Everything was dark, still, and silent. It wasn’t cold or hot or anything in between. There was no pain—no sensation at all. The only thing Yoshika had to confirm that she even existed at all was her own errant thought.

Where am I?

Nowhere. Thought and feeling without form or substance. Fleeting and ephemeral. Dying.

Well that’s not good.

Yoshika felt oddly detached from the notion of her impending doom. She had experienced bodily deaths before, but her present condition lacked the pain and anguish that she associated with those experiences. She was at peace—adrift on an empty sea of consciousness.

She didn’t want to die. There was still so much to do, so many things to experience. But an eternity of quiet oblivion wasn’t bad either.

Except that it was. There were people counting on her—depending on her. What had become of Yumi in those last moments? If Yoshika died, what would become of her Soul Realm, or Rika trapped within?

Stranded. Alone. The Tear will sustain her, but it will take centuries if not millennia to harness the power. Time she won’t have.

Yoshika’s thoughts were jumbled and disjointed. She couldn’t tell which were hers and which came from another presence. There was no other presence, save for that which marked itself by its absence.

Void. You’re here, aren’t you? That’s you talking in my head.

It wasn’t that Void was present with her, but that her own absence had placed her consciousness adjacent to it. A common occurrence for beings powerful enough to linger on after the destruction of their physical forms. Void usually ignored them, but in Yoshika’s case, it seemed prudent to make an exception.

Keeping me company in my final moments? How sweet.

Yoshika’s irony was wasted on the elemental deity. No matter the words she used, it would understand the underlying meaning. The words were only for her, but they made her more comfortable. Void relented, noting that such abstractions would only waste what little time she had left.

“Are you sure you still wish to communicate this way?”

“I am. This is much less confusing. So, we’re dying, huh?”

“It would be more accurate to say that you are already dead.”

That was not what she wanted to hear, but it wasn’t surprising either.

“Is there any way to fix that? I’ve died before.”

“Death of the flesh is hardly a roadblock for beings like us. You would not be here if your death was something so trite. Your spirit has been damaged beyond your capacity to sustain it outside of your core.”

As worrying as that sounded, Yoshika knew Void wouldn’t be bothering with her at all if there wasn’t a chance.

“Then I just have to sustain it inside my core, right?”

“You will find it easier said than done. I will do what I can to aid you, but the chances of failure are overwhelming.”

“Why?”

Void understood that she wasn’t asking why her chances of success were so dismal, but rather why it was helping her in the first place. The answer was too complex to effectively communicate, and impossible to put into words.

“Suffice it to say that fate is not as unchangeable as your predecessor believed. The Tear’s influence weighs heavily upon the fabric of destiny, and it is that which I seek to steer away from catastrophe.”

So because Yoshika held the Tear, she had the potential to bring about or avert some kind of universal scale disaster. Void, being the incomprehensibly huge and powerful being it was, had foreseen that disaster and was trying to nudge her in the right direction.

“That is the essence of it, yes.”

“You could have warned me sooner.”

“I could not.”

It didn’t elaborate further, so Yoshika didn’t press it. Void was the sort of being that would only tell her precisely what it wanted her to hear—nothing more, and nothing less.

“It is good that you understand.”

“It’s still annoying. So what do I do? I can’t feel anything at all, even when I try to meditate.”

“That is because there is nothing for you to sense, nor a you to experience the sensation. You must create them.”

Yoshika wasn’t sure what it meant. Create what? Out of what?

“Everything. Out of Nothing.”

Oh is that all? For a second there she thought it was going to be difficult.

“Uh, how?”

“I do not know. I have never done it. But I have witnessed it countless times, and that is the knowledge I will share with you now. We are almost out of time.”

“Wait! Before you do that...what happened to Master Yumi? I tried to bring her into my Soul Realm but...”

The silence stretched on for an uncomfortable moment before Void answered.

“Her fate is not known to me. Prepare yourself.”

Yoshika wasn’t exactly sure what sort of preparations she was expected to do in her present state, but she mentally braced herself for whatever trauma the ancient elemental was about to inflict on her.

 

---

 

In the vast and infinite cosmos, there existed countless worlds. But it had not always been that way. Once, it had been dead and empty. There was no light or dark, no life or death, and no time, until suddenly there was.

Through a tiny pinprick in the infinite void of absence, an endless supply of energy gushed forth. It was just a feeble trickle on the scale of infinity, taking eons upon eons before it formed into anything of substance, and a near-infinite amount of time again before it resolved itself into the first world—what would later be called the Divine Realm.

To the beings that lived there, the world had always existed and always would. But to the void, its appearance was brutally sudden. By the time life developed on the first world, the nothingness had already long since awakened.

It spent an eternity trying to understand its own nature, and the nature of the newfound reality around it. It thought it would have another eternity still to complete its ruminations.

Before it knew it, the infant beings of the first world had already found their answer and unlocked the power of creation.

 

---

 

Yoshika’s mind reeled and her soul shuddered as she experienced unfathomable scales of time and space in the span of an instant. If she had any bodies, they would have been queasy.

“Oh my—Void stop, it’s too much. I can’t...”

“You must.”

“Wait, don’t—”

 

---

 

The first gods wielded the power of the limitless font of essence from which their world was created to expand its borders. No longer was the form the energy took random or meaningless. The gods created with purpose. They made new life in their own images, carved out domains to call their own, and expanded their realm far faster than its natural growth had ever been.

Eventually, the world grew so large that no one being could ever hope to traverse its entirety. Yet compared to the surrounding emptiness, it was still naught but a speck.

Still, the void grew worried. The world kept growing, and the more it grew the faster that growth accelerated. Would that growth eventually overtake its own endless expanse? Could one infinity eventually envelop another?

It took a moment to ponder that problem, and while it was thinking the world ended.

 

---

 

Yoshika could feel her soul being overwhelmed by the Void’s power. With each vision, her fleeting existence faded further and further—her fragile consciousness being torn to shreds by the enormity of what she was seeing.

“I don’t see how this is supposed to help. You’re going to kill me!”

“Most likely.”

 

---

 

Reality had grown too large. Under the weight of its own power, it collapsed. One moment the Divine Realm was expanding more rapidly than ever, the next it was nothing but a single miniscule speck of matter.

The flow of essence hadn’t stopped, but the speck greedily absorbed everything the void didn’t. Just like that, its problems were solved. Reality couldn’t grow forever—it would turn into an all-devouring speck before that happened.

But the emptiness wasn’t satisfied. What if the speck came to life? Would the living speck then set about creating its own new world of infinite growth until that too collapsed?

It would just mean more specks. An endless number of them multiplying at an endlessly increasing rate. The problem wasn’t solved, then. Merely delayed. Eternity was a long time, after all.

The void went back to thinking.

 

---

 

She was too weak to protest anymore. Her thoughts were fuzzy and fragmented, and even her identity seemed to be slipping away.

“Just a little more.”

 

---

 

The speck didn’t come to life. Not in the way that Void expected. It wasn’t able to consume everything that came through the font of creation. The power it failed to consume coalesced around it, forming stars and planets, and developing life of its own.

A new world, not directly connected to the font. It slowly drifted away, gathering essence at a much slower rate than the first Divine Realm. As it grew more distant, more of the font’s essence was free to gather, taking the form of another new world—the second Divine Realm.

Void watched curiously as these new worlds developed in parallel. The second Divine Realm grew as swiftly as the first. New gods came into being, discovered the power of creation, and began to expand it anew. They were blissfully unaware of the future that awaited them, and Void had no interest in warning them.

The world around the speck was different. Life was sparse, there, with only a few select planets supporting it. They developed more slowly. Without the limitless font of power to sustain them, living things would die, and the essence of their souls would reform into new life.

It was a fascinating process to observe. So fascinating that Void didn’t even notice the collapse of the second Divine Realm—nor the third and fourth.

It was only when one of the mortal creatures on the first speck achieved the peak of power and reached out through the Void for something greater that it noticed the new specks floating around within it.

 

---

 

The Void was empty and alone. As it always was, and as it always would be. Its first and last disciple was no more. Too faint for it to even sense anymore. Nevertheless, it would finish its story.

 

---

 

The mortal creature forced its will through the Void, reaching through the endless expanse in search of the distant font that had given it the strength it desired. As it reached further, it formed a pathway of essence through the nothingness—a connection to the Divine Realm.

It almost didn’t make it. The limited power available to a creature so distant from the eternal font of power stretched and strained, nearly exhausting itself as it instinctively reached out to touch the source of all things.

When it finally did, the power flowed back through that connection all at once, smiting the unsuspecting mortal and annihilating it in an instant.

An anticlimactic ending, but that was only the first.

As time went on, the cosmos continued to shift. Divine Realms came and went, growing and collapsing before being reborn as new mortal worlds. Hundreds, thousands, millions—countless times the cycle repeated itself, each time just a little different.

The mortal worlds continued to strive for their origin, and while the rate of success was abysmal, the number of beings making the attempt only grew with each cycle.

A new class of divine being came to be. Ascended gods. Former mortals that had transcended their meager existences and found their place in the Divine Realm.

They came in many forms—guardians, conquerors, unifiers, despoilers—they were shaped by their experiences in the mortal realms. Hardened by the challenges of mortal life, these new gods quickly outgrew their predecessors and became the ultimate rulers of the divine.

Void knew that it wouldn’t last. They too would suffer the collapse of the divine realm, and the cycle would begin anew. Worlds that grew too distant from the origin would simply fade as their energy dissipated and their specks ran out of power to consume.

That, Void realized, was its nature. All of existence came from Nothing, and would eventually return to nothing.

Yet existence wasn’t finished surprising it yet. The Sovereigns were tenacious. They saw the shape of their world, and extrapolated its nature. They realized that the Divine Realm was doomed to collapse if it continued to grow endlessly. And so they petitioned the only being they knew which was large and powerful enough to do something about it.

They asked Void for help.

It wasn’t sure how to respond, at first. It had always been a silent observer, content to watch the ebb and flow of reality and ponder at its meaning. To interfere directly felt like a violation of its nature. And yet, by engaging it, had the mortals not done as they had always done?

From the moment of the first Divine Realm’s collapse, those tiny specks had been challenging everything Void knew about the universe. Time and again, mortals altered the world, changed the rules, and interfered with the cycle. Change was in their nature, and it was infectious.

So for the first time in its long non-existence, Void acted. It reached out to the font of creation, its antithesis, and tried to peer beyond.

It did not remember what it saw there, if anything. The experience was blindingly painful—the endless energies of existence co-annihilating with Void’s insubstantial form. But it would never forget what it had accomplished.

The font shifted. Its energies took on intentional form and purpose of their own accord, and the first avatar of the demiurges was born.

It looked upon the universe, heard the plight of the sovereigns, and in a single overwhelming act of will, altered the eternal cycle.

From that point on, the Divine Realm was static—held firmly in place by the first of many universal laws. The energy from the font of creation flowed over it and diffused into the Void beyond, once more fundamentally changing its nature.

The Void had always been formless and shapeless, but as a punishment—or perhaps a reward—for drawing the attention of the demiurge, Void was given a border. Between Void and the Divine Realm, there now existed a sea of elemental chaos. It was from this chaos that new worlds could be born.

Some were tiny individual planets, similar in nature to the Divine Realm but on a smaller scale. Others would form like the specks, or even entire microcosms filled with their own fields of specks and stars. Each surrounded by their own border of elemental chaos and connected to the Divine Realm.

The new gods were delighted. They could create new worlds from the chaos instead of developing the divine realm, expanding their domains without risking collapse.

And so began a long and prosperous era of stability. Void’s role in bringing it about was eventually forgotten by all but a select few beings old enough to remember it, and even they—in the way of mortals—would leave it out in order to exaggerate their own roles.

It didn’t matter. Void had no pride to wound, and it approved of the new cycle. Though the chaotic nature of its borders required it to take a more active hand in things, guiding the children spontaneously born from it, the unchanging nature of the new Divine Realm meant that it would never again have to worry about the endlessly accelerating growth of creation.

Eventually, the font would run dry. All of the essence in the universe would dissipate evenly throughout the Void’s endless expanses. The mortals would run out of things to change about themselves and the world around them. And one day, the universe would return to its natural state—dead and empty.

Except for Void. After all...

Nothing was truly endless.

That’s a nice story and all, but I think you left something out.

Yoshika was still reeling from the experience—abbreviated though it may have been—of the entire history of the cosmos. But just as Void could read past her thoughts and feelings to discern her true meaning, that cut both ways.

She’d nearly lost herself in the process, but as Void’s tale unfolded she’d dug deep to find the true meanings and insights behind every moment, and there was something very conspicuous in its absence.

“Where was my so-called ‘predecessor’ in all of that? The Bloody Sovereign, who threatened to overturn everything the other Sovereigns worked so hard to create? I’m supposed to create something from Nothing, not from elemental chaos.”

The Bloody Sovereign’s tomb—actually his Soul Realm, now Yoshika’s—had been made from nothing. It was anchored to Yoshika’s world, but before she’d merged it with Jiaguo, it had been in the Void. So deeply embedded, in fact, that Yoshika had been able to communicate directly with the ancient elemental from within its inner sanctum.

“How did he do that?”

“I do not know. No other has done it before or since.”

That was why Void expected her to fail. Only one person in the entire history of the cosmos had done it, and it was the most powerful cultivator who ever lived at the very peak of his strength. Big shoes to fill.

“Couldn’t you have just led with that?”

“I could not.”

Ugh. How was every tutor she studied under more frustrating than the last?

There was a point to Void’s story—even the parts it didn’t tell. Maybe especially those parts, knowing it. She needed to take a step back and look at it all from a distance, as Void had. To think like an eternal being that had witnessed the rebirth of the universe multiple times. How hard could that be?

To make it easier, she started by reducing her universe to only the things that were relevant in the moment. There was her, Void, and her Soul Realm. She needed to return to her Soul Realm in order to preserve whatever was left of her soul within her core. That wasn’t possible because she didn’t have enough power and within the infinite expanse of the Void, there was nothing for her to draw on. She was just going to dissipate—to return to Nothing, as all things did.

Unless...

She reframed it again. If her entire universe was just her fading soul, her Soul Realm, and the Void, then that made her Soul Realm analogous to the Divine Realm. Thinking of it that way, the Sovereign’s Tear was the font of creation, she was like a distant mortal realm, and the Void was...well, it was still the Void.

As the first Sovereigns had done, Yoshika focused on her origin. Her soul instinctively knew where it came from—what the ultimate source of its power really was. She emptied her mind and let herself reach for that origin.

It was a long way away, and there wasn’t much of her left. But it was all she had. She reached out for it desperately, drawing herself thinner and thinner as her fleeting existence faded. Had she been too slow? Was there enough of her left to make it? Even if she survived, would whatever was left really still be her anymore?

Yoshika let those questions fall away. All that mattered was survival. She could sense it, still so painfully distant but she latched onto that feeling. The pinpoint impossibly far off in the distance was her entire world—the only thing proving she still existed.

She reached and stretched, focusing on nothing else. An eternity passed as she continued to strive endlessly for that tiny pinprick of hope that remained ever out of reach. She forgot who she was and why she was reaching. She forgot about the Void, and the endless cycle of death and rebirth. Nothing was left except for that tiny point.

Then she found purchase. All at once, the origin of her soul flashed across the connection like a bolt of lightning. But rather than smite the pathetic shreds of her soul into oblivion, the power enveloped her in a gentle warmth and drew her into itself.

Deep within the inner sanctum of Yoshika’s Soul Realm, a small cat spirit was distracted from her weeping by the faint glow of a tiny floating gem. She looked up in shock and wiped the tears from her eyes to confirm what she was seeing.

“M-mom?! Aunt Rika! Rika come quick—she’s alive!”