One mont, Rowan stood facing Eosah, the consciousness of Reality pulsing with ancient, grave knowledge. The next, the very fabric of her being was violated in a way that should not be possible.
Eosah’s body bent at the waist, as if every bone inside her torso had been shattered, the hand that shattered her head twisted like a snake and began to head towards Rowan as the voice that had previously sounded cold as it condemned Eosah transford into a tone that was almost sickly sweet,
"Oh, Eos, do not let the small minds of the fallen twist you from your path. Everything will co in its own ti; it is left for you to wait for the right mont. Co and rest in my darkness. Inside here, there are no troubles, just the bliss you deserve."
Rowan, who had been retreating even before the arm of darkness violently burst out of the chest of Eosah, had not gone far before the arm began to reach for him.
To his amazent, his body stopped moving as if he had beco a fly trapped in amber. This should be impossible; at his present level, nothing should be able to just hold him in place.
It was not a matter of power; it concerned the laws he controlled.
His taphysical weight on reality was so potent that Rowan could literally punch through Primordials by utilizing his weight alone.
To be held in place was like a mountain falling from the sky, and unexpectedly, the cloud was able to hold the weight of it.
The arm moved faster than anything that Rowan had ever encountered, and he knew without any doubt that if this hand grabbed him, he would be lost.
He may not be here physically, but his Incarnation was a pipeline to him. Rowan had refined the process of creating his Incarnation to its limits, and among the features he gave them, it was complete separation from his main body.
If, for any reason, his Incarnation was corrupted or affected by an unknown power, even on the scale of the Altar of Unmaking that had the power to gather all the scattered pieces of their target, his Incarnation would be able to fool this process long enough for Rowan to completely sever all ties he had with this copy.
After acquiring the Altar of Unmaking and realizing its enormous potential for destruction, Rowan had seen the weakness of having multiple Incarnations in different locations.
Although he did not have the weakness of the Primordials inside of Reality, if a Primordial were to use the Altar of Unmaking against him, he would lose too much energy too quickly to be regained, and if he did not try to interrupt the process, he would be killed on that Altar.
Knowing this weakness, Rowan had been tweaking his Incarnation with every mont that passed. If an outside observer were to watch all of Rowan’s Incarnation that was scattered across Reality, they would witness sothing truly amazing.
His Incarnations were constantly evolving and changing, and sotis these evolutions were so drastic that to compare his incarnations from a minute ago to the present one would be like comparing the intelligence between an ape and a man.
Rowan’s battle against the Primordials inside Reality was largely done by the combination of his Incarnations and his soul; only in his first battle with Primordial Soul did he entirely use his body to combat her.
Becoming a Reality ca with many benefits, but the weight of his existence was sothing that he had to be careful about; hence, he broke the shell of Eosah.
However, all of his progress on his Incarnations ant nothing against this hand; he had been rudely thrown from his throne of power to the bottom of the trench in a single mont, from an unstoppable god to a wide-eyed infant.
This was a power that had clearly exceeded the boundary of Origin!
The power radiating from this hand was not rely greater than his own; it was of a different category entirely. It was a power that existed before the context of "power" had even been defined. It was beyond Origin.
In this instant, Rowan’s senses ca alive as he channeled the collective consciousness power of all his incarnations, coupled with his flesh and soul.
If the consciousness power of his Incarnation here had previously been at a thousand, it imdiately exploded to at least a billion!
The hand headed towards him stopped a microter away from his face, not because Rowan had succeeded in holding it back, but because his consciousness was burning with so much power that even if ti was still, to him, it was still going too fast.
His consciousness was blazing with so much power that his Incarnation would not last a tenth of a second under this condition, but he needed all of these resources he had allocated to this body to understand what he was dealing with.
First, he turned all that power inward; he did not flinch or try to run from the disaster heading towards him.
Panic was a luxury for beings who operated within a system of cause and effect. Rowan felt only a cold, razor-sharp clarity, beyond anything he had felt up till this mont.
With that clarity ca truth—he could not escape the power emanating from this hand.
He could not move his body, for the concept of movent had been suspended. He could not summon his power, for the laws that allowed for summoning were being overwritten.
This hand had fixed him in place. It did not pin him in space; it pinned him in the narrative of his own existence. He was rendered a static image, a character in a story who could no longer turn the page. His will, which could shatter dinsions and reverse cause and effect, t an absolute boundary. He was trapped not in a cage, but in the definition of himself.
If Rowan were not on the edge of experiencing total defeat, he would be admiring the process by which he had been undone.
Still, he did not give up, because there was only one thing left that this force, for all its overwhelming supremacy, might not have fully accounted for: the nature of his own unrecorded mind that had blood in a way that could not be accounted for or docunted.
The stage had been set, but it was always up to him to determine the manner by which he played upon it.
He abandoned the internal consciousness and, with an act of madness, Rowan pushed his consciousness... outward.
He was not going to try to fight this power... he was going to read it!
He pushed his ntal awareness, the unique, anomalous spark that was his un-inscribed self, against the edges of the force that held him. It was like trying to read the source code of the universe with a single, flawed synapse.
Agony, of a kind Rowan had never known, erupted through his being. This was not pain of the body or soul, but the pain of a mind being forced to process data streams that were fundantally incompatible with its operating system.
A part of Rowan would have been laughing at cataloging a new type of pain in his diary, but that part had been swallowed by all of his consciousness campaign that was focused on a single task... to understand the enemy!
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