"Hmm… but speaking of it, although the Magical Index world has a very high capacity, its stage is actually very small. Even without letting Ophis and the others make a move, just me taking a stroll around would be more than enough."
Noah rubbed his chin, thought for a moment, and then smiled faintly.
It seemed he really had not personally subdued many worlds.
Moreover, the Magical Index world could not accommodate so many people going there. If a real battle broke out, the foundation of the world might even be shattered.
In addition… those Magic Gods actually wished to leave their world. They did not want to crowd in the corners of it.
If given the chance to leave the Magical Index world, they would definitely go mad.
And if they were shown the path beyond the level of Magic Gods, they would absolutely raise their hands to surrender at once.
There would be no need for the usual three steps of inviting, beheading, and forcing them to submit as dogs.
They themselves would become willing guides.
"I've decided, I'll go personally this time. I'll treat it as a vacation."
"Besides, Academy City really is a nice vacation spot."
Noah stretched lazily.
After working so hard for so long, it was time to relax properly.
His gaze turned toward the battlefield of the Solar Sovereignty War.
The Solar Sovereignty War would still last a long time. Just the war between Venti and Zhongli alone had already taken seven years.
Of course, to gods, seven years was merely the blink of an eye.
Given the current state of the divine collectives, even if the higher echelons did nothing for thousands of years, there would be no problems. The God-Kings would handle everything. After all, each of the divine collectives possessed its own nexus.
Moreover, during the Solar Sovereignty War, the entire Pan-Human History lay under Phanes' gaze. With her there, nothing would go wrong.
To have such a diligent wife who arranged everything perfectly was Noah's greatest blessing. Without Phanes, he did not know how exhausted he would become.
Although Asmoday and the others could take Phanes' place, they were not suited to be leaders. They were executors, not rulers.
"By the time I've subdued the Magical Index Great World, the second round of the Solar Sovereignty War might not even be finished."
The second round corresponded to Gemini. The inheritors of Gemini were Raiden Makoto and Raiden Ei, and their opponents were Focalors and Furina—both of whom also fit Gemini.
The third round was Pisces, and Pisces' inheritors just happened to be Focalors and Furina, while the ones tested were Raiden Makoto and Raiden Ei. It was simply reversed.
By then, the two sides had already clashed.
Whether Raiden Makoto and Raiden Ei, or Furina and Focalors, their displayed strength was in no way inferior to Zhongli and Venti.
They even carried auras similar to Venti's higher-level power.
All of them were tied to Noah. The existence of the Heavenly Stigmata granted them the qualification to obtain Laws, and at this moment they all carried the profound might of Laws.
Just like how Venti wielded the profundity of the Principle of Time.
...
Noah withdrew his gaze and activated the system's World Gate.
A golden portal appeared before him.
He had not used the system's World Gate in a long time.
After all, with the power of Super-Primeval God, he had already deciphered the secret of the World Gate, simplified it, and passed it to the gods.
However, his own World Gates could not be compared with those provided by the system.
He could not silently open a gate in a super single-universe world.
Although he was a Super-Primeval God, at multiversal-structure level, his strength was still not enough to ignore the world force of a super single-universe great world.
"The Magical Index world…"
"If we're talking about anime in my heart, it's absolutely my favorite."
Noah could not help but recall the times he spent at home watching anime.
He had always loved Misaka Mikoto, Misaki, and the Misaka Sisters.
There were simply too many adorable girls he liked in the Magical Index world.
He had even written several Academy City fanfictions because of it.
Thinking of this, he stepped into the World Gate.
At the same time, Phanes and the others deep within the Temple of Truth sensed it.
"Noah has left Teyvat?"
"Has Lord Heavenly Principle gone to the Tree and Sea?"
"Most likely. After all, Noah has long been planning how to annex the Tree and Sea."
"Then we must work harder."
...
Magical Index World.
A golden door silently appeared in outer space, just beyond the atmosphere of a blue planet.
Noah slowly stepped out, his aura completely that of an ordinary person.
It was merely a matter of adjusting his own power. Teyvat was a city of gods. Unlike Magic Gods, his entry into a world would not recklessly cause it to collapse.
Upon arriving in this unfamiliar world, Noah immediately began observing its structure.
In less than a minute, the entire structure of the Magical Index world was laid bare before him.
"As expected, this world really is twisted. Its foundation is completely inverted—truly unbelievable."
If other worlds were structured like pyramids, then the Magical Index world was an inverted pyramid.
Normally, water flows downward—but here, water flowed upward.
This was not to say that its rules themselves were reversed, but rather that the world's structure was.
Generally speaking, the present world, as the representation of reality, was the largest, and the deeper one went inside, the smaller it became—yet mass, energy, and laws grew higher.
But in the Magical Index world, the present world lay at the very core. The deeper one went inside, the lower the mass, energy, and laws.
It was like a coconut—its outer shell hard, its flesh softer, and its core nothing but water without mass.
"No wonder the present world is so fragile. When a Magic God enters it, the world collapses. Meanwhile, the outer shell of the world is so unshakably hard that even when Magic Gods reach super single-universe, they cannot escape."
"Moreover, the very form of the Magic Gods' power is as distorted as the world itself."
"As long as one can find a way to reach the world's outer layer, leaving the core and drawing upon the outer power, their scale could leap from less than galactic-level to ten-thousandfold single-universe in an instant."
Only such a bizarre world structure could produce such bizarre, almost grotesque existences like the Magic Gods.
Still, calling them super single-universe was an overstatement.
Their bloated power left them unable to perfectly control it—they could only build within their own domains.
In other words, they could only perform addition, not subtraction. They could waste power, but not erase the phenomena they caused.
Most importantly, the level of their power was not high. The rules they grasped had not reached the level of Laws, much less involved any Truth.
It was merely a matter of piling up occult power until it reached ten-thousandfold single-universe.
Calling them super single-universe meant only that their size had reached it—their mass had not.
If a true super single-universe was a bucket of mercury, then a Magic God was only a bucket of ordinary water.
Furthermore, while the Magical Index world as a whole possessed the mass of super single-universe, its present world had only the mass of a standard single-universe. How could such a fragile mass possibly contain ten-thousandfold single-universe Magic Gods?
"Incredible. Truth and Laws are not within the interior, but directly fused into the world's barrier itself."
"This prevents those within from leaving, and those outside from entering."
"A closed-country policy… on a world's scale? Truly eye-opening."
Noah raised his hand, gathering the power of mysticism into his palm.
So-called mystical power referred to rules infused with countless myths—rules that elevated mass from the bottom upward.
The weakest of such rules could not even compare to those governing ordinary planets, while the strongest could surpass even the rules of a great universe.
To wield these special mythical rules, one had to embody the meaning and identity represented by them.
Even at the same level, it was impossible to cross mythic boundaries to use another's rules.
To cross such boundaries, one needed to alter myths—myth revision or myth compilation. Beings capable of this could escape the inner world and reach the outer side.
"How strange. Even though it has reached super single-universe scale, it doesn't even have a world consciousness."
As Noah clicked his tongue in wonder, he found the reason.
"Law, Truth, and the world's barrier are fused together, not a trace leaking into the inner world, not playing any role at all—merely serving as an eggshell encasing the world."
Indeed, no one within this world could wield the power of Law or Truth. What could be used were only the pyramid-like rules.
The Magic Gods stood at the tip of this pyramid, with all rules flowing downward from them.
With Law and Truth contributing nothing, the inner world naturally could not grow stably—it was exceedingly fragile.
So long as a being beyond single-universe appeared, the world would be disturbed, like water constantly being stirred.
Each disturbance reshaped the world completely.
As many Magic Gods as there were, so too had the present world been reshaped that many times.
With his Super-Primeval God's power, Noah saw at a glance the origin of this world.
At first, its form was that of a World Tree. Truth, Law, and the world's barrier fused together into the eggshell encasing it.
Then, the first Magic God was born by accident, twisting the world into a strange shape. With each change of the world, another Magic God was born.
This cycle repeated until now. The present world, under the unconscious influence of all the Magic Gods, had become the great-universe-shaped structure it was today.
Although the present world had been reshaped again and again by mythical rules, and even those rules themselves had kept changing—
There remained a foundational logic that never changed.
And as mythical rules kept cycling, this unchanging base became more obvious.
It was the pure logic of physical operation.
Any world beyond single-universe scale must possess multiple foundational logics. These logics evolved into world blueprints—in other words, cosmologies.
"Science and magic. The collision of two cosmologies will determine the next era."
Noah did not dwell on it further. His figure moved, flying toward a point on the blue planet beneath him.
Subduing the Magic Gods was not urgent. At the moment, they were gathered in a phase outside the present world.
If he wished to subdue them, he could simply grab them with one hand—they had nowhere to run.
What mattered more was that annexing a super single-universe world was far more difficult than before.
This difficulty lay in the time required.
Anchoring a super single-universe world meant planting many anchors before it could be fully drawn over.
And given how unusual this world was—with Truth, Law, and the world's barrier fused together—even Noah himself had no idea where to begin infecting it through assimilation of Truth.
He couldn't exactly gnaw on the world's barrier, after all.
"This Magical Index world must have experienced a great catastrophe in the past. Otherwise, it could never have turned out like this."
Without world consciousness, with Truth and Law fused into the barrier—this was effectively declaring the world to be a living corpse. Its body still lived, but its soul was dead. It would never grow, forever fixed in its current state.
By the scale and quality of its Truth, if it had grown normally, this world would already have been at weak multiverse level.
...
Academy City
In the western district of Tokyo, occupying nearly one-third of the city's area, stood a fully enclosed city independent from the island nation—a nation within a nation in name and fact.
It housed hundreds of elementary, middle, and high schools, along with dozens of universities and over a thousand research institutes.
Its population was nearly 2.3 million, with 80% being students. The remaining population consisted of top scholars and researchers, who together represented 70% of the world's foremost scientific minds.
On the surface, its science was twenty years ahead of the world, but in truth it surpassed it by more than a hundred.
In just fifty to sixty years, it had become the heart of the science side.
Its very existence split the world into two sides: the magic side and the science side.
Beyond its far-advanced science, what drew students most was, of course, esper powers.
Yet even among nearly two million students, fewer than 40% possessed such powers. And of those, the majority were only Level 1 or Level 2—abilities like making paper scraps flutter or bending spoons.
Night had already fallen. The streets between towering skyscrapers glowed with neon lights and bright advertisements. Wind turbines spun slowly at intervals along the roadsides, while barrel-shaped cleaning robots tidied the streets.
Some students deliberately tossed empty drink cans at the robots, only to be chased by Judgment members with green armbands.
This was the Seventh School District, the very center of Academy City's twenty-three districts, and so it teemed with middle and high school students.
The streets brimmed with youthful energy. From time to time, an accident occurred—an esper causing a gadget to explode or losing control of their ability—followed by a chase from Judgment or Anti-Skill officers.
The students who lived here seemed long accustomed to such incidents.
Noah's appearance had remained that of a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old ever since he became Lord Heavenly Principle, unchanged and blending seamlessly into this place.
"Heh~ To feel this youthful atmosphere… it's like being back in my own school days."
His gaze drifted toward a tea-haired girl being scolded by Anti-Skill after frying a capsule toy machine with electricity. A faint smile tugged at his lips.
—
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