As the last traces of the Eighth Life Parker dissolved into component essence, something fundamental began to crack in the very architecture of reality itself. The mental battlefield didn't just transform—it exploded outward in a cataclysmic cascade of breaking laws, shattering dimensions, and collapsing certainties that had governed existence since the first moment anything had dared to be.
The crystalline chamber around them—reality itself—began to scream.
It wasn't sound. It was the wail of universal constants being violated, the death cry of physics as it realized something beyond its comprehension was awakening. Space folded in on itself like origami made of starlight, time moved in spirals that hurt to perceive, and causality simply gave up trying to make sense of what was happening.
