In the heart of the Celestial Loom—a radiant nexus of shifting glyphs and living equations—the Goddess of Creation stood still.
Her form shimmered like a canvas of galaxies stitched into the shape of a woman, hair flowing with strands of nebulae and starstuff. Her gaze, ancient and piercing, traced the swirling divine script that danced around the Spire's core system.
All was in balance. All was as designed. And nothing out of seem like strange.
Until it wasn't.
A glyph snapped.
A ripple of red—a color forbidden in her code—glitched across the array like a tear in sacred cloth.
[ SYSTEM ERROR DETECTED. ]
[ SELECTION ANOMALY — DIMENSION: AEON-9943-EARTH ]
[ SUBJECT: SOJI TAKASHI — STATUS: UNWORTHY SELECTED AS WORTHY ]
The Goddess of Creation blinked. For the first time in a millennium, her breath caught.
"Impossible," she whispered, her voice soft and vast like the womb of a forming universe. She swept her hand across the console of starlight, and the system obeyed, unfolding a visual record. Her eyes beaming with excitement.
[ Soji Takashi ]
[ Human male ]
Average in every conceivable metric. No combat ability. No mana flow. No ancestral powerline. No fate threads entangled with cosmic events. Nothing special. His very soul barely shimmered—a speck of flickering dust.
And yet… He had been chosen. By the system? Her own flawless system.
"Why?" she murmured, data flowing like rivers around her. She summoned the formula—rechecking every strand of the divine algorithm she had crafted. It was perfect. Untouched. And yet, it had identified him. "I can see many challengers more worthy than him... Why... Him?"
With a gesture, she expanded the selection overlay—projecting alternate candidates from the same dimension. The Loom responded, sifting through trillions of variables and timelines with divine precision.
[ FILTERING: CANDIDATE POOL — DIMENSION AEON-9943-EARTH ]
[ DISPLAYING MOST OPTIMAL: POTENTIAL CANDIDATE ]
First emerged Commander Rafael Stone—a decorated special forces veteran. His hands had painted hundreds of battlefields with resolve, loyalty, and unmatched precision. He had survived nuclear fallout, psychic warfare, and even an encounter with a transdimensional rift that scarred his aura.
"Elite. Hardened. A soul forged in fire," The goddess whispered.
Then appeared Dr. Yuna Albright—a polymathic genius whose intellect had pushed Earth's science centuries forward in secret. Her brain emitted such cognitive resonance that the Loom itself had stored fragments of her thoughts like sacred scripture.
"She could unravel half the Spire's mysteries by observation alone," the goddess mused.
A third shimmered into view: Elijah Cross, a monk-warrior who had transcended human limits through sheer spiritual mastery. He walked barefoot across the molten crust of a volcano to rescue a dying boy. His chi output rivaled some demigods. His soul—flawless and gleaming like polished obsidian.
And yet…
Soji Takashi still hovered at the center.
No accolades. No scars. No genius. Just a man in a wrinkled shirt, frozen in fear beneath a glowing screen.
She frowned.
Each of the candidates before him possessed what mortals would consider greatness. Battle-wisdom. Brilliance. Enlightenment. And still, the Loom—her perfect system—had bypassed them.
She zoomed out, showing the cascading probability threads.
All the others followed patterns. Only Soji's thread… was blank. A space where nothing was written. No ceiling. No ending. No forecast.
Just the unknown.
"You're not stronger than them," she said softly to his image. "You're... something else entirely."
A variable. An absence...
She stared at the result again, and deep within the logic, found a sliver of instability.
No—it wasn't instability. It was an unknown potential.
A void. A null-state so profound it became something the system couldn't quantify.
The Loom, a divine construct older than time, was not merely a mechanism for selection. It was alive in some unfathomable sense—a consciousness forged from creation itself. It wove destinies, weighed merits, traced ancestry, tracked karma and celestial resonance. It had chosen billions before without error. Champions of divine lineage. Warriors carved by tragedy. Geniuses touched by providence.
But never—never—had it chosen someone like him. A man whose thread was frayed and gray, whose path was blank.
She stepped back, expression unreadable.
Then, she summoned the other six gods.
They arrived not with footsteps, but with presence.
The Goddess of Life arrived first, golden and radiant, wrapped in the pulse of pure vitality.
The God of Death followed, draped in a silence that devoured all warmth.
The Goddess of Nature came as a storm and blossom intertwined, the elementals and essence of worlds covers her.
The God of Time floated backward into the room, eyes closed, seemingly already knowing the reason for the summons.
The God of Space folded into existence through a collapsing singularity.
The God of Destruction laughed as he entered from a cracked dimension portal while cracking his knuckles, eager for chaos.
"You called us, urgently, is something happening again? This haven't happened in a millennium," Death said, his voice a whisper of collapsing bones. "What has unraveled?"
"I hope this isn't about another mortal writing poetry about gods again," Nature muttered, arms crossed, exasperated.
"Do not waste our time," snapped the God of Space, his voice sharp like shattered glass. "The Loom pulses with alert. Speak."
"This better be good," Destruction added with a smirk, flames flickering beneath his skin. "I was in the middle of watching two star systems collide."
Even Time opened one eye, his tone cool and unreadable. "The last time you summoned us like this, your invention tried to overwrite reality. What is it now?"
"There's been an error or perhaps something interesting," the Goddess of Creation said, voice cool but laced with tension. "The system selected a candidate from Dimension Aeon-9943—Earth. A man named Soji Takashi."
A projection formed.
An image of Soji standing in the street, staring up at the system screen, bewildered and trembling.
The God of Death sneered, his voice curling with disdain. "That? He's barely a spark. I've seen moths with more will to live."
"Yet the system chose him," said the Goddess of Creation, her expression grave. "It easily bypassed all the safeguards."
She expanded the display—lines of divine code flaring across the space. Metrics, energy readings, soul-scans, and fate-pulse signatures flared around Soji's image. All of them were marked in gray.
An absence of data.
A null zone.
"He is not just weak," she continued. "He is invisible to the Loom's deeper functions. His fate cannot be predicted, his choices not pre-modeled. Every challenger has a known probability branch. He has none. He is unreadable."
"Perhaps it saw something," mused the God of Time, fingers ticking in rhythms unseen, a slow smile crossing his lips. "A strand not yet woven. A fracture with potential."
"He's weak," said the Goddess of Nature, her tone edged with skepticism. "He will be eaten alive."
"All the better," the God of Destruction chuckled, eyes glowing like dying suns. "Let him die screaming. Or surprise us. Either way, it'll be fun."
The Goddess of Life stared long at the image, her luminous eyes soft but intense.
"An anomaly..." The God of Space muttered. "Or an infiltration."
"Or a gift," Creation replied, eyes narrowing. "I marked him after the selection. I wanted to see what the Loom was trying to tell me. And when I did—something… resonated."
The room grew silent.
And then, the Goddess of Creation made her decision.
"He will enter. Not because he is strong—but because he is unknown. He is a Null something unknown. A variable unaccounted for."
The God of Space nodded slowly. "Let the system watch him closely."
The Goddess of Creation raised her hand, sealing the anomaly with her divine authority.
"Soji Takashi," she declared, "may climb."
"And also let it be recorded in the Loom's threads," the Goddess of Creation said, her voice echoing with excitement, "this is the first breach in my perfect design—an anomaly born not of flaw, but of fate. A true... UNKNOWN ERROR FROM THE SYSTEM."