Chapter 0: Prelude - A Vast Expanse
A void stretched out further than any eye could possibly ever see. It was endless in the truest sense of the word, an eternally expanding gap of nothing pushing its way forward in every direction. It wasn't uniform, rifts and pulsating distortions intersected the endless terrain of nothing seemingly at random.
These gaps in space were barely noticeable, like the blur of heat floating off of pavement on a sunny day. A figure, shrouded not in darkness but somehow in the void itself, in shimmering nothingness that shrunk and grew chaotically, glided through expanse as it weaved its way around the veins of haze.
Suddenly, the humanoid shape came to a stop. The cloak of void gradually dissipated and a figure was revealed. An ordinary looking man stood, with dark hair and tanned skin. Tall but not towering, toned but not muscular. The only notable aspect to his being were his eyes. They changed colors, shifting from a deep gray to dark blue. Barely noticeable were the hints of grief and regret and melancholy locked in his stare.
He sighed and as he did, the distortions surrounding his suddenly went wild, as if they finally noticed an intruder, as if the presence of the man had suddenly been unmasked and they had no idea what to do but panic. A new rift opened only inches away from the man, rushing towards him to engulf the intruder and banish him to some wayward iteration. In a slow and tired wave of his hand, the man shattered the rift into disappearing shards.
But just before the pieces of the rift returned to nothing, the shards flashed with color, and small glimpses of life could be seen within. Images of vast planets covered in endless green, of desert realms with gigantic storms covering continents, and worlds of endless ocean teeming with life flashed by.
A planet with vast arrays of asteroids revolving around it could be seen, and even more surprising were the specks of people waiting to jump across the narrow gaps between the large rocks, navigating towards colonies in space. Another image popped up, and now an arctic land was visible, with soaring mountains that literally scraped the sky as they punctured the atmosphere and forced vacuums and depressions of immense pressure to surround inhabitants. A volcanic realm was next, and instead of humanoid shapes spaced through the land, two vast legions of large metallic insects could be seen marching towards the equator with horns of war so loud they could deafen beings on any of the seven orbiting moons.
This all, as well as hundreds of other visions of strange worlds and exotic places, sped by in the space of milliseconds within the shard. Just as the shard was about to blink out of existence, it stopped at one final image. It was an ordinary planet, 3 large continents and single smaller island stood in a bright blue ocean. The planet seemed overburdened with leafage and age now, as vast swaths of forest covered the world, but sparse relics of an older civilization that dotted the landscape proved this hadn't always been the case. The world seemed stable, and unusual, with one abnormality.
Not a single living being could be seen on the planet.
In the microsecond where the world was visible, the look in the man's eyes seemed to change. Initial surprise quickly turned to profound grief as the figure quietly lifted his hand to prevent the shard from fading away. He quietly pulled the image to him, staring at it with clear recognition in his eyes. The distortions and blurs around the figure, previously trembling and out of control, suddenly stilled, as if they wished to pay respects to a grief so huge it was palpable.
Not much existed that could force a reaction out of the man. He walked the boundary between worlds now, living in the fine line that separated order, chaos, and nonreality. He had long ago severed karma and memory with any iteration lucky enough to still exist, and all the people that he had once laughed and eaten with, those who had cultivated alongside him would be fortunate if their remains hadn't already turned to dust. It had been like this for millennia, he had already walked to the end of his path. Some part of him wondered if this really was true, be he quashed the hope that there were still greater heights to climb. What was hope but a lie he was too old to believe?
He had for thousands of years now transcended what he had once believed to be the end of a sacred artist's path. The road he walked down now was nameless and boundless, without definition or constraint. Enduring, unchanging, shapeless, beautiful, terrible. His path was transcendent, without peak, yet he knew that he stood at its end.
The Nameless Path wasn't what he'd always called it. A distant part of him remembered.
Scavenging through garbage and refuse for a way to learn cultivation, he'd found the Path of the Moonlit Night.
Crawling through shadows to try to kill his first real master, he ran away with the Path of Heaven's Spheres.
As he stood at the helm of his army, ready to wage his first war, he rained destruction down from the heavens with the Path of Starry Descent.
When in madness he annihilated the worlds and people he had once sworn to protect, he forged the Path of God's Jest from the remains of broken planets and dying suns.
The paths weren't truly different. He knew that now. They were all part of one path, his path. A path that had led to his self-imposed exile. An unrecorded exile, for he had forcibly removed himself from the memories of the billions who had once worshipped him as their savior, from the friends who had once fought with him, from the enemies who would've sacrificed galaxies to injure him. Not that they'd ever find him anyways.
The border realm that he drifted through now was beyond even the comprehension of some who thought they stood at the peak of The Way.
And yet, just the glimpse of a world in a shard had left him petrified. Deep and distant memories he had tried to lock away resurfaced. He wished he could forget, but even if he was powerful enough to wipe away the memories of others, he was cursed to remember. He opened his throat, and in a voice unheard in thousands of years, he whispered.
"Home…"
A deep ache, a longing he thought himself to numbed to feel filled him. He wished he could go back, relive it just one more time, see his parents again, love his wife again, fight through the vicious yet wonderous world he had ascended from again. He knew that there existed those who could reverse time and space – he had once had the power himself – but even if one could be found they wouldn't do so here. Who would?
The Abidan named him an agent of chaos. Those of chaos named him a fool.
His parents had named him Calydon.
Calydon began to funnel power into his hands. He had reached the point where virtually any technique or power was available to him, but he was accessing a familiar path, the one he had used on the last stretch of his journey. Brilliant white light began to shine out of his hands, bright enough to incineration nearby worlds. It condensed into a liquid that poured through his fingers, and then solidified into a metallic glove that looked as if it had been stitched with stars. It was radiant, to a degree that shook the void, forming cracks in space itself near as it released a terrible heat. At the same time the shard began to glow with a similar light, growing brighter and brighter as the nearby distortions began to rotate and squirm violently, once again fearful of this unknown power.
"Heavenly Decree: Regression" whispered Calydon.
The shard exploded with light that began to expand violently as it warped everything around him. Reversing time and space was beyond him now, but manipulating madra of memory and belief had always been one of his strong points. And now he was bringing those memories to life.
The nearby distortions, going wild again in the presence of such immense power, began to leak some of the vast energy into the realms they connected. It was an infinitesimally small fraction of power being released, yet it shook the galaxies they were linked to.
The Way noticed.
Order itself stepped through a distortion.
It began to radiate its own power to prevent what was happening. Calydon seemed to expect this, and he increased the power he released by yet another tier as he once again whispered.
"Let me have this. Let me create it just once more. I know I can never live it again but just let me see it happen one more time."
The Way did not care.
"I saved you once. Debts must be repaid. Let me have this."
The Way faltered.
"You wronged me. I was a sacrifice for your mistakes."
The Way ended its resistance, and winked out of the void.
Calydon turned back to the source of the exploding light and closed his eyes.
"How far back do I go? When did it all begin? Was it the creation of Idol, as the burning amalgamation of planetary fragments cooled into a planet? Was it the construction of the Obelisk that made my world another stop on the Pilgrimage? No… this is my story. Yet it doesn't begin at my birth. No… it began… when I met those two idiots"
A ghost of a smile touched his face for the first time in eons.
"Let's start where I died"
And the light destroyed and made everything.