Time, in the belly of the facility, no longer moved. It bled.
Seconds melted into minutes, then into hours, and at last, into something nameless—something viscous and directionless. The sterile white light overhead never dimmed, never shifted, only hummed with the static lifelessness of a broken god.
Lucien no longer screamed.
There was no one left to hear him.
He no longer cried.
His tears had dried into salt long ago, crusting against skin too bruised to feel their sting.
Pain had become a companion. Suffering, a metronome by which he counted the heartbeat of his imprisonment.
And in this silence—this long, rotting corridor between agony and insanity—Lucien began to build.
Not with hands.
Not with tools.
But in the stillness of his mind, where their syringes could not reach.
The seed had been there all along.
The seed of madness.
It had nestled in the folds of his thoughts like ivy in a ruined manor. But now—after all their experiments, after all the trials, the mutilations, the unraveling of his very self—now it had flowered.
And its fruit was genius.
> "They can steal my blood. They can carve my bones. But they can't imprison my mind."
Lucien sat curled against the far wall of his cell, knees drawn to his chest, head bowed low, like a monk in mourning. Around him, the pipes dripped, the monitors ticked, and distant voices murmured through intercoms like ghosts. All of it blurred into static.
Only his thoughts remained sharp.
> He needed a way out.
Not through brute strength. They'd taken that. Not through charm or lies. These men dealt in numbers and knives, not words.
He needed something else.
Something they could not see coming.
Something… absolute.
> "They use powers," he muttered, breath fogging the cold air. "Magic. Machines. Mutations. Time. They reach into every thread of the weave."
> "So I must become…"
He opened bloodshot eyes, pupils wide with revelation.
> "…untouchable."
And with that word, something in him caught fire.
Not rage. Not even defiance.
Inspiration.
It came not in a scream—but in a whisper. A name. A memory.
> Featherine Augustus Aurora.
A being so high in the hierarchy of fiction that her existence required permission to be perceived. Her name alone bent logic. Her presence shattered continuity.
> "I want to be like that," Lucien breathed, "a thing that cannot be understood. A being whose story can't even be told."
More followed.
The Presence. From DC's distant pantheon. Not mighty—but primary. It did not win fights. It wrote them.
> "What if my mutation could do that? What if I could define myself… outside the structure?"
Not resist the system.
But become invisible to it.
> "You can't destroy what doesn't appear on the ledger."
His hands moved now, fingers sketching invisible glyphs on the floor, trailing patterns in dust and dried blood.
He thought of Kars—the ultimate lifeform from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. A being free of death, of decay, of hunger or age.
> "But even Kars… he still obeyed physics. Still belonged to time."
> "And Ajimu," he whispered, recalling her face—half-smile, eyes older than the stars. Ajimu Najimi, bearer of 12 quadrillion skills, including immunity to every ability imaginable.
> "But she still fought. She still played within the rules."
> "I don't want to play."
> "I want to erase the board."
His eyes gleamed now, fever-bright.
The diagrams grew more complex, looping back upon themselves. Circles within squares. Triangles of thought. A geometric madness.
And then—clarity.
A word. A name.
Oblivion.
Not an act of creation.
Not even mutation.
But removal.
An annihilation of categorization. A seed that erased Lucien from the system of reality itself.
> "If nothing can identify me…"
> "…then nothing can affect me."
> "Not gods. Not time. Not death."
And slowly, reverently, Lucien whispered the blueprint aloud—his voice like a sermon to a congregation of shadows.
---
The Oblivion Frame — Conceptual Components
Featherine Augustus Aurora (Umineko):
Immunity to narrative and causality; cannot be perceived without consent.
Ajimu Najimi (Medaka Box):
Skill: No Skill Works—translated into a layer that nullifies all supernatural influence, past or future.
The One Above All (Marvel):
Non-addressable reality status; detaches Lucien from all fundamental narrative structures.
The Presence (DC Comics):
Immunity by authorship; Lucien becomes a self-authored variable, undefined by any existing universal law.
Antispiral (Gurren Lagann):
Immune to progress, evolution, entropy. Exists in conceptual stasis beyond escalation.
Doctor Manhattan (Watchmen):
Simultaneous presence in time, reversed: Lucien will exist at no fixed point—thus cannot be targeted or altered.
Kars (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure):
Ultimate biological adaptability; not for power, but to eliminate all structural weakness.
Griffith/Femto (Berserk):
Dimensional transcendence through sacrifice; applied as exile from all dimensional laws.
---
Lucien wiped blood from his lip, but his grin—wide and wild—remained.
> "This… this is what they've created."
> "Not a mutant."
> "An exemption."
And so, the Oblivion Seed was born.
Not with thunder. Not with flame.
But in the quiet alchemy of thought—the kind that bends stars, the kind that breaks stories.
A seed that would not grant strength.
But sever the leash of existence itself.
> Unkillable.
> Untouchable.
> Unobservable.
A paradox. A phantom.
A silence in the shape of a man.
He would not merely escape the facility. That was small now. Distant. Meaningless.
He would escape the ledger of reality.
And from outside its walls, he would become what no god, no system, no universe could contain.
The Architect of the Underworld.