The last tremor of the collapsing abyss faded, leaving only the echo of Adrian’s final strike reverberating through the broken realm.The formation was gone.The shadows were ash.The Sixth Abyss convulsed like a dying beast.And in the center of the wasteland—Lucy lay unconscious in his arms.Adrian tightened his hold, feeling her pulse—weak, faint, but alive. Her aura flickered like a thread stretched across a canyon, but it was still there.Good.He adjusted her carefully and rose to his feet.Then the ground cracked.A deep, ancient rumble rippled beneath him.Adrian’s eyes narrowed.“The realm is collapsing faster than expected.”The Sixth Abyss, already a battlefield graveyard, was now unraveling at the seams—skies splitting open, rivers reversing upward, stones liquefying. A storm of black-red energy tore across the horizon.He didn’t have long.He looked toward the far side of the dying realm. The torn opening back to the mortal world was shrinking, threads of light snapping

Reality tore like wet parchment.The abandoned laboratory ceased to exist.Adrian felt the transition instantly—not as movement, but as judgment. Space inverted. Time buckled. Gravity lost meaning. For a fraction of a heartbeat, his soul was exposed to something vast enough to measure it.Then—Stone.Cold, radiant stone beneath his boots.Golden light flooded his vision.Adrian stood in the center of a colossal amphitheater suspended in nothingness. Pillars the size of mountains rose into a fractured sky. Each was carved with divine runes—names of gods long erased, titles burned out of existence.The Divine Court.But wrong.Broken.Half the seats were shattered. Others were empty, stained with dried god-blood that glimmered faintly like rusted starlight. Massive chains crisscrossed the chamber, some snapped, others still humming with suppressed authority.This place was not alive.It was a scar.Lucy lay several steps away, suspended midair by crimson sigils that wrapped around her

Adrian did not fall.Falling implied direction.This was disassembly.His body unraveled into light and memory, stripped layer by layer as he drifted through a void that was not empty—but crowded. Countless fragments of broken realms brushed past him like ghosts: shattered heavens, drowned hells, dead battlefields still echoing with screams that had no mouths.Between realms.The place gods feared most.His divinity burned—not stabilizing, not reforming—searching. The seals had been torn apart violently, leaving jagged wounds in his soul. Power leaked uncontrollably, threatening to scatter him across existence.Adrian clenched what remained of his consciousness.Focus.He anchored himself to one thing.The debt.The vow.Lucy.A thread appeared.Thin. Golden. Frayed.But unbroken.Adrian reached for it—Pain unlike anything he had ever known ripped through him.A presence stirred.Then another.Then dozens.The void noticed him.A god unjudged.A verdict denied.An oath unresolved.Vo

The gate answered the chain.Not with light.With sound.A deep, grinding resonance rolled through the abyss, through the mortal world, through Adrian’s fractured soul—like the universe dragging a blade across its own spine.The chains surged upward.Kaelith’s throne cracked further, fissures racing through the stone as ancient authority strained against a boundary it had never intended to cross.Adrian moved.Not toward Kaelith.Toward the chains.He seized one with both hands.The moment his fingers closed around the cold, ancient metal, agony tore through him. Not pain—accounting. The chain measured him, weighed his sins, his wars, his refusals to kneel.His knees bent.The abyss screamed.Kaelith watched with quiet fascination.“Do you feel it?” Kaelith asked. “Every life balanced against your grip.”Adrian bared his teeth.“I’ve carried worse.”He pulled.The chain resisted—then screamed as divine force ripped backward through it. Runes flared violently, entire sequences burning

The golden thread screamed.Not audibly—not in a way mortal ears could perceive—but across existence itself, like a violin string pulled far beyond tolerance. Reality warped around it, space bending inward as if trying to understand what had just been born.Adrian felt it first.A pressure behind his eyes.A pull in his chest.A presence that did not belong to the Abyss, the mortal world, or the divine battlefield.Something new.The Warden recoiled.For the first time since its manifestation, the construct of cosmic correction lost cohesion. Its eye flickered erratically, the perfect symmetry of its form fracturing into jagged distortions.“ANOMALY—”“UNREGISTERED ENTITY—”“RECALCULATING—”Kaelith screamed.Not in triumph.In fear.“No—no—this isn’t possible!” Kaelith roared as its fading body trembled violently. “The debt cannot create! It only balances—only removes—only seals!”Adrian’s chains loosened slightly as the system faltered.“What is it?” Adrian demanded.Kaelith’s eyes l