"He hissed!" Wiz whispered—his voice audible only to Yash. "Is that human?"
"Crazy human, maybe. It shouldn't be a trait among regular folks." Yash scratched his chin, sifting through countless species of life and their proximity to Zack. "Although he did qualify as a Broken-Soul."
"I'm resetting—"
"—No, don't. Let's think this through."
"Yeah… thinking is definitely not one of our strong suits." Wiz frowned. "On the other hand…" He lifted his wrist, ready to snap.
"NO!" Yash yelled. "I've figured it out."
He severed the snake tattoo's connection to Zack, instantly reducing the reptilian traits. "Done."
"For now," Wiz snorted. "We always end up like this, or in some equally stupid situation." He nodded at his snapping fingers. "More you than me."
Yash wanted to retaliate — desperately wanted to retaliate; If only he could wipe Wiz's memories the way he wiped any normal god's.
Zack hovered closer, interrupting the two bickering gods. "Do either of you know a Lancy?"
"Lancy!" Wiz instantly aborted the snap and clamped a hand over his mouth, forcing down the kind of laughter that could wipe out continents.
"Here." Yash handed Wiz a plastic bag, as if it were their standard procedure. "Try not to overdo it this time."
The mysterious yet perfectly ordinary-looking polythene bag absorbed Wiz's suppressed laughter; It whisked his laugh far beyond the known universe, where his "harmless" amusement casually created and obliterated solar systems.
"You know you can laugh like a normal mortal, right?" Yash demonstrated a painfully awkward smile.
"A laugh is like a fart—force it, and it's—"
"—Yeah, yeah!" Yash snapped, rolling his eyes. He looked at Zack. "Can you believe this guy?"
"I can't believe either of you," Zack scoffed. "Actually—scratch that. I can't believe this entire ridiculous soul system."
"We are gods doing godly stuff," Wiz shrugged, glancing at Yash, who nodded solemnly. "What's so complicated?"
"Which is…?" Zack pressed.
"If you haven't gotten it yet, you never will." Wiz lost interest in Zack. "I should've known he was a dud when you said he was special." He jabbed a finger at Yash. "Everyone's special in your eyes." He pointed toward Dozy, who was approaching Quazy—yet another of Yash's acclaimed geniuses. "I honestly don't get how you keep yourself entertained."
"And that's what you don't get." Yash snickered, raising his hand toward Zack for a high-five.
Zack drifted back, letting the high-five linger. "Maybe you should explain what it is that he and I supposedly don't understand."
"You don't understand how simple it is," Yash said. "And he's in the same boat. Metaphorically speaking."
"Enlighten me anyway."
"Oh, I've been doing that since your people first walked the Earth." Yash turned his gaze toward a distant tree, about four hundred miles away. "Only the Trees have bothered listening, and I'm glad to see them getting what they asked for—"
"—To cut the monologue and restricted-knowledge nonsense short," Wiz interrupted, glaring at Yash hard enough to shut him up, "you're simply not broken enough."
"In simple words," Zack said, nodding as if he'd solved the universe, "neither of you is clever enough to explain the grand scheme in simple terms."
Zack's taunt successfully provoked both gods, as Yash and Wiz exchanged a long look before Yash finally revealed the ultimate truth.
"Cause," Yash said with a nonchalant shrug.
"Your folk actually got it right the first time," Wiz added with a matching shrug. "This is all just a happy coincidence. Mind-boggling to a limited mind, sure, but still nowhere near our actual standards."
"Why—" Zack searched desperately for the right words. "—Even bother!?"
"We aren't." Wiz frowned, insulted by the implication.
"I do!" Yash raised his hand enthusiastically.
"Yeah," Wiz rolled his eyes. "Because this—" he pointed at Yash "—is his happy little accident."
"I'm sorry — what was that again?" Zack blurted out.
"He's the default god of our universe," Lux said, still kneeling. "Solgrave's boss. Our big boss."
"Our universe's big boss," Pinky added.
"The holy scriptures were basically a Broken-Soul's rant," Psycho cackled through their link. "Sure, Boss created all of us… Well, our ancestors. But the rest is hilariously misinterpreted."
"Wait the fuck up!" Zack's frantic urge to slow things down bled into his Sub-Space, causing the entire reality around him to crawl like thick syrup.
"Nope!" Yash and Wiz sliced through the area at the same time and commanded, "Fold—"
—And realities folded over each other like pages in an infinite book.
"That's one too many folds," Yash frowned at Wiz. "I thought you didn't care."
"This is the least bored I've been in eons," Wiz admitted, sniffing at the warped air, "so I'm not letting your little pastime project collapse. At least not in his hands."
"How noble of you," Yash chuckled.
"Is this some kind of joke to you?" Zack yelled at the carefree duo.
Meeting our saviour J, or in this instance, meeting J's father so casually, twisted Zack's understanding of reality into knots. If he hadn't been broken before, he certainly was now. Humans weren't the first to latch onto consciousness—not even close. They were just some Broken-Soul's pastime; A spark of amusement born out of boredom.
"Why even bother!?" Zack spun through every plausible dimension of thought, circling back to the doubt he began with.
"Cause," Wiz repeated with the same shrug, sending a jolt of déjà vu through Zack's spine. "Godhood isn't all it's hyped up to be. You've touched infinity and seen its potential. So tell me…" He drifted forward and made his voice heavier. "What does a being that has everything actually desire?"
Zack froze. Not physically, but mentally. The question was too large even to entertain.
Yash stepped closer and placed a hand on Zack's shoulder.
Zack expected the crushing weight of a god's touch — expected to buckle under the pressure of existence itself. Instead, he felt strengthened as if he could tackle any problem. As if he could carry the weight of the universe on his weak, indecisive shoulders.
"When everything can be snapped away," Yash said, snapping his fingers and reintroducing Zack to the endlessness of infinity, "then the death of 'thrill' is the only ending. He waved his hand, and every living creature flickered past them in the void. "It took me six days to figure out heaven and build Thrill for life… For a Broken-Soul to find purpose." He showed Zack a glimpse of the soul realm, teeming with gods. "For Sani to be more than raw power." He chuckled, glancing toward a colossal castle door guarding an entire planet. "To cure boredom."
Visions cascaded through the void: a couple celebrating the spark of new life, a family of four orbiting each other in familiar chaos,
friends drawn together until they became a constellation of their own, and an old couple holding hands as they watched their final sunset bleed across the horizon of time.
"Thrill, hope, desire, fulfillment," Yash narrated in a soft, prideful tone.
They hovered over Earth as it spun from day to night, the continents igniting in threads of golden light as humanity pushed back the shadows.
"Heaven," Yash declared, spreading his arms wide, a proud smile radiating from him.
"You forgot suffering… hate… resentment… fate," Zack whispered, his gaze darkening as he traced the fractures of human misfortune. "Why not—" the question died unspoken, smothered by the sight of Yash's celestial glow dimming, as if the universe itself winced.
"Balance," Yash said in a harsh, almost defeated tone. "Do you understand the price you paid for power? For Sani?"
"Everything," Zack replied without hesitation. "What does that have—"
—Yash lifted a hand.
The void shuddered, then flickered, rewinding itself into a memory.
Yash appeared younger, though Zack knew instantly the form was for narrative convenience; for Yash had never been human… He was energy given shape, choosing whatever face made the story easier to digest.
"Perceptive," Yash snickered, and the illusion dissolved into its truer, stranger state.
A flat rock floated in the pocket of Yash's robe, shielded from the soul realm's shifting moods. The "rock" was nothing more than vibrating packets of energy—pure concept wrapped in form. Yash had created it for amusement, then decorated it: adding texture, then color, then shape, and refining it into something beautiful, simply because he could.
His fellow entities admired it for a fleeting moment… until the trick was exposed, and they began crafting their own constructs—imitations born from boredom, curiosity, and ego.
Sani helped build and destroy millions of concepts, until one big-bang of an idea propelled Yash toward creating a garden Zack knew all too well.
Experiments A and E lived in harmony there, in the kind of paradise humans would later mistake for heaven. Yash watched his creation go about its clumsy, mundane, predictable routines… routines that only deepened his boredom.
Eons passed before Yash conceived a new idea: reproduction.
His own kind popped into existence whenever enough energy gained consciousness. But Yash wanted something better. Something less mechanical, less monotonous. So he cracked open his muse and designed a pleasure-filled reproductive system.
But godhood didn't guarantee perfection, and his first attempt was a failure; a soulless heap of unmoving flesh with no meaning.
Yash didn't know how to create a soul. Not truly. Not until the miracle took place:
A fellow god's unraveling delirium broke his will, allowing Sani to consume what it had lost.
Sani's violent reclamation of its own essence sent tremors through the soul realm, pulling in wandering concepts; unrelated, untouched, foreign. Those fragments wove themselves into the child, gifting him the spark of being — a soul.
Yash never learned how it worked. Even now, he can only name it a miracle. For all his power, every creation of his is a fortunate accident — miracles that defy even the logic of gods.
Yash was flushed, his boredom washed away, replaced by something foreign… an emotion he decided to name Thrill.
He shared that emotion with his fellow gods, who ran it through themselves again and again, creating slight variations—tweaks, distortions, new expressions of the feeling. And in the span of a snap, they exhausted every plausible version, falling back into the cold, suffocating embrace of boredom (Just another ordinary day in their eternal lives).
But Yash held onto the feeling longer than the rest; a spark of defiance that would eventually become the beginning of the known universe.
Wanting to share this joy, Yash appeared before his creations. And needless to say, the imagination of the first mortals was subpar at best.
To comprehend a being like Yash, Adam and Eve compared him to the most meaningful crop they had ever grown into existence:
An apple.
———<>||<>——— End of Chapter Thirty-Three. ———<>||<>———