On a hot summer day, the noisy chirping of insects stopped.
Elios stood on the ground, looking directly at the sun in the sky. The scorching sun did not affect his eyes at all. To some extent, he might be more dazzling than the sun at this moment.
So much so that the air around Elios was distorted, as if it could not bear Elios's existence.
His existence was constantly distorting everything around him. The human form seemed ready to collapse at any moment, as though something vaster and indescribable was pressing against it from within.
Elios had reached a threshold, one that exceeded what this world could sustain.
Therefore, in his eyes, this world was riddled with loopholes.
"After all," Elios murmured softly, "it's just a world curled up like a bug."
Elios had been mad for a long time. If not for the last thread of persistence anchoring his consciousness, he would have already degenerated into a formless, chaotic distortion.
"Then let this world usher in a greater future."
Suppressing the turbulence in his thoughts, Elios forced himself into clarity. He raised his hand and carved two intersecting wounds across his forehead, forming a perfect cross.
Dark red text seeped from the wounds, crawling outward like living scripture.
These characters carried madness, omen, and decay, yet they did not collapse.
They were restrained.
Locked in form by a deeper authority.
This was Disc Power, Tier Three: Projection Authority.
At this tier, Elios could not yet overwrite reality itself, but he could invoke the Disc to project, simulate, and anchor a lower-dimensional world derived from a higher template.
The "Earth" beneath his feet was not the true origin world.
It was a Disc-world.
A copied framework, drawn from the coordinates engraved in his soul, reduced in dimensional depth, and sealed into an enclosed causal loop.
A reflection.
A shadow.
An illusion made real enough to suffer.
The real Earth still existed, untouched, far beyond this Disc-projected domain.
The next instant, countless dark red words surged outward. Anything they touched was infected. Their propagation defied resistance.
Birds, beasts, and crawling things twisted violently, transforming into grotesque forms beyond mortal comprehension before exploding into blood and fragments.
Vegetation bloomed and withered in rapid succession. In mere breaths, countless cycles of growth and decay were completed.
The dark red scripture pouring from Elios's forehead seemed inexhaustible, polluting everything it encountered.
Land, mountains, oceans, sky, even the sun, were stained crimson.
From matter to concept.
From surface to essence.
From present to history.
The Disc unfolded its authority through time and space, saturating the entire projected world.
"I feel it," Elios said calmly. "The core. The most real point of this world."
He opened his eyes fully.
"As expected."
"The reality of this world comes from me."
"This is not creation… it is reclamation."
By activating the Disc at this tier, Elios had returned to authorship over the projected world.
Not a true creator god, but the sole administrator of this closed reality.
The dark red text trembled violently, then plunged into the core of the world like anchors driven into flesh.
At that moment, Elios stood as the only god within this Disc-domain.
More than thirty thousand deaths echoed within him.
Each death refined his control over the white mist.
Each death sharpened his grasp of the Disc.
These dark red words were the accumulation of those deaths.
Released all at once, they were sufficient to infect the entire Disc-world, rewriting its most fundamental framework.
"The current form is no longer sufficient," Elios said. "I must rewrite the beginning."
He extended his hand.
From the void, pulled forth by crimson scripture, a white Dove appeared.
This Dove was not life. It was symbol.
The condensed meaning of the old Disc-world.
Peace.
Continuity.
False harmony.
"My Will," Elios whispered.
Dark red bled into the Dove's form.
He tightened his fingers.
The world trembled.
"Crack."
The Dove died.
And with it, the illusionary world collapsed.
But this was not the destruction of Earth.
This was the termination of a Disc projection, a simulated lower-dimensional reality whose sole purpose was to bear Elios's awakening.
Mountains shattered.
Seas overturned.
Civilizations erased in an instant.
Yet beyond the Disc boundary, the true Earth remained intact, unaware, untouched.
The destruction continued until only chaos remained.
Then,
Chains of dark red scripture stabilized the void.
Chaos reorganized.
A new world began.
Not an illusion this time, but a fresh Disc-seeded domain, lighter, weaker, but wholly his.
"The new world shall be named Desolate."
And the Disc recorded:
[Genesis 1:1 — God destroyed the illusion and created Desolation by killing the Dove.]
At this time, in the desolate world, the dark red text no longer surged outward. Instead, it spread like an invisible net that covered heaven and earth, sinking silently into the fabric of the world.
Only a gigantic node remained suspended high in the sky, overlapping with the sun itself, dyeing the sunlight with a faint crimson hue.
Elios stood upon the desolate land, yet seemed utterly detached from it, present, but also outside it.
At this moment, he still held the Dove in his hand.
Everything appeared simple.
Easy.
Destroying a world, rebuilding a world, smooth enough that it felt almost natural. From beginning to end, nothing deviated from Elios's expectations. His expression did not fluctuate in the slightest, as if all outcomes had already been calculated long ago.
Yet beneath that calm exterior, Elios was far from tranquil.
He had finally done it.
Taken the most critical step.
Now, his spirit was deeply integrated with Desolate.
To lose control was to shake the world.
The title of master of the world was neither exaggeration nor metaphor. It was a concrete, terrifying authority.
For example,
Elios raised his hand and casually opened a portion of the land. He then buried the corpse of the Dove into the soil.
In that instant, miracles bloomed.
The authority of creation manifested.
The lifeless corpse embedded in the soil transformed immediately. A faint breath of vitality emerged, fragile yet stubborn, and began to grow at an astonishing speed.
Soon, Elios felt it.
Fetal movement.
This was creation.
Life was not an ornament of the world. It was its engine. Without life, a world could only drift toward entropy and nothingness.
Elios's gaze left the empty land and pierced beyond the world itself.
His will crossed the world barrier and touched the outside.
Void.
There was no light.
No darkness.
No emptiness.
Only nothing.
Even perceiving it caused instinctive panic, as if existence itself was being denied.
Fortunately, Elios remained bound to Desolate. The weight of reality anchored his perception, affirming his own existence.
The world floated within the void, fragile and transient, capable of collapsing back into nothingness at any moment.
Elios could clearly sense it, the vitality of Desolate was slowly but steadily decreasing.
This vitality was the true lifeline of a world.
At this moment, Elios faced two paths.
One: return the world to a closed cycle, minimizing consumption, allowing it to persist through endless repetition.
Two: force the world forward, develop it, enrich it, strengthen it, at the cost of greater expenditure.
There was no hesitation.
The world had already been dragged onto Elios's chariot. There was no retreat.
Only by advancing toward truth, by refining illusion into reality, could the world gain weight and permanence.
A world born from nothingness would inevitably sink back into nothingness. Only through accumulation, through substance, life, spirit, could it become real.
Thus, after reopening the world, Elios's first action was creation.
Life would give rise to civilization. Civilization would give rise to meaning.
Matter and spirit were equally indispensable.
Of course, beyond cultivating this world, Elios had another objective.
To find casualty, to destroy the cancer from within.
The coordinates of those viruses engraved deep within his soul.
Leaving the incubating life behind, Elios once more extended his will beyond Desolate. In the distant void, he vaguely sensed an immense existence, vast, heavy, and faintly familiar.
"I can sense it," Elios murmured. "But it's still too vague."
"To anchor it… time will be required."
It was like fishing.
The bait had been cast.
Now, only patience remained.
"If nothing responds, I'll cast again."
Probability and time would decide the rest.
"I hope the anchoring succeeds sooner rather than later."
With that thought, Elios withdrew his gaze.
Though he had only been absent for a brief moment, nearly half a month had passed within Desolate.
The flow of time between worlds was never equal.
A moment could equal millennia.
During this interval, he would cultivate this land, prepare a world worthy of use.
As Elios's attention returned, the nascent life responded.
The soil where the Dove had been buried began to stir.
A blood-stained wing pierced through the earth.
Then a beak.
Then the full body emerged.
A new life, partially anthropomorphic, yet fundamentally still a Dove, struggled free from the soil.
"Coo… coo…"
Its eyes had not yet opened. The sound came purely from instinct.
Elios extended his hand.
That vast hand lifted the newborn creature from the mud, gently straightening its fragile body.
After a brief pause, Elios spoke.
"You shall be called Agu."
Scarlet eyes opened.
The young Dove gazed upon the god before it. His radiance reflected clearly within its pupils. From its dry beak, it spoke the first word of its existence,
"God."
[Genesis 1:2 — God gave birth to the beginning. Feathers were born in the soil, and they saw God and received their name.]