Looks. Words. Thoughts. History.
These fragile social constructs have no authority over a Broken-Soul. Long before the fracture, most have already abandoned sensation, emotion, and identity itself.
You might think that's a prerequisite.
It isn't.
Never was.
Power is a fickle concept. A lie we agree to believe in. And that shifts with perspective.
The one ready to burn you shapes tomorrow; the promise of justice paralyzes you today. A Broken-Soul, stripped of fear and loss, inverts that equation—projecting terror onto those who still have something to lose.
Power isn't strength; It's the courage—or insanity—to abandon consequence; It was always about how far someone was willing to fall.
The same cruel irony holds true for the immortals of today. Their thoughts, emotions, and remnants of mortality are the shackles that bar them from true ascension. Yet those same flaws grant them the strength to defeat other Broken-Souls, and to deny Sani's hunger for their essence.
Zack records this paradox obsessively in his journals, always circling it; never once coming close to understanding it himself.
The rest of his group was less broken, their very character design a beacon, marking what they had lost and what they still clung to.
Zack had no such design as his parents' interference stripped the concept of meaning, freeing him from that weight while magnifying his power beyond theirs.
Azrith and Virith elevated that ideology further, weaponizing their appearance to manipulate their opponents. Zack loathed the realization, yet couldn't deny it: looks still mattered.
When facing the sisters, he hesitated. He spent less energy, disguised hesitation as strategy, reframed retreat as calculation, and masked defeat behind doctrine.
In reality, it was neither restraint nor tactics that failed him.
It was his principles, his rigid ideals held by Sani—never to change, never to grow—that made him vulnerable.
Zack might have stood a chance against Solgrave, yet against the twins, he always fell—no matter how often he revisited the moment.
As a god, a simple adjustment could rewrite the result in an instant. But how many snaps would it take to lose oneself? How many broken rules before humanity fades into memory?
An old soul like DJ Rizz would never raise a hand against a woman. That wasn't merely his character; it was his identity. A thread tied to his origin, his time, his place in the stream of history. Everything that made him… him.
Power waited at the edge of thought. But to reach for it meant erasing why it mattered at all.
One step away from questioning it all; One step from joining Sani.
The soul's fragile, maddening will bound them to the Soul Realm, and Zack came to see it as the root of its corruption. In their pursuit of power, these souls had lost something profoundly basic: the freedom to change.
Their thoughts stagnated.
Their growth repeated.
Time itself refused to move for them.
Cruel as it may be, mortals still possess the ability to become something else. And perhaps that is more powerful than power itself.
These harsh truths were necessary for Zack to confront, for the Soul Prison housed many such criminals. Gods, criminals, Broken-Souls. Deity or not, no god should be able to cage another; it defied the very concept of omnipotence.
And yet, the cells remained occupied.
The more Zack learned about Solgrave, the more respect he found himself developing for the tiny twerp.
"Maybe he uses his size to fool these clowns," Zack mused. "Not that it'd work on me—I saw his power before I ever became one of them—"
—The thought shattered before conceding to its fullest as rusted chains erupted around his arm, biting deep into his flesh. They chewed through muscle with brutal patience, grinding nearly to the bone before a final, vicious twist tore his arm free.
The stench of rust and blood slammed into his senses.
Zack reacted instantly; one sharp thought, and his receptors shut down. Pain dulled, flattening into a distant, immersive inconvenience rather than agony.
"Tch… escapees," he muttered, picking up the thread of his interrupted reasoning as if nothing had happened. "There were some recently, weren't there?"
He tilted his head, mind already racing.
"How did they get out…?"
With time distorted beyond meaning, Zack had lived several lifetimes in the Soul Prison. In that endless stretch, he learned how the prison truly worked.
"Artifact… or slot?" The question surfaced—
—and he annihilated the memory before it could settle.
Some truths were liabilities, especially when you were planning a prison break.
Guards were unnecessary in a prison meant for gods, which meant their presence served another purpose. Zack concluded Solgrave had placed them there for the power boosts that came through self-imposed restrictions.
"Come to think of it," he mused, "maybe the sisters' slip of the tongue triggered another multiplier."
He logged the thought away, adding yet another note to his growing understanding of the prison's design.
Time has no hold on Broken-Souls. Aging, decay, loss—those questions ceased to matter the moment immortality took root.
Some Broken-Souls rewind life, resurrect the dead, anchor loved ones in time, and haunt their existence until love itself rots away.
Ugly? Certainly.
But which part of "broken" was unclear?
"Right… Mom. Dad?" Zack let out a hollow chuckle as the seals on his buried emotions failed, forcing themselves back into circulation.
The overload was immediate; Pain surged. Emotion followed. His form flickered—then vanished into absence.
Only his core endured… Awake, intact, and alone in a realm where realization ruled, time sprinted faster than thought.
"Hey," he called out to the little girl across the cell, voice oddly calm. "How long?"
"First you," she said, smiling.
Zack grimaced. "That's unsettling. When was the last time you did that?"
"An eon," she said. "Possibly two."
"Right." Zack rubbed his forehead. "Should've accounted for the immortal factor."
He showed her how to pass as human. She taught him how to live with being broken, while quietly tracking mortal time.
"Ten days," she revealed.
Zack exploded. "That's a decade per day!" His voice cracked. "I was too late to save the waitress… or was it a waiter?"
"Impressive, right?" The girl smiled—this time, unmistakably human. "Solgrave's grip on this prison is terrifying."
"Admirable!?" Zack winced, then nodded. "Still—" he paused, distracted. "—nice work." He pointed at her face. "Smile's getting there."
"Forcing his Epiphany Realm onto this prison to warp our perception of time is… Brilliant. You might not grasp it yet, but among Broken-Souls, acceptance is already a warning sign. The moment more than one of us agrees someone is 'good,' that being becomes untouchable. So never confront them."
She smiled thinly. "You'll wish you were dead… And only if you're fortunate, mercy shall be granted."
She catches Zack's hidden amusement. "Practicing to smile?" she asks.
"No! I asked a million times—quite literally, but you never answered." Zack laughed under his breath. "Guess figuring it out myself was enough to wake my ego." He said, gesturing to his lips, which moved on their own to form a wide grin.
"My form?"
"Mm-hm."
"There's no—"
"—someone you chased," Zack cut in, unwavering. "Someone distant. Someone you watched from afar. Someone you admired. Someone you wished to become. Someone who made you cross the line and forget who you were. And yet… someone you'd still go even further for."
She laughed; wrong at first, cracked around the edges, then genuine after Zack corrected her. "See… the sisters said you were impressive," she admitted. "You proved them right. I'll confess—I was skeptical. Twins, after all." She shrugged. "My mistake. I should've followed my own preaching. Won't happen again."
Her aura shifted mid-breath, like a mask clicking into place. Willpower and borrowed habits reshaped her posture, warped her presence into something unsettlingly endearing. Almost disarming. Not innocent—never that—but undeniably human.
The shift was jarring, and somehow, the mix of sheer willpower and Zack's relentless training made her seem cuter. More human than any actual human had the right to be.
She leaned forward, eyes bright, voice laced with seduction, "So tell me, Zack—what's the plan? How do we break out of a prison built for gods?"
"Dial it down to about an eleven, and you're done!" Zack snorted, utterly blind to her calculated charm.
She blinked, baffled by the so-called clown. "This is meant for Broken-Souls," she said, reigning in her boiling rage. "Not disposable mortals."
"Ah." Zack scratched his head with his newly grown arm, flexing it experimentally like he still didn't trust it to stay attached. "Right. I keep forgetting the broken part." He looked at the arm again. "…Still neat, though."
Zack found a way out of the prison through the mid-battle epiphany of his last foe—an insight he kept as a reminder never to lose himself. His humanity.
That fragment exposed the prison's lie. Yet Zack kept it to himself, deliberately reinforcing Solgrave's restrictions, because the little girl's training had taught him a hard truth: sometimes, the only way to survive was to be broken enough not to explain yourself.
Broken-Souls trusted no one. Not even themselves. So Solgrave carved a restriction into the prison's bones: helping another soul sharpened your own escape—a system designed to exploit the broken.
And it worked; cruelly so.
Since arriving, Zack's thoughts had been muddled, unable to form a single coherent thought about freedom; his every attempt at breaking free collapsing under its own weight. Yet when he helped the little girl across from him, the prison blinked, the noise fell away, and its logic unraveled with blinding clarity.
"My key out of here," he said, etching every guard who had ever visited his cell into memory.
Another clue hid in their patrol timings. Artifact or slot, Solgrave should possess absolute awareness of every soul within his domain.
So why post guards at all?
Whenever a prisoner edged too close to the truth of the prison, a guard was dispatched to extract the epiphany through torture. The deeper the revelation, the more severe the punishment became; every sense, every emotion forcibly activated for the entire duration.
Zack learned quickly; after his first session, he began dividing his realizations into fragments. The chains might claim a limb. Sometimes even his head—
—But never the whole truth.
"Never the whole truth!" He scowled, a bitter laugh slipping through. "And they call me smart."
Broken souls don't obey. They erode. They explode. A decade, or maybe less, should've been enough for them to go supernova, tearing chunks out of the inevitable Soul Prison.
Yet here they were… Idle. Obedient. Following rules.
Not imprisoned; entertained; marching through Solgrave's labyrinth of open doors, doors that led absolutely nowhere, mistaking movement for freedom, mistaking choice for escape.
"Never heard of anyone escaping," the girl said wistfully, staring through the bars, too scared to stretch her hand out. "But they say whoever does can never be imprisoned again."
She leaned back, eyes gleaming as she tapped the air, outlining a diagram. "Even if Solgrave breaks his word, the restriction binds you with the key. That twerp might keep you caged for an eon—two if he's petty. Pretend he's won. But the moment his attention wavers…" Her lips curled. "We're out, returning the favor by kicking his broken little ass all across the cosmos."
The idea alone made the prison feel a little less eternal.
There was one other truth Zack uncovered and chose to bury deeper within his core.
The prisoners believed Solgrave's epiphany-driven time distortion existed to spare them regret; to let them return to the mortal realm while something—someone—still mattered. For beings who dismissed eons, a century or two was meaningless. Solgrave knew this and exploited that apathy, weaponizing their indifference while hiding the real backlash beneath a mask of mercy.
Suppose time itself was the restriction, then Solgrave's rule was absolute; He didn't need chains or guards, because rebellion was impossible.
Solgrave didn't need dominance or power, only patience.
And with eternity at his disposal, the prison ruled itself.
———<>||<>——— End of Chapter Thirty-Eight. ———<>||<>———