling through a desert toward a mirage of water only this time, Null wasn't seeking life. He was actively trying to delete his own soul. Heavy, scalding tears streamed down Null's cheeks, burning his skin as they fell.
"I'm only... 17," Null choked out, his voice cracking with a lifetime of buried anguish. "I just turned 17 recently... and yet out of all these 17 years of my life, nothing has ever been kind to me..."
The kid version of Null stayed silent, staring up at him with wide, terrified eyes.
"Not even myself," Null sobbed, stepping closer until he was inches from the boy. "I've never been kind to myself. Just a talented guy with the Prime Stone in his chest. It might not even be the strongest Prime Stone in existence, but I tried my best every single day! I wasted my entire teenage years making new abilities, bleeding, dying over a thousand times... just to be an enslaved god!"
Null reached the child. His hands trembled as he raised his arms in a vicious, chokehold posture above the boy's neck.
"If I must reverse everything... if I must kill off everyone I know who will ever cause problems in the future... another threat will just rise to take their place!" Null roared, tears blinding his vision. "But you... you sit here inside my head being a crybaby! A spoiled princess with cool abilities who never put them to good use! You could have solved world hunger! You could have saved millions of lives! But no..."
Null slammed his hands around the child's throat around his own throat and squeezed with every ounce of physical and divine force he possessed.
"YOU MUST DIE FIRST, SOREN ASURA!"
BOOM!
The white space of his soul exploded. The realization hit the void like a physical hammer: Aera was dead. The universe was gone. Everything had turned to ash.
At that exact second, Null snapped past the threshold of human and god alike. He reached a brand-new, terrifying goal a total corruption of his psyche that bled straight through the pages of reality itself.
"KILLING YOU AND PLEASING THE READERS! RESETTING! KILLING MIND! SHE LOVE HATE ISGEKEFSKAVWKSVSKAVWK HATE HATE HATE HATE HATEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
Null lost his mind completely.
The entire Omniverse every timeline, every sub-space, every parallel plane was painted in an overwhelming, suffocating shade of bloody red. The Prime Stone in Null's chest didn't just radiate energy; it Leaked an absolute, cold, apocalyptic killing intent that bypassed the laws of distance.
In the farthest, most ancient reaches of existence, the Stone King felt a sudden, icy shiver run down his spine. Across millions of mortal and immortal realms, lower-tier gods dropped to their knees, vomiting black blood. In every world that existed, weak-willed entities, demons, and corrupted spirits instantly DRIED UP AND DIED from the sheer pressure of Null's raw bloodlust.
Null's killing intent was so absolute, so unnatural, that it breached the boundary of the story itself overlapping directly with the mind of the Author writing his path, forcing the scribe's hands to type absolute, manic chaos into the record of time.
Null's physical body dissolved and reformed into a dark, demonic leviathan. Massive, ink-black wings sprouted from his spine, extending so far into the void that they touched the conceptual boundaries of Death and Resurrection. Pointy, obsidian horns erupted from his forehead, sharp enough to puncture the gates of Hell itself.
"I will restore everything..." Null's corrupted thought resonated.
He looked down at Aera's lifeless, broken body floating in the red dust. With a slow, protective movement, Null's dark tail wrapped around her waist, gently drawing her physical form inside his own shadowy mass to preserve her soul from being erased.
"You will be with me..." Null whispered softly, his voice a monstrous, double-layered roar. "Always."
BOOM!
The massive, void-black Herald struck first. Its colossal fist, larger than a galaxy, slammed down with enough kinetic energy to shatter the fundamental laws of physics.
The shockwave shook the entire outer realm, but Null didn't dodge. Using his massive tail as a shield, Null absorbed the initial impact, stabilized his footing on empty space, and lunged forward. He drove a brutal, dark-matter-infused straight punch directly into the Herald's liver construct.
CRACK!
The internal organs of the spatial giant ruptured. The Herald doubled over, coughing up glowing, high-dimensional fluid.
"THIS IS NOTHING COMPLETED TO WHAT YOU DID TO EVERYONE I CREATED!" Null screamed.
Null pivoted, snapping out an upward kick that launched the colossal Herald soaring into the upper void. But in this empty, erased realm, there was no oxygen no medium for sound or friction. Null didn't care. Using his Reality Manipulation, Null forcibly created an atmosphere mid-combat, filling the void with air just so the Herald could feel the drag and burn of his strikes.
Teleporting instantly to the Herald's back, Null brought his leg down in a devastating, downward axe kick.
The Herald, responding with millennia of battle instinct, raised its massive arm to block the kick. Using the momentum, the Herald spun and threw a vicious, rising uppercut, following it up with a heavy kick that carried the collective, kinetic weight of every entity bound within its spatial hive.
The Herald's foot caught Null directly across the side of his neck, holding him pinned against the spatial pressure before unleashing a point-blank kinetic detonation.
BOOM!
Null was blasted backward across thousands of miles, his body skipping off spatial tears like a stone across water. But Null had anticipated the angle. The second his momentum slowed, he vanished, reappearing directly behind the Herald to unleash a dark-matter Flash Whip strike.
The Herald, however, knew the weakness of raw spatial jumps. Anticipating the exact arrival point, the Herald flipped mid-air, facing Null head-on, and drove a massive, spatial-coated fist straight into Null's stomach.
PFT!
Null's eyes widened as black, divine blood erupted from his mouth. His dark demon form flickered violently, suppressed under the Herald's overwhelming physical scale.
Null wiped the blood from his jagged, white mouth, a cold, unhinged smile spreading across his face.
"Fine..." Null hissed, his dark eyes locking onto the giant. "Let's kill each other."
"LOWER-DIMENSIONAL DEMON!" the Herald roared back. "COME THEN!"
They moved simultaneously.
Teleporting side to side across the blood-red void, the two monsters wove weapons directly out of their surrounding elements. The Herald reached into the spatial tears, pulling out jagged shards of broken cosmic glass and shaping them into a giant, shimmering, space-slicing broadsword.
Null manifested a pitch-black longsword crafted from pure dark matter and infused with the raw elements of fire, lightning, ice, and void ensuring that every single cut would inflict maximum, agonizing pain upon the Herald's soul.
*CLASH! CLASH! CLASH!*
The blades collided with a deafening, reality-splitting roar. Destruction rained down upon the distant, surviving civilizations of the omniverse. Across countless worlds, mortal citizens looked up at their night skies in absolute terror as red lightning, distant shockwaves, and the sound of giant swords clashing echoed through the clouds.
"WHAT IS GOING ON?!" a mother screamed in a distant mortal realm, holding her child close as the ground split open.
"CAN SOMEONE HELP?! MY DAUGHTER IS DYING!" a father begged, watching his child's soul energy flicker from the leaked killing intent.
"HELP! PLEASE HELP! ARE THERE ANY DOCTORS AVAILABLE?!"
"MY PRIME STONE ISN'T WORKING! THE POWER SYSTEM IS COLLAPSING!"
"ARE THE GODS DESTROYING US?!"
Screams, prayers, and wails from billions of innocent souls echoed across the omniverse, completely helpless against the cosmic duel occurring in the void above them.
CLASH!
Null drove his blade upward, cutting through the Herald's glass sword, but the Herald leaned forward and literally bit Null's dark-matter blade, shattering it between its teeth! With a swift counter-swipe, the Herald sliced deep across Null's stomach, spilling dark, divine blood into the void.
Null didn't even wince. He immediately manifested a raw, imperfect dark-matter dagger in his left hand, unleashing a rapid, 12-hit strike combo directly into the Herald's chest to weaken its spatial armor. He sliced the Herald's head clean off its shoulders but the Herald's spatial body simply reattached the head mid-air, continuing the relentless barrage of blows without missing a single beat!
They fought. And fought. And fought.
In the human mortal worlds below, time flowed differently. To the mortals watching the sky, the battle between Null and the Herald raged on for three thousand years.
Three millennia of non-stop, brutal, flesh-tearing combat.
As the thousands of years bled away, the toll of the fight began to break their immortal bodies. Null was a god in power, but his physical frame had not yet achieved true, immortal godhood he was still bound by the physical limitations of a mortal vessel.
Slowly, inexorably, their movements began to slow.
Their massive, dark forms withered. Their skin dried against their bones. Their glorious, destructive combat devolved into two frail, stick-like figures floating in the red silence, throwing slow, agonizingly heavy punches at one another.
Null's majestic, dark hair slowly died back to a stark, snow-white hue. His eyes grew milky and blurred with extreme old age and cataracts. Technically, Null's body had already died centuries ago his heart had stopped beating long ago but his unyielding, stubborn willpower kept his corpse moving, throwing punch after punch after punch.
Thump... thump... thump...
Two withered, skeleton-like sticks in the middle of a dead void, blindly throwing weak punches into the darkness.
Gathering the very last drop of dark matter left in his soul, Null raised his frail, trembling hand to throw one final, absolute strike intended to end it all. The Herald, equally withered and blind, copied the movement, raising its own shattered, glass-like spatial limb to throw a counter-strike.
The two attacks collided... and froze inches before contact.
Their bodies began to turn to stone, locking them in a eternal, frozen monument of mutual destruction.
Inside Null's fading consciousness, a final, ancient truth surfaced a universal law known to all Prime Stone wielders since the dawn of creation:
When a Prime Stone user reaches the absolute brink of death, they are granted a single, final choice. They can either pass on to another world to live out a quiet, peaceful life without worries... or they can initiate the ultimate reset, collapsing the omniverse to rebuild it anew.
If a warrior of the Prime Stone begins the sacred Death Prayer with the words "Dear Heavens...", the cosmos itself recognizes the command, ordering all souls to seek immediate safety as reality prepares to dissolve.
Null's stone-encased mouth slowly, painfully opened. A small, protective dark cage manifested around the Herald one last time, pinning the giant in place so it couldn't interfere.
Null reached deep into the cold, silent depths of his dying heart. He thought of everyone. He thought of the Author watching him through the screen. He thought of his long, grueling 17 years of life.
(Forgive me, God... forgive me, Fang... forgive me, Umbros... forgive me, Soren... forgive me, my brother whom I created not so long ago... forgive me, everyone...)
Null's blurred, white eyes looked up past the void, past the dimensions, looking directly through the page, staring straight into the eyes of the Reader and the Author sitting on the other side. He thought (did you all enjoy??)
He offered a small, tired, bloody smile.
"Dear Heavens... that live above everyone..." Null whispered, his voice echoing through the minds of every living soul in existence.
The omniverse held its breath. The stars stopped dying. The red sky turned pale.
"Forgive everyone... but here I must die to reach what has long been decided. Let the doors of death open wide, so that all who have suffered may be RELOADED."
Null raised his frail, stone-covered hand one last time, pointing it at the center of reality.
"Thou shalt not kill the soul.
Thou shalt return to the beginning.
DEATH PRAYER: ABSOLUTE RESET."
FLASH!
A blinding, infinite white light erupted from Null's chest, swallowing the Herald, the dead universe, Aera, the omniverse, the red sky, and the entire pageerasing everything down to a clean, quiet, spotless white void.
[END OF VOLUME 1]