"Explain."

The servant obeyed, each word carefully enunciated:

"The entity, codename: Dark Star, has been traveling through adjacent universes. Hunting. Killing."

"What we initially recorded as isolated phenomena, universes collapsing without cause, sovereign-level beings vanishing without conflict, was, in truth, a pattern."

"It was an intelligence failure."

"We failed to analyze his motives. We failed to treat it as a threat."

"The entity had been harvesting souls, Quasi-Transcendents, Immortal-class beings, one after another. He stored them like weapons. Not sealed. Not honored. Just… waiting."

"And then, he used a sliver of his own divinity to destabilize the very structure of their fragments. Not destruction. Collapse. Chain-triggered implosions, one feeding the next."

"A single one could erase a city. But according to our intel..."

The servant hesitated, as if saying the number out loud might summon them again.

"He had thousands."

"...And today, My Lord..."

"...he unleashed them."

The orb shimmered.

A new vision appeared.

The mist rolling over a devastated battlefield.

Then, blinding flashes, chain explosions, massive soul flares erupting like the heavens themselves had detonated.

"He used… the souls..."

A pause.

The Great Lord's porcelain mask flickered.

The orb showed it:

The moment a Quasi-Transcendent level being soul shards ruptured.

Each fragment, a sovereign will, exploded.

And the divine chain reaction began.

When a soul reaches immortality or higher, every fragment becomes semi autonomous, held together only by divine bindings.

Destabilize one?

It sings.

Destabilize all?

It screams.

The scream reached across planes.

The explosion obliterated the first Transcendent-class entity caught in its radius, body, soul, and divinity ruptured.

In his final moment of implosion, the dying Transcendent fed the explosion further, creating a divine cascade event.

The second Transcendent had no time to flee.

Nor did the land beneath them.

The orb zoomed out.

And revealed the true extent.

A scar of fire and ruin now replaced what was once a third of the Faction's realm, equivalent to the total surface area of an entire mature universe.

Gone.

The servant dared to lift his head slightly.

"Our Lord… we believe this was not a miscalculation."

"It was strategy."

"He let himself be summoned."

"And he brought… everything."

Silence again.

The Great Lord leaned back, folding his shadowed fingers.

"Send word to the Central Conclave."

"Begin preparation of the revival Protocol."

"And retrieve the shards of the fallen Transcendent Lords for revival trials."

He paused.

Then spoke darker.

"From this moment onward… it's a war!"

_____

One hour before...

Location: Edge of the Eastern Block, 27 seconds before detonation.

The ground beneath Wang Xiao was no longer stable

Not because of tremors.

But because space itself had stopped holding his form.

Dust floated upward.

The sky shimmered like torn silk.

Before him stood two Transcendents, veiled in stormlight and gravity-bending robes, taller than towers, each a walking force of law.

They didn't speak.

They were trying to analyze him.

To measure what he was.

To figure out why everything they knew about balance was… wrong.

Wang Xiao stood calmly in the crater, hair drifting behind him.

In his hand, a glassy sphere, glowing with red lightning.

Inside it, fragments of Maliketh's soul. Once a tyrant, a devourer of civilizations.

Now, a trembling prisoner, shredded, sealed, contained.

"You screamed a lot when I trapped you," Wang Xiao murmured, softly.

"But in the end, Maliketh, you made a better weapon than a ruler."

The sphere cracked, just slightly.

Maliketh's fractured voice echoed faintly within:

"Y-You... won't survive this either…"

Wang Xiao smiled. "We would see."

And he let go.

The soul fragments shattered.

The explosion began inward, ripping through the soul's own bindings, triggering each piece like a lined charge.

Every soul fragment responded with blind panic, rupturing in a cascade.

Maliketh screamed.

It wasn't rage.

It was betrayal.

Final, total betrayal.

And as his soul ignited, Wang Xiao stepped back and whispered, "This is for that day..."

Light.

Not golden... Not divine.

But raw white, the kind that burns out names and rewrites memory.

The first Transcendent was obliterated instantly.

No fight.

No drama.

Just a flash.

The second tried to flee, teleporting between time layers.

But the expanding divine energy caught him.

Shattered his teleport stream.

Ripped apart the coordinates of his existence.

The explosion that followed…

Was not nuclear.

Not magical.

It was Divine.

Wang Xiao stood in the heart of the aftermath.

The soulburst crater still glowed behind him, glass plains stretching for miles, lined in a spiral pattern scorched into the very bone of the Netherworld.

He walked through it, his silhouette sharp against a world reduced to dust and memory.

His soul had endured.

Not by strength.

But by preparation.

It had been years in the making.

Thousands of auxiliary souls, pre-fused, reinforced, crystallized inside him like anchors, held his essence steady.

Not even he remembered how many.

But none of that concerned him now.

His mind wandered, not to the dead, but to what made all this possible.

What is a single soul frgament?

A strange thing.

Wang Xiao had always believed anything could be converted into anything.

And he wasn't wrong.

But there were rules.

A soul fragment… isn't just energy.

It's a specific structure.

A labyrinth bound by cohesion beyond physics.

You can burn a body.

You can shatter a mountain.

But you cannot force a soul fragment into becoming something else, you can't alter it's structure, only reinforce it.

Not directly.

You cannot turn fire into a soul. First seen on MV4LEMP|YR.

Nor a soul into fire.

Not because they are different.

But because their bindings are.

Soul fragments are cohesive.

They resist disassembly.

To convert them, one must first break them unmake their bond.

That's the secret.

Not power.

Not will.

Understanding the glue.

Any Immortal-level beings specializing in fire can control fire.

They command it... Shape it.

But they are still coercing it.

Fire answers them out of force.

A Transcendent, if truly aligned with fire, becomes fire.

The element recognizes him as kin.

It obeys not by command, but by instinct.

He is no longer outside it.

He is it.

This is what separates Transcendents from Immortals.

Immortals push the world.

Transcendents rewrite it, and become a part of it.

Wang Xiao had tested this boundary.

He could lend Immortal-tier strength to his daughters when necessary.

But not beyond.

Because transcendence wasn't transferable.

Not unless he had absolute control over their soul structure, and perfect understanding of what he wanted to turn them into.

For Wang Xiao, when he invoked his transcendental form, his soul would begin to melt, not in destruction, but in metamorphosis.

It reshaped.

The structure unraveled.

And when it reformed, it mimicked dark matter, something no other dark matter element could defy.

Dark matter alone held no individuality.

No will.

Only gravity... Presence.

But Wang Xiao's soul after metamorphosis… had both.

He had become something… unnatural.

Not dark matter.

Not soul.

But a quasi-dark matter, bearing the cohesion of the former, and the will of the latter.

A paradox that should not exist.

And yet, he did.

There is a rule etched deep into existence itself:

The strong rule the weak.

Not just in men or beasts, but in elements, particles, laws.

The superior consumes.

The lesser obey.

And so, as Wang Xiao's essence bled into the void, a will-bearing shadow among mindless matter, the dark matter around him yielded.

Not by force.

But by instinct.

He had become their center, their origin, their hive-mind.

Thier... God.

Something colder.

Something real.

Because in that state, he wasn't just a being of power.

He became a center of reality.

But there was a problem.

He could reshape matter into dark matter, yes.

But only soul carried will.

And converting soul fragments was different.

Dangerous.

To convert a soul fragment, he needed to break its bonds.

And what binds a soul fragment into it's current structure?

Not chains... Not logic.

But Divinity.