Klein's World - Lord of the Mysteries Universe
Klein Moretti stood above the gray fog, his Fool persona forgotten in the face of what he was witnessing.
A new pathway had appeared.
The twenty-third pathway. Something that should be Impossible. It was just...Wrong. The universe had twenty-two pathways. That was fundamental law. That was how reality worked.
Yet there it was. Shimmering at the edge of perception. A pathway that led... somewhere else. Somewhere that made even the god pathways look like children's toys.
"This is impossible," Klein whispered. "The pathways are fixed. They can't just—"
The sky outside his window flickered. Day. Night. Day. Night. Stuck between states, unable to decide which it should be.
Klein felt his Seer powers amplifying. Not gradually. Explosively. His ability to perceive, to See, suddenly expanding beyond anything he'd thought possible.
He stumbled to the window, looking up at the transformed cosmos. The stars. So many stars. All of them visible. All of them singing.
"The stars," he gasped, hand pressed against the glass. "They're so beautiful."
He could see them. All of them. Every star in existence. And in their light, he saw truths that should have driven him mad.
Saw the past and future simultaneously. Saw probability branching into infinity. Saw the structure of reality itself laid bare like an open book.
And it was beautiful. Terrible. Overwhelming. Perfect.
Klein fell to his knees, tears streaming down his face. "I See. I See everything. Too much. It's too—"
His words cut off as understanding flooded through him. The twenty-third pathway wasn't being created. It was being revealed. Had always existed. Hidden. Waiting.
The Eternal Night pathway. The path of stars and void. Of endings and beginnings existing simultaneously.
And someone was ascending it. Someone was becoming its anchor to reality.
Throughout Klein's world, the Beyonders felt it. Every single one of them, from Sequence 9 to the hidden gods themselves.
Their connections to their pathways, usually a subtle background presence, suddenly blazed like bonfires in their souls. The spiritual resonance that let them use their abilities amplified a thousandfold.
A Sequence 7 Seer in Backlund suddenly found himself seeing every possible future branching from the present moment. He collapsed, screaming, unable to process the infinite information flooding his mind. His mind broke from the strain.
A Sequence 5 Guardian in Intis felt her defensive abilities surge. Spatial barriers she could barely maintain before now sprang into existence effortlessly, layering reality with protective shells she couldn't dismiss. She even felt it herself, improvement her sequence.
The hidden existences stirred. Ancient beings who'd been sleeping for eons opened eyes that had remained closed since before human civilization.
The Evernight Goddess looked up from her eternal domain, her expression shifting from serene to shocked. "A new pathway? But that's... the structure is complete. Twenty-two is all there should be. Unless..."
Her words trailed off as realization struck.
"Unless someone is transcending the system entirely. Creating not a pathway within the structure, but a pathway that exists parallel to it. A twenty-third option that breaks the established order."
She smiled. A genuine expression of wonder that her followers would have been shocked to witness.
"He posseses something that is similar to my path, but so much greater. How fascinating. And how terrifying. I want to meet this god."
Sung Jin-Woo's World - Solo Leveling Universe
There was panic everywhere.
The dungeons all around the world closed.
Not gradually. Not with warning. Just... closed.
Every dungeon across the entire world simultaneously sealed itself. Gates that had been stable for years, decades even, simply vanished. Mid-rank gates about to break and release monsters just winked out of existence.
And everyone inside was expelled.
Hunters materialized outside where gates had been, confused and disoriented. Some were mid-battle, weapons still raised against enemies that were no longer there.
Others were collecting magic crystals that had vanished from their inventories.
"What the hell?!" A Korean B-rank hunter stumbled, looking around wildly. "We were in the middle of a raid! Where did the dungeon go?!"
His party members were equally confused. The gate they'd entered through was simply... gone. No trace it had ever existed.
Reports flooded in from across the globe. America. China. Japan. Europe. Africa. Every single dungeon had closed. Every single hunter expelled.
Including some who'd been trapped for years.
In a hospital in Tokyo, a man materialized in the middle of a hallway.
He was injured. Malnourished. His clothes were tattered rags. But he was alive.
Nurses screamed. Security rushed forward. The man collapsed, barely conscious.
"I'm... I'm out?" he whispered in Korean. "The dungeon... it let me go?"
He'd been trapped for ten years. Given up for dead. His family probably had held a funeral. He thought about his children. His daughter, and adopted son.
His stepson, he's talentless. he probably won't amount to much of anything. But his daughter, so wholesome, untainted by the degeneracy of this world.
He thought fondly. They probably didn't get along very well.
But he was alive. And free. Maybe he could finally go home.
Similar scenes played out worldwide. Hunters who'd been presumed dead, trapped in high-rank dungeons they couldn't escape, suddenly found themselves expelled back into the real world.
But the strangest phenomenon was the healing.
People who'd been sick suddenly weren't. Terminal illnesses vanished. Chronic conditions disappeared. Injuries from dungeon raids closed as if they'd never been.
Hospitals across the world erupted into chaos as impossible recoveries manifested everywhere at once.
In Seoul, South Korea, a particular hospital room drew one very specific visitor.
Sung Jin-Woo's phone rang, drawing him out of the stream.
He was in his apartment, having just returned from a dungeon raid. Still processing the impossible things he's witnessening through the chat stream.
Kokabiel. The angel. Walking into infinity. Disintegrating with each step.
His phone rang again. Insistent.
Jin-Woo answered without checking the caller ID. "Hello?"
"Jin Woo!" His sister Jin-Ah's voice came through, high-pitched with excitement and tears. " YOU NEED TO COME TO THE HOSPITAL RIGHT NOW!"
Jin-Woo's blood ran cold. "What happened? Are you hurt? Is it—"
"IT'S MOM!" Jin-Ah interrupted, sobbing. "She's AWAKE! Mom opened her eyes! She's talking! She's—oh my god, she's asking for you!"
The phone slipped from Jin-Woo's suddenly nerveless fingers.
His mother. Who'd been in a coma for years. Trapped in eternal sleep by the aftereffects of a dungeon poison. The woman he'd become a hunter to pay medical bills for. The reason he'd risked his life in E-rank dungeons despite being the weakest.
Awake.
Ding!
A notification sound. His system. The omnipresent presence that had been with him since his "second awakening."
Jin-Woo ignored it completely. Didn't even glance at the translucent blue screen that appeared in his vision.
He was already moving. Already calling for his shadows to transport him. Already crying without realizing it.
His mother was awake.
Nothing else mattered.
The ignored system notification flickered in the air where Jin-Woo had been standing:
[SYSTEM NOTICE: Reality Parameters Have Shifted]
[New Quest Available: "Step-Mom Route"]
[Warning: Dimensional instability detected. Timeline divergence at 347%. Multiple futures now equally probable.]
[Would you like to—]
The notification faded, unanswered and unseen.
Bleach World - Soul Society
Captain-Commander Genryūsai Shigekuni Yamamoto stood in the First Division barracks, his eyes closed in meditation.
Then they snapped open.
"Impossible," he spoke in disbelief.
Around him, every captain felt it simultaneously. A disturbance in the spiritual energy of the universe itself. Reishi, the spiritual particles that comprised everything in the Soul Society, were fluctuating wildly.
Youruichi was already near her friend Kisuke's store. She thought he might have some answers.
She materialized next to Kisuke Urahara who had his zanpakuto out. Her voice was unusually serious. "Kisuke. Tell me you're feeling this."
Urahara's usual playful expression was gone, replaced by genuine concern. "The balance. The universal balance between Soul Society, Hueco Mundo, and the World of the Living. It's... shaking."
"More than shaking," Yoruichi shivered . "Look at the clocks."
Throughout the house, clocks were moving. Backwards. The hands spinning counter-clockwise, time itself reversing.
Then forward again. Then stopping. Then jumping ahead hours.
"Time isn't stable," Urahara said quietly. "Something is affecting causality itself."
Youruichi wanted to tell him about the chat group, but a notification popped in her head.
[Warning! Any revealation about the chat group's existence would result in removal and erasure of memories. Even Death!]
That stopped her in her track.
In the First Division, Yamamoto's spiritual pressure erupted. The ancient captain's power, usually kept tightly controlled, blazed like a supernova.
Every captain felt the summons. Every captain materialized immediately via Shunpo.
"Captain-Commander?" Shunsui Kyōraku's usual lazy demeanor was absent. His hand rested on his zanpakutō. "What's happening?"
"Report," Yamamoto commanded. "All divisions. Status."
The reports came in quickly. Each more concerning than the last.
Division Four: Spiritual healing techniques suddenly working at ten times normal efficiency. Injuries healing impossibly fast.
Division Seven: Training grounds experiencing temporal fluctuations. A training session that should have lasted an hour took three. Or fifteen minutes. Time wasn't consistent.
Division Twelve: All research equipment giving readings that defied physics. Mayuri Kurotsuchi was having a breakdown trying to understand the data.
"This is bad," Unohana Retsu said quietly. Her gentle smile was absent, replaced by the cold expression of Kenpachi Yachiru. "If the fundamental laws governing spiritual energy are unstable, the entire Soul Society could collapse."
Yamamoto was about to respond when he felt it.
Above them. Far above. In the dimension only accessible to the Royal Guard.
Something had moved.
Squad Zero - The Soul King's Palace
Ichibē Hyōsube, the monk who named all things, stood before the Soul King's crystal.
The Soul King. The linchpin of reality.
The being who maintained the balance between all worlds. The cosmic existence who'd been sealed, mutilated, and transformed into a living keystone.
The Soul King had never moved. Never spoken. Existed only as a vegetative consciousness maintaining universal balance through his mere existence.
Until now.
"Impossible," Ichibē whispered.
The Soul King's eyes, sealed behind the crystal, had opened.
Ōetsu Nimaiya dropped Sayafushi, his greatest zanpakutō creation. The blade clattered against the palace floor. "Did the Soul King just...?"
Kirio Hikifune's perpetual smile vanished. "He's never moved. Not once in all the millennia I've served here."
Senjumaru Shutara's multiple arms trembled, her weaving needles falling still. "This shouldn't be possible!"
Tenjirō Kirinji, always the most relaxed of them, had gone pale. "If he moves. If he actually moves, the entire universe could—"
The Soul King suddenly looked upward.
Through dimensions. Through realities. At something only he could perceive.
And spoke.
His voice was soft. Barely a whisper. But it carried across the entire palace with impossible clarity.
"The Eternal Night is being born."
Six words. The first words the Soul King had spoken in over the millenias. Perhaps forever.
Squad Zero stood frozen. Unable to process what they'd just witnessed.
"Eternal Night?" Ichibē found his voice first. "Soul King-sama, what do you mean? What is—"
The Soul King's eyes closed again.
But this time, for the first time since his mutilation and sealing, his lips curved into the faintest smile.
An expression of... peace.
The five members of Squad Zero looked at each other, each seeing their own shock reflected in the others' faces.
"What," Ōetsu finally said, "the actual hell was that?"
Konosuba World
Kazuma Satou was having a relatively normal day if he ignored the reality breaking stream he was watching moments ago.
Which, given his life since being isekai'd, meant it was only mildly terrible instead of catastrophically awful.
Aqua was being useless as usual, crying about something trivial. Megumin was planning which location to nuke with her explosion magic today. Darkness was off somewhere, probably thinking something masochistic .
Normal. Relatively.
Then the world started shaking.
"EARTHQUAKE!" Kazuma dove under the nearest table.
But it wasn't an earthquake. Not really. The ground was stable. But reality itself seemed to be trembling, like the entire universe had developed a nervous tic.
"Kazuma-san!" Megumin stumbled, her staff clattering to the floor. "What's happening?!"
"How should I know?!" Kazuma crawled out from under the table. "What's Aqua doing? That useless goddess should at least be able to help for once—"
He stopped.
Aqua stood in the middle of the room. Perfectly still. Her usual bouncy, energetic demeanor completely absent.
Her eyes were glowing. Pure white light emanating from both pupils.
She stood ramrod straight, arms at her sides, face expressionless.
"Aqua?" Kazuma approached cautiously. "Hey, Aqua? This isn't funny. Stop being weird and—"
Aqua spoke.
Her voice was Mechanically flat. Completely devoid of her usual emotion or inflection.
"The Eternal Night shall engulf the worlds."
Silence.
Kazuma and Megumin stared in shock.
"What?" Kazuma finally managed.
"The Eternal Night shall engulf the worlds," Aqua repeated in that same mechanical tone. "The stars sing. The void welcomes. The Eternal One ascends."
"AQUA!" Kazuma grabbed her shoulders, shaking her. "Snap out of it! What are you talking about?! What Eternal Night?! Do you know what's happening to—"
Aqua blinked.
The glow vanished from her eyes. Her posture relaxed. She looked around in confusion.
"Huh? Kazuma ? Why are you shaking me? And why do you look so scared?
Did you finally realize how great this goddes is? Are you finally ready to worship me properly as your goddess and—"
"YOU JUST WENT ALL CREEPY POSSESSED GODDESS ON US!" Kazuma shouted. "You were glowing and speaking in monotone and said something about eternal night!"
"I did?" Aqua blinked. "I don't remember that. Are you sure you're not making things up? Maybe you hit your head. You're pretty weak and pathetic, so even a small bump could—"
"I SAW IT TOO!" Megumin interjected. "Aqua-san, you were definitely acting strange. What did you mean about the Eternal Night?"
Aqua tilted her head, genuinely confused. "I have no idea what you're talking about. I feel fine. Perfectly normal. As expected of a goddess!"
Darkness burst through the door at that moment. "Everyone! Come outside! You need to see this!"
They rushed out.
And stopped dead.
Reality around them changing.
A large boulder, easily the size of a house was transforming.
The stone rippled like water. Its gray surface shifted, flowing, becoming something else entirely.
Gold.
Solid gold.
The entire boulder had transformed into pure, solid gold.
Kazuma's eyes went wide. His jaw dropped. His brain short-circuited.
Then he screamed—a high-pitched sound of pure joy—and dove at the golden boulder.
"GOLD! IT'S GOLD! ACTUAL GOLD!" He pressed his face against it, tears streaming. "DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THIS IS WORTH?! I'M RICH! FINALLY RICH! I CAN PAY OFF ALL MY DEBTS! I CAN AFFORD REAL FOOD! I CAN—"
"Kazuma, that's not normal!" Megumin tried to pull him away. "Rocks don't just turn into gold! Something is very wrong!"
"WHO CARES?!" Kazuma hugged the golden boulder tighter. "IT'S GOLD! Beautiful, wonderful, debt-paying gold!"
Throughout the town of Axel, similar transformations were occurring.
A wooden fence turned to pure silver. A patch of grass became diamonds. A stone wall transformed into copper, then iron, then back to stone, then into something that had no name, a material that shimmered with colors that shouldn't exist.
People were panicking. Screaming. Running in confusion as their reality literally transformed around them.
But Kazuma didn't care.
He had gold.
Finally, finally, after all his suffering, all his terrible luck, all his debt and poverty and humiliation...
He had gold.
"Thank you!" he sobbed into the golden boulder. "Thank you, mysterious cosmic force! Thank you for this blessing! I don't care what Eternal Night is coming! You gave me GOLD!"
Megumin and Darkness exchanged worried looks.
Then Kazuma's mind finally clicked. "Wait a minute, is this related to what Kokabiel is going through? But he's in a different world! How ?"
Above them, the stars continued to shine where the sun should be.
And reality continued to transform in ways that made no sense.
Fate/Grand Order World - Chaldea
The originally fragile world was trembling.
ALERT! ALERT! ALERT!
Red lights flashed throughout Chaldea Security Organization. Klaxons blared. Every screen in the facility suddenly displayed the same warning:
[DIMENSIONAL INSTABILITY DETECTED]
[TIMELINE CORRUPTION AT 857%]
[CAUSALITY BREAKDOWN IMMINENT]
[ALL SYSTEMS FAILURE IN 3... 2... 1...]
Everything shut down.
Lights. Computers. Life support. The FATE system. Sheba. Chaldeas observation sphere. Every single piece of technology that the organization relied on simply... stopped.
Emergency backup generators kicked in, bathing everything in dim red emergency lighting.
"REPORT!" Da Vinci's voice cut through the chaos. "What just happened?!"
Staff scrambled. Technicians frantically tried to reboot systems. Nothing responded.
"It's not a power failure!" one technician shouted. "The systems themselves have shut down! Like something overwrote their fundamental operating parameters!"
"That's impossible!" another argued. "These systems are designed to function even during—"
"NOTHING'S WORKING!" a third screamed. "Chaldeas is offline! We can't monitor human history anymore! We're blind!"
In the medical bay, Romani Archaman clutched his head.
His vision swam. Colors that didn't exist. Sounds that weren't sounds. And through it all, a cascade of information that threatened to tear his mind apart.
His Clairvoyance, the ability he thought he lost when he stopped being Solomon, had activated involuntarily.
And was showing him infinity.
"No," he gasped. "No no no, this can't be—"
Endless cosmos. Stars beyond counting. Galaxies spiraling through void. And between them all, connecting everything, pathways of light that formed patterns he almost understood.
Almost.
It was too much. He was seeing too much. His human mind, even enhanced by Solomon's legacy, couldn't process this.
He collapsed, nose bleeding, barely maintaining consciousness.
Through the overwhelming visions, one image crystalized with terrible clarity:
A figure. Walking down the stairs that led to nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. With each step, the figure dissolved. Became less. Became more.
Became something that existed in ways that made no sense.
And around that figure, reality itself was rewriting.
"What are you?" Romani whispered through bloody lips. "What are you becoming?"
The vision cut off abruptly. Mercifully.
Romani lay on the floor, barely conscious, his mind trying desperately to forget what he'd Seen.
He couldn't.
The image was burned into his memory forever.
In the command room, Ritsuka Fujimaru didn't notice any of the chaos.
They were too busy staring at their phone. At the chat stream that only they could see. Watching as Kokabiel, the angel they'd gotten to know through messages and banter, walked toward oblivion.
"Don't," Ritsuka whispered. "Please don't. Come back. You don't have to do this."
But Kokabiel kept walking
And with each step, disintegrated a little more.
One Piece World - Water 7
The Straw Hat Pirates were taking a break. Luffy was eating. Nami was counting her treasures. Zoro was napping. Sanji was cooking. Usopp was working on inventions.
And Robin was watching the stream in her room, her eyes fixed at the screen in front.
Then day became night.
Not sunset. Not evening. Just instant transformation from bright afternoon to complete darkness.
"WHAT THE HELL?!" Nami jumped up, looking at the sky.
Where the sun had been, there was nothing. Just stars. Endless stars. Brighter than should be possible. Filling the entire sky with their light.
"Oi oi oi," Zoro woke up, hand on his swords. "What's going on? Why is it night already?"
"It's not night!" Usopp's legs were shaking. "The sun just disappeared! It's just... gone!"
Robin burst out of her room to see what was happening, and became speechless as she saw the endless stars.
Her mind wandered to Kokabiel. "Is this related to him?" She muttered softly.
Luffy stuck his head out of the galley, cheeks stuffed with food. "Whaff?" He swallowed. "Whoa! Look at all the stars! So pretty! SUGEEEE!"
His eyes literally had stars in them as he stared upward in wonder.
"This isn't normal!" Nami tried to check her navigation instruments. "The compass is going crazy! The Log Pose is spinning! I can't get any readings!"
"NAMI-SWAN! ROBIN-CHWAN! Don't worry! I'll protect you from—" Sanji stopped mid-declaration, staring at something.
Nami's treasure chest, her precious collection of gold and jewels she'd been counting, was transforming.
The gold coins rippled like water. Their metallic sheen faded, replaced by organic textures.
They became flowers.
Beautiful, delicate flowers in colors that seemed to glow with internal light.
"My..." Nami stared. "My gold..."
"IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL!" she squealed, picking up a flower that had been a gold coin moments before. "Look at these colors! I've never seen anything like—"
Then her brain caught up with her eyes.
"MY GOLD!" She collapsed dramatically. "MY TREASURE! IT'S GONE! TURNED INTO STUPID FLOWERS! WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT FLOWERS INSTEAD OF GOLD?!"
Luffy picked up one of the flowers. "But Nami, they're really pretty! And they smell nice! And—"
"THEY'RE NOT GOLD!"
While Nami mourned her lost treasure, Robin remained on the deck. Watching the stars. Feeling something she hadn't felt in a long time.
Peace.
The pain in her heart, the constant ache from her childhood, from betrayal, from loneliness, from being hunted and hated, it had eased. Not gone. But... lighter.
As if something vast and cosmic had reached down and gently touched that wounded place in her soul.
She didn't understand it. Didn't question it.
Just closed her eyes and let the feeling wash over her.
"Thank you," she whispered to the stars. To whatever force had brought this moment of peace. "Thank you."
Chat Group POV
The members returned back to watch in shocked silence as Kokabiel walked inside the spiral stairway.
His body disintegrated. But then the particles reformed. Reconstituted into a barely-humanoid shape one step higher on the spiral.
Only to dissolve again when he took another step.
Die. Resurrect. Die. Resurrect. Over and over.
[Girl Who Loves Reading: @Heaven's Wrath! Respond! Can you hear us?!]
[Shadow Monarch: @Heaven's Wrath! Answer us!]
[The Fool: @Heaven's Wrath! Kokabiel! Say something!]
Nothing.
The Heaven's Wrath username remained gray. Offline. No response.
They could only watch helplessly as the figure that had been Kokabiel continued descending. Continued dying. Continued transforming.
[Last Master of Humanity: What is that spiral? Where is it taking him?]
[The Fool: I don't know. But in my world, a new pathway just appeared. The twenty-third. If Kokabiel is creating that... he's becoming something fundamental to reality itself.]
They could do nothing but watch.
The stream continued showing the impossible sight.
Kokabiel,or what remained of him, walking down an infinite stairway that hurt to look at.
Disintegrating with each step.
Reforming with each step.
Losing his humanity with each step.
Gaining something else with each step.
The chat members watched with bated breath, unable to look away, unable to help.
Until finally, after what felt like eternity compressed into moments, the figure reached a point where they could no longer see it clearly.
Too far. Too distant.
The stream flickered once more.
Then the stream cut out completely.
[CONNECTION LOST]
[Flash Goddess: What?! NO! The stream! It's gone!]
[Last Master of Humanity: I can't reconnect! It's like the signal just... vanished!]
[The Fool: It's not a technical issue. The stream didn't disconnect. It was severed. Whatever is happening now... we're not meant to witness it.]
[Shadow Monarch: Kokabiel... please be okay...]
[Girl Who Loves Reading: All we can do now is wait. And hope.]
They could only stare at the black screen, powerless to help the friend they'd come to know through messages and shared experiences.
Across the multiverse, only the most ancient and powerful beings could still perceive what was happening.
And what they saw filled them with awe and terror in equal measure.
Across the multiverse, reality itself held its breath.
Waiting.
Wondering.
What would emerge from the Eternal Night?
****
About the different world timelines, you'll know why the time has suddenly moved forward in later chapters. Can't spoil much