Chapter 5 — The God's Regret

Light-years away, in the highest Sanctum of the LinBoo Astrolabe.

It was a platinum temple suspended at the crossing of higher-dimensional star-tracks. Vast, cold, eternally dustless. Tens of thousands of bright silver threads of law wove and writhed across the vault like the sinews of a galaxy, transmuting the energy, lifespan, faith, and death of the entire system into row upon row of precise golden runes, endlessly pumped into the central ledger of the Astrolabe.

Astra, the God of Light, stood alone beside the empty throne at the summit.

She wore a robe woven with starlight; her golden eyes mirrored the rise and fall of a hundred million stars. Yet at this moment, those divine eyes — the very emblems of supreme mercy and order — were clouded with a grief that no amount of wiping could clear. Upon the star-map at her feet, the star-realm that had been Tartarus had already been wiped clean into a void of utter black.

This was no ordinary darkness. It was a dead hollow gouged out by a blade.

Astra slowly lifted a slender finger. In her palm, the bright golden filaments she had meant to "stitch" Tartarus's collapsing core were unraveling, until at last, like embers burned to ash, they drifted down and vanished without a sound.

"Another one…" Her voice was very soft, laced with a weariness and guilt that went to the bone.

To save that aging mining world, to spare the mortals struggling in cold and hunger from facing despair head-on, she had spent the Sanctum's stockpiled pure holy light, forcibly pumping life into Tartarus's failing core. In her design, light meant healing, meant hope — give mortals enough warmth and they would go on enduring in peace. That was the obsession of a God of Light: that beauty, brightness, and order were the only reason life was worth living.

Yet physical law never heeds tender prayers.

The forcibly injected higher-dimensional energy had not healed the frail planet. Like an overdose of poison, it crushed the already overtaxed core and triggered an irreversible pressure backlash. To keep that local collapse from rippling across the LinBoo Aegis, Umbra, the God of Darkness, had brought down her cold blade of shadow at the final moment, striking Tartarus entirely from the map of the cosmos.

"You're burning divine power on your cheap sentiment again, Astra."

A voice heavy as a mountain rolled through the Sanctum. Behind the platinum pillars, the phantom of Jupiter, the God-King, slowly took shape. He bore the sigil of thunder; his divine majesty fell like a crushing weight. In his eyes there was not the faintest ripple at the destruction of a world — only the arrogance and coldness of one whose order had been disturbed.

"Tartarus's karmic fuel rate had already fallen below the critical line; its very existence was a deficit against the Astrolabe's energy," Jupiter said with a cold snort, his voice setting the nearby threads of law trembling. "Umbra's judgment was timely. One mortal mining world, doomed to die, bought three thousand ages of stability for the Astrolabe's core regions. That is the trade most aligned with physical interest."

"That was not a simple 'asset loss,' Jupiter." Astra turned, her golden eyes meeting the Lord of judgment and majesty head-on, her voice trembling with restrained anger. "Those were tens of billions of living souls. They drew stars on walls. They held each other in the snowstorm… We are gods. We are supposed to be their shelter, not bookkeepers who erase their lives from the ledger on a whim!"

"Shelter?" Jupiter's phantom curved into something close to a sneer. "Mortals are foolish, chaotic, and greedy weeds. Without the Astrolabe's orbital constraints, without the laws we set, they would have burned themselves and this star-realm to ash in their own infighting. Giving them unrealistic 'hope' only speeds their blind destruction — exactly as you just did. Your 'mercy' was the very fuse that pushed Tartarus into the abyss."

The words struck Astra's heart like a poisoned dagger.

Yes. She could not refute them. It was her forced stitching that triggered the core's overload; it was her pity that handed Umbra the perfect pretext for the Silent Strike. This helpless guilt wound around her soul like a vine of poison, making every breath a suffocating agony.

"Go soothe the masses, Astra." Jupiter's phantom began to fade, leaving one last icy warning. "The mortals in the lower star-realms have already noticed the gravitational anomaly from Tartarus's direction. Use your light to fill their panic. Tell them it was an 'inevitable natural catastrophe.' That is the duty of a God of Light — and the role the Divine Court needs you to play."

The phantom dissolved; the Sanctum sank back into dead silence.

Astra stood alone at the center of the platinum hall. She lowered her head, looking at these hands that had once saved countless worlds, and a wan, self-mocking smile tugged at her lips.

She slowly closed her eyes and spread her divine awareness across the whole LinBoo Astrolabe. In an instant, the prayers of countless mortals dwelling in safe star-realms flooded her mind like a tide. They praised the light. They begged for peace. They gave thanks for the faint mercy the Divine Court doled out. They had no idea that a few light-years away, a world just like theirs had already turned to silent stardust beneath a god's careless stroke.

"Inevitable regret…"

Astra breathed the five words. Then she clenched her teeth, forcing down the grief and guilt in her heart, and her fingertips lit once more with a dazzling, gentle holy light. A vast divine edict unfolded into golden wings filling the sky, pouring from the Sanctum, smoothing the gravitational waves trembling at the edge of the Astrolabe, burying the truth and the blood utterly beneath a veil of serene radiance.

It was a false healing — a utopian cage woven for mortals from painless lies. Yet at this moment, she could find no second path but to keep maintaining this vast machine of lies.

---

At the same moment.

Far from the Sanctum's illuminating reach, at the freezing edge, the black void was like a bottomless coffin.

The vacuum here was cold enough to crack a soul. In the dead stillness there was no light, no sound, not even the concept of "direction." Only heaps of fine dust and twisted wreckage drifted, in the grip of physical inertia, formlessly toward the deepest dark.

Elias floated in that stillness.

The suffocation of oxygen starvation gripped his windpipe and lungs like an invisible iron claw. Every attempt to breathe sent a searing pain through his chest, as if his organs were shriveling and dying inch by inch.

His eye sockets, swollen from crippling intracranial pressure, had long since flooded with blurry crimson. The hypoxia began to conjure hallucinations — he seemed back in Tartarus on a snow-lashed evening, leaning in the doorway of a broken shed, watching his sister Aira scrawl with charcoal on the cabin wall.

"Brother, look! The star I drew glows…"

"Aira…"

Elias cried soundlessly in his heart, but his parched throat could only manage a faint, cloth-tearing wheeze.

The extreme cold was swiftly stealing the last of his body's heat. His fingers had long since gone numb and black, losing all sensation. Yet no matter how blurred his consciousness, no matter how numbed his nerves, his right fist stayed clamped against his chest, the knuckles a strange deathly white from the force of his grip.

In his palm he clutched that half of a broken star-core pendant.

It was the keepsake Aira had pressed into his hand with her dying breath — the last proof that poor, doomed Tartarus had ever existed in this world. At the broken seam of the pendant, a faint blue phosphor flickered, stubbornly brightening and dimming in time with Elias's ragged heartbeat.

The glow was so small that in the vast, cruel vacuum it drew less notice than a mote of dust. Yet it was like a thorn driven into flesh, nailing fast the soul that was slipping away.

"Can't… die… here…"

Elias bit through the tip of his tongue. Salty, icy blood spread through his mouth; the bone-deep pain jolted him awake from the death hallucination for a single instant.

He lifted his head. Through blood-flooded eyes, past the drifting wreckage dust, he glared at the distant, brilliant star-realm. Even across several light-years, he could faintly make out bright platinum threads of law crisscrossing the void, wrapping the whole Astrolabe in a sacred, warm afterglow.

That was the paradise where the gods dwelled.

There, the lofty God of Light was perhaps already sending down a gentle edict, soothing the panic of the multitudes. There, the proud planetary gods were elegantly parceling out the deeds to star-realms, calculating the next cycle of the karma tithe. They would never care that in this black dead corner they had casually struck off, a mortal boy was convulsing in the vacuum like a stray dog with a broken leg, suffocating in despair.

"Hypocritical light… cold law…"

A wordless fury erupted in Elias's chest. Not fear of death, but a towering hatred for this unjust heaven and earth!

Why? By what right did a god's casual wave turn hundreds of billions of lives, laughter, tears, and memories into a mere zero in the ledger? By what right must the stars drawn on walls, the steaming broth, the lives that supported one another in the snowstorm, be buried as tribute to the grand "order" they preached?

If this is the physical law the gods decreed, if this is the astrolabe's orbit the cosmos must obey —

Then to hell with the rules!

"So long as I… draw one more breath…"

Elias curled his body in the void, like a young beast baring its fangs in a hopeless corner. He pressed the half-pendant deeper into his chest, letting its cold broken edge cut his skin, letting his blood merge with that last remnant of star-core energy.

A burning pain tore through his chest; the blue phosphor, having fed on his blood, suddenly burst into fine, needle-like electric light that raced along his nerves to every limb. This self-mutilating jolt forcibly awakened his collapsing cells, buying him a last few minutes of survival.

He needed no god's pity. He needed none of that hypocritical afterglow shooting across light-years.

He only needed to live.

To live and leave this silent graveyard. To live and set foot on that lofty Astrolabe. And then… to drag those condescending gods, one by one, down from their platinum thrones, and let them taste the suffocation, the despair, the erasure of everything — right here in this black vacuum!

At this moment, the holy light Astra poured down from the heavens and the pure killing intent erupting from the mortal boy Elias in the deep-space ruins formed the most ironic, most cruel rending in the vast universe.

The Astrolabe thought it had erased an insignificant star — unaware that in the black crack it had miscalculated, a seed called "revenge" had already split its shell in blood and suffocation.