Emperor of the Source

Adrian stepped past the gravitational boundary of the Virelith Galaxy and plunged directly into the uncharted darkness.

With his physical form synchronized with the spatial rules around him, he moved extremely fast. He was a streak of white-grey light cutting through a sea of eternal night.

Three days passed in silence.

As he navigated the mostly empty intergalactic void, he did not come across a single starship. There were no wandering merchants, hidden pirate fleets lying in ambush, or spatial storms.

On the latter half of the third day, a faint glow pierced the darkness ahead. As Adrian closed the distance, he found himself looking at an isolated galaxy. From the outside, it was a swirling disk of pale blue and violet stars, silently rotating in the vacuum. Adrian slowed his flight, his eyes narrowing as he observed the cosmic structure. He reached inward, allowing the resonance of his Concepts to guide him.

The golden threads did not dip into the pale blue galaxy. Instead, they slid right past its gravitational edge, pointing deeper into the dark.

Adrian gave the galaxy one last glance before shaking his head. He bypassed it, accelerating his speed and keeping his flight locked onto the pull.

More days passed.

The journey stretched into an unbroken rhythm of silence and speed. It was already the twenty-second day since his departure from the edge of Virelith.

Adrian had traveled across the void before, but this journey was much bigger than anything he had previously undertaken. Truly, this was the first time he had traveled this immense distance by himself, relying solely on his physical speed and spatial comprehension.

His current velocity was almost impossible to comprehend through ordinary standards. He could now cross a gulf equivalent to the distance separating the Milky Way from Andromeda, approximately two and a half million light-years, in only three days. After twenty-two days of nearly uninterrupted travel, he had already crossed more than eighteen million light-years of dead and uncharted space.

Despite that astonishing distance, the golden threads had not yet reached their destination.

Adrian gradually slowed and allowed himself to float within the pitch-black void. He looked to his left and right before extending his perception upward and downward, but every direction revealed the same oppressive emptiness. There were no stars, faint trails of distant nebulae, or scattered light from galaxies hidden beyond the horizon. The darkness appeared absolute, stretching endlessly around him without offering even a single point upon which his eyes could settle.

For a fleeting moment, the true scale of the universe pressed down upon his mind.

Adrian had gained enough strength to annihilate armies, challenge Astral Stage sovereigns, and command the laws of reality through the Source. Yet surrounded by this infinite cosmic expanse, even that power felt insignificant. He seemed no greater than a speck of dust suspended within a bottomless ocean, moving across distances that could swallow civilizations and erase their existence without leaving a trace.

The realization was humbling, and it reminded him of the ancient sorrow he had once sensed within the Void Emperor. Perhaps an existence that climbed high enough would eventually look upon the universe and understand that even unimaginable power could not fill its endless emptiness.

"Is this the loneliness of the apex?" Adrian wondered as the silence threatened to seep beyond his senses and settle within his consciousness.

He immediately shook his head and cast the dangerous line of thought aside. Long periods of travel through empty voids had damaged the minds of countless cultivators throughout history. Deprived of reference points, companionship, and meaningful change, some had begun questioning whether anything beyond themselves truly existed. Others had surrendered to the silence and drifted through space until their bodies failed.

"I am not dust," Adrian muttered into the vacuum, reaffirming his identity against the crushing emptiness.

He ignited his spatial manipulation once more, his figure blurring into a white-grey streak as he resumed his flight.

The days continued to pass.

Finally, on the twenty-eighth day, a faint light broke the endless horizon of the abyss. Adrian decelerated, his robes drifting weightlessly around him as he arrived in front of a new galaxy.

Unlike the pale blue galaxy he had passed weeks ago, this one felt incredibly ancient. It was bathed in a deep crimson and dark gold luminescence.

Adrian closed his eyes and checked the golden threads of Fate and Causality. They no longer stretched past the stars. Instead, the dense tethers plunged straight into the very heart of this galaxy.

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"Finally!" Adrian muttered, a tired but victorious smile breaking across his disguised face.

Without a moment of hesitation, he flew past the outer gravitational boundary and entered into the galaxy.

…

Far deeper within the galaxy, at its very center, there were no suns or habitable planets here. It was an empty void, a hollowed-out center.

Suddenly, a booming laugh echoed through the silent void.

"Hahahahaha!"

Floating in the center of the emptiness was a tall, powerfully built alien being. His skin was a deep red, and he wore loose robes that left his chest bare, radiating an aura of intense heat.

In front of him, the fabric of the void began to violently split apart. The space groaned as reality was peeled back, revealing a colossal, freestanding door made of dark stone. The monolith was unfathomably large, towering like a mountain in the vacuum. It was wrapped and bound by countless threads of conceptual energy, holding it tightly shut.

In the very center of the dark stone door was a circular indentation. Carved into that circle were seven distinct, small slots, clearly designed for placing seven rings.

The red-skinned alien fell to his knees in the void, tears of joy streaming down his face as he stared up at the monolith.

"Kaalatva!" the alien screamed, his voice trembling with reverence. "The door to Kaalatva has finally appeared!"

He floated closer to the door, his eyes completely transfixed, not daring to touch the conceptual threads that bound it.

A moment later, the space a few hundred meters to his right rippled. A female alien stepped out of the spatial fold. Her skin was translucent blue that glowed with a soft inner light. She possessed no hair, only a crown of floating shards that rotated gently above her head.

"Brother Kaelen," the woman spoke as she immediately fell to her knees beside the red-skinned alien, her eyes locked onto the door in pure awe. "I felt the resonance. The Great Cycle has finally turned."

Before the red-skinned alien could reply, the void fractured four more times in rapid succession.

A hulking giant emerged from the first rift. His immense body appeared to have been carved from interlocking slabs of dark stone, and every movement carried enough physical weight to disturb the surrounding space. Despite his intimidating appearance, he approached the monolith with profound humility and knelt without hesitation.

From the second spatial tear stepped a slender figure wrapped in dense black mist. As the shadowy vapor parted, it revealed a pale face marked by four entirely black, pupil-less eyes. He carried a simple wooden staff whose surface seemed ancient enough to predate the surrounding stars, and both of his hands trembled as he leaned upon it.

The third rift released a serpentine being whose upper body possessed a humanoid structure clad in intricate scaled armor. Below the waist, however, his form dissolved into shifting currents of space, allowing him to swim through the vacuum as naturally as a creature moving through water.

The fourth and final tear expelled a being wreathed in ceaseless lightning. Blue and white arcs concealed most of his physical features, but the energy surrounding him carried none of the volatility associated with an uncontrolled storm. His presence was disciplined, calm, and restrained despite the destructive force continuously crackling across his body.

A total of six powerful alien beings now floated in a semi-circle around the colossal dark stone door. They were clearly the apex sovereigns of this isolated galaxy, yet in front of this monolith, they possessed zero arrogance. They treated the door as something akin to a god, a supreme divinity that they had worshipped for their entire lives.

"It has appeared," the stone giant rumbled, his voice resonating through the void. "We have guarded our pieces through innumerable eras while waiting for this moment."

The four-eyed being leaned more heavily upon his staff. His black gaze moved across the other sovereigns before settling upon Kaelen. "Which of you accomplished it?" he asked, his whisper carrying wonder. "Who finally recovered the missing piece and awakened the resonance? Was it you, Kaelen?"

The red-skinned alien, Kaelen, shook his head slowly, his eyes never leaving the door. "No. I was merely meditating in my sector when my ring began to burn with a light I have never seen. The pull dragged me here."

"My ring reacted in precisely the same manner," the translucent woman added softly. She raised one hand, revealing a dull ring resting upon her finger and radiating a faint golden glow.

"As did mine," the serpentine being hissed, bowing his head toward the monolith. "I assumed the Lightning Weaver had finally unearthed the lost relic from the dead stars."

The lightning-wreathed entity shook his head, and the blue energy surrounding him shifted with the movement. "I have not left my sanctum in a thousand years. I guard the fifth ring, but I have neither seen nor touched the seventh."

A stunned silence fell over the six sovereigns.

They exchanged confused glances, their reverence now mingling with a growing uncertainty. Seven slots existed within the circular indentation upon the door. For generations stretching across millions of years, their six lineages had each guarded one of the corresponding rings. The seventh, however, had vanished into the cosmos eons before any of them were born, carried away by currents of Fate that even their oldest records could not trace.

Without the final ring, the door to Kaalatva had remained buried beyond the fabric of ordinary reality. It could not be summoned, perceived, or opened, regardless of how much power the six lineages accumulated.

"If none of us awakened the resonance," the translucent woman murmured, her luminous eyes widening as she followed the implication, "and we have searched every star, dead planet, and void current within this galaxy for millions of years without finding the final key..."

The four-eyed being continued, "...then the seventh ring was truly outside of our galaxy as we thought earlier, and someone has brought-"

At that moment, the golden resonance radiating from the colossal door pulsed violently.

All six sovereigns turned simultaneously toward a particular direction within the void. A solitary figure emerged from the distant darkness and began floating toward them.

He appeared to be an alien man wearing simple white-grey robes. His aura was radiating nothing more than the generic pressure of a High Rule Stage wanderer.

Adrian, wrapped in the disguise of 'Aeon', glided silently through the vacuum. His gaze passed over the six sovereigns without lingering and locked directly upon the colossal dark stone door. Around his index finger, the dull-grey ring had begun burning with such intense heat that the surrounding space visibly distorted.