Chapter 501
Yang Tiada let out a sigh.
Not a sigh of exhaustion, not a sigh of disappointment, but a sigh that emerged from the deepest abyss of emptiness—a sigh that sounded like someone watching a film that was too slow, too predictable, too insignificant for their taste.
"Is that all?" he said, and for the first time, his voice carried something that had never existed before.
Not anger, not sorrow, but disappointment—genuine disappointment, the kind that made the nine women before him feel something far more painful than physical wounds, deeper than the loss of their sisters, more bitter than all the boredom they had accumulated over thousands of years.
"You were born from My residue. You are the smallest fragments of Myself scattered when I released you into the world—into the Multiversal Pathways, into the tiny boxes called universes. I expected something more. Something... worthy of being called resistance from My own children."
He looked at Lilith, looked at Asherah, looked at Mammon, Ashmedai, Baal-Zevul, Chemosh, Apollyon, Rahab, Apophis—one by one, with a gaze that did not judge, yet was far more devastating than any judgment could ever be.
"And you came with this? With shattered mirror-shadows that broke before touching Me? With withered roots before they could even coil around Me? With a concept of possession incapable of owning anything because I possess no 'ownership' to be possessed?"
He shook his head—a slow, deliberate motion so light that for several moments, no one moved, no one breathed, no one dared to blink.
"Pathetic."
That word—pathetic—fell among them like a stone cast into a once-calm lake, but instead of creating ripples, it created an explosion.
In the depths of Lilith's consciousness, Bes, who always laughed, suddenly stopped laughing.
Enlil, whose questions had never been answered, suddenly screamed—not with sound, but with vibrations that made Lilith's entire body tremble like earth beneath an earthquake.
Lamashtu, who died in a place without flowers, suddenly sent forth a wave of sorrow so dense that Lilith felt tears she had never possessed begin to form in the corner of her remaining eye.
Ahura Mazda, who spoke like a philosopher, suddenly flooded her mind with a thousand unfinished questions, while Mictlantecuhtli—the quietest, the most mysterious, the hardest to predict—remained silent.
But this silence was different.
This silence was the silence of a blade being sharpened.
"How dare you," Lilith said, and her voice was no longer cold.
It burned.
Burned like the Earth's core blazing from within, burned like rage that had reached its boiling point after thousands of years buried beneath layers of suffocating boredom.
Behind her, her eight sisters moved at the same time—not in unison, but like nine waves triggered by the same earthquake, nine clenched fists, nine pairs of eyes ignited with flames that would never be extinguished by anyone's disappointment, including the disappointment of the mother who birthed them from nothingness.
"You call us pathetic?"
Asherah stepped forward, her emerald-orange hair pulsing like magma on the verge of eruption, and within those pulses, Enlil's voice screamed questions that no longer carried doubt—questions that had become demands.
Mammon clenched her jaw, and within her copper-darkness, Bes's laughter returned—but not joyful laughter. It was laughter born from the edge of a horn, laughter declaring that he would not die a second time without leaving behind scars.
Lilith raised her hand, and this time, the mirror-shards forming around her were no longer fractured like before.
They were whole.
They were solid.
They were mirrors reflecting not her own face, but the faces of her five dead sisters—Bes smiling, Enlil nodding, Lamashtu staring with eyes full of flowers she never received, Ahura Mazda whose lips still moved despite no sound emerging, and Mictlantecuhtli, who remained silent, yet whose silence alone was enough to freeze the space surrounding them.
From beneath the invisible veil wrapped around their bodies like mist refusing to disperse, Theo watched everything with unblinking eyes.
Not because he was brave, but because he was too terrified to blink, too afraid that even for a second of closed eyes, he would lose a fragment of the chaos unfolding before him—a fragment that might become the key to understanding why the world—or whatever remained of it—still continued to spin despite its axis already being cracked.
Beside him, Aldraya stood in the same position as several minutes ago, yet her eyes—eyes that were usually empty, flat, incapable of showing anything beyond tedious boredom—now shimmered in a strange way, a way that did not suit the situation, a way that made Theo suddenly realize that Aldraya was not afraid, not anxious, not preparing to flee.
She was enjoying this spectacle.
"They're going to die," Aldraya whispered, her voice flat yet carrying a tone difficult to interpret—was it satisfaction, curiosity, or something entirely new?
"I've already seen it. Not with my eyes. But with something deeper. Older. More... certain."
Theo inhaled—a breath that felt like breathing underwater in a bottomless ocean, a breath insufficient to calm his racing heart, yet enough to remind him that he could still think amid the chaos surrounding him.
"I know," he answered softly, and within that murmur—within the heart he never showed anyone, not even Aldraya, who had become his only friend in a world he never chose to enter—he whispered to himself, I won't let that happen.
Not this time.
Theo clenched his fists beneath the invisible veil, and for several moments, he could only stare—stare at Lilith HaRish'a raising her hand with the intact mirror reflecting the faces of her five dead sisters, stare at Asherah whose emerald-orange hair pulsed like erupting magma, stare at Mammon, Ashmedai, Baal-Zevul, Chemosh, Apollyon, Rahab, Apophis—nine women standing before their own deaths without realizing it, or perhaps realizing it yet choosing to remain because rage was the only thing left once everything else had been taken from them.
"In the original scenario," Theo muttered, his voice barely audible, barely escaping his throat like someone reading an epitaph from a gravestone he had never seen.
"They die. All of them. Lilith and her eight sisters. They're beaten that easily. Weakened. Torn apart. And when their bodies are lifeless, when those nine women are nothing more than nine motionless masses of flesh..."
He stopped.
The next words were too heavy to say, too filthy to leave the same mouth once used to pray to a God they never truly believed in.
Aldraya turned, her emotionless eyes staring at Theo with an unreadable gaze.
Not because she did not understand, but because she understood too well, and that understanding did not make her afraid, did not make her angry—it only made her curious in a strange way.
"He's going to violate them," Aldraya said, and the words left her mouth like a fact, like a weather report, like something carrying no emotional weight whatsoever.
To be continued…