Chapter 476: A Choice! I
The Star Seas stretched beyond comprehension, a weaving of light and void that contained within it countless trillions of individual stellar bodies, each one a sun that might warm worlds, each world potentially harboring billions of lives, each life a story being written in the anthology of existence.
In the mind of a common entity…perhaps a merchant traveling between colonies, or a soldier stationed at some remote outpost, the Star Seas represented the ultimate vastness.
They could walk or fly across them for their entire lives, generations even, and never map out more than an infinitesimal fraction of their totality.
To such beings, the Star Seas were Everything, the absolute boundary of what existence could contain.
But in the mind of another entity…one whose power had transcended conventional limitation, the stellar seas could be traversed in a few steps, each stride covering distances that light itself would take millennia to cross!
The difference lay not just in power but in perspective, in the fundamental understanding of what space meant to you.
Perspective was key!
Yet outside this endlessly vast expanse where Achilles currently resided, past the Edge of Space where reality grew thin and uncertain, onto frontiers that others did not know and could not even imagine existing…there lay something else entirely.
Going further past all of this, through layers of existence that had no names because naming required observers and none had ever returned to provide vocabulary…there was a place.
It was not a location in any sense that could define. One could not arrive there even with perfect coordinates, because coordinates implied spatial relationships and this place existed outside such mundane concepts!
It was surrounded by roiling white clouds that weren't clouds but the visual interpretation of pure possibility. Plasmic rays of gold and purple permeated throughout as the suggestion of illumination, creating an environment that looked like something out of a dream.
Which was, in fact, the most accurate description possible…a Domain of Endless Dreams, where reality was negotiable and narrative was the only currency that mattered!
A Domain…of Nar'Thyss!
In this impossible place, at this moment that existed outside conventional time, blazing auras of power began to rise one after another.
Each single aura contained enough force to make a Tier Five existence like Chancellor Mackiy, who commanded multiple Regulations and had lived for eons, feel like an ant that could be crushed with less than a glance, eliminated by the mere acknowledgment of its insignificance.
And there were over a dozen of these auras emerging simultaneously, their combined presence making the Domain itself strain to contain them!
Each being manifested in variations of the butterfly form that marked the Nar'Thyss.
Some maintained relatively pure configurations…wings of impossible colors attached to bodies that existed in too many dimensions.
Others had evolved into humanoid forms with butterfly wings extending from their backs like banners of authority.
Still others displayed unique features that seemed undecided about their own nature, shifting between states as if form itself was merely another narrative to be edited at will.
But undoubtedly, every single one was a Nar'Thyss of the highest order…the Constellation class that stood above many others!
The first to speak materialized more fully from the churning clouds, their body radiating a regal golden aura that made the space around them defer to their presence. When they spoke, their words impressed themselves directly onto reality.
"So every single one of us sensed a Nexus Deviation Point in our Fables?"
HUUM!
The term hung in the impossible atmosphere with weight that transcended language. To anyone else, 'Nexus Deviation Point' might sound like technical jargon or mystical rambling.
But to the entities gathered here, it represented one of the core structures of their existence and power.
For beings who dealt in controlling and manipulating the Fables of others to gain ever more narrative authority, they understood better than anyone the potential dangers lurking in possibility.
They knew that even with odds approaching zero, even with impossibilities stacked against it, mutations and anomalies would always arise across existence.
They were living proof of this principle…beings who shouldn't exist, manipulating forces that shouldn't be manipulable.
They knew that among those whose Fables they steered, there would always be the potential for one or a few entities to rise who might become strong enough to contend against them, perhaps even injure them or ruin the carefully crafted outcomes of their narratives.
So they had built self-defense mechanisms into their system, and one of the most crucial was the Nexus Deviation Point…a moment where something arose that could potentially threaten their authority.
When detected, they could track down this point of deviation and crush it before it could bloom into genuine threat.
In the past thousands of years, there had been several such incidents, each one a lesson in the importance of vigilance.
One had occurred in Star Sea Gamma-7, where they had been orchestrating the Fable of a unique race of crystalline titans who gained power through harmonic resonance.
The narrative had been proceeding beautifully…brother fighting brother, love twisted into betrayal, the usual profitable themes…when somehow, against all probability, a titan arose who could resonate not just with his immediate kin but with his entire lineage simultaneously.
He could channel the power of every titan who had ever lived into himself, becoming a singular being of such concentrated might that within a few years, he would have been able to crush the Nar'Thyss overseeing that Star Sea.
They had sensed his Nexus Deviation Point the moment his mutation manifested!
Before this being could even understand what was happening, before he could grasp the destiny that awaited him, they had descended upon his reality like antibodies attacking an infection.
His existence had been crushed into oblivion, erased so thoroughly that even the possibility of him had been excised from that timeline.
Another incident had occurred in the Aurelius Cluster, where a species of void-swimmers had produced an individual who could metabolize narrative itself!
She was a unique being that they came across!