Chapter 1: The End of All Things
The sky burned blue the day the world died.
Above the glittering skyline of Neo-Tokyo, the Ascendant Star hung like a bleeding god in the atmosphere. Unblinking. Silent. Eternal. It had appeared six months earlier—a cosmic anomaly unknown to any telescope, satellite, or quantum array. It wasn't visible to the naked eye unless you wore a special visor. But today, for the first time, it could be seen unaided. And it was growing.
The world's last age of peace was already cracking.
From orbit, Earth still gleamed—a planet thriving with shimmering oceans, sky-bound cities, and spiraling towers of crystalline steel. But on the ground, society was fragmenting. The AI Networks were going dark, one after the other. Climate control failed. Factories seized. Fusion reactors stalled.
Technology, the very thing that once liberated humanity, was betraying them.
And at the center of it all—Jacob Walker.
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Neo-Aeon Bunker, 212 years ago
"Stabilize the core!" a voice barked.
Sirens howled through the bunker's titanium halls as engineers scrambled like insects around the central lab. The Null Reactor was screaming, leaking something impossible into the air—something that distorted the lights, made people hallucinate things, bleed from their ears.
Yet Jacob Walker was calm.
He stood in front of a massive cylindrical pod, the core of his life's obsession. His once black hair was now a streaked silver, the price of years spent dancing with quantum madness. His hands hovered over the console, trembling not with fear—but anticipation.
"This is it," he whispered. "We're almost there."
Beside him, his son sat in a sterile white chair, unconscious, restrained, wires attached to his veins, spine, and skull.
Ethan Walker.
Seventeen years old. Genius. The only human on Earth who could outthink Jacob himself. And Jacob had just broken him.
"Ethan," he said softly. "You won't understand now… but I'm saving you."
The reactor surged. The Null energy in its chamber pulsed once—then imploded in silence. The bunker walls groaned as space folded inside out for a single moment, tearing a hole into the void between universes. And something answered.
It wasn't supposed to.
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Thirty Years Earlier
The world hadn't always been on fire.
Back then, when humanity still ruled Earth with confidence, Jacob Walker was the messiah of science. Born in 2071, a prodigy from birth, he had rewritten the theory of relativity at fourteen, created the first stable teleportation array at twenty-two, and founded Walker Conglomerate by twenty-five. His company was the beating heart of Earth's technological dream.
But that dream was ending.
The Ascendant Star's appearance changed everything.
It radiated no light, no heat—yet exuded a gravitational presence felt in dreams. Satellites that tried to study it disappeared. Probes returned corrupted. Every physicist on Earth dismissed it as a bizarre black hole-like phenomenon.
Except Jacob.
He called it the boundary of the dying equation.
His theory? The universe wasn't expanding—it was collapsing. Not slowly, but exponentially. The Ascendant Star was the singularity where causality, logic, and time began to crack. He saw the numbers. He knew it was true. No one believed him.
So, he built his own salvation.
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Back in the Lab
The Null energy touched Ethan's spine—and the universe flinched.
Every monitor exploded. Every needle bent. The cryo-chamber around him hissed violently, steam rushing out like breath from a sleeping god. The nanites in his bloodstream mutated. His body began to change.
But what happened next wasn't part of Jacob's plan.
Aether responded.
It was not summoned. It was not welcomed. But it came—drawn across the dimensional veil by the impossible existence of Null, something no being had ever merged with before.
The lab became a holy storm.
Ethan's body was the altar.
The Null and Aether energies entwined like lovers, crashing and fusing inside a vessel that should have died. And yet, it lived. It thrived. His cells became stars. His blood turned to streams of evolved code and energy. His mind fragmented, then rebuilt itself ten thousand times in an instant.
Jacob watched in awe and horror as the walls dissolved, machines atomized, and time slowed to a crawl.
"I—was wrong," he said, tears trailing down his wrinkled cheeks. "Null wasn't the signal. It was the doorway."
A hand reached for the console as his skin burned to ash.
"Sleep, my son. Wake up… and become more than me."
He slammed the seal protocol.
And Ethan vanished into frozen stasis.
The bunker collapsed. Earth screamed.
And the world as it was—ended.
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Two Centuries Later
The air was thick with mana.
Not the artificial, humming kind Jacob had studied—but raw, feral, ancient magic. The forests had overgrown with monstrous trees. Strange beasts roamed the skies, their wings glittering with runes. Ruins of the old world dotted the wastelands—towering glass skeletons swallowed by nature and silence.
No one knew what had happened to the old Earth.
The new one belonged to kingdoms, empires, and power.
The Supreme Universe had rewritten everything.
But beneath the deepest ruins of the past, something stirred.
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Neo-Aeon Bunker, Present
With a sound like shattering ice, the cryo-pod split open.
Steam billowed out. A naked boy stumbled onto the metal floor, coughing, limbs twitching. Black hair with a streak of silver clung to his pale scalp, and golden eyes snapped open—eyes that moved like stars orbiting gravity.
Ethan gasped for air.
The world was different.
No... I'm different.
He staggered to his feet, only to collapse again. The mana in the air pressed against his skin like heat, but instead of burning, it seeped in, twisting inside his cells.
His body reacted instantly.
He convulsed. Screamed. And then—
Shrank.
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Over the Next 48 Hours
It was worse than any nightmare.
Ethan's body regressed—rapidly. Muscles thinned. Bones restructured. Organs compressed. The energy inside him, the fused creation of Null and Aether, wasn't killing him—it was rewriting him.
At first, he thought he was dying.
Then he realized the truth.
His body wasn't failing. It was optimizing.
Not for power.
But for survival.
By the end of the third day, Ethan Walker—the man who had once built nuclear AI in his sleep—was a baby. An infant with the mind of a god trapped in a helpless shell.
And that's when fate found him.
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Valen Territory, Kingdom of Allitia
Viscount Darius Valen was a minor noble with an estate on the outskirts of the magic-infested Silverwood. His carriage rolled to a halt as a scout ran up, pale and breathless.
"My Lord," the scout stammered. "There's a child in the ash."
Darius frowned. "A child?"
"Alone. No clothes. No prints. But… he glows."
Intrigued, Darius ordered the carriage forward. There, in the middle of a shattered crater, was the impossible. A one-year-old boy with black and silver hair, golden eyes barely open, lying on a bed of burned grass and white ash.
And he was smiling.
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Later That Night
Darius held the child in his arms, puzzled.
"A lost child in a ruin no one remembers," he murmured to his wife. "No aura. No mana signature. But perfect form. This… is no ordinary child."
His wife—a regal woman with curves that could kill—took the boy with a sigh.
"Then we keep him."
"What should we name him?"
The baby's golden eyes fluttered.
Darius smiled.
"…Ethan."
And so, the boy who ended the world began again.
But the Supreme Universe had no idea what it had just inherited.
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