Chapter 20 – The Birth of the Cyberworld
The ship that carried Marl sliced through timelines like a blade against fragile silk. Every ripple it left behind warped into spirals of fractured moments—children laughing backward, suns rising upside down, voices crying in languages that hadn't been invented yet. The vessel was a paradox made manifest, refusing to obey the same physics that chained every other craft in existence.
Marl stood at its heart, staring into the cascading storm of reality streams flickering before him. The panels around him sparked in blues and reds, whispering fragments of timelines as if alive. Some showed battles fought centuries from now, others revealed civilizations unborn. He traced a finger across the glowing strands like a composer before his orchestra.
"Endless notes," he murmured. "But every symphony needs a finale."
The strands twisted, narrowing into a single abyssal spiral. The vortex pulled with gravity that wasn't gravity, light that wasn't light. At its center: nothing. No sound, no stars, no pulse of existence.
The Zone State.
Marl's grin was sharp, hungry. "Finally."
The ship plunged.
---
The Zone State
Silence pressed like a living thing. The void was not absence but weight—the kind of emptiness that crushed thought itself. No horizon, no ceiling, no direction. An infinite expanse of black that devoured meaning.
Marl stepped out onto it, his boots not sinking nor standing—merely existing. His breath echoed strangely, as if it were the only sound this realm allowed. For most minds, this place was death. A prison where identity dissolved. But for Marl, it was freedom.
He inhaled the emptiness like oxygen. "The womb of endings. The graveyard where time buries its mistakes. This… is where I ascend."
From his coat, he withdrew the crystal—a shard so small it could be mistaken for a jewel stolen from a child's toy. Yet its cloudy surface throbbed with a sickly rhythm, a fractured heart unwilling to die.
Marl whispered to it. "Awaken."
He pressed the shard into the console of his ship.
At first, nothing. The void remained mute.
Then—
The crystal pulsed.
The Zone screamed.
Reality convulsed like a living organism cut open. Colors bled where none had existed. Empty horizons folded inward and twisted outward again. Towers of steel tore from nothing, their surfaces smooth as mirrors yet glowing with veins of code. Rivers of neon spilled across the dark, snaking like veins through a cosmic corpse. Bridges wove from light and machinery, infinite and recursive.
Marl's ship tore itself apart willingly, its pieces reconfiguring into spires, circuitry, conduits of crackling plasma. Every wire became a nerve, every plate a bone. The shard sat at the core, throbbing with energy, feeding on the Zone itself.
Marl threw his arms open wide, his laughter booming through the newborn world.
"Behold—the Cyberworld! A throne above gods, a citadel beyond time. Here, I am architect, executioner, king!"
The towers responded to his declaration, humming with static as if chanting in worship. A throne of circuitry rose beneath him, carrying him high above rivers of liquid light. He sat upon it, his figure a silhouette against the storm of artificial rebirth.
Marl had turned nothing into empire.
---
The Sentientes' Dilemma
Back in the headquarters of the Sentientes, alarms flared crimson. Holographic grids jittered across the central hall as Sissy barked orders to her squad.
"Recalibrate trackers! Find that anomaly!"
But every effort failed. Marl's readings slipped through nets like water, then dissolved into static. Even their most advanced systems couldn't lock onto him.
A young officer slammed his fist onto the console. "He's not in the timelines anymore! It's like he's outside the chart entirely."
Miya's voice cut in, sharp but trembling. "Not outside. Above. He's building something where rules don't apply."
Ren, seated near the heart of the control floor, clutched the pendant at his chest. Sweat rolled down his temple. The artifact pulsed irregularly, each glow sharper than the last.
Then, without warning, it detonated in light.
Ren cried out as holographic projections burst into the room. But unlike the Sentientes' neat maps, this was chaos. Lines jittered and bled into each other. Segments repeated endlessly, glitching like broken video. Structures appeared, vanished, then reappeared sharper: chrome towers, glowing rivers, endless circuitry.
Ren staggered. His vision split into hundreds of overlapping frames, each replaying a different fragment of the Cyberworld's birth.
Miya caught him as he fell to one knee. "Ren! What is it? What do you see?"
His voice was broken, half choked. "A… new world. But it's wrong. It's feeding on me—on the pendant."
---
The System Awakens
Alarms wailed. Reality itself flickered in the hall, as if Marl's interference had spread here. Pieces of the floor glitched into wireframe before stabilizing again. The pendant projected words into the air:
> [System Alert]
Unstable Input Detected
Origin: Unknown Zone State
Classification: Cybervoid
Collapse Probability: 82%
Ren's body shook violently as Marl's face glitched into the projection. The madman's grin stretched too wide, his eyes burning with code.
"Hello, little hero," Marl's voice boomed directly inside Ren's mind. "Did you think I'd run? No. I've built my stage. And soon, your pendant will sing my symphony."
The image fractured into static and vanished.
Ren dropped, gasping for air, Miya holding him close. His pulse hammered like war drums.
He whispered hoarsely, "He's not hiding anymore. He's… rewriting existence. And the pendant—" His hand pressed against his chest. "—is bound to it."
The Sentientes chamber fell into grim silence.
Sissy's eyes hardened like steel. "Then he's not just threatening timelines. He's building a weapon that could erase them."
Ren's pendant pulsed once more, softer now, like a whisper.
> [New Objective Unlocked]
Stop the Birth of the Cybervoid.
Warning: Failure = Multiversal Collapse.
Ren inhaled deeply, forcing strength back into his trembling limbs. He met Miya's worried gaze and gave her a thin, determined smile.
"Then we stop him. Together."
Miya squeezed his hand, her warmth grounding him. "Always."
---
Back in the Cyberworld
Marl sat upon his throne, gazing into the rivers of neon light that coursed across the realm like arteries. His fingers drummed against the circuitry, his grin widening.
Through the glitches, he had seen Ren—weak, vulnerable, tethered. He leaned forward, whispering like a lover to the world itself.
"Let them come. Let them bring their Sentientes, their hope, their love."
The towers hummed, resonating with his will.
"The deeper they walk into my Cyberworld… the faster they'll belong to me."
The void pulsed with life. Marl's laughter echoed across the infinite chrome.
And in the distant glow of the pendant, Ren felt the echo crawl into his bones.
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