Nicholas sat upon his throne, his consciousness spread across the vastness of his universe, and he thought.
The multiverse was the obvious next step. Infinite universes, infinite possibilities, infinite power. It was the logical progression from where he stood—a single universe, vast and growing, but ultimately limited. One reality. One set of laws. One timeline.
But if it were just a matter of creating multiple separate universes, it would be no different from what he was already doing. His cosmos was already expanding, already generating new worlds, new realities, new domains. Adding more universes would simply be more of the same. More power, certainly. But no qualitative changes. He would still be a being of a single universe, just one with more room to grow.
No. He needed something else. A jump from one to infinite. A transformation that would change the very nature of his existence.
He needed a higher dimension.
The dimension of time.
Nicholas had always understood time as a river—a single, linear flow that carried all things from beginning to end. He could see its currents, its eddies, its hidden depths. He could perceive the past and future of everyone and everything as lines on his palm, clear and distinct. But that perception came with a condition: he could not intervene. His sight of time was only clear when he was not actively shaping it. The moment he reached out to change the flow, the lines blurred, the currents shifted, and his vision became uncertain.
His own past and future were a mystery even to him. He was the Architect of Reality, the God-Emperor of the West, the Creator of the New Universe. But he could not see his own timeline. He could not perceive the shape of his own existence. He was a blind spot in the fabric of time, a paradox that defied the very laws he had created.
To split the one temporal flow into many—to create a multiverse in the truest sense—would require temporal surgery on his own universe. His own body. He would be operating on himself, blind to the consequences, unable to see the effects of his own actions until after they had been done.
The challenge was immense. He would need to exist in a paradoxical state—both non-conscious so as not to intervene in the temporal surgery simply by thinking, and conscious so as to actually perform the surgery. A catch-22 that seemed insurmountable.
He could not simply will it into being. His will was the law of his universe, but it was also the source of the paradox. To change time, he had to stop thinking. But to stop thinking, he could not change time.
Nicholas considered the problem from every angle. He reviewed the knowledge he had gathered from the void universes, the media that humanity had produced, the fragments of information that had drifted across the infinite sea. He searched for any precedent, any example of a being who had achieved what he was attempting.
And he found one.
The Daluo Immortals.
In the mythology of a reality far removed from his own, the Daluo Immortals were described as beings who existed simultaneously in all timelines, all universes, all possibilities. They were one yet many. Infinite and immeasurable, they stood above all concepts of time and space. They incarnated in all universes, their consciousnesses scattered across the multiverse, and yet they remained a single being. A single identity. A single will.
Nicholas studied the path of the Daluo Immortals with growing fascination. Their cultivation was unlike anything he had encountered in the Eastern or Western traditions. The transition from Taiyi Immortal—a being of immense power within a single universe—to Daluo Immortal involved a process that was both simple and impossibly complex.
They seeded the heavens.
The Taiyi Immortal, having reached the peak of power within their native reality, would begin to spread their essence outward. Not through conquest or expansion—not through the crude accumulation of territory. They would scatter fragments of their consciousness, their authority, their very being across the heavens and all realms. Each fragment would incarnate in a different universe, a different timeline, a different possibility. They would live countless lives, experience countless realities, accumulate countless perspectives.
And then, when the seeding was complete—when every fragment had matured, had grown, had achieved its own form of transcendence—the Daluo Immortal would unify all essences. Not by absorbing them, not by conquering them, but by recognizing that they had always been one. The fragments were not separate beings. They were reflections of a single consciousness, scattered across infinity, each one a facet of a greater whole.
The unification was not a merging. It was an awakening. A realization that the self was not confined to a single timeline, a single universe, a single existence. The Daluo Immortal was one yet many, infinite yet singular, existing simultaneously in all places and times.
Nicholas considered this. The process was elegant. It solved the temporal paradox that had confounded him, but I was not yet his path. The Immortals who achieved this were but wanderers without a home. Taking the infinity as their home, they were unbounded, but that was not what he wanted. He wanted to create his own multiverse, to become infinite and yet one. Those who learn from me live and those who imitate me die. It was time to create his own path, yet he could use this as inspiration.
But through this thought process a terrifying implication also emerged.
To be continued...
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