Chapter 4091: The Illusion of Control! II

Her voice grew stronger, more certain.

"Scheme to steal mere drops of blood. Sacrifice what others would never risk. Do anything...everything, that must be done. Because I know what I am...someone who has to climb mountains that others are born atop."

She approached the corpse, her hand reaching toward the illusory heart.

"If I want to ascend higher, I have to give. Not take, not steal, not trick...I need to give." Her expression hardened with resolution that transcended determination. "Others speak of Everything as philosophy. Schrodinger discusses it like poetry. But I...understand it as currency."

She placed both hands on the obsidian heart, feeling its hungry pulse.

"O Corpse of an Early Creature, I give you... Half of my Everything. My life, my death, my very existence and all else...you can have Half of my Everything. Just give me power!"

HUUM!

Initially, there was only silence.

This was a corpse, not an Inevitability. It shouldn’t respond, couldn’t respond, had no mechanism for response.

And yet...

BOOM!

Obsidian light erupted with violence that suggested something fundamental had heard and accepted.

Diviticus gasped as she felt it...Half of her Everything being pulled out with the inexorable force of gravity claiming what was owed.

The sensation exceeded pain to become absence, like having half of every memory, every thought, every possibility torn away and fed into the illusory heart!

A pillar of obsidian light engulfed both her and the corpse, reality struggling to contain transformation this profound! Power flooded into her...not her own but borrowed, stolen, earned through sacrifice. It exceeded what ordinary Dukes commanded!

"Even though I lack their talent," she proclaimed, her voice ringing with power that made the mirrors tremble, "with sheer grit and effort, I will stand at the top! Not through gifts or inheritance, but through willing to pay prices others won’t even consider! I will..."

Behind her, unnoticed in her moment of triumph, the corpse moved.

Not much...just its head turning slightly, eyes opening to reveal orbs that contained depths of awareness that death should have erased.

Within those eyes lurked cognizance that transcended simple awakening.

A Will that had been sleeping, waiting, watching, began to stir.

The corpse gazed at Diviticus with something that might have been interest, might have been hunger, might have been amusement at her assumption that she was the one in control.

She had given Half of her Everything to awaken it further. But perhaps...just perhaps, it had already been awake, waiting for someone desperate enough to make such an offering.

Waiting for someone who would mistake their sacrifice for control, their payment for power.

The mirrors reflected thousands of possibilities, but none of them showed Diviticus noticing those open eyes.

None of them showed her realizing that perhaps she hadn’t awakened something, but merely fed it.

None of them revealed whether she was exhibiting genuine control, or the most dangerous illusion of all...the belief that corpses stayed dead simply because they appeared to be.

This...was a grand illusion of control!

—

Away from the Transcendent Paradoxical Folds.

In the Transcendent Elemental Folds, where extremes defined existence, there existed a region that even other extremes avoided.

Here, endless glacial Wheels of Existence spun in the void...some massive as segments of Folds, others small as thoughts, all frozen in perpetual motion that generated cold beyond conception.

The temperature wasn’t just low; it was the absence of warmth given its own identity, cold so profound that even Originus Venerant beings who could survive in spaces between spaces would freeze instantly upon entering.

The Wheels spun with mechanical precision, their icy surfaces reflecting nothing because light itself moved too slowly in such cold to create reflections.

Then, cutting through the frozen silence, an obsidian light flashed...eerily similar to what had just engulfed Diviticus and her corpse. The light didn’t illuminate so much as reveal, showing cracks in reality that had always been there, waiting.

A massive tear opened in space itself, its edges ragged with the particular damage that came from something forcing its way through from somewhere that shouldn’t connect to here.

A Tear in Existence!

Within the tear, only death and endings were visible...the aggressive absence of anything that could sustain or continue.

Even the incomprehensible cold of the surroundings refused to enter that tear, as if recognizing a more fundamental ending than mere temperature death.

Seconds passed with the weight of eons.

Then, massive obsidian-crimson eyeballs blinked into existence within the tear.

Not appeared...blinked, suggesting they had always been there, just closed. They moved forward with purpose that transcended instinct, showing emotions that dead things shouldn’t possess.

First came surprise, the kind that suggested unexpected awakening. Then, terrifyingly, joy...not simple happiness but the profound elation of something that had been denied sensation discovering it could feel again.

The cold that would kill Fold Dwellers, that made even concepts crystallize and shatter...this Dead Existence found it wonderful!

Because cold was still temperature!

Temperature was still existence. And after wherever it had been, even frozen death was vibrantly alive!

The eyeballs flashed with decision, and a body materialized around them...or perhaps emerged through the tear to join them.

A cat, but only in the way nightmares were dreams. Its form was purely skeletal, bones that seemed carved from crystallized void.

Wings spread from its spine, each bone-feather sharp enough to cut concepts. Three tails swayed behind it, each one dripping with poison that wasn’t liquid but liquified ending...anything it touched wouldn’t just die but would retroactively never have lived.

Its power would cause weak Dukes pale!

The creature opened its mouth once.

The nearest spinning Wheels of Existence...massive constructs that had spun for millennia, simply vanished into its maw.

They were swallowed whole as if they were morsels rather than structures!

The cold they generated, the space they occupied, the history they contained, the countless lives...all disappeared into jaws that seemed no larger than necessary to meow!

Its deathly body pulsed with newfound power and life, bones becoming slightly less transparent, form becoming slightly more real.

It looked around with intelligence that suggested this wasn’t random emergence but calculated arrival.

Without pause, without exploration, it shot off in what seemed like a random direction...though nothing about this creature suggested it did anything randomly.

It moved with purpose that exceeded understanding, leaving behind only disturbed space and the memory of impossible consumption!

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