There had never been silence like this.
Not in the billion-fold layers of Ye Zai's forged realities. Not in the primordial pulse of Tianxu's heart. Not even in the last breath of the old Almighty as he was swallowed by meaning.
No—this was unmade silence.
The Evervoid had awakened.
It did not scream. It did not roar. It merely arrived, and existence remembered it had once not existed.
Galaxies evaporated in thought.
Ideas wilted mid-bloom.
Fiction cracked, groaning under the pressure of a presence that never wanted to be.
At the precipice of the Omnishell—the final membrane before all new birth—the Genesis Warden stepped forward. His cloak was made of pre-creation flame. His form was not matter, but the function of becoming. Where he walked, rules birthed themselves to permit the notion of a footstep.
He saw the Evervoid not with eyes, but with cause itself.
The Evervoid spread—black, but not darkness. Absence weaponized. Threads of story recoiled. Even stable Daos shivered and refused to be known.
And then, it began.
The Warden raised his hand.
Chronos halted. Not paused. Not slowed. Just… refused.
Across all nearby verses, stars trembled mid-collapse, trapped in a breathless second.
The Evervoid surged like a thought no one could think.
The two forces collided.
No thunder. No clash. No explosion.
Just reversal.
An entire dimension folded in on itself, like a thought too ashamed to be had. Reality buckled and scattered—time did not shatter, it screamed as its spine broke and its meaning fled. Laws crumbled into bleeding glyphs that rained down across sleeping multiverses, branding stories that had nothing to do with this war.
Children forgot their names.
Old gods wept without knowing why.
Planets dreamt of falling into their own cores.
The Genesis Warden pressed forward, body cracking with architectural agony.
Every step he took forward birthed new rule, pushing back the null-flesh of the Evervoid with raw purpose.
But the Evervoid spoke, and in that whisper, a thousand possible futures unwrote themselves like regret.
"I am what you were before you were."
The Warden's left arm—the one that carried the Scriptbrand of Origin—withered. It fell from his body as ink and became a dying sentence on the last page of a forgotten book.
But he didn't stop.
He reached into the air and pulled forth a beginning.
A newborn universe, glowing and untouched, torn from the Vault of Infinite Seeds. He thrust it into the Evervoid's core.
It screamed—not in sound, but in unreality, causing an entire 17-layer verse cluster to collapse inward like lungs gasping for fiction.
The clash tore the cosmos open.
Eighteen Reality Chains were severed. A city of silent watchers at the edge of Time's Frame was instantly atomized—then rewound, then atomized again. Words themselves fled.
The Warden bled starlight and laws. The Evervoid bled nothing, and that was worse.
But with one final surge, the Warden reached into himself—past his form, past his name, into the thought Ye Zai had when He created him.
He found it.
The first rule.
He made it true again.
And the Evervoid, unable to reject it, was cast back—bound within the unborn.
The silence broke. But it did not heal.
Thirteen layers of story were lost. Nine dreamworlds fused. Entire civilizations across fiction would never remember this battle, but they would feel the shape of the wound in their bones.
The Warden fell to one knee.
He had won.
But the cost was stitched across every page of creation.
And from far beyond all of this, Ye Zai watched—not with pride, not with pity.
But with the knowing quiet of the Untranscendable.
There is a silence after battle that no hymn can reach.
It is not peace—it is a hum of what might still be broken.
The Genesis Warden stood on the remains of a ruined possibility. Around him floated what was left of the verse-cluster he had once vowed to protect. Shattered frameworks of potential curled in on themselves like burning petals, drifting across the void.
His wounds were not flesh. They were principles undone, definitions scarred. His left arm, lost to the Evervoid's whisper, could not be regrown—not until the notion of "origin" remembered it had once trusted him.
He did not mourn.
Instead, he turned away.
He descended through the cracks between layers—not portals, but folded certainties, gaps between belief and realization. He passed beneath cause. Beneath the concept of sequence. Through the bedrock of things that had always been.
Until he reached a space that even Ye Zai had never spoken of.
It was known only in half-echoes.
The Hollowroot
A garden beneath fiction where the first seeds of power were planted, but never allowed to grow. Here, possibility sleeps, and reality refuses to look.
The Warden knelt at the edge of a black pool that did not reflect, and placed his remaining hand upon the soil.
It pulsed—not in time, but in yearning.
"I was born to guard," he said aloud, though no one would answer. "But to guard in full, I must become something that cannot be outwritten."
His voice splintered across the hollow as a low wind. Somewhere in the roots, potential stirred.
He placed his knees to the ground. The air thickened—not with pressure, but with introspection. And then he began.
The Ritual of Becoming Unquestioned
He let go of form.
He poured himself into the soil of unmade thought, letting every truth he carried—his memories, his rules, his bindings—bleed into the garden.
The Hollowroot fed, not hungrily, but with sacred solemnity. In return, it offered him concepts forgotten even by Ye Zai—lost blueprints of existence, burnt drafts of logic from before stories were shaped.
He endured.
He endured the silence of having no role.
He endured the voice of his own fear, whispering:
"You are no more than a tool."
He endured.
For a thousand silence-cycles, he became still.
Until finally… his form began to shift.
The New Genesis Warden
When he rose again, he was no longer simply the Warden.
He was the Anchor Before All Intrusion, the Hearthstone of Reality's Right, the Shield Ye Zai Would Never Need—but now would never dare to forget.
His lost arm was no longer an arm.
It was a wreath of infinite precepts, orbiting his shoulder like loyal moons. His scales no longer bore nebulae—they were now paradox mirrors, reflecting even what could not exist.
And above all, deep within his core, a whisper of the Evervoid remained. Not as a wound, but as a warning—etched into his being so that he would never forget what nearly was.
Now, he waits in the Hollowroot.
Not to hide.
Not to rest.
But to watch the firmament from beneath, silently ensuring that no new hunger will rise again to challenge Ye Zai—or what Ye Zai dreams.
And should it try…
Then this time, the Warden will not merely guard genesis.
He will become its blade.
Ye Zai was Proud of his creation and its new found power.