Chapter 6 — The Abyss Watches

The bottom of the universe is forever a cold, dead black.

Even though Astra had poured down, light-years away in the platinum Sanctum, a skyful of comforting, peaceful holy light, that golden tenderness could never pierce this physical blind spot carved out by higher-dimensional law.

In the black ruins, dark matter thick as ink was spreading soundlessly.

Umbra, the God of Darkness, stood within the void. To her, Astra's way of smoothing memories with light and stitching wounds with warmth was no different from feeding a caged beast tranquilizers. It was painless enslavement — letting creatures lose, in comfortable warm water, the chance to grow hard bones. Whereas the "annihilation" and "cutting" she represented, cruel as they were, were the most fundamental physical truth of this universe — only by facing the searing pain of the blade does life learn what true endurance means.

"Residual divine energy… thirty-six thousand law-nodes cleared."

Umbra slowly raised a slender finger, cold yet surging with ruinous might, and gave a light flick.

One after another, black dark-matter pulses slid across the void like spirit-snakes, utterly annihilating the higher-dimensional aftershocks of law left in the ruins by Tartarus's explosion. She had to scrub every trace. In an environment where the Divine Court's inner politics roiled with undercurrents, her forced execution of Tartarus's judgment had already twitched the sensitive nerves of certain old timers. She could not leave any seam of law that a political enemy might seize.

Yet just as her dark law was completing its final sweep of the blind spot, a strange ripple suddenly struck her divine awareness.

"Hmm?"

Umbra's fine brows lifted slightly.

In that dead corner of metal slag and frozen gas, an extraordinarily faint yet stubbornly resilient life signal was struggling against the vacuum's absolute zero and oxygen starvation.

In her awareness's reckoning, the hundreds of billions of lives on Tartarus had been utterly erased the instant the dark law fell — not a shred of soul-residue could remain. That was the Silent Strike she had executed herself; every thread of law precise to the particle level of the cosmos's deepest layer.

How could anyone still be alive?

Umbra's form rippled lightly in the void; the next moment she crossed tens of thousands of kilometers as silently as a ghost, alighting beside the twisted wreckage.

In the black space-wreck, Elias huddled against a broken steel bulkhead.

The boy had fallen into extreme shock and unconsciousness. His face was paper-white; frozen purple-black blood caked his lips; his eye sockets were laced with terrible veins of blood. Hypoxia and extreme cold bit into every cell of his body like invisible jaws. Yet even in this extremity where flesh teetered on total collapse, his right hand remained like a clamp forged of wrought iron, pressing that half-broken star-core pendant hard against his heart.

The faint blue glow from the pendant, together with the boy's fiercely resisting, violent obsession, stirred in the vacuum ring after ring of small but sharp psychic arcs.

Umbra hung less than three feet above him in the half-air, looking down upon this ant-like mortal boy.

She extended a finger clear as white jade and lightly touched Elias's forehead. A minute dark-law probe pierced instantly into the boy's soul's depths.

In an instant, a vast residue of emotion and memory exploded in Umbra's consciousness —

No wailing pleas for life, no blind worship of gods, not even fear of death. In the boy's soul's depths there was only a raging blood-red gale! It was the despair of his sister Aira dissolving in the wind; it was the humiliation of this aging world being struck off like garbage; and a killing intent, pure to the extreme, sworn to drag every god in the sky down from their altar!

What shook Umbra even more was that, as her divine awareness scanned him, the boy's soul-structure showed an exceedingly rare wavelength deviation — his soul-frequency, by sheer absolute physical coincidence, had precisely slipped off the death-frequency of the dark law's erasure!

"An off-track aberration… the Anomaly."

In Umbra's black-hole eyes, which had known no ripple in ten million years, a deep, unfamiliar light flashed.

In this universe, tightly controlled by the LinBoo Astrolabe, where all things were written into fixed fate, an off-track ripple had emerged, wholly outside the law of causality. He was a living man not in the ledger — a derailed, reversed note.

"How interesting…" Umbra's lips curved into a cold, elegant arc. "Astra exhausted herself trying to protect a 'perfect order' — and yet overlooked you, its greatest flaw."

Suddenly, a faint pain knit between Umbra's brows; a wisp of black, disordered airflow flickered and vanished amid the divine energy around her.

To forcibly bring down the Silent Strike and sever the causality of an entire world, even for a God of Darkness, had brought an exceedingly heavy higher-dimensional backlash. Vast sedimented waste-energy and karmic toxin were crushing her divine core. If she returned to the Divine Court, she would need an extremely long time of meditation to purge them — and at any moment risk Jupiter or Saturn detecting the weakened state of her injured god-body.

Looking down at this boy who, though near death, possessed formidable pressure-resistance and an anomalous soul-structure, a cold and exquisite idea suddenly rose in Umbra's mind.

A mortal body is fragile, but this "Anomaly's" soul was like a limitless dry sponge. His unusual wavelength happened to be the perfect vessel for holding higher-dimensional dark backlash.

"Since you're so determined to live…"

Umbra slowly crouched; her long black skirt spread across the ground. She drew a deep breath, and that icy finger lightly pressed against Elias's burning forehead.

"Then let your soul be my 'karmic buffer.'"

With her cold whisper, a supremely hidden higher-dimensional dark covenant crashed into being in the unconscious depths of Elias's spirit!

Boom!

A black flow of backlash-energy ran along Umbra's fingertip, endlessly injecting into Elias's bodily cycle. This was not killing annihilation-force, but inert dark higher-dimensional waste-energy, carefully filtered and compressed by Umbra.

To an ordinary mortal this energy was a fatal poison — but to Elias, whose flesh was now in extreme hypoxia and whose life-force was utterly spent, it was like a brutally potent "stimulant"!

The higher-dimensional waste-energy entering his body forcibly stimulated every cell on the verge of death. His heart, which had already stopped, gave a dull, heavy thud! Then the capillaries across his body burst one after another, and a faint black-purple halo rose under his skin — yet his scattering consciousness was, by a miracle, locked fast inside his flesh by this icy energy!

"Hah…!!"

The unconscious Elias suddenly opened his mouth, instinctively sucking in a violent gasp; his whole body spasmed in the void like a bow drawn taut.

Umbra watched the boy's agonized struggle with cold eyes, the backlash-output at her fingertip held at an exceedingly precise flow.

Through this hidden anchor, she successfully vented about thirty percent of her overloaded waste-energy into Elias's body. From this moment, so long as Elias lived, he would endlessly absorb and drain the toxin of her divine backlash for Umbra; and in return, this vast energy from the God of Darkness would become the "icy umbrella" that kept this mortal from freezing to death outright in the cold vacuum.

This was an absolutely cold, absolutely utilitarian exploitation and binding.

In Umbra's eyes, Elias was merely a physically superior tool she had chanced upon. She wanted to see what storm this off-track anomaly who swore revenge against the gods could raise within the Astrolabe's icy prison, after absorbing her dark energy.

"Don't die too fast, little one."

Umbra slowly rose, and from on high brushed at dust that was not there on her palms.

Deep in the ruins, a faint red glow of a wasteland scavenger ship's engine was slowly approaching. The searchlight's beam swept back and forth across the cold rubble; the engine's rumble reached through the vacuum medium as a faint tremor in solid matter.

Umbra gave the approaching battered ship a cold glance, and her form faded again, merging into the boundless deep shadow around her.

The abyss had fixed its gaze upon this mortal, and the gears of fate began to turn, at a speed no one could predict, with a roar.