Almarine sat across the table from the only person in the realm that she both feared and respected. The man with multiple galaxies held within his irises waited patiently for her to speak, knowing that Almarine wouldn’t ever speak to him or claim the single favor he owed her without a truly magnificent reason.

“How is Winter?” asked Carter Omni simply. The pair sat at a table. A table holding a single cup full of tea, made of glass refined from sunlight, with a white hole spiraling at its center, powerful enough to end entire realms with its mere existence.

“He is fine. Hoping that my involvement with you, temporary or longterm, won’t end in my death or more likely the destruction of our realm,” said Almarine with the wave of her hand. The gesture summoning her own mug of steaming coffee onto the table worth more than their entire realm layer. The room they conversed within was as large as a planet, and held celestial bodies condensed down to the size of dinner plates, floating in patterns that mimicked the gravitational flows experienced throughout creation.

“Why ever would you expect such a drastic result from me, my beloved sister?” Almarine had to force herself not to glance toward the series of planets that drifted past her face that she knew most likely held trillions of lives, captured by her brother, not to bolster his ego, or inflate his ever-growing power base, but for mere entertainment.

“I don’t know, Carter, maybe because the last time we spoke you were in the middle of drinking the souls of captured gods, and using the energy gained to refine your bones under the strain of a blackhole, or maybe because you actually managed to kill the last heir to the mantle of Father Nature, or maybe—“ Carter raised his hand, and Almarine focused on keeping eye contact, even while one of the many captured galaxies within the rooms bounced planets off of her cheeks in its rotation through the room. She couldn’t look away from her brother no matter what, knowing her life was truly at risk every moment she spent in the company of the killer of gods and eternal forces that was her brother, Carter Omni.

“I see your point, but he should know I have no intention of harming you, my beloved sister. Without you, I’d truly be alone in this world, as I do not want to ascend any further, a sentiment I know that we both share.”

“We haven’t shared a thing since mortality, brother. Please don’t presume that you know a thing about me, and I won’t put on a performance either.”

“Hmm, well then, sister, tell me why you are here. I don’t have the...” started Carter, before he actively changed his wording mid-sentence at the sight of Almarine’s raised eyebrow.

“patience… for sitting around as you contemplate the value of interacting with me,” finished Carter. The words affected Almarine enough that she unintentionally let her gaze drift, before her diligent mind took in the environment and made her refocus in an instant.

“I am here to discuss your great-nephew,” offered Almarine to see if the man would react to her words in any way.

“Which one? At this point I have far too many of those to know whom you speak of, sister.”

“Arson.”

Carter grimaced and looked away. A reaction that Almarine didn’t expect in the slightest. The face made by her brother was enough to cause her own facial features to contort in alarm.

“So you do know he is of our lineage,” said Almarine, the words more statement than question. Carter nodded, still not looking in her direction.

“What has you so disgruntled, Carter? You look like your stomach is turning at the mention of the boy. Is there something I am missing here?”

Almarine knew there were very few things that bothered her younger brother. She may have been alive longer than the man, but he’d done far more as an immortal man than she’d ever accomplished as an immortal Cultivator, which was the root of her confusion.

What could make such a powerful man look so dismayed?

Almarine truly began to worry if she’d made a mistake by coming to see Carter. She needed her grandson’s momentum to slow, but not stopped entirely, and wondered if her brother may already have severe intentions for the young man.

“He is an Anomaly,” said Carter, and in that moment Almarine knew exactly why Carter was bothered. She bursted out into laughter and Carter frowned, his gaze darkening at her reaction to his admission.

An Anomaly was a figure cloaked by fate and the System itself. This meant that her brother’s powers of discernment and even his prophetic capabilities had no effect on the young man. A problem that had to this day allowed for their very own father to stay hidden from both of them since their own youth.

“You laugh, yet know how problematic they are to the realms. They make the impossible, possible, and destroy my numerous calculations by simply living and breathing. You act as if you haven’t had to fake your own death a handful of times to merely escape the potential interaction with our father,” stated Carter. Almarine stopped laughing with a nod, and cleared her throat, covering her mouth with a fist.

“I… see your point, but he isn’t our father, far from it, nor has he even showed the same potential as Arkanous,” said Almarine. A pain in her chest at the thought of her dead son. The very creator of the realm layers as they were in their current form was her son, and without his death, life as Cultivators knew it wouldn’t even exist.

“I’m sorry to say this sister but he does, he glimpsed a Uni-Vare as a child and though I thought it would kill the boy and my gift to him would be returned before he grew to manhood, it did not, and he’s even claimed my own ability as his own…”

Almarine’s frown deepened, and she knew her brother’s inability to look in her direction in that moment carried more weight than even she could recognize on the surface.

“What did you do, Carter…”

He finally looked back at her with a scoff. An intense staring competition began, and her worry for Arson gave her the strength to match her brother’s glare for the first time in eons, and after a long while Carter finally sighed and spoke once more.

“I was owed a favor by a god, a dying god, and as an experiment, I forced said god to give me a corrupted tribulation core, a tribulation core that I gave to Arson the day of his birth,” said Carter. Almarine’s brow furrowed, under the assumption that Carter’s previously mentioned gift was this corrupted core of a god, but didn’t see how that could fill her brother with the level of agitation he currently displayed.

“And… it's not as if the boy has the power to fix the core, or activate it in its uncompleted form, that’s not even all that powerful of a gift. Why would this make you act like you just ate rotten food?” Carter rolled his eyes and when he spoke again Almarine’s stomach dropped in a way that she didn’t even know her powerful body could react.

“Yes, he can, as the gift I gave him was not that core. I told you, he claimed an ability of mine…” Almarine’s eyes widened and her thoughts began to race wildly. Her hands gripping the table in front of her until the glass made from sunlight began to groan under the pressure and she stood slowly.

“What ability did he claim, Carter?” Carter merely shook his head and sighed at first. Slowly shaking his head at his sister.

“What ability did he claim?” Carter looked up at his older sister and spoke words she wished she’d never heard. Now knowing she was far more at risk of losing Arson than she ever had been before; the swirling of her gut intensifying with the might of a planet’s gravitational push and pull. A literal storm of worry forming inside the woman as the table she held cracked.

Then Carter spoke the words she feared more than any. A power formed from creation itself, a power that only matter manipulators could process and grow into, a power that may make Tempest’s want for Arson to become its conduit a true possibility.

“You couldn’t have, you wouldn’t give just anyone a prime ability. The primordial cloak of light and knowledge would have killed him…” started Almarine, bellowing with volatile anger, until more of her brother’s words floated through her mind, and she knew her plans to protect Arson may have already failed. The table in her grip shattering with an explosion that pushed the contents of the room to the boundaries, countless existences blown aside as if caught in a powerful breeze; the two Ancients unaffected by the might of an unleashed white hole's power.

“He’s already a Godling…”

…

Arson knew he was being followed, yet he couldn’t stop his mad dash to Alister Industries. He did his best to lose his pursuer, but for whatever reason found the feat far harder than he believed it should have been.

Darting through open doors of businesses, rushing through the multiple floored buildings and jumping from open windows to drop onto adjacent rooftops. Cutting through alleyways, and even jumping or swimming across the flowing canals of Maelstrom. Not even the use of the various portals left open for train and flying tram transit systems didn’t work.

Man, this girl is dedicated…

“You're putting yourself in danger by following me, Chozen, and I don’t know that I can protect you from what I am about to rush into,” roared Arson still in a dead sprint.

“You owe me answers, and if you die, I don’t get them,” yelled the young woman chasing after him.

“Well, don’t blame me if you die,” yelled Arson with a roll of his eyes. He took off his tabard as he ran, snatching a simple red shirt from a clothing line while still in the slums of the bronze sector, luckily for him it fit.

“What in the sparks are we doing?” Arson ignored the young woman, and continued to disguise himself. Anastasia cursing at him when he took off his watch and pocketed it. Just before he took off his new name brand shoes, pulling sandals from his spacial inventory with a tap of his pocket, hopping to put them on while continuing to run.

Just as they made it into the Silver Sector, they rushed toward a group of young adults shopping in a market, and Arson burst into the group, pulling a mana stone from his pocket. A young man’s eyes widened as Arson popped the expensive item into his mouth after his jaw dropped open in shock, and before he knew it Arson has stripped him of his all white jacket and rushed off.

“Sorry,” yelled Chozen back at the group that now celebrated at receiving something far more valuable than the jacket Arson had stolen.

“What in the sparks are you doing, dude? Are you always this crazy?”

Arson chuckled and pulled a black hood from thin air over his long hair; the cowl submerging his entire face in rippling shadow and a familiar spiral of stars like the night sky spun into existence across his face.

“I don’t know what you are doing, but I am going to help a friend. You are a princess of a foreign nation so I advise you to figure out a way to cover that rather pretty face of yours, if you are going to keep following me before you cause an inter-realm incident!” Arson’s now deeper and near demonic voice still managed to cause the princess to blush, but she still heeded his warning, pulling a simple white mask from her own spacial inventory and dawning it quickly.

“Done. Now could you at least tell me what we are doing?”

In the very next moment Alister Industries came into view in the distance and a depiction of devastation was revealed to both the young adults. Arson glanced back at her and chuckled once more.

“Kicking a mana beehive!”

…

Bernard was beginning to believe that his climb up the social status of the Ruler Rankings wasn’t going to be nearly as easy as his older sister once made it look. Where he’d once thought the demon masked raider that shared his core type was a boon, he quickly realized he was wrong.

The individual was somehow able to suppress his crows, pulling many of the creatures back into their own shadow, which meant the raider had more of an affinity for the element than even Bernard did.

His second attack on Alister Kim was far more successful as the raider couldn’t completely control all of Bernard’s numerous summons, yet any area the raider traveled through was cleansed of Bernard’s plague in a breath.

Bernard’s eyes went wide at the sight of the skill he’d only ever heard of, as the raider’s colossal shadow consumed hundreds of crows with the sweep of its massive arms. The titanic shadow washing away the crows with every move it made, saving dozens of lives in moments.

Bernard had long ago become callous to killing after his sister was lost, but still felt pangs of regret flutter through his being at the sight of all the dead and dying his attack had already left behind.

Yet he knew what was at stake, and felt he couldn’t stop. No matter what happened to his soul through the process, he couldn’t let what happened to his sister happen again. Never again.

The cycle of creation was far more complicated than even he understood with his vast experience, but the knowledge he was missing, was enough for him to make decisions he felt were for the grander good, even as he mercilessly killed those in his way.

Never again would he watch an innocent life sacrifice themselves to keep the corrupt structure controlled by gods and their imperfect System alive. Even if he had to watch every mortal existence used to prop them up, burn to cinders and ash.

He needed a new plan. He needed allies, and as he watched the raider, he knew he needed to grow far stronger than he was now, or ever had been before.

The only place he knew that would bring him the power he felt he needed, was the tower of the Ancients, left behind by the lost Godlings of Ikarus. The same tower that made his sister the closest thing to an Ancient that Bernard had ever seen beside his very own parents. And although he knew he’d been abandoned by his bloodline and the rest of the Archons, he was now a Maelstrom, and all would know the might that his sister left behind.

He once more took to the skies as a flock of crows. Seeking out the place he’d exited, kept in a near eternal slumber, to once more walk the path toward godhood that all immortal Cultivators sought after.

By the will of all ends, I will break my chains and end the cycle…