In the silent dark beyond the firmament, Ye Zai floated — or rather, he was the firmament. His vast form stretched beyond stars, beyond clusters, beyond the filaments of the universe itself. Galaxies spiraled like tiny beads upon the vast expanse of his existence, and yet, Ye Zai hungered.
He had already surpassed the limits of his own reality. He had consumed the Supreme Author of his verse, crushed omniversal walls, and bathed in the concept of nonexistence until he transcended it. But beyond his boundless body, he sensed it — a pressure, a thin veil, an unfamiliar dimensional horizon.
This was no ordinary barrier.
This was a boundary between realities, one that even infinite beings could not cross. And yet, Ye Zai, in his arrogance, stretched out a hand — a clawed limb the size of millions of light-years — and pressed against it.
The veil rippled.
And snapped back.
BANG!
The force recoiled so violently that Ye Zai's immense form shook. Stars shattered in the waves of his aura. But the hunger inside him only roared louder.
For the first time in aeons, Ye Zai knew he needed something more. He needed to cultivate.
For hundreds of thousands of years — though time had long since become meaningless — Ye Zai entered a state of closed cultivation.
In the deep folds of the void, he sank inward. His colossal body, wrapped around the empty shell of countless destroyed universes, shimmered with ancient, eldritch runes. His consciousness burrowed not just through power, but through states of being.
He devoured the remnants of the timelines he'd annihilated. He refined their temporal essence. Past, present, future — all became fuel.
He consumed the laws of physics from collapsed multiverses, drinking in the flavor of entropy, causality, and quantum chance. Every time he absorbed a law, his body restructured. Where once his cells were composed of divine essence, now they became universes unto themselves — each atom a roaring reality engine.
He tore open dormant dimensions hidden in the fabric of space and absorbed their fundamental principles. Geometry, time loops, probabilistic strands, infinite hierarchies of dimensions — all collapsed into his being.
The more he devoured, the larger his true form became. He grew past size. He became a conceptual bulk, existing not just across space but across meta-space. His body extended into layers of reality that did not permit form.
And all the while, the dimensional veil in front of him shimmered.
Waiting.
Then, after what could have been an eternity, Ye Zai opened his eyes.
And the dimension shuddered.
BOOM.
A single glance from him collapsed a supercluster in a distant region of the void. His pupils each a spinning maelstrom of collapsed galaxies focused upon the veil.
And he grinned.
With one smooth motion, Ye Zai clenched his fist.
The fist was not merely physical; it contained thousands of cultivated Dao. It was infused with the breath of annihilation, the memory of past deaths, the raw energy of cannibalized cosmologies.
He punched.
The dimensional veil broke apart.
Not cracked. Not split. It dissolved.
And beyond it lay a new dimension.
This place was different.
Here, galaxies spun with unfamiliar physics. Laws of matter and energy sang in strange harmonies, entirely disconnected from the cosmos Ye Zai had come from. The fabric of space here could not even be measured in conventional terms; it was woven from principles of pure idea, pure story, things that should not obey mass or form.
And yet Ye Zai towered over it all.
He stretched out his hand.
An entire galaxy trembled.
He clenched.
CRUNCH.
The spiral arms of the galaxy folded inward like paper, its billions of stars collapsing into a singularity in his palm. And Ye Zai no longer bound by mere physical hunger devoured not just the matter, but the essence.
He absorbed the galaxy's will, its narrative core, its existential imprint.
His body flared.
Where once his cultivation was limited to power, now it included meaning.
He grew again.
With each galaxy he crushed and consumed, Ye Zai's strength multiplied.
He learned to punch not just through space, but through the conceptual frameworks that supported entire universes. When he punched a universe, he didn't just tear through matter he smashed its laws, its constants, its reasons for existing.
A single punch could erase a universe, past and future, rewriting the multiversal landscape.
The gods and beings of this new dimension ancient titans, timeless rulers, cosmic weavers rose to stop him.
But they were ants before a dragon.
Ye Zai swatted aside primordial entities that had shaped their own reality for trillions of years. He devoured pantheons, absorbed the very storylines of divine orders, and bent them into his own cultivation base.
He refined, over and over, until the dimension itself began to tremble under his presence.
Then, as the last great stronghold fell a hyper-construct of twelve universes interlocked by quantum tethers. Ye Zai gazed into the horizon.
And saw another veil.
This one pulsed with a strange, sickly light.
It was older.
It was thicker.
Beyond it lay something even grander, a dimension beyond dimensions perhaps a meta-dimensional realm where even stories like his were mere echoes.
Ye Zai licked his lips.
The hunger stirred again.
He had cultivated past the point of matter. Past the point of energy. Past the point of narrative.
Now, he was ready to punch through existence itself.
And so, with one final flex of his arm, Ye Zai gathered everything he had the power of hundreds of thousands of years of cultivation, the weight of devoured galaxies, the screams of dead universes, the absorbed memories of infinite cosmic truths into a single blow.
And he punched.
The dimension cracked.
The cosmos shattered.
And Ye Zai, the Devourer, stepped forward ready to consume what lay beyond.
As Ye Zai stood at the edge of the shattered dimension, his System pulsed softly in his mind, a cold, mechanical voice murmuring:
"Host, new artifact unlocked: the Almighty Quill."
Before him materialized a shimmering object no mere weapon, but a tool of creation and erasure. The Almighty Quill could write new laws, shape realities, and even craft false histories that became true.
Yet as Ye Zai grasped it, feeling its infinite potential hum beneath his fingers, the System calmly added:
"Warning: Host's current cultivation insufficient for Narrative Transcendence Recommend further absorption of higher-order dimensional essences."
Ye Zai's eyes narrowed.
Even with galaxies crushed in his grip, even with universes shattered beneath his fists, he still had not reached the tier where a single thought or strike could annihilate a Multiverse an infinite nesting of realities layered far above the mere universes he'd consumed so far.
His hunger deepened.
The path forward was clear.
He would need to push beyond not just dimensional walls, but the very scaffolding of hyperdimensional existence.