The soul screamed.
It was a weak, fraying thing, dragged from two directions at once by forces that did not care whether it lived or died — only that it be *used*. Its hands went first, wrenched from its wrists with a sound like tearing silk stretched a thousand times too far. Then its legs, torn from the hips in a spray of light instead of blood, because souls do not bleed — they *unravel*. What remained was a ruin: a chest, a head, a pair of eyes still burning with something the darkness hadn't managed to put out.
That ruin was sucked into a vortex of sickly green light, spinning faster and faster until the starry chaos beyond swallowed it whole. And as it disappeared — small, broken, and utterly alone — a voice followed it into the void. Female. Weak. And absolutely, unmistakably furious.
*"I will return tenfold what they have done."*
The vow hung in the emptiness long after the voice was gone, echoing off nothing, promised to no one, remembered by no one.
Except, perhaps, by fate itself.
---
Somewhere far beyond that dying scream, in a realm untouched by struggle or scarcity, none of this mattered yet.
"Master... Master, those old fogeys are at it again," Durken's voice cut through the quiet, equal parts urgent and exhausted, like a man who had said this sentence a thousand times and expected to say it a thousand more.
*Snort.*
"How many times..." A man lay sprawled across a bed built for someone twice his size, his face — otherworldly, impossibly handsome, the kind of face that could start wars without meaning to — twisted into a look of pure, petty annoyance. "Can they not leave me alone?"
Durken stood at attention beside the bed, the picture of loyalty, though his shoulders carried the particular stiffness of someone bracing for chaos. His master lifted his head just enough to fix him with a considering stare.
"Little Black. What are your thoughts on this?" the man asked, voice syrupy with false thoughtfulness. "What should I do to those ghosts? Destroy their souls? Feed their flesh to my devour pigs for extra meat?"
Durken's composure cracked instantly into panic. "Master — I really think it's better *not* to kill them. You'd lose your entertainment."
"...You're right." A sigh, long and put-upon, as if restraint were the greatest sacrifice a being could make. "But how do I stop them from peeping at my meals? I don't like it when they copy what I eat, thinking it'll make them as strong as me."
He sat up at last, one hand propping his chin, the other still clutching a roasted pig leg he had apparently refused to set down through this entire crisis. If any of the other primordial beings in the cosmic chaos could see him now — greasy-fingered, sulking over dinner etiquette — none of them would believe what they were looking at.
Because this lazy, sulking, pig-leg-wielding man was Novaah Chaos. The Prime Primordial Chaos Cosmic Being. The living embodiment of the true origin of nothingness. The single strongest existence among all primordial beings who had ever drawn breath in the endless dark.
And also, by unanimous and long-suffering agreement of everyone who knew him — the embodiment of sloth and gluttony.
Durken was his most trusted servant, the Lord of Darkness, an abyssal being Novaah had found as a child — abandoned by the heavens, discarded by his own family, left to die somewhere the light didn't reach. Novaah had picked him up like a stray and never quite put him down again. He'd taught him. Given him purpose. Given him a realm to govern and two cultivation sutras fit for a god.
Durken had chosen to master only one of them.
The other — the *Primordial Chaos Supreme Origin Sutra*, two full grades above its sibling, prime eternal grade and priceless — sat forgotten and unfinished, because Novaah had fallen asleep before he'd bothered completing it. Durken, in quiet protest, had turned it into a leg rest. Its cover was woven from the silk of the eternal snow butterfly — one of the finest materials in the entire starry chaos — currently serving as a footstool for a servant who couldn't be bothered to use it properly either.
"Master," Durken offered, "what if you gave them an artifact that blocks them from peering into the future? Then they can't see what you're cooking before you've even started."
"Mmmh." Novaah considered this with the gravity of a man deciding whether to nap now or later. "Let's go with that."
He raised a hand. Light gathered, folded, and cooled into a black necklace forged from something that had no name in any known tongue.
"Use this."
"Master..." Durken hesitated, the way one hesitates before poking something that might bite.
"What."
"I've heard of something called a 'system.'"
"And?"
"Why not build one? Choose a mortal. Make them the host." A pause, calculated. "You'd never be bored again."
Novaah actually paused at that — genuinely paused, fork of pig leg halfway to his mouth. "...Okay. Later."
Durken left before *later* could turn into *never*, and Novaah drifted back to his meal, idly conjuring flickering images of a thousand different races across a thousand different realms, watching them live and struggle and die with the enthusiasm of someone flipping through a menu they'd already memorized.
"Boring," he muttered.
So he made something instead.
Pulling a fragment of material that existed nowhere in any known cosmos, he began to work — and after a while, a small, transparent pyramid hovered above his open palm, humming faintly with a power that had no business being contained in something so small.
"Done."
He turned it over once, admiring it — and that was precisely when a woman slipped, uninvited and very naked, into his room.
"Loita. How many times do I have to tell you not to sneak into my room like this?" Novaah didn't even look up as he flicked his wrist, and clothes bloomed into existence around her, robbing her sneak attack of most of its impact. "I'm not going to fall in love with you. You're still a baby to me. I'm older than you by more chaos circles than you have hairs on your head, and I have no interest in love."
She settled onto the edge of his bed anyway, entirely undeterred, her presence lighting the room with a beauty that felt less *seen* and more *survived*.
"Senior. Since you saved me and brought me here, I've decided — I'm going to make you fall in love with me. Just wait. I won't give up."
Loita was the last pureblood of the primordial elven fey — a bloodline so coveted it had been hunted to near extinction, their blood, souls, and bodies prized for their power to elevate lesser races toward prime eternal grade. Even their so-called allies had turned hunters in the end. To save what was left of them, her people had scattered their children across the cosmos and begged Novaah to shelter their princess, offering him something in return: the right to use their descendants for his own amusement.
It had amused him, all right. What amused him more was that after being *rescued*, Loita had immediately, boldly, sworn to conquer him instead of thanking him quietly and staying out of his way.
"Loita." He set the pig leg down — a genuine rarity. "I'm going to seal you inside this system. If, one day, you break free and come back to me... I'll marry you."
"Also — while you're in there, keep an eye on the chosen one for me. Who knows," he added, a smile curling at the edge of his voice, "maybe you'll fall for them instead."
He already knew the truth: she would never try to escape. She'd stay in there forever, by choice, and he would finally be free of her relentless pursuit. A perfect, elegant solution.
"No — wait — if I escape, will you really marry me?"
"Have I ever lied to you?"
"...Yes. You're lazy and you forget things constantly. But I'm very good at remembering."
"Swear it on your origin," she pressed.
"No need."
"I know you wouldn't lie to me anyway."
"Good," he said, satisfied.
"But I'm only ever going to marry *you*. Also — what exactly is this 'system' thing?"
"You'll find out," he said, already moving through a slow, deliberate series of hand signs. Light unraveled her form, thread by thread, and pulled her — gently, almost tenderly — into the waiting pyramid.
"Loita? Loita — did I do that right?"
Silence.
Then, faint and slightly muffled: *"Senior... it's really small in here!"*
"Don't worry." He produced something else — the Fey Crest, ancient and radiant, a relic she clearly hadn't expected him to still own.
"Loita, I'm going to fuse this into the space."
"...You kept it? All this time?"
"Of course. The Fey Realm was one of the most beautiful realms that ever existed. And with what I've done to it since — it might even be bigger than my own now."
"...Thank you, Senior." Her voice had gone quiet. Soft in a way it hadn't been all conversation.
"No need."
"No — really. Thank you. I thought..." She faltered. "I thought you'd destroyed it. For fun. Like you do."
"Because I'm that destructive?" he guessed, not unkindly.
"Yes. *Extremely.*"
"Aren't you afraid I'll leave you locked in there forever?"
"...I am."
"Then why still want this?"
"Because I want to be your wife."
"Good luck with that," he said, and there was real amusement in it now.
"I *will* win."
"Hehe. We'll see." He fused the crest into the pyramid, and light bloomed outward, filling the tiny space with color.
"*Wow!*"
"Senior — senior, when we're married, could we leave this for our children someday? It's so beautiful..."
"We'll build a new one. Together." He said it so easily it took a moment to land.
"...Hehe. So you *do* agree we're getting married. Hehehe."
*Why do I always feel like she's engineering these moments?* Novaah wondered, not for the first time. He picked up the sutra he'd been using as a footrest and, with barely a thought, sent it drifting into the system.
"I'm adding my cultivation techniques too," he said, as booklet after booklet materialized and vanished into the pyramid, one after another — martial arts, origin divine spells, movement techniques, defense arts, body refinement, bloodline and soul cultivation, every method he had personally created, corrected, and perfected to prime eternal grade. "Including your family's — I upgraded the Primordial Chaos Nature Goddess Sutra. Prime eternal grade now. Better than anything your bloodline ever managed on their own."
"Prime eternal...? How— how is that even *possible*?" Her voice cracked with disbelief. Then, quieter, almost afraid to ask: "Senior... are you the Prime Primordial Chaos Cosmic Being?"
"Scared now?"
"No. I still want to marry you."
"Good luck. I *am* the embodiment of nothingness itself."
"I still won't give up."
"Whatever," he sighed — but it wasn't really a complaint — and sent a flood of prime-eternal-grade weapons, treasures, pills, and seeds long since extinct in the chaos pouring into the system after everything else.
Then he stopped. Went still. And, after a long moment of thought that felt heavier than anything before it, he reached inward and pulled something out that should never have been removable at all: his own origin. Alongside it came two more — the origin of time, and the origin of creation, both beings who had fallen from the true chaos cosmic alongside the very concept of creation itself.
He wove the three together. And when they merged, something new was born — a supreme origin, and every creature across every realm felt it the instant it came into being, like a held breath finally released into the universe.
"Senior — take it back! I don't want to lose you!" Loita's voice cracked with real panic now, the newly formed origin completely forgotten in her fear.
"Loita. It's fine. I made a fake to wear in its place."
"But—"
"No buts. I won't die before the embodiment of this supreme origin comes into being."
"...Okay. You'd better wait for me."
"I won't die before you've given me a few descendants either."
He placed the supreme origin gently inside the pyramid. "Will the space hold something like this?"
"Yes," she said, though she didn't sound entirely sure.
"I built it from a transparent starry chaos crystal heart."
"*What?*" That single word left her dizzy — that crystal alone was capable of shielding the membrane of the chaos cosmic itself.
Novaah exhaled, and poured the last of his power directly into the pyramid. Light erupted outward in a cascade, and the air itself seemed to ring with a series of soft, resonant chimes.
*Ding! Ding! Ding!*
*"Hello, Master,"* a new voice announced — flat, robotic, and utterly unaware of the storm it had just been born into.
The system was online.
And somewhere, unseen, unheard, a vow made by a dying soul was already beginning to find its way home.