Chapter 250: Time... Ticks (3)
Time doesn’t rush so much as it closes in... like a hallway narrowing with every step, the walls inching closer until the air itself feels crowded with things that were meant to stay apart.
Khaos never kicks the door in... it seeps, it swells, it memorizes the shape of the rooms. It settles in the throat of the hour and waits for the smallest nod to move forward.
But Destiny is the slipperiest of them all, the one you can’t quite shake.
It flares and wavers, pretending to be a choice until some stray wind finds it, and then it’s nothing but a wick—fragile, inevitable, already claimed by flame...
You can turn your back on the clock, rename the heavy burden with softer words, insist the road was never yours.
But the wick still knows you....
.... The hour still runs thin.
And when the fire comes, it will wear a face you’ve seen before.
----
Far away from Sunya, but also in a place perhaps that was made especially for her, the scale of things ceased to belong to any single world.
From a distance, even the Minor Existence appeared as a simple colorful bubble, bright and contained, and seated on top of it was a smaller, more mythical bubble whose surface held a different kind of light.
From the upper bubble, a single thread drifted upward, weaving into an intricate web spun from countless other small existences.
Each filament reached toward a vast cosmology, so immense that almost none of its form was visible—only a red infinity symbol, shifting through every imaginable color.
Every thread converged into that symbol, which served as the gateway to the verse...
The verse of Pantheos.
----
If someone stepped into this place for the very first time, after a simple flight, their vision would open to reveal an endless expanse of multiverses suspended in the void.
Each held within containers of every imaginable form—some shaped like trees, others like statues, and still others taking on shapes without any true name in the languages of lesser worlds.
Through the dark around those containers, beings fought, traveled, bargained, died, and began again; and in the middle of all that motion stood a few massive leaderboards marked with similar words.
Divine Cosmic Ranking
All around the rankings, Dragons lingered in place.
Humans mingled alongside Phoenixes, Angels, and Demons. Striking bronze-skinned Nosferatu stood near wild, pale-skinned Asuras, while others with races were even more unique than anything ever spoken about.
And... None of them were passing through; they waited with purpose, their conversations circling back, again and again, to the same board.
"When is the physique ranking update?" a dragon muttered, claws flexing against nothing, eyes never leaving the highest line.
"It updates when it updates," an angel said, though the tightness in the words betrayed how little comfort that gave.
"We’ve all received the same prophecies... so, why are you rushing?"
A Nosferatu’s mouth curved without humor.
"Who wouldn’t rush such things... the Era of Khaos is merely ten years away from commencing."
A pale Asura spat to the side but kept his gaze fixed.
"Tsk, I don’t get why everyone’s making such a fuss. These rankings change every damn day... what’s so special this time?"
No one could offer a rebuttal—mainly because they knew he was right.
In Pantheos, the rarest aspects one could possess were the Divine Cosmic.
And it wasn’t just about their rank... no, anything bearing the title "Divine Cosmic" was essentially a cheat, the kind of thing that could turn anyone into a living legend.
The downside?
Even though such items were rare, it wasn’t unusual for the rankings to shift.
After all, when you considered that the verse of Pantheos had thousands of minor existences tethered to it, along with infinite multiverses—and that was only the first stage of cosmology—it was no surprise the rankings fluctuated so often.
Still, they couldn’t ignore what they had all felt... nor what had been foretold in prophecy by the One God himself.
They’d all sensed it, and had for decades: the stirrings in Destiny, in Fate, even in Chaos, as though the rankings themselves were on the verge of revealing something unlike anything before.
Their conversations meandered, looping back on themselves, never quite settling into agreement, because no one wanted to be the first to admit that the long-reigning first place might not make it through the hour.
HUMMMMMM!!!!!
Then after a long while... a massive surge of divinity arrived without warning.
And just like that, the rankings started to change.
The titles of physiques that had held their top spots for what felt like forever slipped down in one sudden, public drop, and a new physique claimed first place.
For a long moment, silence hung in the air. It wasn’t exactly because a new physique had claimed the number one spot in all of existence—everyone understood that this ranking merely reflected the potential of the aspect.
Still, that potential was no small thing.
After all, who wouldn’t be intrigued by the physique with the highest possible promise in the entire cosmos?
Yet, what truly left everyone reeling wasn’t just its position at the top, but the slight description of the physique itself.
[1. Crownwood All-Sea Physique - This is a physique that instantly magnifies the user’s total battle power by +50]
When the silence finally broke, it did not break into celebration.
It broke into the kind of talk that tries to sound informed while the speakers are still catching up to their own unease.
"That... has to be a hidden gem," a phoenix said, feathers tight along the neck, eyes fixed on the spare line as if more words might appear if they stared hard enough.
"+50 is absurd, yes, but it is also the sort of number this board has shown before...."
A bronze-skinned Nosferatu’s smile was thin.
"Indeed... If the ranking is this vague, if it will not even hint at what the bearer truly does, then the number is the least of it."
An Asura’s pale fingers flexed once.
"Then it is as prophesied. When the Era leans in, the first thing the cosmos does is hide the real teeth behind a clean title."
Across the boards, the same thought kept surfacing in different voices: a frame that tall, with so few details attached, wasn’t something the verse was ready to make sense of.
That kind of potential wasn’t a prize to show off—it was a fuse waiting to be lit.
One of them slipped a token from their sleeve, pressing it to life against their palm, the signal shooting through channels that didn’t care how far down the web a small existence might be.
The voice that followed was quiet, steady, and already set on its course.
"Find the Goddess of the Eternal Hour.... Locate Sunya Ultos before she blooms into a monster."