"Let me physically transcend."
Upon Un's declaration, the void folded inward. The resonance of the Tree, carrier of infinite possibility, began to tremble beneath the pressure of being undone.
The unified form of Kyorin and Yao began to retransform. Veins pulsed black, ink trails blooming across once-pristine skin.
The human flesh dimmed—not with shadow, but with totality—each atom shimmering with pale, ghostly luminance, as though the body were burning from within.
Then came the rupture.
The void unraveled. Worlds did not simply collapse—entire universes accelerated toward their entropic heat death, and at the apex of dissolution, everything broke.
Reality peeled back—unzipping like worn parchment—and behind Un's form surged a vision no sentient mind was meant to survive. Creatures of every possible shape and unshape became visible.
DEVA, Lucia, and Xia bore witness, frozen, as they saw themselves staring out from behind the tapestry of faces. All were present—each identity, each form.
From a line to a doodle, from an ant to a human, from mystics to the goddess of creation—every being that had ever existed or would ever exist shimmered in Un's becoming.
He had not summoned them; he had become them.
The void teemed with faces—the totality of this reality's existence—until a hand appeared. First, it was invisible, as if non-existent.
Then, a single line. Then, many. It looked like a child's drawing of a hand. Then, suddenly, a hand made of matter.
And in the next instant, it had already reached them, coming to a time when it had grabbed them.
Lucia gasped. Her mind reeled as thought pierced into wordless comprehension: 'Fourth dimensionality?'
"No." She narrowed her eyes. His form—Un's form—had not yet finished transcending the world.
Crack
But then, everything collapsed into motion.
She gazed at Un—and suddenly, she was no longer herself. They were no longer themselves. They found themselves inside Un's flesh, not through a single path, but through a thousand impossible entrances.
No step had been taken. They had not walked, nor had they been pulled. They had been absorbed. And yet each felt, without doubt, that they had chosen their way.
A vision overtook them.
They pressed through a labyrinth of living thresholds: clusters of flesh adorned with eyes that blinked, mouths that whispered, ears that listened, and organs for which no name had yet been spoken.
The walls dreamed. The doors dreamed. They dreamed.
And then, clarity came like the break of dawn. Except dawn had arrived, literally.
They were no longer in the world that they knew. They had arrived somewhere else. Somewhere other.
A world reborn.
Nothing behaved as it should. Gravity bent sideways. Forms flickered between dimensions. Time unfurled in spirals, not lines.
Yet at the core of this chaos, something pulsed: Resonance.
Not as memory, but as reinvention. The echo had changed—yet the source remained unchanged.
Then—Something impossible occurred.
Two realities—one known, one unknown—merged. They intertwined. Akin to twin notes drawn into harmony, not erased but amplified.
And in that convergence, truth emerged: All realities, all selves, all worlds, were scaffolded upon the same song. Resonance was the chord behind the cosmos.
Lucia's earlier guess—fourth-dimensionality—shattered beneath the pressure of new comprehension.
They had passed it long ago.
Now they stood within octate dimensionality. Eight axes. Eight directions of becoming.
And Un... Un was no longer bound by eight.
He was shifting again.
Lucia felt the surge before it struck. Her body could bear the shift—her godly lineage as the creator allowed her to survive transcendence.
Yet the others could not. She instinctively cast a dome around them, a cocoon of dimensional stability.
A clarity washed over Lucia: Un had already reached the Deci.
Eyes lifted—and met a gaze so overwhelming that it caused a gasp, breath stolen by the weight of that presence.
Before them stood a being—Un—as a terror beyond comprehension.
Un's legs plunged like gnarled roots into the abyss. But they gripped not soil, not stone, but suffering—its anchor was anguish, its foundation eternal pain.
Un's body shimmered with corpse-light: pallid, deathless, refusing definition.
It was not alive.
It was not dead.
It was the ember that flickers even after life had fled.
Six arms spread from its torso—five complete: Earth, Water, Fire, Metal, and Wood.
The sixth, severed, hung unfinished. Once, it had held the soul. Now its essence flickered faintly in Un's breath, forever unreachable.
The face was split perfectly in two—one side male, the other female—a seamless union, the unmaking of duality.
Un's head floated, severed from its body, yet tethered by a single thread of blood—a bridge from spirit to flesh, from heaven to earth.
Its hair spilled upward and outward, blotting out the skyless sky. Each strand was a thought. A memory. A myth. A world.
Where Un stood, there could be no heaven, nor hell—only a story.
Even the hair upon its body writhed. Each filament was its being—each a vision of a different death.
Un was the graveyard.
From it sprang the beginning.
In it nested the end.
Then, just as they began to comprehend deci, Un moved again.
Not forward. Not up. Not beyond. But through.
Un, shattered the tenth. Bypassed the eleventh. And entered the twelfth.
And suddenly, it was not just Un—but every possible form of Un. Every myth, memory, aspect, echo, and shadow. All embodiments of what it had ever embodied.
Time itself split.
Two times emerged. Two clocks ticked. Both true, both real, both active.
And Un, transcended, becoming that which transended the probable reality—The Twelfth Dimensional Singularity.
Upon the attainment of apotheosis, Un took command of reality. Every universe—all of them—had reached the final threshold.
They remained suspended, caught in stillness, just a final breath away from conclusion.
In a voice that annihilated reality, Un spoke: "Entropic... Death... Of... All... Universes."
Energies collapsed. Stabilized universes came to a complete and absolute stillness.
There was no bang. No flash.
Only decay.
A withering, like a flower silencing itself as it fades.
The cosmos, like the lotus, withered in silence. All beings aged instantly, dying before comprehending what had occurred.
And then, the Outer Beings came.
They surged forth, desperate to claim dominion over the freed space.
But Un's presence fed on them.
He devoured their will. They fled—or perished.
With two clocks in hand, Un stood between what had ended and what was to begin.
One of Un's hands held destroyed time—fragmented, burnt, lost, and the other grasped the new creation, about to be established.
Offering the latter to Lucia, Un began to assimilate the souls of reality into the broken one, ready to be reborn upon the new Epoch.
As Lucia took hold of the Covenant of Creation, her primordial powers surged back into her.
She rose to her full stature—her true power: A celestial force worthy of painting stars across the empty void.
Influenced by the old reality's pull, DEVA and Xia began to fade.
Lucia turned to Xia and said gently, "To ease your suffering, you will only partially remember him in other lifetimes. But in the lifetime when you are truly Xia... you will remember him fully."
Xia's eyes widened initially, but she accepted the goddess's terms. She knew it was for her protection, though a quiet indignation stirred within her.
Still, the goddess urged softly: "Oh, Heavenly Mother... please. It's for the welfare of all."
Xia reluctantly nodded as her form dissolved completely.
Then, Lucia turned her gaze to DEVA. Her expression grew pained. DEVA's condition was unique—she could not yet move forward.
Lucia, at the very least, needed approval from the Destroyer.
After waiting what felt like eternity, a figure approached—half man, half woman—splitting apart as they neared. Kyorin and Yao emerged as separate entities once more.
Kyorin handed Lucia the remnants of the old reality, where the collective souls still lingered. Lucia took heed of the souls, honoring them before assimilating the old with the new.
Snapping her finger, she brought forth the Old Book of Fate.
As if life had been breathed into its pages, they began to flutter—alive again. Reality stirred. With subtle tweaks, a new story began to write itself.
Golden hands, mirroring Lucia's own, appeared. They held the mightiest pen once again, and the new chapter began.
Lucia watched the book and nodded in quiet approval at the progress of the new world. She turned to Kyorin and Yao.
Yao glowed faintly with an ethereal light, though she held it back, restrained.
"Tch, it seems I must depart soon," Yao said, her eyes dimming slightly. The time had come for her to depart for Tathāgata.
But before leaving, she turned to Kyorin and asked, "Teacher, what will your next incarnation be like?"
Kyorin did not answer directly. He looked toward Lucia.
Lucia smiled gently and replied, "Oh, kindred spirit, your incarnation will be that of a Thernodian."
She continued, "You will exist only for so long, a Thernodian by circumstance—and will be slain by the righteous one."
With a bit of apprehension, she asked, "Do you still wish to manifest?"
Kyorin gave a simple smile. "Even if it's only for a short time… It's for the sake of the Mechanical Wonder, the one who transcended cold logic for the sake of my flawed self," he said softly.
"I must at least honor her sacrifice… and let her be my strength in one lifetime, however brief." Kyorin agreed to Lucia's terms—for it was the only way he could deliver liberation to DEVA.
"I do have a condition, however," Kyorin said solemnly.
Lucia turned to him, "What is it?"
"Do not make the mistake of granting me knowledge of my former self when my soul incarnates." His words carried the weight of a warning more than a request.
Lucia tilted her head. "Is there a reason you do not wish to remember?"
Kyorin turned his gaze toward the void, silent for a moment.
Then he asked, "Do you know why souls tend to forget their past lives after reincarnation?"
Lucia replied calmly, "Because they are not fully awake."
Kyorin nodded. "That's one reason. But there's another."
He looked at her, and though she knew the answer through her omniscience, he spoke it aloud: "Knowledge is a double-edged blade."
He gave a quiet laugh, shaking his head. "For someone like me, knowledge is unnecessary. I relish in the mortal realm."
Lucia, puzzled by his humility, asked, "Then why do you choose to incarnate as a mortal at all?"
With eyes full of quiet wonder, Kyorin answered: "To witness the miracles of the Eternal Spirit."
The Eternal Spirit—Lucia could guess at what it was. But even her omniscience could not grasp its full meaning. It evaded definition, slipped past her god-sense like mist through fingers.
And yet… a reassurance tugged at her mind, a subtle thread.
If she follows the story of Kyorin's next incarnation, she might come to understand what this Eternal Spirit is.
So, she did not ask further.
Kyorin then turned to Yao and addressed her earlier question.
"About my next incarnation?" he repeated, a gentle fire kindling in his voice. "It will be the very glory we just now achieved."
"How come?" Yao asked softly, curiosity brimming in her lotus-shaped eyes.
Kyorin looked down at himself, then back at her. "I was once called the Great Demon, Great is called Da," he began, "and the word Da also comes from my past life's surname—Dan."
He turned to Yao and continued, "And you, who is titled 'lotus eyes', you hold the word Lián." He smiled, as if the name had already taken root. "By taking 'Great' and 'Lotus' together, I shall be called… Da Lián."
"So a monster called Da Lián would be born, huh?" Yao teased.
But Lucia quickly interjected, "Who said he will be born a monster?"
She reminded them, "He is a Thernodian by circumstance." Then she smiled gently and added, "Just as he wore the robes of existence, he will wear the robe of humanity."
"Why?" Kyorin asked, confused. Why would Lucia make him wear human flesh, yet belong to that of a monster?
Lucia murmured, "Of the existing, yet not of existence."
Kyorin understood—this was her gesture of apology, a straightforward apology: Kyorin would be given human attire to live the life he could not before.
But he would not be human. He would be a monster dwelling amid the waves of resilient mortality, known as humanity.
"Haah," Yao sighed. "It seems the real story begins here." She spoke with a touch of pity.
"I wish... I could have witnessed it." She shook her head, then began to dissolve from reality.
"Farewell, Teacher." With those words, her presence vanished as she ascended to Tathāgata.
Kyorin, too, could now shed the persona of Dan Kyorin—and be born as Da Lián. This was the end of the old and the beginning of a new saga.
He looked at Lucia and requested, "Please… do the honors."
Lucia stepped forward, understanding.
She approached Kyorin, placed her hands gently on his chest—Splatter—she killed the persona called Dan Kyorin.
***
In the future of Solaris III, when Lament ran rampant and many suffered under the relentless onslaught of TDs and the Thernodian, a righteous one was prophesied to emerge.
Yet among those waves of hope, no prophecy foresaw the specific circumstance that would birth a Thernodian in human flesh.
And the one who allowed the birth of such a being was the Creator herself, as she wrote the persona of Da Lián.
This soul was not close to her, but neither was it alien. Whenever she thought of it, two traits always came to mind: insight and compassion.
Yet even as she considered them, she understood: these virtues alone would not guarantee peace. For insight and compassion, while noble,did not equate to tolerance.
Instead, they could birth intolerance—because such a soul would understand too much, feel too deeply, and take heavy action when driven by love or necessity.
Intolerance, as she well knew, was the cradle of anger. She pondered this for a while, then her lips curled into a knowing smile.
She knew exactly what final quality to bestow upon this persona.A quality often overlooked, yet one that served as the ultimate balm to anger.
It didn't promise peace—nothing ever truly did—but it made the emotional terrain of wrath easier to traverse.
That quality… was mischief.
End of Volume 3: FULL SPECTRUM
To be continued...