“Can you feel it, Ravian? The space ahead of us no longer follows any logic!”Master Han’s voice trembled with a fear he rarely showed, making the cold air cut straight to the bone.Ravian’s heart tightened instantly.“I can feel it, Master. It feels like every step we take is being measured by thousands of eyes that never blink,” Ravian replied, his hand gripping the hilt of his sword so tightly that it now felt foreign in his grasp.“These patterns... they’re crawling beneath my skin,” Lian Xiu muttered as she rubbed her arm, her face twisted in horror, her voice nearly breaking apart.Elara stood between them, her eyes glowing with shifting spectrums of color as she stared toward the narrowing corridor. Around them, reality no longer resembled solid walls or floors. Everything was woven from intersecting strands of golden light, crossing one another with agonizing mathematical precision. Every time one of those threads vibrated, the surrounding space shifted several inches in impos

“Release me, Architect! You cannot imprison my soul within your labyrinth of fear forever!” Ravian roared, his voice trembling violently within the suffocating cosmic void.Before him, the shadow of the Primal Architect no longer resembled an old man. It had become a vortex of light that constantly shifted colors. The Architect’s voice sounded like the grinding of thousands of metal blades inside Ravian’s skull. “You scream as though you have a choice, Ravian. In truth, every word you speak is merely an echo of a design I created millions of years ago.”Ravian gasped for breath, his body feeling as though it were being stretched across a dimensional torture rack. He had just witnessed the history of the universe through the eyes of that entity. He saw the Banished Gods rebel, only to realize that their rebellion had merely been part of a variable in the purification pattern. The feeling, a paralyzing despair, nearly shattered his nerves.“I saw everything,” Ravian whispered in a much

“You think you can imprison me inside your numbers forever, Architect?” Ravian challenged, even as his voice fractured into millions of unstable data fragments.Around him, the void that had once been dark suddenly convulsed, forming thousands of intersecting golden lines moving faster than light itself. He could no longer feel the weight of his body. He was nothing more than a strand of consciousness drifting within the neural core of the Creator of Reality.“Identification: Anomaly Ravian Arbian,” the voice echoed from nowhere, flat and cold like ice frozen in a vacuum. “You are a variable that should have already reached zero point. Why do you still insist on maintaining this corrupted frequency?”“Corrupted?” Ravian laughed, the sound scraping like metal inside this mathematical dimension. “You call love and free will corruption simply because you can’t fit them into your formulas?”“Love is inefficient biological residue,” the Primal Architect replied, and suddenly a colossal geo

“You think this light will erase me that easily, Architect?”Ravian stood in the middle of the pure white storm, allowing his body to be torn apart by the frequencies of Judgment unleashed by the entity above the heavens. Yet beneath the attack that should have killed him, he felt a single point of consciousness still trembling violently. It was not the consciousness of the Judges, but the remnants of the Primal Architect’s conscience, now shaking in terror as it watched its creation about to be flattened into nothingness.“Identifying... system failure,” the Primal Architect’s voice rasped inside Ravian’s mind. “Why are you still standing there, Ravian Arbian? Judgment has already been passed. There is no pattern left that can save us. Everything will return to zero.”“Zero is just a number for people who are afraid to start over,” Ravian replied, his voice steady now even as the blue veins in his neck looked ready to burst. “Listen, Architect. The Judges came because they saw your w

“What is your identity, wanderer?” the woman asked again, her voice as cold as the mountain wind that had just swept across the grasslands beneath their feet.Ravian stared at the tip of the silver spear gleaming beneath the overly bright sunlight, searching for even the faintest trace of recognition within the emerald-green irises of the woman standing before him. But all he found was the same emptiness that existed inside his own mind. “I already told you, I don’t know. But if you want to stab me, do it now before I die from this longing that doesn’t even have a name.”The woman frowned slightly, but the tip of her spear did not waver. “You speak like a dying poet, not a threat. But on this planet, anyone who falls from the sky without memories is considered a spy of the Evaluators. Tell me, were you sent by them to erase our order?”“Evaluators?” Ravian repeated the word, feeling his tongue grow numb as he spoke it. “I... I feel like I’ve heard that word before. But it’s like tryin