Chapter 487
The boy's body no longer looked whole.
The black mist was not merely surrounding him—it had become a part of him, creeping upward from his feet to his chest, from his chest to his shoulders, like a rising tide slowly drowning the only island in the middle of the ocean.
Ilux's face was half-hidden behind the constantly shifting mist, but Theo could still see the expression there.
Not pain, not fear, but something far more complicated.
Something resembling a person trapped in a dream, unable to distinguish whether the dream was reality or the other way around.
"What exactly are you carrying, Ilux?" Theo muttered inwardly, his inner voice almost inaudible even to himself.
His eyes did not blink.
"It's not just the consciousness of King Xavier XVII. There's something else. Something even the Gods do not know how to read."
The cracked sky did not merely reflect dead light—it also reflected memories that should never have existed.
Theo did not move from where he stood, yet his thoughts traveled far away, tracing something that did not belong to him, something inherited through the echoes of consciousness left behind by Xavier XVII.
He saw that journey like shards of glass forcibly rearranged—a journey toward the Land of the Gods, where every step should have already been written, determined, secured from every possible deviation.
"There shouldn't have been any gaps," Theo murmured softly, his eyes remaining fixed upon Ilux's body, which was sinking deeper and deeper into the mist.
Yet within those gaps that had never been acknowledged, one name appeared like an ink stain upon a sacred white page—Ilux.
Not merely unregistered, but truly never planned from the very beginning.
Not forgotten.
Not erased.
He had never existed from the start.
"Even the possibility of him… was never granted," he continued quietly, as though speaking to something older than the concept of time itself.
He slowly drew in a breath, and with that breath, another fragment of memories that did not belong to him unfolded—about a woman who should have remained empty, about a womb that had been decided would never become a place for life.
The diagnosis had been absolute.
Unshakable.
Undeniable.
Infertility—the starting point of the destruction of two ordinary humans who had never asked anything from the world other than a small miracle.
Yet that miracle happened nonetheless.
Without reason.
Without permission.
"He was born from something that did not even permit birth itself," Theo whispered, his brows slightly furrowed.
There had been no long suffering as there should have been.
No slow destruction consuming his parents from within.
What existed instead was a birth too silent to be called a miracle, too strange to be called coincidence.
A child who came into existence, yet every second of his existence was dragged backward by something greater—his traces erased, his breaths denied, his very existence rejected by reality itself.
"As though this world refuses to acknowledge that he ever took his first breath," Theo added, his voice nearly drowned out by the deepening pulse of the black mist.
The mist trembled, and with that tremor, the final image appeared—the clearest and cruelest of them all.
The Gods, direct descendants of Xavier XVII, had not come as guardians, but as executioners of something they could not comprehend.
At first, they did not hunt Ilux.
They hunted his source—two humans who had violated something that had never even been given a name.
Theo saw how the two parents ran, not to save themselves, but to buy time for something that should never have lived in the first place.
"Take him, as far away from us as possible," a woman's trembling voice echoed, her hands shaking as she handed the baby over to an unfamiliar world.
"Don't let them find him," the man beside her continued, his eyes hollow, yet his resolve unbroken.
That orphanage was never a sanctuary—it was merely a pause.
A semicolon within a sentence already destined to end.
And when the Gods finally found them, there was no negotiation.
No explanation.
Only a silent execution, as though those two lives had never possessed the right to be defended from the beginning.
Theo stood within the heavy silence, his eyes never leaving the vortex of black mist that continued consuming Ilux's body.
He knew those questions would eventually come—from Aldraya later, from the guardians who would surely arrive, from anyone brave enough to ask what exactly had been born before them at this very moment.
Yet Theo did not move to answer questions that had not yet been asked.
One of his hands remained tucked inside his coat pocket, his fingers touching the cover of that yellow book once more, not because he intended to open it, but because he needed to remind himself that all of this had already been written—or at least, a small portion of it had.
"You want to know what the Nothingness is?" he suddenly muttered, his voice soft enough to nearly disappear beneath the roar of the mist, yet clear enough to become a question directed to no one except the swirling wind around him.
He smiled faintly, a smile that never reached his eyes.
"No. I won't tell you yet. Not now."
The black mist before him pulsed faster, as though hearing him and demanding answers.
Theo shifted his weight, his eyes narrowing as he followed the movement of the mist that had begun forming patterns unreadable by ordinary logic.
"The Nothingness does not come from Heaven. Nor from Hell," he said, his tone flat like someone reciting facts that no longer interested him.
"Heaven has its limits. Hell has its foundations. Both are creations born from the same order—from space created to be filled, from time created to pass."
He paused briefly, observing how the black mist reacted to his words—moving, rustling, like something listening and responding in a way no living creature could ever imitate.
"But the Nothingness… it was not born from the realm of chaos later organized by Quil-Hasa into the universe you know now. Even that still belongs to the same category. Still within boundaries."
He exhaled deeply, and for the first time, something resembling exhaustion appeared upon his face.
"Imagine something that existed before Quil-Hasa itself could even be categorized as 'existing.' Before the word 'exist' had any meaning. Before anything could call itself 'I,' because there was nothing capable of distinguishing one from another."
The black wind that had been swirling around suddenly shifted direction, as though those words had drawn something out from within the mist—something that had long been sleeping at the bottom of Ilux's consciousness.
Theo did not flinch.
He even stepped closer, not because he wished to see more clearly, but because he knew what would happen next required the proper distance.
"You can imagine it as something that possesses no place," he continued, his voice slightly louder so it would not be swallowed by the increasingly violent hiss of the mist.
"Not here. Not there. Not anywhere you can point to with your finger or comprehend with reason. It is a nothingness that does not require existence in order to be real."
He raised his left hand, palm open, as though trying to grasp something invisible.
"The Gods, the Angels, even Quil-Hasa itself—they all came into being through process. Through cause. Through space and time arranged in such a way that they could be understood. But the Nothingness—"
He slowly clenched his hand into a fist.
"… It never went through any process. It never became. It simply is. Like a question that never needed an answer because it is the emptiness of the question itself."
To be continued….