Sunny drifted through the viscous, oily texture of the negation domain, his mind a whirlwind of cold calculations and hardening resolve.
The darkness here did not just block sight; it seed to eat the very concept of potential.
In the world outside, he was a Sovereign, a being who could weave multiverses into his soul and command the fundantal laws of reality with a casual snap of his fingers. Here, he was a man.
A high-tier, cosmic-blooded man, certainly, but stripped of the divine machinery that made him a God.
His Nihilium Omniscience was dead. His Void Step was a mory. Even his connection to the System, that constant hum of data and progression that had been his heartbeat for centuries, had gone silent.
He was trapped in a sphere of expanding non-existence that moved faster than his physical body could travel.
At this rate, he wouldn't just be imprisoned; he would be the center of a growing void that would eventually swallow everything he had ever built.
"This is the ultimate counter," Sunny whispered, his voice falling flat in the airless dark. "A domain that reverts an immortal back to the frailty of a single life."
Just as the weight of his isolation began to press against his sanity, he saw a flicker. It wasn't a light, but a break in the uniform blackness, the silhouette of a seated figure.
Even without his Divine Eyes, Sunny's biological evolution was so advanced that his natural retinas could pick up the faint thermal signature of a living body from miles away.
"Who could survive in this graveyard?" Sunny murmured. He felt a pang of nostalgia for the days when he could simply peer into a soul to read a biography. Now, he had to rely on his feet.
He pushed off against the nothingness, his muscles, dense with Nihilium bloodline, propelling him forward with a raw power that surpassed any mortal race.
Within minutes, he closed the distance. As he neared the figure, he slowed his approach, his hands open in a gesture of non-aggression.
"Hello, fellow traveler..." Sunny began, but the words died in his throat as the man turned around.
The being looked ancient, not the dignified antiquity of a God, but the ragged, decaying age of a mortal who had been left to rot.
His skin was like yellowed parchnt stretched over a skeletal fra, and his back was hunched so severely it looked as though his spine were trying to fold in on itself.
He shivered uncontrollably, his hands clutching his knees as if to keep his bones from rattling apart.
Despite the decay, Sunny's mory remained a perfect, unerasable record. He recognized the facial structure, the slope of the brow, and the unique resonance of the soul-knot.
"Chronos?" Sunny whispered, his eyes widening. He reached out, his strong hands catching the old man's shoulders to help him stand. "The God of Ti? How... how did you beco like this?"
Chronos looked up, his eyes milky and weak, blinking slowly as if the effort of focusing was a marathon. "Who are you?" he wheezed, his voice like dry leaves skittering across stone. "How do you know that na? It has been... so long since I heard it."
"My na is Cosmos," Sunny replied, keeping his voice steady and calm. "I know your na because I have seen you before."
"Cosmos..." Chronos repeated the na, a ghost of a smile touching his cracked lips. "A grand na. A young na. Just sit with . There is no exit from this place. I have wandered these shadows for sixty years. Ti has no aning here because the Law of Ti is dead."
He coughed, a wet, rattling sound that shook his entire fra. "I was an ascended God. I was immortal. But as you have found, this domain is a negation of all boons. Without the Law to sustain us, our divinity is stripped away. We are reverted to our base biology. I am a mortal man of nearly a hundred years now, and I can feel my heart slowing. Sit. Wait for the end. It is easier than fighting the dark."
"Sixty years?" Sunny asked, his mind racing. "Is there truly no lead? In all that ti, did you find no way out?"
"None," Chronos whispered. "Inside this domain, every being is the sa. We are soft. We are fragile. Perhaps if you were a Great Dragon or a Titan of the Primal Earth-sothing with physical strength that exists independent of talents, you could punch a hole in the boundary. But for us? We are just at in a cold room."
Chronos leaned back, his breathing heavy and taxed. "When I entered, the domain was small. I was attracted to the scent of the Ti Law within it. I thought it was a treasure. I didn't realize it was a digestive tract. It wasn't expanding back then... it was waiting."
"It's not waiting anymore," Sunny replied grimly. "It is expanding with lightning speed now. It's devouring multiverses. Even if I could run at my absolute physical limit, I cannot outrun the expansion of the sphere itself."
Sunny shivered. The truth was more brutal than he had imagined. If he died here, he wouldn't revive.
"My clones..." Sunny thought, a cold dread pooling in his gut. "My connection to the sixteen soul-shards outside is severed. If this main consciousness passes away in this negation zone, will it jump to a clone? Or will the connection remain broken, leaving sixteen Sunnys to wake up as independent beings while I rot here?"
The thought of sixteen versions of himself, each with his mories but without his central soul-anchor, was a nightmare. He would be creating sixteen rivals for his own throne.
"Don't overthink it," Chronos said, sensing the tension in Sunny's grip. "Just lie down. Save your energy. Perhaps a miracle will happen... perhaps soone will look down and pity us. But if you keep pacing, you will die of exhaustion soon. Like I will die by the next day."
Sunny looked at the old man, and a spark of his old defiance flared. He wasn't ready to lie down in a grave.
"You should save your energy, Chronos," Sunny said. He reached out and tapped the old man's forehead with a single finger. "I am going to find the heart of this thing."
That tap was not a simple gesture. Within that touch, Sunny utilized the one thing the negation domain couldn't fully suppress because it didn't rely on mana or external Laws: Faith.
Faith was a conceptual energy generated by the souls within Sunny's inner world. Since his inner world was physically integrated into his cosmic body, the battery was still there. He couldn't use it to cast a spell, but he could transfer it.
A surge of pure, golden belief flowed from Sunny's finger into Chronos's soul. It was a dense, magical and sent straight to the dormant, shriveled seed of the Law of Ti within Chronos.
The Law of Ti, sensing the absolute negation of the domain outside, had curled into a tiny ball to survive.
But as the Faith flooded in, it recognized a source of fuel. It didn't try to expand, that would be suicide, but it began to release a steady, nourishing warmth into Chronos's physical cells. It began to wake up his latent Void-born physiology, the natural durability of an ancient being.
Chronos gasped, his eyes flying open. His skin took on a faint, healthy hue, and his shivering stopped. "What... what did you do? I feel... I feel the pulse again."
"Don't speak," Sunny commanded, already drifting away. "Absorb it. It will give you back your powers, it will give you an another century of life. Stay alive, Chronos. I'm going to find the exit, and I'm coming back for you."
"A century?" Chronos whispered in shock. He watched as Sunny vanished into the darkness at a speed that made his old eyes blur.
As Sunny moved deeper into the negation, he felt the constant trickle of Faith points filling his reservoir. It was a massive, untapped fortune.
"Faith is the ultimate energy," Sunny whispered to himself. "It's built from the inside out. The domain can't take it because it's mine."
But his frustration remained. He had the fuel, but the engines, his talents and professions, was still stalled. He was like a man with a billion gallons of gasoline and a broken car.
He looked into the infinite black, his violet eyes searching for the source of the expansion.
Sowhere in this dark, there was a heart beating. Sowhere, the Beyonder was feeding.
And Sunny decided that if he couldn't cast a spell to see it, he would simply keep walking until he bumped into it.
"Sixteen clones," Sunny muttered, his jaw setting. "I'm not letting sixteen versions of ruin my world. I'm getting out of here."
Far behind him, Chronos sat upright for the first ti in decades, a tiny spark of silver ti-light dancing in the center of his pupils. For the first ti in sixty years, the God of Ti looked at his watch.
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