The Chaos gods would have gladly meditated on this miraculous entity for all eternity, but their studious mood was interrupted by Chaos.

  Pangu had created an immense void in which the new world had germinated, but it was only temporary. Chaos was rolling back in and was gradually refilling nothingness with its grey gas, causing it to inexorably shrink until it disappeared.

  With Chaos expanding inward while the Tao grew outward, nothing remained of the void, and both existences collided violently.

  There were no deafening sounds or visually stimulating sounds, but slowly, ever so slowly, the glow of the millions runes covering the World Lotus were dimming.

  Eventually, when a particular rune had lost all of its golden luster, it rapidly decayed, until it collapsed and turned into a new strand of Chaos. The only defense the Lotus had was to continually provide more energy to repair or replace broken runes, feeding off of the aura of the Primordials.

  It had become a race, to see if Chaos could cause the lotus to decay faster than it could repair itself. At first the Lotus was by far the winner in this contest, but the tides soon turned.

  As the new world grew, not only did it require exponentially more energy to continue advancing, it also offered an increasingly large surface area which made contact with the Chaos. It was getting harder and harder to cope with the demand.

  The Chaos gods had never expected the world to expand so much, but it was not in their character to give up, so they could only continue feeding the greedy cosmos.

  Chaos Gods had infinite power, and they would never run out, but there was a limit to their output. As time passed and consumption increased, it changed from an almost unnoticeable drain to a fairly obvious burden.

  Soon the Mazingers had to strain and make an active effort to provide enough energy, instead of lazily letting their aura flow around.

  Even the Lotus was having a hard time gathering all of this energy, and the Primordials had to resort to directly linking up with their respective roots to facilitate the energy flow.

  The consumption was rapidly increased to ridiculous levels, to the point that no single Mazinger could bear it, and they had to band together once more, interfacing with the jade butterfly of fate to make the conversion of energy more efficient.

  The situation was gradually getting worse, but the idea of quitting never crossed anyone's mind. The Chaos had no consciousness and was only acting according to its nature, while the World Lotus only directive was to guide and fuel the expansion of the world until it reached a sufficient size. No one knew what a sufficient size was or why it was so important, only that it had not been reached.

  As for the Primordials, they were too proud and stubborn to admit any kind of defeat. If they needed to nourish the lotus forever, they would do so, because they would never surrender to the idea that there existed something that was too hard for them to do.

  The world had been enlarged to a truly unreasonable extent, now measuring almost a square light year, filled to the brim with an unimaginable concentration of minuscule golden runes, and nothing else.

  As it had expanded, it had encountered and devoured the fragments of Pangu's axe, and had discovered that it had absorbed a minuscule part of Pangu’s origin while doing so.

  This “origin” was infinitely mysterious, but was fitted perfectly in the new world’s order, as if it was always meant to be there. Once assimilated, it also started producing infinite energy, finally providing the world with its own means to fight against the Chaos without relying on outside help.

  Responding instinctively to this discovery, The World Lotus immediately stopped passively accepting the energy it was given, and instead targeted its benefactors, trying to devour and assimilate their origin, and gain their infinite power for itself.

  The Primordials grew furious at their creation’s greed, but there was nothing they could do. The lotus was immune to all of their powers, and

  Even escape was impossible, as they had previously established a link with the Great Lotus of Chaos to facilitate the energy transfer, and that link was now trapping them, providing a direct connection through which their laws could be drained.

  They could only rage helpless as the world ferociously stole their law, their origin, their consciousness, their everything.

  The Chaos gods were not physical entities that could be killed, but were universal constants. They would exist forever, and nothing, not even Chaos, the Tao or each other could destroy any of them.

  They were in no danger of dying, but they still feared being assimilated into the world. It was like a wooden beam in a house. The beam itself was still intact, but it could no longer sway in the storm or roll down hills, imprisoned by the building it was a part of. The Primordials were in a similar situation. Everything, including their consciousness, had become the building blocks of this new universe, and had become immutable constants.

  They had become perfectly predictable, without free-will or emotions. To an outsider’s eye, there was nothing left of those great beings, and it was as if only the Chaos and the Tao had ever existed.

  The Tao did more than plunder their law, it refined them and incorporated them into itself, forming an unprecedented unity. They were no longer individual laws, but the 3000 Daos that composed the singular Tao.

  Upon the complete incorporation of the 3 000 Dao’s, the Lotus celebrated, having achieved perfection. Suddenly, this immense world measuring trillions of light years across halted, and then abruptly deflated.

  It shrunk so fast and violently that the Chaos pursuit could not keep up, recreating a circular expanse of void. It shrunk down from a trillion light years to a billion, a million, a thousand, until it was smaller than even one light year. And it became smaller still, faster than the eye could see, to the size of our sun, our earth, our moon, a basketball, a marble, an atom, even becoming smaller than an electron.

  The countless runes that had filled this huge world were all compressed into an infinitesimally small point. They had become a singularity so dense they started to fuse together and sublimate into something new.

  In a glorious eruption of light, the final act of creation was revealed. Perfectly obeying all of the Dao’s and their cycles, perfectly adapted for the inception of life, physical matter finally appeared in the universe.

  The world was no longer only conceptual, it now contained something unique, something more tightly bound by natural laws, something imminently logical, and something consistent.

  All of the objects that had were attracted by the nascent light, and they flew into it, getting transformed and gaining material forms.

  The light then gradually died down, and the material world was revealed. It was much smaller than the previous humongous ball of light, measuring only a few million kilometers across, smaller than our solar system, but that was enough.

  For now it was only filled with the mythical five colored clouds, but under the operation of the 3000 Dao’s, those clouds were being converted into familiar objects. They became the sun and moon, the earth and seas, and everything in the cosmos.

  It was already a beautiful world, but it was also terribly barren. The multicolored clouds of creation could transform into anything, but they could not inspire life into anything. No, animating the cosmos was the responsibility of something else.

  The World Lotus, having completed its mission, had withered and died when the world had become a singularity. Then, the light of creation, its body had been miraculously transformed, and its leaves had fallen down into the world.

  Four of those leaves were now morphing into the four divine beasts, namely the Azure Dragon, the White Tiger, the Vermilion Bird and finally the Black Turtle.

  Lastly, the fifth leaf, alongside the rest of the withered Lotus body and its 3000 roots, had evolved into the world tree. It was a gorgeous tree with the duty of holding up the sky, its branches extending into heaven while its roots delved right down to the underworld.

  Other than the World Lotus, the jade butterfly of fate was also absorbed, and it had shattered into 3 000 pieces, raining fragments down upon the world. Transformed by the Tao, those pieces turned into runes, but only 1 000 of those runes were clear and distinct, while the remaining 2 000 remained blurry and half-incorporeal.

   As for the fragments of Pangu’s axe, they had yet to take a definite form. Avery couldn't remember what had happened in the legends, and had no clue what he should do with them, so for now they remained formless.

  Avery was taking extreme liberty with the Chinese myths, even mixing in foreign legends, but he believed that was okay. All that mattered was that it emotionally resonated with him, so that more intent could be produced.

  This was his own version of the myth of creation, one he knew very well and understood all the supposed mysteries. Taking a step back to gaze at his work, a feeling of pride welled in his chest, and he hesitated whether he should go ahead with his crazy plan and risk it all.