Chapter 49
The battlefield had become unbearably still.
The winds that once screamed through the shattered peaks now drifted in silence, as though the world itself held its breath. The sky hung dim and fractured, split by fading scars of the war that had torn reality apart. The air was heavy with the scent of ash, both from dying worlds and collapsing destinies.
Orion stood alone at the heart of the devastation.
Stage 0 power still flickered around him like a storm not yet fully awakened—streams of silver and shadow dancing around his wings. His eight wings stretched wide, white feathers with obsidian tips rippling like banners of judgment. His long black blade rested loosely in his grip, humming with the resonance of all his Domains: Space, Time, Rivers and Mountains, Ink, Immortal, Asura, Black Bamboo.
Everything in him was exhausted—yet impossibly calm.
Ahead of him, the enemy's final remnant knelt broken. Once a False Outer God, now a trembling husk, its form had cracked like porcelain. Rivers of cosmic fluid dripped from its wounds, dissolving into nothing before they touched the ground.
"You… should not exist," it whispered, voice trembling like the last cry of a dying star.
"You have reached Stage 0 too early. You defy the order… of everything."
Orion stepped forward.
His voice was soft, yet it shook the air like a tolling bell.
"I do not walk the order of your universe," he said.
"I walk my own."
The creature screamed, lunged—
—but Orion did not move.
A single flicker of his blade ended it.
Not a slash.
Not a strike.
Just intent—and the False Outer God unraveled into dust, erased from memory and existence.
But even as silence fell, Orion felt something else.
A calling.
A pressure.
A doorway opening somewhere above all creation.
A throne waiting for him.
The Pillar Realm.
He looked up slowly. The sky split like a page turning, revealing a colossal ring of ancient symbols, spinning with impossible depth. They rose from nothing, layering themselves infinitely until even the horizon bowed beneath them.
Space began folding around him.
Time bent like a river pulled by a higher tide.
Then—
A voice older than the First Dawn whispered:
> "Orion…
The Pillars have watched you.
Your battle has ended.
Now rise."
A force pierced through every layer of his being. His Domains trembled; his mythical creature form roared within him; the combined essence of worlds surged toward a single point.
Orion exhaled—
and ascended.
THE WORLD TREMBLED.
His wings burst into cosmic brilliance.
His skeleton reshaped into an eternal frame.
His soul spiraled upward through the gates of the Primordial Court.
Reality bent to allow his passing.
He could feel truth pouring into him—limitless, blinding, heavy beyond comprehension. He felt his Title imprint itself upon him, forged by cosmic decree:
THE KEEPER OF SPACE AND TIME
A being who could collapse galaxies into ink
and rewrite destinies with a breath.
The moment the crown settled upon his existence, everything shifted.
He could now see a future thread—thin, distant, trembling.
A girl wrapped in chains of fate.
Eyes filled with quiet sorrow.
A name whispered through the fabric of creation.
⬜li⬜⬜
His heartbeat stopped. Then started again—fiercer than before.
He now understood.
This was why he ascended.
Why the universe allowed his rise.
What awaited him in the next arc.
He reached toward that shining future thread—
—and whispered:
"I'm coming."
The light swallowed him whole.
[luminous]
And so ended the arc.
Not with a fall.
But with a man rising to a throne meant for no one.
[cecilion][Aamon]
My dear friend you have return
[Nous]/[Zephyro]
Aha
{1Arbiter}
Hmmm
Why are GREAT OLD one are her