My return to the cosmic warehouse was anti-climactic. I'd lived a good life and seen a bunch of the Naruto characters I knew grow up, but it'd been very different from the original story. With Bastion a place of peace that was impenetrable to even the most determined of hostile forces the balance of power in the Elemental Nations had been shifted irrevocably in their favor. Those who were allies with the new nature and peace-loving masters of runic magic were inevitably better off than those who weren't, and the world followed suit. I shook my head to clear it of such thoughts. That world was behind me now, and Washu was studying a few suggested builds she'd put together when I expressed an interest in continuing the Jump-Chain.
"Welcome back, son!" She said, not bothering to look at me as I approached. "I've got some challenges for you, if you'd like to try them. You could really do creative mode and just stomp around everywhere if you wanted at this point, but I think it'll be more fun for both of us and a better learning experience for you if you send avatars instead and let me teach your main self."
I nodded, and glanced at the screen. Most of the challenges seemed to be to limit myself to or from using specific powers, and the rewards were pretty fantastic. The ones she had prepared were Civilization, Death Note, Discworld, Doctor Who, and Dragonball. I looked over them for a bit and chose the Death Note challenge since it would be quick and fairly easy. Several perks were free since I already had equivalent abilities, but I picked up I Can See You, Private, Immune, and Invisible in addition to 400 choice points worth of drawbacks that wouldn't matter if I met the conditions of the challenge. An extra fifty choice points put me right where I wanted to be: the same school as Yagami Light just after he picked up the Death Note but before he wrote in it.
Turning on my new invisibility ability along with a host of stealth spells then scrying for Light's location was easy and only took a few seconds. Teleporting to him and summoning the Death Note from his backpack didn't even catch his attention, but the reaper Ryuk was immediately after me since I'd stolen the book that would set his precious game in motion from his chosen pawn. A half hour or so flying over Tokyo to find a nice uninhabited place later found me confronting a panting reaper who looked both annoyed and confused. He couldn't see my name or when I was going to die, so he couldn't even attempt to use his own Death Note on me, and he wasn't actually all that physically powerful.
I let him watch me as I scanned him with my Builder and Gamer abilities, then yanked his fancy pen and his copy of the Death Note out of his fancy belt holster. He jumped into the air and went to chase after it as I telekinetically brought it to me, only to meet a combination of mystical barriers and my telekinetic grip around his neck.
"Hello, Ryuk. You've been a naughty boy, and attracted the attention of something bigger than yourself," I said teasingly. He growled and struggled, but it was essentially useless. "Now, you're going to tell me how to enter your world to save me some time. If you don't you'll experience a great deal of pain," I said and pulled an apple out of nowhere to munch on. "But if you do I'll give you a few of these as a parting gift. What do you say?"
He sagged in mid-air, hanging from his neck and wheezing a little. I knew his name, could see him, could restrain him, knew of his addiction to apples, and had taken his only means of fighting back. I drew him closer and allowed him to take a bite of another apple, but he didn't immediately divulge any information. With a mental twitch I crushed his limbs, causing him to howl in agony. It wouldn't kill the bastard, and he'd been perfectly willing to cause any number of deaths both for entertainment and to prolong his twisted un-life. After a few minutes of gasping and whimpering his limbs began to straighten themselves out, so I generated a bit of fire under him to keep him motivated.
"Alright!" He gasped, having figured out that I could hurt him and wouldn't hesitate to do so. "It's easy to get in! All you have to do is use the Death Note! Kill somebody with it and you can get in!" He struggled weakly, and I sighed.
"I'm not an idiot, reaper. I'm well aware of the Notes and how they work. I'm also aware you can fly home, as it were, and that you can bring things with you. Tell me how before convincing you becomes more trouble than finding it myself." His eyes bugged out, and he hissed a laugh.
"You really think you can do anything to me? Oh, the pain! The mortal with the fancy powers thinks he can intimidate a Death God! A reaper, as you say. Don't make me laugh. I only need breath to speak, and while you can damage my body you cannot kill that which is already dead! Even if I told you what you want to know the Death God King would crush you in an instant! You're just one of them with some fancy tricks," he said with a sneer. He looked a lot less pathetic hanging by his neck now, and was actually taking the weight off by hovering a little. "I can't sense another of my kind here, after all. That means you're cattle, and nothing more. I'll find your name and take your life, then I'll take the lives of everyone you hold dear! Or maybe...maybe I'll do it the other way around, eh?"
His expression was smug now, and his visage would be vaguely intimidating if I cared. His limbs were once again crushed in my telekinetic grip, and his eyes went wide but he didn't scream again. His gasp as I struck at his mind was ignored, and since we'd just been talking about it the information I wanted was right near the top of his thoughts. He was screaming now, and might have even been visible to the normal people of this world in his agony as I tore the information from his mind.
'Washu? Does Death have any objection to my potentially wiping out the parasitic scum that call themselves Death Gods in this world?' The reply took a moment, and sounded a bit hesitant.
'No. They're technically perverting the natural cycle instead of enforcing it, but… Wren, you're acting like some of your alternates before I had to end them. Please explain yourself young man,' she said in Mom Voice.
I winced a little, but went through my reasons logically. While the whole cat and mouse game presented in the show would have eliminated a lot of criminals, in the end Light killed quite a few innocents too. The whole thing was set up to provide entertainment and longer life to the reapers in defiance of Death and the natural cycle, meaning that not only were they parasites they went out of their way to cause chaos and destruction for no reason other than boredom. Stopping them was a priority, and there were only a few ways I could see to do that. First, I could seal away the human realm and eliminate the source of the Death Notes. Second, I could kill them all so they'd receive judgement at the hands of the entity they flaunted. Last, I could erase them and their realm so thoroughly there was nothing left to judge. I much preferred the first option. Washu "hmm"ed in the back of my mind as she contemplated this, but she seemed to accept it.
'Alright. You were bound to pass judgement like this at some point. I can't keep giving you the answers forever and expect you to grow, so I'll leave the choice in your hands. Just...don't be too hasty. Eliminating souls is not something you should take lightly, no matter how evil they seem.'
I nodded, confusing the recovering reaper in front of me and deciding on a course of action. I could see Ryuk's twisted soul, but it was in theory only a part of the infinite whole. Destroying it would be pointless and might damage others that were connected to it but less deserving of punishment. If I was going to represent life, death, or any other force as a god I would do so responsibly. The fact that what I was about to do was probably more painful than burning the wretch out of existence with a holy version of fiendfyre was just a bonus. I gathered myself, then struck out with divine energy and tore the soul from the body before me and let it pass on. The body itself I deconstructed and stored in my inventory as raw materials.
My eyes sought out and found a place in the sky where Ryuk's portal into the mortal world was slowly decaying, and I shot through it into a world of lifeless gray. The portal itself was scanned and dispelled as I went through it, and I found myself surrounded by reapers who'd been watching the goings-on with interest. Not having heard my conversation with Washu and having had very little time to realize I'd actually killed one of them they didn't react to defend themselves and they were subjected to the same treatment. Their Death Notes joined Ryuk's and Light's in my inventory, and I set out to find the supposed Death God King.
Munching apples as I went and deconstructing the cores seemed to fuel both my in-Jump apple and sweet addictions, but boredom was getting to me. A quick check of whether or not I could deconstruct the scenery revealed that the place counted as already claimed, so instead of using the actual builder power I dedicated a whole lot of thought to tearing the place apart with earth bending and storing the chunks themselves in my inventory. The results were roughly the same, and the gaping void where ground had been was interesting enough to study that following the results of my latest scrying spell wasn't quite so dull. I probably should have re-considered taking the Boredom drawback when I had a theoretically infinite number of threads to entertain. Limiting the number active was helping, as was giving them all something to do in addition to their normal tasks.
As I went a curious resistance to my actions started to build up. I could feel something pushing back at me, attempting to prevent me from killing the reapers I came across and especially trying to prevent me from essentially devouring the world as I went. Theoretically infinite threads of thought multiplied and continued to fight, and I started to toy with the idea of inverting the use of my genesis ability to collapse the entire plane of existence instead of confronting the kind within his own castle as it were. It probably wouldn't be necessary, but I dedicated a few threads to working out how to do it anyway.
The resistance grew greater with time, but it was in no way insurmountable. Gaming the system of my mystical energy by dedicating arbitrary numbers of threads to generating more and to overcoming said resistance with as little as possible wasn't nearly as difficult as it should have been. With determination and creativity I wasn't sure there was anything in this world that could actually stop me, but I proceeded with caution nonetheless toward the growing spheroid of flesh in the distance. The skull motif was heavy here, and the bug-like pincers of the thing were scrabbling madly even as it called the other reapers to defend it. There weren't many, and those that answered the call met their ends before they could hurt me.
Many were more physically capable than Ryuk had been, and a few had supernatural abilities to throw my way as well. These were countered, dispelled, or ignored and the reapers themselves eliminated. The translation felt wrong here. These parasites called themselves shinigami in Japanese, meaning god or spirit of death. They could also be termed reapers, but it was an out-of-the-way interpretation. Reaper also seemed to give them too much credit. Were they merely undead, then? Powerful malevolent spirits of those departed pooling what supernatural ability they had to extend their own existence at the cost of others? Was this purgatory?
Ultimately it didn't matter. When I reached the huge chain-laden ball of flesh and skulls the parasites called King I smote the damn thing hard enough that the echoes of my divine energy were probably felt in other realms. The stack of Death Notes it'd been sitting on were scanned and destroyed, with me only keeping one copy of the "human" version, one of the version they'd been using, and one that seemed to be a combination of the two for study. I felt the ripples of my actions spread through the world around me and into the not-space I'd started feeling that indicated time and other dimensions. I watched as time ground to a halt with the destruction of the the very structure that drove the plot of this world and Washu's avatar manifested before me. She watched as I claimed and deconstructed the whole of that world in minutes, and said nothing as we slipped out of that world back toward Elysium. She did smile, though.
New power settled over me as I felt the Immune perk I'd gained grow in scope and utility, and Death's Blessing further warped my divine energy to the point where I could actually see and feel the cycle of life, death, and the afterlife. For most souls there was no end: there was always more to explore and experience. Those too damaged or judged unfit to continue as they were experienced a death of personality, but were not erased completely. Even the infinite timelines constantly shifting, collapsing, and being born anew didn't destroy souls.
My new mother had been testing me with the fiendfyre thing. I could have destroyed the individual bits that existed in that universe, but their souls would have lived on despite anything I could currently do. Washu watched my expression with a soft smile as I processed these new revelations, and hugged me to her as I examined my own soul again. We were connected. Not just myself and Washu, but everyone and everything I'd ever loved. By my soul she was just as much my mother as the one I remembered from before she plucked me up. Through those immediate links a vast web connected me to the rest of creation. The tenuous threads connecting different multiverses reminded me strongly of the pictures I'd seen illustrating the way galaxies were connected by filaments of barely-there gases, and the similarities didn't stop there. This was the pattern of creation, and it was breathtaking.