He did not look at the beast. He did not gesture. He simply gave the first command.
Unmake.
The Beast of Entropy did not lunge. It simply leaned forward, pressing its formless presence against the pulsating, fleshy wall of the stomach. Where it touched, reality ceased. There was no explosion, no tear, no sound of rending tissue. A perfect, silent circle of the leviathan's gut simply vanished, erased from existence as if it had never been.
Where there had been oppressive, organic darkness, a scene of apocalyptic chaos was revealed.
They were high above a churning, midnight ocean. A storm of impossible scale raged, but it was dwarfed by the war being waged within it. The three Archons moved with tectonic slowness, their forms creating tsunamis with every shift.
The sky was a kaleidoscope of violent light as hundreds of Codex users, the full force of the Rapax Morsatra Institute, unleashed their power. Siege platforms floated on raging waves, their massive sigils flaring. Aetherion-fueled artillery streaked through the air, detonating against scales the size of continents. It was the full, desperate might of a civilization fighting for its life against primordial gods.
And the moment the hole appeared in the largest Archon's side, the moment Nulls and his silent beast were revealed standing in the wound, every single one of them stopped.
The symphony of destruction faltered. The leviathans stilled. Hundreds of heads, human and otherwise, turned. Every eye, every sensor, every psychic sense locked onto the two figures standing unscathed in the gut of their greatest enemy.
It was Skylar, stepping forward to shout a warning, to scream for a stand-down, who moved first. Her movement broke the spell.
A single, unified thought seemed to pass through the entire battlefield, friend and foe alike: New variable. Threat.
And they attacked.
It was not coordinated. It was instinctual, a tidal wave of pure, simultaneous aggression. A storm of spatial blades from Institute snipers. Lances of solidified lightning from aerial mages. A psychic shriek from a lesser Morbus. And from the Archon itself, a whip-like tendril of chitin, moving to scissor the irritant from its flank. Every force on the battlefield, save for Skylar, turned their fury on Nulls.
His smile widened, becoming a thing of pure, unadulterated joy.
"Perfect," he whispered.
He gave the second command.
Blind.
The Beast of Entropy did not attack the bodies below. It did not counter the spells. It turned its annihilating gaze upon a different plane entirely, the plane of consciousness.
A wave of absolute nothingness pulsed outwards from the beast, a silent, expanding sphere of void that touched everything within a two-thousand-meter radius. It was not a physical force. It was a conciousness erasure.
The effect was instantaneous and total.
A sniper mid-pull of her trigger felt her sense of self simply… switch off. Her body went limp, tumbling from her perch into the raging sea below. An aerial mage, his lightning lance half-formed, became a marionette with its strings cut, his flight spell sputtering out as he plummeted. The lesser Morbus's shriek died in its mind before it could leave its throat, its body going inert and sinking beneath the waves.
Across the battlefield, hundreds of Rapax Morsatra personnel collapsed where they stood, falling into the ocean below. The three Archons, whose ancient, hungry consciousnesses were vast beyond measure, did not fall. But their single, cyclopean eyes glazed over. The terrifying intelligence within them was severed from their forms. They became nothing more than mountains of drifting, unthinking flesh, their world-ending spells dying unborn.
On the floating debris beside Nulls, Skylar met his eyes for a split second, her expression one of horrified betrayal. Then the wave touched her. Her platinum glow vanished. Her eyes rolled back, and her body folded gracefully, slumping into an unconscious heap at his feet.
In the space of a single, silent heartbeat, the apocalypse was put on hold. The only sounds were the wind, the rain, and the sloshing of the ocean against dormant titans. The sky was clear of hostile magic. The battlefield was a graveyard of sleeping combatants.
Nulls stood amidst the sudden, profound silence, the storm whipping at his hair and clothes. He looked out over the scene, the floating bodies, the drifting leviathans, the unconscious woman at his feet.
He nudged Skylar's limp form with his foot, a casual, checking gesture.
"Two hours," he said aloud to the sleeping world, his voice almost friendly. "That should be more than enough time to fix this mess."
The silence after the psychic blast was profound, broken only by the wind and the churn of the sea. The Rapax Morsatra's main battle cruiser, a hulking fortress of steel and etched sigils, listed gently in the water, its crew slumped over consoles and railings. All around it, the ocean was a grim tapestry of floating bodies and dormant Codexes.
Nulls stood on his piece of debris, the Beast of Entropy. Marky, a silent, shifting void beside him. The logistical problem before him was, in its own way, more tedious than any cosmic battle.
"Marky," he said, his voice cutting through the wind. "A restrictor. On your primary manipulator. Something gentle."
The beast seemed to condense, a tendril of its form solidifying into a smooth, obsidian claw, its edges softened as if polished by eons of non-existence.
"Carry her," Nulls commanded, nodding towards Skylar's unconscious form. "To that ship. Do not damage her."
The claw, impossibly careful, slid under Skylar, lifting her with the reverence one might afford a relic. It then moved with a silent, gliding motion across the water, depositing her safely on the cruiser's rain-slicked deck before returning to its master's side.
Nulls took a deep breath, the salt spray stinging his face. Then he dove into the cold, dark water.
The next hour and a half was a study in monotonous, grueling labor. He was a cosmic engine reduced to a salvage crew. He swam from one floating body to the next, grabbing a uniform collar or an arm, and began the arduous tow back to the cruiser.
Each trip was a battle against the waves, the dead weight of the body, and the growing ache in his own mortal-adjacent muscles. He would heave them onto the lower deck access ramp, a tangled pile of sleeping soldiers, then go back for the next.
Halfway through, a sleek, predatory sea creature, drawn by the scent of so many vulnerable beings, shot from the depths, its maw a tunnel of needle-teeth. Nulls didn't even break his stroke. A flick of his wrist and a shard of solidified air, a crude, White-level application of raw force, shot into its brain. It convulsed and sank, a minor inconvenience disposed of with quiet efficiency.
As he hauled another limp form, a flicker of something unfamiliar pricked at his mind. It was a tight, sour feeling in his chest. Guilt. He was using his power, his Nexus, for this… manual labor. Yog would have been apoplectic.
Yog? he thought, casting the name into the silent psychic space they shared.
Nothing.
Yog? he tried again, more insistently, treading water beside a floating lieutenant.
Only the howl of the wind and the slap of waves answered.
Yog! A third, mental shout, edged with a frustration he rarely allowed himself. Still, nothing. The silence from his Codex was absolute, a void more profound than the one Marky represented. He gave up, the unfamiliar guilt curdling into a cold, hard lump of isolation.
He swam on, his mind now a torrent of self-recrimination.
This is inefficient. This is pathetic. I could have summoned Eros. I could have compressed this entire ninety-minute ordeal into a single second. A flicker of accelerated time, and every last one of them would be neatly arranged on the deck. Why didn't I think of that?
Finally, the last body was dragged aboard. He floated in the water, chest heaving, looking up at the mountain of unconscious personnel he had so painstakingly collected. He pulled himself onto the cruiser's deck, water streaming from his simple clothes, and collapsed for a moment beside the pile, his energy reserves, both physical and mystical, scraping the bottom.
But there was one last task. He stood, walking to the rail and looking out at the three mountain-sized Archons, drifting mindlessly like icebergs.
"Marky," he said, his voice hoarse. "Gather them. All three."
The Beast of Entropy expanded, its form becoming a vast, dark net of un-being. It enveloped the nearest leviathan, then the next, and the next, its impossible strength exerting a force that began to drag the colossal beings through the water, away from the battlefield.
Nulls focused, pouring the last dregs of his Nexus energy into the beast. He felt a profound emptiness open up within him, a cold, hollow sensation he hadn't felt since his rebirth. He was dry.
"Once you are ten thousand kilometers from my position," he commanded, his voice a weak rasp against the elements, "cease to be. Detonate."
The beast, now a distant, continent-sized shadow towing three gods, acknowledged the final command and continued its silent journey into the stormy horizon.
Nulls turned, walking unsteadily to the cruiser's upper deck. He found Skylar where Marky had left her. He sat down heavily beside her, his back against a cold gun turret, and let his legs dangle over the ship's edge, his feet hovering above the dark, churning water.
He didn't have to wait long. A pinpoint of absolute black appeared on the far horizon, a silent star of negation. It expanded for a single, soundless instant, a perfect sphere of un-creation that consumed the three leviathans, the Beast of Entropy, and a vast swath of the ocean. There was no flash, no boom. It was a hole punched in the world, which then sealed itself, leaving behind only a perfectly calm, circular sea.
The leviathans were gone. The beast was gone. His power was gone.
Nulls sat in the sudden, true silence, the only conscious being on a ship of sleepers, adrift on a placid sea under a clearing sky. He was utterly, completely vulnerable. And he had never felt more exposed.
Thirty minutes passed with the slow, inexorable crawl of a dying star. Nulls remained on the deck, his back against the cold steel of the gun turret, Skylar's unconscious form beside him.
He watched the sky clear, the storm clouds dissipating as if the very weather had been pacified along with the combatants. The only sound was the gentle lap of waves against the hull of the silent, drifting cruiser.
He felt the exact moment the effect wore off. It was not a sound, but a shift in the quality of the silence. A low groan from the pile of bodies, the scuff of a boot on deck plating, a sharp, startled intake of breath.
Then, the screaming started.
It was a brief, professional kind of panic. Shouts of "What happened?" and "Report!" echoed across the deck. Orders were barked. In less than a minute, the highly trained personnel of the Rapax Morsatra Institute had shaken off their disorientation and assessed the situation. Their enemies, the Leviathans, were gone. Their ships were intact. And sitting calmly among them was the Apex-class entity.
Every eye locked onto him. Weapons were leveled, not with the wild fury of the battlefield, but with the cold, precise intent of a containment squad.
Nulls didn't move. He offered them a weary, congenial smile. "Good morning. I trust you all slept well?"
They did not respond with words. A squad in heavier armor, their uniforms marked with containment sigils, advanced. One of them held a familiar bundle of thick, grey canvas. Another carried a set of heavy, rune-etched manacles, Argus-class restraints.
"Ah," Nulls said, his smile not faltering. "A reunion."
He didn't resist. There was no point. He was a hollow shell, his Nexus reserves utterly spent. He let them roughly pull him to his feet. He cooperated as they forced his arms into the stiff, confining straitjacket, the coarse material a bitterly familiar sensation against his skin.
The heavy manacles were clamped around his wrists and ankles, their internal sigils flaring to life with a dull, orange glow, sending a wave of profound heaviness through his limbs, a magical gravity that sought to pin not just his body, but his very will.
He was marched at Codex-point through the ship's corridors, the crew parting before him with a mixture of terror and hatred. They led him to a featureless room deep within the cruiser's hull. The walls, floor, and ceiling were forged from a single, seamless sheet of dull, Argus-class steel, etched from corner to corner with intricate suppression runes that hummed with a low, oppressive frequency. The door sealed behind him with a final, resonant thud that sounded like a tomb closing.
He was alone. In the silence. In the dark.
And then, he wasn't.
With a soft, almost apologetic shimmer, his Codex materialized on the floor beside him. The scarred leather cover was a stark, organic contrast to the sterile, magical steel of the room. It had followed him. Yog, or whatever consciousness resided within the book, had refused to be separated.
Nulls looked down at it, then let his head fall back against the cold wall with a soft thud. The straitjacket creaked with the movement.
He let out a long, slow breath, the sound loud in the absolute quiet. A wry, genuine smile touched his lips.
"Well," he said aloud, his voice conversational in the oppressive stillness. "This is a very unwelcoming way to welcome a new personnel."
Time lost all meaning within the Argus-steel room. There was only the hum of the suppression runes and the faint scent of ozone from his own Codex. Nulls had settled into a state of patient stillness, his mind a calm lake despite the magical chains weighing him down.
The air in the center of the room shivered, not with a tear, but with a smooth, localized re-weaving of space. The platinum glow was subdued, strained, but Skylar materialized within it, her boots making no sound on the seamless floor. She looked tired, her face pale, the memory of broken ribs likely a fresh ghost in her mind. Her expression was a mask of official duty, but her eyes held a storm of conflict.
Nulls looked up, his head still resting against the wall. The wry smile returned to his lips.
"Is this how you Rapax treat new members?" he asked, his voice light and conversational, as if they were meeting in a cafeteria. "The orientation package is… restrictive."
Skylar's jaw tightened. "You are not a member. You are a classified asset. A contained threat."
"Semantics," he dismissed with a slight shift of his shoulders, the straitjacket rustling. "Let's review the terms of our agreement, shall we? As I recall, the deal was thus: I would demonstrate my utility by subjugating the leviathan threat. In return, you would facilitate my introduction to your leadership and vouch for the mutual benefit of my inclusion."
He tilted his head, his gaze sharpening, the friendly tone acquiring a blade's edge. "I have held up my end, Skylar. The three Archons that were poised to grind your Institute into paste are now subatomic particles drifting in a vacuum. The battlefield is clear. Your people are alive, albeit with a collective headache. I have delivered a victory so absolute your strategists probably don't have a classification for it."
He leaned forward as much as the restraints would allow, his voice dropping, not to a whisper, but to a tone of inescapable logic.
"Now," he said, "it is your turn to hold up yours. I have done the impossible for you. The least you can do is get me out of this… frankly, very uncomfortable jacket."
Skylar stood rigid, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. The official mask cracked, revealing the raw, weary soldier beneath.
"You expect a parade?" she shot back, her voice tight. "You expect to be given a uniform and a desk after what you did? You slaughtered my comrades on that mountain before I ever found you in the gut of that thing. You are a weapon of mass destruction that temporarily pointed itself at a bigger target. That doesn't make you an ally. It makes you a useful cataclysm."
She took a sharp step forward, her platinum aura flaring briefly, causing the suppression runes on the walls to glow brighter in response.
"You want me to hold up my end? This is me holding it up!" she gestured around the sterile, enchanted cell. "You're alive, aren't you? You're contained, not dissected. That was the guarantee I made. No harm would come to you in your vulnerable state. I never promised you a promotion."
Her eyes flickered to the Codex on the floor beside him, then back to his unnervingly calm face.
"You'll get your debriefing. You'll get your audience. But it will be from in here. They will speak to you through layers of security so thick you won't even feel their Aetherion. You are not a new recruit. You are a specimen. And if you ever want to see something other than these four walls, you will start acting like one."
She turned on her heel, the spatial energy around her beginning to gather for her departure. "Your 'fulfillment' of the deal has been noted. Now, you wait."
The air in the cell went cold.
The pleasant, conversational mask on Nulls's face shattered. It did not twist into a snarl; it simply emptied, becoming a smooth, terrifying blank slate. The friendly light in his eyes vanished, replaced by a flat, cosmic indifference that was infinitely more frightening than any rage.
"You misunderstand the fundamental nature of our arrangement, Skylar," he said, his voice low and devoid of all its previous warmth. It was the sound of stone grinding against stone.
He shifted, the straitjacket groaning in protest. "I am not a 'specimen' to be debriefed. I am not a 'weapon' to be stored. I am the architect of your continued existence. I offered you a partnership, and you respond with chains."
He leaned forward, his movement unnervingly fluid despite the heavy restraints. "You think this cell can hold me? You think your steel cube is anything more than a momentary inconvenience? My vulnerability was a strategic choice, not a permanent state. And my patience," he hissed, "is a finite resource you have just exhausted."
His eyes locked onto hers, and for a moment, she saw it, the abyss he contained, the eternity of hunger and calculation.
"You believe you are essential to my goals. You are not," he stated, the words absolute and final. "I do not need you. I need your voice. That husky, defiant cadence… it is the only part of you that has any value to me."
A horrific, serene smile touched his lips.
"So, here is the new deal. You will walk out of this room, you will go to your superiors, and you will fulfill your part of our original bargain. You will secure my proper introduction and integration. Not as a specimen. As a personnel."
The smile vanished. "If you do not, I will make this floating fortress a gallery of horrors that will haunt your species until its last, gasping breath. And I will start with you."
His gaze drifted to her throat.
"I will peel back the layers of this reality until I can rip the very memory of sound from your vocal cords. I will tear out your throat and use the bleeding tissue to mimic the voice of the one I loved all those ages ago. I do not need you alive for that. I only need the shape of your voice box. The rest of you is disposable."
He settled back against the wall, the terrifying intensity receding as quickly as it came, leaving only a chilling calm.
"The choice is yours, Skylar. Fulfill your promise and take me to your leaders as an equal. Or become the first note in an extinction, and I will find my way to them without you. But I assure you, you will not like my methods of introduction."
A strange sound broke the tense silence of the cell. A short, sharp, almost brittle laugh.
Skylar didn't flinch. She didn't step back. Instead, a mocking, weary smile touched her own lips. She crossed her arms, leaning her shoulder against the cold Argus-steel wall as if they were sharing a private joke.
"Are you finished?" she asked, her voice dripping with a sarcasm that was far more potent than fear. "Tear out my throat? Mimic a voice? Do you have any idea how pathetic that sounds?"
She shook her head, a strand of hair falling across her face. "You just spent the last of your power playing ferryman, hauling our unconscious bodies around like a common deckhand. You're sitting in the most potent suppression field we can forge, wrapped in a straitjacket, and you're threatening me?"
She pushed off the wall and took a single, deliberate step closer, her eyes narrowed. "You're not an architect right now. You're a prisoner. Your grand symphony of extinction? It starts with you trying to wiggle your fingers. Go on. Give the command. Summon your beast. Let's see what happens."
She gestured vaguely at the humming runes surrounding them. "This room was designed to contain things that think in supernovas. It eats concepts for breakfast. Your empty threats are just noise in here."
She paused, letting the silence emphasize her point. "You want to be treated as an equal? Then stop throwing a tantrum like a child who didn't get his way. You'll get your audience. On our terms. In our time. And it will happen a lot faster if you sit there quietly and remember which one of us is currently wearing the chains."
With a final, dismissive look, she turned her back on him, the spatial energy once again gathering around her. She was calling his bluff, and she was sticking around to make sure he knew it.
The cell did not grow cold. It became still, as if the air itself had died.
Nulls did not shout. The sound that came from him was a low, guttural vibration that seemed to originate from a place deeper than his lungs, a sound that had no place in a human throat. The friendly, analytical facade was not just gone; it was annihilated, revealing the raw, infinite hatred that was his true core.
"You arrogant maggots," he hissed, the words dripping with a contempt that spanned universes. "You think this cage changes anything? You think your little Institute is a power? You are a stain. A temporary, irritating fungus I have chosen to scrape from the cosmos because your extinction serves a purpose."
He leaned forward as much as the straitjacket would allow.
"Let me illustrate the alternative to our 'partnership'," he said, his voice chillingly precise.
He began to laugh, a soft, horrifying sound that held no humor, only the vast, yawning void of his patience finally snapping. His eyes, flat and ancient, pinned her to the spot.
"I will not simply kill your species. I will make death a cherished memory they will beg for. I will torture every man, woman, and child. And when the last one has finally, blessedly expired, I will reverse the flow of time with my beast. I will rewind them back to the moment of their birth, their memories intact, their souls scarred, and I will do it all over again. They will remember every cut, every burn, every moment of despair from the cycle before."
He leaned forward, the straitjacket straining, his voice dropping to a intimate, venomous whisper.
"I will personally slit your soldiers' throats, pull their tongues out through the wound, and gouge their eyes out in front of their families. I will not be quick."
His gaze swept around the room as if he could see through the steel to the thousands of personnel on the ship.
"I will engineer a pestilence that increases the human pain receptor's sensitivity a billion-fold. Your entire world will become a planet of nothing but scream. And because I am a generous god, I will make you all biologically immortal first. You will suffer for all eternity, and the entire human race will know it is the arrogance of the Rapax Morsatra that brought this upon them."
He was not even looking at her anymore, his eyes seeing a future he was meticulously designing.
"The Morbus... I will find their spawning grounds. I will not destroy them. I will unleash them upon your cities. I will ensure every human is consumed alive, and I will preserve their consciousness so they can scream in the digestive tracts of those beasts for a thousand years."
A truly manic light entered his eyes.
"I will force a cross-breeding. Your species with the Morbus. I do not care how grotesque the offspring. I only care that when that new, malformed species tears its way out of its human host, I will command it to repeat the cycle on the next generation."
He finally looked back at her, his expression one of pure, unadulterated loathing.
"I will strip intelligence from your kind. You will be incapable of reason, of hope, of anything but the base, animal instinct to suffer and scream. I will malform you into ten thousand different, pitiful species. You will be lowered to animals. Then to insects. Then to less."
He took a final, shuddering breath, the promise hanging in the air like a poison.
"And after the first second of eternity has passed," he whispered, "only then will humanity have atoned for one nanoangstrom of its sins."
Skylar did not flinch.
She stood there, a statue carved from duty and dread, as the cosmic hatred washed over her. She did not cry out. She did not plead. When his tirade ended, the silence that followed was broken only by the hum of the runes and the ragged edge of her own breath.
She had seen the truth in his eyes. This was not a bluff. The being before her was not a monster of myth; he was a function of reality, a natural law of suffering given sentience. Every word was a simple, factual statement of capability.
Slowly, deliberately, she knelt down in front of him, bringing her eyes level with his. Her face was pale, but her gaze was unwavering.
"I believe you," she said, her voice quiet but clear, devoid of fear, filled only with a terrible, resigned clarity. "Every word."
She swallowed hard, the sound audible in the stifling room. "And because I believe you, I will do everything in my power to ensure that meeting happens. Not to save you. Not to serve you. To save every man, woman, and child from the hell you just described."
She rose to her feet, looking down at him not with hatred, but with the grim focus of a surgeon preparing to operate on a bomb.
"The transport arrives in six hours," she stated, her tone all business. "I will be on it. I will personally escort you to the abyssal station zero and stand before the High Stratas. I will tell them what you did to the leviathans. And I will tell them, verbatim, what you just promised to do if they refuse you."
A flicker of something like pity touched her eyes. "You think your threats make you powerful. They just make you predictable. You've shown them the fire. My job is to make sure they understand that the only way to avoid being burned is to give the arsonist exactly what he wants."
She turned and walked towards the sealed door, pausing only once without looking back.
"Six hours," she repeated. "Try to get some rest."
The door hissed open and then sealed shut, leaving Nulls alone once more with the echo of his own damnation and the chilling certainty that, for the first time, someone had heard his ultimate threat and had not broken. They had simply added it to the ledger.
The cell was silent again, the hum of the runes the only sound. The threat was not a roar; it was a decree. And for the first time, Skylar truly understood that the chains and the steel were not containing a monster. They were merely decorating its cage.
The silence in the cell was absolute, broken only by the frantic, thunderous beat of his own heart against the straitjacket's canvas. Skylar's contemptuous dismissal echoed in his mind, more corrosive than any acid.
The rage was a nuclear fire with no outlet, turning inward, threatening to consume him. He was a god in a cage, his divine wrath met with a mortal's pity. He threw his consciousness inward, a desperate, furious scream in the vast, silent space he shared with his Codex.
YOG!
This time, the void answered. Not with a voice, but with a violent, sudden pull. His awareness was wrenched from the confines of the Argus-steel room and plunged into the Noosphere. It was a realm of pure information, a kaleidoscopic tapestry of swirling concepts, memories, and potentialities.
Before him, the form of Yog coalesced, not a humanoid or a monster, but a towering, intricate structure that resembled a living, breathing library of impossible geometry, its form constantly shifting between solidity and thought.
"I am here," Yog's voice resonated, not in his ears, but within the very fabric of his being. It was the voice of a weary, brilliant scholar, laced with a deep, ancient bitterness.
Nulls's psychic form trembled with residual fury. "They chained me like an animal. That woman… she tricked me. She dismissed my power as a tools for her organization." The words were a snarl of pure, undiluted humiliation.
A wave of what felt like profound, knowing disappointment emanated from Yog's form. "Of course they did. What did you expect? A banquet? You tried to reason with them. You showed them a sliver of civility, and they saw it as a lever to be exploited. I warned you. Their nature is a constant. They are parasites, building their fragile kingdoms on foundations of fear and arrogance."
"I offered them a partnership!" Nulls's thought was a blast of frustrated energy.
"And they responded as they always do: with chains and condescension. You are a force of nature trying to negotiate with the insects you intend to step on. It is a pointless endeavor. I have watched this cycle play out across millennia with my previous wielders. They crave power but are terrified of anything that truly possesses it."
Yog's tone was not one of 'I told you so' in a gloating sense, but with the grim resignation of a scientist watching a failed experiment unfold exactly as predicted. "Your mistake was believing your intellect alone could override their fundamental biology: the instinct to dominate or destroy what they cannot comprehend."
The truth of it was a cold splash of water. The rage began to cool, hardening into a sharper, more focused resolve. "My Nexus reserves are depleted. I am powerless in that cell. How do I replenish them?"
Yog's form shifted, concepts of ritual and sacrifice flowing to the forefront. "The energy must be taken, as all things of value are. The ritual is simple, but the intent is everything. You must draw a pentagram. The medium is irrelevant, but the blood of a juvenile organism carries a potent, unspent potential. It is… efficient."
A schematic of the ritual imprinted itself on Nulls's consciousness.
"Place my Codex at the center. The sacrifice is placed upon it. Then, you must speak the keys to the lock. My honorifics. They are not mere titles. They are the coordinates of my existence within the Noosphere."
The names unfolded in his mind with the weight of cosmic truths:
"The Lurker beyond the Threshold."
"The Tome and the Knowledge."
"The Noosphere Monarch."
"The Calamity of Oneiros."
"The ritual will filter the latent potential of the sacrifice into pure Nexus, channeling it through me and into you," Yog explained, his tone clinical, yet beneath it ran a current of shared anticipation. "It is the only way. Their world does not give energy freely. It must be claimed."
There was a moment of profound understanding between them, a meeting of two vast intellects in mutual contempt for the lesser beings that surrounded them.
"I promise, I will not make the same mistake again," Nulls stated, his resolve solidifying into something cold and unbreakable.
Yog sighed. "Same word. Different people." Yog replied, the scholar's patience returning.
The Noosphere dissolved, and Nulls's awareness slammed back into his body, into the stiff canvas and the humming steel. But he was no longer a prisoner raging against his cage.
He was an engineer who had just been handed the blueprint for his escape. His eyes, calm and terrifyingly focused, scanned the sterile floor of his cell. He just needed a medium. And a sacrifice.