For a time, he drifted through a Sea of Oblivion, where things no longer possessed names, and they themselves no longer recalled who they had been.
He, for an uncertain span, was one of these formless things. His body was pale and blank, stripped of every distinguishing detail. His Shadows split away from him, searching desperately for an empty vessel to fill, unaware that they had been severed only because the vessel itself could not contain them.
For those Shadows were not the four familiar cores that had once defined his Soul. They were Fables.
They were the manifestation of the very history he had created.
Fill... fill... fill...
The empty vessel needed to be filled. Yet something held the tide at bay.
The Vessel did not know why.
He felt himself sinking deeper into the thing men called a Soul Sea. The water was not water at all, but a heavy, nameless mass pulling him down by the very thread of his spirit.
The absolute absence of a burden causes a man to grow lighter than air, to soar into unknown heights or drown in unknown depths, to take leave of the material and the earthly, and become only half real.
It felt as though a thousand years passed before he understood this. Yet, as every Fable tore itself away from his being, he realized it was not a thousand years at all. It was not even a single second.
When one's end draws near, no images remain from memory. There remain only words — words displaced, and mutilated by the passage of a life.
The empty one realized these fractured words were himself. He was the separation of a soul from its own history. The image that remained was forced to bear the burden, while the self became a hollow phantom.
But why? The vessel questioned the silence. What was it doing here, drowning in this nameless black sea?
The shadow had no name. It was a blankness carved into the light, a tear in the fabric of the world, and it sought to possess him because it possessed no substance of its own.
For he was the substance. The Fables were merely the ink.
Yet again, he was held at bay. Why could the hollow shell not simply rejoin itself with the flood of memory surrounding it?
He could see everything, after all.
At one point, glowing white sentences coalesced into the symbol of a greatsword, a beautiful, flowing pattern permeating its steel, indescribably fearsome and unnervingly familiar. The empty one took a moment to read the Fable, understanding that it described a version of himself who had crossed blades with a being known as the King of Swords. It made sense that the Fable itself would mirror the exact weapon his fallen adversary had once wielded.
The vessel reached out, grasping for the Fable. For a fleeting instant, the greatsword solidified in his hands. Then, the resistance returned, and it dissolved back into a stream of white sentences, reforming the blade just beyond his reach.
Perhaps there was an error in this process. Despite his featureless, pale form, a black scar remained etched upon his chest.
The scar is not a reminder of the wound. The scar is the wound itself. It is the singular part of you that refuses to forget what tore you apart.
And consciousness — he still possessed one. Suffering is the sole origin of awareness. It is the one sensation that screams loud enough that you cannot pretend you do not exist.
There was no doubt now.
This nameless being was not entirely without a name.
Rather, the things that had granted him identity, color, detail, and every fragment that comprised a Spirit and a Soul had simply been ripped away.
Was the distant memory of the King of Swords not proof enough of that? He had slain a King.
Turning his formless gaze, he found even more stories drifting in the void.
One took the shape of a figure wrapped in darkness and mist, its wings a harrowing shade of black that struck him as beautiful despite the absence of physical eyes to witness it. According to the Fable, this version of himself had conversed with the Demon of Destiny for a long while. It was a tale of a meeting between three important strings of fate — the nameless being, the Demon of Destiny, and the Demon of Imagination — as they sought to breathe life into a fledgling existence.
The only identifier attached to that creation was a single word: 'Saint.'
Another story arrived as a dreadful whisper hiding within the wind, flowing with an insidious grace into his ears. He found it strangely sad, yet liberating. It depicted a version of himself tested by the Demon of Dread, a trial that ended in a hard-won victory against the ancient fear.
A Fable floated closer that he found himself particularly drawn to. It depicted a graceful figure woven from threads of darkness and light; had he possessed physical eyes, he was certain they would have wept at her beauty. This tale spoke of a bond between a man and a Daemon — a relationship that blurred the lines between teacher and student, or perhaps mother and son. It was, above all else, a happy tale.
Unlike the fragmented stories surrounding it, this Fable remained remarkably whole, detailing a mastery of Runic Sorcery so profound that it left the vessel in silent awe.
Another Fable pulsed with an ethereal presence, a sweetness that hid in the deepest recesses of hell. There was little detail he could grasp; it was the story of many worlds, yet the majority of the text remained shattered and incomplete.
The next Fable to drift near carried a peculiar connection. Though broken, he could discern fragments of a ghostly silhouette that smelled of seawaves and starlight, possessing eyes as vast and piercing as the sky, yet as unfathomable as the cold embrace of Shadow.
This particular Fable told of a journey between the nameless one and the Demon of Repose, two daemons who traversed the world in a shared search for meaning. It was a story of freedom and respite, tainted by an undercurrent of madness and doubt.
The only certainty was that the nameless one had fought alongside a being called the Storm God to suppress the Demon of Repose after she had lost her mind, confined by...
It was unfortunate that the rest remained obscured.
The empty one turned his attention toward more drifting Fables, sentences that no longer bore the shape of Daemons, but something far older and heavier.
These were core stories, and thus, each one had taken on the visage of a divine originator.
Storm God. Shadow God. Sun God. War God. Beast God. Heart God.
And then, a Fable that made even the void around him seem to recoil — the Forgotten God. The God of Corruption, Dreams, and Nightmares.
It was a terrifying tale in isolation, but its threads reached out and wove themselves into another story, one far more intricate than the rest. Unaware to the empty one, his form was no longer as pale and featureless as it had been. Reading these fragments, even through a filtered gaze, was slowly returning color and texture to his shape.
[The Unholy Miracle, 'Primal Vessel Constraint', is unable to perform the 'Wish' due to the status of Incomplete Fables…]
[The Unholy Miracle is partially sealing the 'Forbidden Epochs'!]
The connected tale spoke of a Last World, a place a version of his nameless self had once walked. It was a World of impossible perfection, one that had already conquered every threat born of Corruption.
Every Unholy, Cursed, Great, Corrupted, Fallen, Awakened, and Dormant nightmare had been slain, or sealed for eternity.
The beauty of it only deepened his confusion. A tale so serene had to carry a counterweight of suffering somewhere within its pages.
The answer arrived attached to a symbol bound to a woman. A woman he recognized on a level that transcended mere memories.
She possessed an otherworldly, breathtaking presence, divine in a way that felt inherent rather than earned. The Fable told of one who began as a shadow, evolved into a Phantasm, and finally became the last remaining proof that someone, somewhere, had been… loved.
It told of sacrifice. Of grief. Of a story left permanently incomplete. It told of a woman who had lost the one she cherished— the entire world she wished to have, in any worldline that might exist. But in the end, her beloved chose to seal himself away regardless.
That Worldline achieved its perfection because a single being had chosen to carry the entire burden alone. He was not the antagonist at the beginning of the tale, yet by its conclusion, he undeniably was. The 'Enemy of the Story.'
This nameless fragment was a tired shadow who chose to become the Avatar of the Forgotten God, only to seize control from within, overpowering the very deity he hosted, and casting the threat of the Void away forever.
Yet there was an oddity buried within it…
Because the story also spoke of another version of himself — one who had arrived in that same World and altered its course entirely. That iteration had found the woman desperate to save her home, and he had done exactly that.
The Fable fractured again near its conclusion, the text dissolving into static. The only certainty that remained was that the Avatar of the Forgotten God had been slain, and the God of Corruption had died alongside it. That World's peace was absolute, for no Nightmare would ever be born there again.
And finally, the empty one understood why he existed here at all.
He watched a drifting story that described a version of himself who constructed an Ark, one that endured countless years within an Inverted Ocean, drowning in boundless frequencies as he performed his duty and maintained an unbroken vigil, watching over every other version of himself scattered across three separate Nightmares while one remained far beyond his reach.
He watched versions of himself who chose to chain their existence to an endlessly repeating Nightmare, an Unholy horror sealed alongside them in that loop. That particular fragment had died one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three times before his long road finally reached its end.
His eyes widened, figuratively, at the tale depicting a brutal war against an Archangel, and another that described the moment he first met the Banished Light.
He understood now.
He was an empty vessel not because he lacked the capacity to hold these Fables, but because he lacked the capacity to comprehend them. He could contain them, certainly, but not in their raw, unfiltered form.
It was simply too much.
The empty one recognized that his current self-persona was not vast enough to both hold and fully understand the content of the Fables at once. It was almost laughably simple, in hindsight.
Of course the Unholy Miracle had been forced to intervene.
Consider it this way: Outer Gods, or rather the Kings among them, occasionally descended into other Worldlines to meddle with their affairs, much to the displeasure of the Law of Mysteries, which inevitably summoned the Memory of Gaia to purge them. But that detail was beside the point.
How did Outer Gods manage to retain a coherent self across thousands, tens of thousands, or even billions of years of existence?
The solution was elegant. They fixed their self-persona to a locked age, a kind of memory ceiling that could never be exceeded.
The empty one's current ceiling was that of a seventeen-year-old. It had been vastly expanded, of course, by the presence of his Weave, and by the sheer scale of what he had become — an Incarnation of Divinity, of Dream, a mind stretched by sorcery beyond its natural bounds.
So despite the low number attached to it, his ceiling held far more than a typical seventeen-year-old ever could.
But even that expanded room could not house every memory contained within the Fables he had created. A mind capped at seventeen simply could not hold the totality of those thousands of years without a filter placed between them.
That was precisely how Outer Gods preserved themselves. The King of all Outer Gods had shifted his own ceiling numerous times throughout his endless existence. At one point he had fixed himself at twenty-eight. At another, one hundred. At others still, one thousand, or two thousand.
The larger the ceiling, the easier it became to retain a coherent self while still carrying an ocean of memory. In other words, it allowed a King of Outer Gods to remain whatever age he preferred while never losing a single fragment of what he had lived.
But for this nameless soul, there was no room to raise the ceiling any further. The gap between a limit of seventeen and a limit of a thousand or two thousand was not a small one. It was a chasm.
And so the Unholy Miracle activated, constructing a filter in place of expansion.
The nameless one might have laughed, had the sensation of recollection not been so entirely foreign in this state. He recalled, in fragments summoned by the Miracle itself, the peculiar way a certain King of Outer Gods had once explained the mechanism.
That Outer God — one who had already reached his Conclusion — had clearly fixed his ceiling to a mind born in a far more modern age, because his explanation carried an oddly technical flavor.
His name was Viceroy, architect of the 'Dimensional Door'.
Memory, Viceroy had said, behaved like a dense video file recorded in impossibly high resolution, stored on a small drive meant for far smaller things. The nameless one's physical, seventeen-year-old mind was the screen attempting to play it.
Because that mind had not yet developed the neural framework, the matured emotional centers, or the hormonal balance of a twenty-eight-year-old, let alone a thousand-year-old being, it could not physically process what it was being shown as an adult would. It could read the data — the combat forms, the sorcerous theory, the recorded history — but it was forced to interpret every fragment of it through the narrow lens of a boy who had not yet finished growing.
It was ingenious.
It was also, undeniably, taxing beyond measure.
The original intent, he understood now, had been simpler and far more brutal: erase every memory outright and let him relive each Fable as though experiencing it for the first time. That plan had clearly failed, though.
What remained instead was a filter draped over memories that had never truly left him.
All of this formed in his understanding as the empty one continued to sink through the black expanse. He had fallen so far beneath the surface of this Soul Sea that any hope of swimming upward on his own had long since faded away. Not that his current form was capable of swimming at all…
But something was wrong. Or perhaps, something was present.
He was not alone here. Above him, he sensed presences of considerable scale — two. There was even a lesser one, a third.
One felt like a Sacred, and a formidable one at that. The empty one could not identify which specific Sacred had taken residence in his Soul Sea, but its presence pressed down like a mountain.
The second presence was far worse. There was no question that whatever it was dwarfed the first entirely.
A single word surfaced in his mind at the thought of it.
Archangel.
The empty one chose not to dwell on that presence any further. Naming such a being, even in thought, invited consequences he had no desire to test.
The third presence, however, was closer. Warmer. Achingly familiar. If he had possessed eyes or a mouth in that moment, he might have wept, and smiled in the same breath.
Yet in this place, he still retained something resembling a body, and it was through that vestige that he felt the third presence reach him.
It wrapped around him in the deep, closing into an embrace that lightened the crushing pressure of the Sea itself.
Who was this?
It had reached him despite the great depth separating them. The Unholy Miracle reacted instantly, its process accelerating in a sudden, violent surge.
[The Unholy Miracle is nearing completion.]
[The Unholy Miracle is unable to fully seal the 'Forbidden Epochs.']
[The Unholy Miracle has successfully filtered the 'Forbidden Epochs!']
Detail returned to him in a flood. He was no longer empty.
He reacted on instinct, holding the third presence back against him as sensation returned in waves — touch, sound, sight, smell, and finally the ache of his own limbs reasserting their shape around him.
The third presence was—
To sink into a Sea of Oblivion is to lose your language, to watch every story you have ever told drift away like bubbles rising through black water, until nothing remains but a hollow, silent shell. But memory is a haunting thing. It refuses to drown quietly.
It reaches into the dark, seizes the empty vessel by the throat, and forces the water out, refilling the lungs with the cold, agonizing air of who you used to be.
And so, forced into being once more, he opened eyes that had only just been given back to him.
He opened his mouth and felt the phantom sensation of drowning, his body seizing with violent tremors. Sound crashed back into him, his ears ringing under the pressure of a Sea with no true depth.
His eyes threatened to collapse under the sheer mass bearing down on them, and his skin screamed as though his entire body were being pressed flat beneath the tide.
Yet three realizations struck him in that instant, each heavier than the last.
First, he remembered who he was. Sunless. Lost from Light. The Daemon of Possibility.
He bore the Modifier 'King of a Kingless World,' and he was the one who had ventured into the Etheric Sea to recover what he had lost, and to finish what he had begun.
He had completed three Nightmares. He had built the Final Ark. He had lived for a time within the Last Worldline.
That knowledge only made the sight before him heavier still. Because the one who had dove into her own lord's Soul Sea, driven purely by the fear of losing him, was Saint.
He had no idea how she had slipped past the Vile Thieving Bird he had taken into his Soul Sea during the Eternal Nightmare, mere moments before that Nightmare shattered under an Angel's broken chains. It hardly mattered now.
She was here.
'Are you insane?!'
He wanted to scream it, though the thought barely held together as his own sanity frayed at the edges of this depth.
Diving into one's own Soul Sea carried a scattering of possible outcomes. With luck, a diver might find their Spirit, or perhaps their Flame of Desire. He prayed, desperately, that they were not sinking toward the latter.
He was a being of Flame and Void, untouched by the madness of Corruption in its purest sense — though he had not been the first to walk that road. Abaddon, the Saviour of Corruption and King of Corrupted Angels, held that distinction.
But by virtue of what he was, his existence carried both the Flame of Desire and the writhing Darkness of the Void within it. Should they drift toward that Void, Saint would drown in Corruption without a chance of salvation.
His Void had been born from the stolen essence of the King of Outer Gods, and it had only grown more unfathomable after he assimilated the power of an Archangel. Saint would not survive contact with it. He could not allow this to happen.
And so, though his own existence remained fractured from the encounter with another Archangel, he acted.
The Unholy Miracle reached completion. Despite housing more memory than any mortal mind was ever meant to carry, it succeeded in finishing the Memory Module and shielding his self-persona intact.
He remained who he had always been — a seventeen-year-old thrust into the Forgotten Shore on the day of the Winter Solstice.
He was not ancient. He was not old. Those memories had been filtered, softened into something his mind could survive holding.
It was a strange thing to sit with, knowing that a technique built by a being who had reached his Conclusion had activated purely to keep him from collapsing. Had those memories struck him in their raw form, he would have collapsed entirely from within — a total, irreversible shutdown with no path back.
Then again, attempting to make sense of age and time as an Outer God experienced it was a fool's errand. Time, as a concept, did not exist within the Etheric Sea at all.
Armed with that understanding, and with every memory now accessible — filtered, but whole — he pulled Saint closer against him and turned his body toward his Spirit.
The Spirit was the part of an existence that anchored its Fables. They drifted through the Dark Sea because the Miracle had tethered itself to his Soul, drawing every Fable out of his Spirit and into the current so it could coat them, wrapping formless black ink around the white sentences he had authored across a thousand lives.
It was a masterwork of design, whatever Viceroy's true nature might be. He would offer his silent gratitude to that Outer God, if only for the moment.
Saint herself had begun to drown, and he intended to scold her thoroughly for this reckless dive the instant she could hear him. He would have been fine without her interference; her presence had only accelerated a process already underway.
He could not fault her entirely, though. He remembered, in fragments, exactly what had led them here.
After emerging from the Etheric Sea — and he would owe an apology for remembering that moment with such clarity — he, alongside Abaddon, Lethe, and Saint's Phantasm Manifestation, had been released from the Soul of Gaia into her Body: the physical plane itself.
Something had clearly gone wrong in that transition. He could feel it echoing through him even now.
He had become a… Lost.
He remembered waking briefly within the walls of the NQSC, the stricken face of Teacher Julius, and the pale, horrified expression on Jet as the boy simply dissolved into ash before them.
It made sense, in the end — his physical shell had never been built to withstand the sheer volume of what Viceroy would call 'Data'. His Soul Body could shift and adapt to nearly anything, but mortal flesh had limits, and that limitation, cruelly, had worked in his favor.
He would owe them an apology all the same. Humanity likely believed that "Sleeper Sunless" had died.
After that, he had been drawn back into the starlit expanse the Nightmare Spell offered every Awakened who conquered a trial. From what he could recall, the integration of the Mind Weave had begun shortly after, rendering him entirely unconscious.
Something had happened following that… because filtered fragments of memory showed him wounded, torn apart again and again in some manner he could not fully place. He could still feel the ghost of his own Soul Flame flaring in response, and the unmistakable pull of the True Darkness once stolen by Avarice, alongside the Unholy Frozen Starlight of Ariamis, Son of the Rich Night.
After that, he must have rested. His final clear memory before this abyss was waking in a comfortable bed, Saint's worried face the first thing to greet him — and the first time he had ever heard her curse aloud.
That, he decided, he would never let her live down!
'And then…'
That was the exact moment the flood of memories had returned in full, overwhelming a mind capped at seventeen years, forcing the Unholy Miracle to activate before the pressure tore his self-persona apart at the seams.
Now here he was, swimming toward his own Spirit with an unconscious Saint held tight in his arms. Under ordinary circumstances, his Soul Sea would have offered her a kind of sanctuary, given that she remained his shadow despite her new life as a Living Phantasm.
But nothing about this depth was ordinary. Anything caught this far within a Sea born of such contradiction would drown, regardless of what it once was.
'Come on—!'
He pushed harder, bending the currents of his own Sea to carry them both toward what looked, impossibly, like a surface far beneath where any surface should exist.
It was not an ending, but a threshold — a passage into the deeper, more essential part of his existence: the Spirit.
Just before crossing it, he pulled Saint's head and shoulders against his chest, folding his arms around her like a shield. He knew what waited on the other side would be violent; a foreign Spirit forcing its way into his own was never gentle.
Then—
He broke through the surface, and the fuse to his consciousness snapped once more.
The last thing he saw was Saint's face, achingly close, framed by the strange sky stretched above this new Sea, and his own body falling toward what could only be described as a grand library.
—
When his eyes fluttered open, Sunny found himself lying on a pale, expansive floor.
Shadow Sense confirmed it before his physical vision could catch up — intricate patterns etched into white stone, and numerous corridors branching outward into the darkness.
"Ugh…"
He tried to move, but his limbs refused to cooperate, weighed down by the lingering toll of the Unholy Miracle.
Viceroy had warned him the effects might linger, and the Outer God King had not exaggerated.
But more pressing than the leaden heaviness in his body, and the needle-sharp throb still pulsing behind his eyes, was Saint. She lay across his chest, unconscious.
His gaze snapped downward in alarm — white sentences were coiling around her body like protective script.
'The Story…'
The letters dissolved a moment later, and relief flooded through him. She had survived. Whatever this place was, it hadn't rejected her as a foreign presence within his Spirit.
Still, his body refused to obey him. He couldn't lift her, couldn't even attempt to rouse her, so he settled for observing his surroundings instead.
Lamps burned steadily within countless niches, carving pockets of light from an otherwise consuming darkness.
In all his travels, across every Nightmare and every era, he had never laid eyes on a place quite like this one.
The pillars ringing the chamber were etched with sorcery — Spellweave, unmistakably, but interwoven with something else entirely, a craft he didn't recognize.
Divine Miracles were not foreign to him; he'd created one himself, reshaping the Seventh Enchantment of the Curse into something he'd named the [Advent of Half-God]. He couldn't bind it to his Soul yet, not with the Enchantment channeling the might of seven Divine Suns — the equivalent of seven Divine Soul Shards, each layered with its own woven blessing.
It functioned much like the Sorcery of Names — invoking a True Name unleashed its power upon the world. His own Miracle simply spoke several names at once, directing that power inward rather than outward, amplifying his body to a terrifying degree.
Were he a Supreme, perhaps a single black sun would suffice to bind the Curse and elevate himself. As things stood, merely attempting the bind would collapse him from within. The Enchantment remained dormant, likely for a long while yet.
Somewhere in the heart of his Soul Sea, the seven rings of the Curse were resting atop —
'…Actually, I don't even know what my Soul Sea looks like anymore.'
He possessed blessings from every God and every Daemon now. There was no predicting how such a transformation had reshaped his Soul.
Setting that thought aside, he noted he seemed to be at the center of this space. Between each pair of pillars, white corridors stretched away, their walls marked with black sigils of sorcery.
This was the last thing he'd seen before losing consciousness.
"A library. Fitting, I suppose, given the nature of Fables."
It was undeniably a library — the puzzling part was why one existed here at all. His Spirit should reflect his innate affinities: Death, Fate, at minimum.
He carried others, certainly, but those were drowned in profanity, stolen from an Archangel and a Profaned God.
So why a library?
'Is this the Miracle's doing as well?'
Were the endless volumes on these shelves his Fables? Or was the library itself — the very act of confining his Fables to bound pages — the filter placed over his memories?
A theory began forming as his eyes adjusted to the unnatural dark, the space around him sharpening into focus.
This was where every record of his stories had been gathered. His memories. His experiences. His suffering, bound and shelved.
He muttered, weariness thick in his voice.
"...This seems far larger than the stories I actually possess."
The King of Outer Gods' Spirit would have been staggering in scope — vast enough that even a version of Sunny devoted entirely to reading would never live to see its end.
But Sunny knew his own tale, despite spanning thousands of years and the bittersweet span of the Last Worldline, wasn't nearly this expansive.
Yet the space stretched on, shelf after shelf, further than sight or Shadow Sense could measure. He doubted he could finish even half these books in a lifetime.
Then the stabbing pain returned, memory cracking open like an eggshell splitting apart. What had felt foreign moments ago now felt achingly familiar — the lamps nestled in their niches, the endless rows of shelving.
Goosebumps rose along his arms as the realization struck him.
'I've been here before. There's no doubt of it.'
When? When had—
A voice cut through the library, otherworldly and ancient. Mobility returned to him in an instant; he sat upright, pulling Saint's sleeping form with him, curling protectively around her as he scanned the shadows.
But the tone was one he recognized. One he'd heard before.
「 Sunl ess. 」
The library trembled faintly at the sound. Fortunately, Sunny knew exactly what presence this belonged to — a fragment he'd claimed in the Last Worldline, a shard of the Wall guarding the path toward 'Conclusion', toward 'The Root' itself.
He still hadn't settled on what to call it.
「 Yo ur so ul was in dan ger. I pr otected y ou. 」
"Danger? My Soul was at risk because of the flood of memories?"
「 Y es… 」
「 I call ed you… 」
So the 'Fragment of the Akashic Gate' had summoned him here. That much wasn't difficult to piece together.
"Are you here too, then? In this place?"
「 Corr ect. 」
"Great. So I really am in deep trouble."
Sunny let out a tired laugh, still seated on the cold floor. The fact that the Fragment had bothered to speak to him directly meant his condition rivaled the aftermath of Archangel Avarice's assault.
He tilted his head back, finding only the beautiful, rippling underside of a sea stretched across the ceiling like a sky.
He called out.
"Do you know what I need to do? I'm guessing my broken Fables still need realigning, but the memories themselves — am I clear on that front?"
「 Yo u're memo ries a nd da ta ar e fin e. Vice roy' s Mira cle was succ essful. 」
「 How e ver , yo u stil l nee d t o alig n you r Fab les. Yo u a re current ly a mes s. 」
Sunny nodded slowly. "Right…"
His gaze drifted back down, lingering on Saint's sleeping face without meaning to. If he wasn't careful, he was going to get himself killed in battle one day, distracted by nothing more than the sight of her.
Still watching her, he asked, quieter now. "What about her? Is she alright?"
「 You 're lov er i s fin e. 」
'W-Wha?!'
"H-Hey! No, she's not my— this isn't the Last Worldline, fool!"
「 … 」
"...Hello? Fragment?"
'Is this thing seriously doubting me? I'm not lying!'
Though, to be fair, he'd met this Fragment while wearing the role of that Worldline's Sunless — a version of himself who had, in fact, been Saint's lover.
So the confusion wasn't entirely the Fragment's fault.
…That didn't make it any less mortifying.
Eventually, the Fragment simply said:
「 Foc us o n explo ring fo r n ow. Cle an up y our Spir it. It i s a lso . . . a me ss. 」
Sunny blinked, confusion melting into understanding almost immediately. His Fables were unaligned, missing whole sentences — and since his Fables lived within his Spirit, this library was likely in an equally chaotic state.
"Wonderful."
But that also meant something useful: cleaning the library and reading its contents would speed the realignment considerably. Faster, certainly, than what the normal method entailed.
He looked around again, still unable to spot an end to the shelves, his Shadow Sense too narrow to encompass the whole of his Spirit's world.
'Damn it all.'
The scale of what he carried was only now sinking in — far more than any Dormant had any business possessing.
'This is going to take forever, even with a shortcut.'
He sighed, glancing down at Saint again. He gave her shoulder a gentle shake, but a voice answered instead of her waking — a tone identical to the Spell's, though it clearly wasn't the Spell speaking.
['Phantasmal Saint' is in an illegible state of consciousness. Do not attempt to wake this Soul.]
"...Makes sense."
His Spirit was both divine and profane in nature. No telling what she might perceive if her eyes opened here.
Not as lethal as wandering too close to his Flame of Desire or his Void, perhaps, but harrowing all the same.
Exercising his authority over his own Spirit, he conjured a bed borrowed from Nether's design, laying Saint upon it in a comfortable position. Then he rose and started toward the southern hall of the library.
He glanced back once, uneasy. There was no telling what might be lurking in a place like this. He hadn't been fully conscious when Abaddon remade him, and the shadow of the Archangel — the one still lodged somewhere within his existence — remained unaccounted for.
"Fragment," he called out. "Watch over her. If she winds up dead, I'm sabotaging this entire life out of spite."
「 . .. St upid Sun le ss. 」
The moment the words faded, a soft blue light wrapped itself around Saint and the bed beneath her. Sunny smiled, huffed a quiet laugh, and turned to walk deeper into the stacks.
"Now then..."
Every shelf held a Fable of his own making — a world built entirely from his own stories, and, curiously, some that didn't belong to him at all.
Walking the pale, almost regal hall, he felt an unfamiliar warmth settle over him.
Happiness, of all things.
This was a story with no true end, no matter how far he read. He wouldn't hunger here — his soul required no such thing. And there was nowhere else to be, so he might as well read.
Roughly fifteen minutes passed — by earthly measure — before he came upon his first disaster: a collapsed shelf, its books scattered across the floor.
"So that's what he meant."
He crouched and lifted one, reading the title before flipping it open.
[Lost from Light, 10th Record of the 1st Round.]
[To his relief, the shadow of Condemnation seemed to sense the silent malice of the giant moth perched atop the mountain. Still looking up, it slowly raised its titanic foot and took a step forward, breaching a vast distance with that single step.]
"Huh. My fight with the Puppeteer?"
He read further to confirm it.
[At the last moment, the Puppeteer righted its flight and allowed the wind to support its wings, turning from the dark slope toward the towering colossus. The two of them collided with harrowing violence, making the sky split apart and causing the mountain to fracture. The giant moth's six legs pierced the chest and the neck of Condemnation, and it straddled the Sacred shade, facing it directly.]
'It really is!'
Inexplicably excited, he sat down right there on the floor and lost himself in the pages, turning them with a kind of greedy hunger.
Who wouldn't relish reading about themselves standing against a God?
Some time later, he set the Fable aside — thankfully one he already knew intimately, having lived it some time ago. He picked up another and found himself facing the Dread Lord within the Tomb of Ariel, during his third Nightmare.
[Lost from Light, 7th Record of the 1st Round.]
['Just wait a little… I'll kill you too…'
Everyone… he was going to kill everyone!
But the dragon would be first.
Even if Sunny had to rip his own soul apart to murder the loathsome worm, he would see him dead.
'Die! Die! Die!'
Even with nearly endless reserves of essence and the boundless fury of the [King's Resentment] fueling him, Sunny was struggling to deal severe damage to the Dread Lord. He vaguely remembered that there was someone else he had to kill… a vile amalgamation of countless beings hiding in the reflections… but he couldn't even slay this winged fiend!]
He laughed, a touch embarrassed at his own past self.
'Damn — I know that was the Enchantment talking, but was I really that far gone?'
He scratched his head and kept flipping through the pages, losing himself for what turned out to be roughly three earthly hours before he finally stood, sighing, and began the tedious work of righting the fallen shelf and returning each book to its place.
It took time, but eventually the shelf stood whole again.
'That was... easier than I expected—'
A jolt ran through his mind before he could finish the thought. The Spell's voice followed.
[You have aligned minor Fable Fragments.]
[The conflict within you has been slightly mended.]
He did feel marginally lighter — only marginally. His expression fell.
"If that was only slight... I'm going to be doing this for months."
He meant, of course, months on the Forgotten Shore. He couldn't linger here indefinitely; there was no telling what was unfolding outside while he sat reading.
The only thing summoned nearby was the Silvershade Harrow. Saint didn't count — she remained asleep within this space, shielded from Corruption by design.
Turning his gaze north, he already knew what waited down that particular hall.
That corridor held the shelves devoted to his coldest, most unbearable years — his battle against the Great Old Ones, his confrontation with Archangel Avarice, the Void Beings he'd been forced to end.
Those stories held his suffering. His isolation. The stretches of existence where death had felt like the only mercy left, where he'd hated himself and the world in equal measure for cursing him with a fate that was too ancient for any child to bear — a fate he had, in some twisted sense, chosen for himself.
The King of Outer Gods had reached his Conclusion and earned 'Eternity' from it. Which meant, at some point, he had reached 'The Root' as well.
The 'Swirl of the Root' — the 'Akashic Records', sometimes called 'Heaven'. The metaphysical apex sitting above every theory, in every dimension; the wellspring of all events and phenomena across the entirety of existence, and every existence beyond it.
Sunny had foolishly searched for it once, deep within the Etheric Sea. It was out there somewhere, buried in that Labyrinth. But an impassable Wall stood between any existence and that singular truth encompassing all.
That was why he now carried the Fragment of that Wall — so that one day, he might open the Akashic Gate himself, and choose his own ending rather than have Akasha choose it for him.
Eternity was a cruel Conclusion, in the end. But it was also the reason he existed at all. His entire Worldline would never have been born if the original him — the one who became King of Outer Gods — hadn't earned that fate.
And yet, sometimes, Sunny wished his World had never been made. That the Labyrinth of Worldlines itself had never come into being. Because now he was doomed to suffer for it — himself, his world, and everyone he loved within it.
They all had to walk this harrowing road laid out by the Nightmare Spell now. They had to clean up what the Nine, the Daemons, and the Gods had left rotting behind them.
'Damn it all…'
His eyes stung before he even registered the tears forming. He wiped them away roughly and kept walking, a heavy sense of injustice settling over him.
He was the one left to carry this World — because, in a roundabout way, he was the one who'd created it.
"Gods... why did I do this to myself?"
He couldn't even answer his own question. He was both the original Sunless and not. He carried none of that being's memories directly — only what the Eternal Nightmare had granted him, and what he'd created with his own hands since.
The realization only deepened the ache in his chest.
'No. I can't drown in this right now.'
He turned north and started walking—
And then the entire dimension shuddered around him.
'Oh, hell—!'
He didn't need the Fragment to explain what was happening. The library shook once more, and the moment it stilled, he broke into a run, sprinting out of the southern hall.
'Saint—!'
He was waking up. Even glancing skyward, he could see the sea above rippling violently. The threat to his mind, soul, and spirit had passed — still a mess, certainly, but no longer a lethal one.
Which meant he was being ejected. Automatically. The next visit here would require his own Will to initiate.
'Or I could call the Fragment.'
One thing mattered more than any of that: reaching Saint before the sea crashed down and sealed this place back into slumber. If he didn't, she'd drown in the depths of his Soul — and at this depth, Corruption was all but guaranteed.
He bent the space of his Spirit around himself and sprinted for the center, covering the distance in under three minutes. He reached the bed, dissolved it with a thought, and swept Saint into his arms.
Then—
He looked up and watched the sky, the inverted surface of his own Soul Sea, come crashing down toward him.
Within moments, the Grand Library was swallowed by the black tide. He began to rise, lifted free of the floor, ascending toward the surface of his Sea.
The Fragment's voice reached him just before he broke through.
「 Sun les s , be fore you wa ke. .. I mu st wa rn yo u. 」
「 W atch o ut f or t he . . . 」
His ears rang violently as he shot upward through the dark. Below him, the second surface leading back down to the library shrank away, and the Fragment's final words followed him up.
「 . .. St ar of Des pair. Nir v ana . .. 」
—
Clutching Saint tightly against him, Sunny burst through the surface of his Soul Sea in a single violent motion. He hung in the air for a heartbeat before gravity reasserted itself, dropping him hard onto something like solid ground.
"Kuh—ah—hah!"
He gasped for breath, soaked through from his time submerged. Saint fared no better, her clothes clinging to her in ways that immediately became the second most distracting thing in the vicinity.
Because his Soul Sea—
"...Holy."
Was breathtaking.
Gone was the simple, lightless expanse dotted with floating suns.
It made sense — he was no longer merely blessed by six Gods and seven Daemons in name. Those blessings had reshaped the very structure of his Soul.
Lying on his back, Saint held close against him, he stared up first at the sky. A true, starlit expanse stretched overhead — he recognized it instantly as the Nightmare Spell, its endless constellations burning bright.
And what he rested upon wasn't a void of black, but something else entirely.
Turning his head, Sunny found only one way to describe it: paradise.
He lay upon a bed of Astérisque Flowers, spread across a small island suspended directly beneath his four black Shadow Cores. White trees rose around him with an otherworldly splendor, blue light filtering gently through their branches and leaves.
The whole space seemed to pulse — a pulse he recognized as the Divine Miracle of Heart God, Qliphoth.
The Miracle that let his Soul hold multiple Blessings and Miracles at once, much like Heart God's own Lineage allowed for the assimilation of other Lineages.
He'd have laughed, if he had the breath for it. Asterion had wanted every Lineage to become an Incarnation of Divinity — heir to all six Gods. And here Sunny was, having stumbled into something similar by an entirely different road.
The difference was that he carried the Blessings themselves rather than the Lineages — and the result, it seemed, was far greater.
The Blessings reached directly into his Aspects, amplifying their properties. There was no telling what his abilities were capable of now.
But he had to abandon the thought, and the admiration, almost immediately.
A presence loomed behind him — massive, suffocating. He froze, terror seizing every muscle as he fully registered the will pressing down on this space.
'R-Right. How could I forget?'
He wasn't alone here with just Saint and his dormant Shadow Legion.
Slowly, shaking, he turned to face it.
"H-Hello again... you damned bird."
There it was. The same terrible creature he'd absorbed during the Eternal Nightmare.
The Vile Thieving Bird.
And Sunny, in this moment, was nothing more than a Dormant Devil.
And so, two things happened at once.
The Vile Thieving Bird's talon extended, poised to cleave Sunny and Saint apart in a single strike—
And a thunderous, resonant blast tore through the air as the bird was slammed into the ground, crushed beneath the Will of something far, far greater.