The Law had been formed, and with it, the fate of Rael had been rewritten.
Then, without warning, it felt as though something had seized me by the spine and hurled me out of that alternate space—or rather, as if that space itself had unraveled into nothingness, disintegrating into thin air as though it had never existed at all.
A wave of nausea rippled through me, bending my balance for a heartbeat and twisting my gut as if my body was still catching up to my own existence.
When my senses finally steadied, I looked ahead toward those damned Skin-Stealers.
Their positions hadn't changed from where I last saw them before the Law took form, yet the moment my focus landed on them, I realized something fundamental had shifted.
They were still rushing toward me, but faster—far faster, like the dream itself had quickened its pulse.
My thoughts scattered, darting between panic and calculation as their paper-thin limbs flailed wildly, closing the distance inch by inch.
Clink.
The sound cracked through the air, sharp and crystalline, like glass shattering underwater.
It echoed across the endless dark, stretching into an eternity within that single haunting note.
And then, silence.
I froze.
The hundreds of those abominations halted mid-motion.
Limbs hung suspended in the air; some twisted backward at impossible angles, others frozen mid-lunge, jaws gaping open in eternal hunger.
Their bodies hovered in grotesque stillness, trembling faintly as if reality itself struggled to keep them paused.
It was as though a puppeteer had cut every string in perfect unison, leaving the marionettes stranded mid-performance, caught between motion and nothingness.
The stillness that followed was deafening, pressing against my eardrums until it felt like even my heartbeat had gone quiet.
With a snap, their necks twisted in the distance, all in perfect, unnatural synchrony.
Before I could think any further, they were already bolting toward the sound in a frenzy, stumbling over each other, clawing and thrashing as if the concept of coordination had been stripped from them.
They moved like a single broken instinct given form, utterly oblivious to the fact that I was still standing there.
I didn't dare make another sound.
Only when their shapes had drowned once more in the fleeting darkness did I let out a slow, rasping breath, my chest tightening as the silence returned.
I had read about this, Law Formation, in the novel back in my previous world.
As far as I could remember, the step I had just taken was about as bad as a situation could possibly get.
Every living being in this world was bound by fate, the dream of the Outer Gods.
According to the novel, reality itself was the by-product of their unconscious thoughts—a projection of sleeping divinity where every single thing, from the smallest atom to the grandest law of nature, existed merely as a consequence of their dreaming.
There was a popular quote for it too, one that stuck with me ever since I first read it:
"The universe doesn't think; it remembers the dream it was born from."
And within that memory, every being was assigned a path—a chain of events predetermined by the nature of its origin within the dream.
To exist was to repeat what had already been imagined.
To choose was merely to follow the direction your part of the dream demanded.
But even within that repetition, fragments of resistance appeared, small ripples in the current of divine slumber.
Laws.
Law Formation wasn't magic. It was an override.
When one set a Law for themselves, it became as natural and absolute as gravity—an axiom inscribed directly into the memory of existence itself.
But unlike the cosmic constants, it was personal and self-authored, carved by will and conviction rather than divinity.
It rewrote the dream, bending causality by asserting one's will as the higher truth, transcending even the dream's order, if only temporarily, and only in fragments of various aspects.
Ultimately, to form a Law meant to remove a part of oneself from the dream's record, trading away fragments of freedom to defy the path written for you.
It allowed one to perform impossible feats, yes, but only by erasing what made them whole.
And me?
I had just formed one.
The same Law the previous Rael once did.
To be honest, he didn't need to form a Law of such defiance just to escape from a few Skin-Stealers.
He could've chosen something simpler—a Law that prevented him from touching the ground, or one that let him generate tremendous bursts of force.
It would've worked just as well, or at least that's what I thought.
And yet, even after all that, he still died miserably—not instantly, but slowly, through the hands of the very Skin-Stealer he'd tried to escape.
And that left me wondering.
A few questions, complicated ones, that used to crawl into my head during those so-called mental-capability expansion sessions.
Even after crafting a Law so paradoxical, one that could conceal his existence from even Thaal'Ruun, the very dreamer of this world, all for his will to go through them, he still ended up devoured by a mere Skin-Stealer.
Just how fated was his death, that not even defiance itself could save him?
And above all, how did he even conceive such a Law in the first place, which in theory should have been nothing but a myth for him?
Did he somehow already know this was the only path to survive?
Or was there something else, some deeper intent he had in mind?
Or perhaps it was all just a coincidence too perfect to be one?
Whatever it was, despite the irritation constantly bubbling inside me, I knew figuring it out would take time.
There were things far more pressing.
A Law that denied Thaal'Ruun's presence—no, erased my presence.
The god could no longer perceive me.
To every eye and mind that ever was, is, or would be, I no longer existed.
A perfect hiding place, perhaps, I thought, taking a slow step forward.
My mind replayed the plan I'd devised, fragments of logic and desperation stitched together, hoping it would maybe work to untangle the chaos I had just stepped into.