[Neumann Universe - Age of Infinitum Unification]
Stars and whole systems had been built into cities. Even galaxies had been bent, their dragging tendrils and wild magnetics tamed to the will of those with the power to bend reality.
At the center of it all lay an emptiness so wide it felt like a cradle, and in that cradle sat an ancient citadel.
Nomological laws and old edicts ran through it like veins, threaded into every pillar and lintel, holding the dark together by force of rule that the naked eye should never have seen.
Seventy two pillars rose from the void, each one wrought from the remains of beasts that once devoured civilizations.
Every floor had been laid with the skeletons of the defeated, wars fought and won until even screams had become decoration.
Faces were caught in crystal glass like art, mouths frozen open in the last curse they had hurled at the victor who ended them.
As one walked, power pressed closer, heavier with every step.
At the center waited an obsidian lotus, vast enough to make worlds feel small.
Purple bled through its black, and bloody gild traced the edges of petals that swayed as if a gentle breeze had found its way into vacuum.
Each slow motion warped the air around it. Space buckled. Time stuttered. Images of past and present flickered along the petals with every sway, faces and battles, births, and betrayals flashing like movies unveiling.
That day mattered. Not to one empire or one realm, but to everyone who lived in the Neumann Universe.
Dragons, the size of stars, flew toward the citadel, their behemoth bodies dragging light behind.
Monks and daoists who held empires in their palms raced in ships that cut the dark.
Elemental gods came from realms they had made for themselves.
Archmages who had mastered the arcane to its limits crossed the distance as if the void were only a road.
They arrived one by one at the castle of skulls and bone.
Leaders of great clans stepped down from their pedestals and stood among the rest like common men.
One by one, they dropped. Knees struck the cold floor. Horns touched stone. Wings rustled and tucked in tight, as if even pride had learned to be small here.
"Praise to the Highest."
All of it was offered to one man. He sat upon the Lotus of Chaos and Order itself, calm as a verdict.
White hair. Golden eyes. A black robe kept neat, clean, simple, like luxury had never tempted him. Radeon. That was his name.
"Your coming is appreciated," he simply said.
Nothing more. He closed his eyes. The bowed ones withdrew at once.
Ships peeled away into the void. Wings beat back from the citadel. Silence gathered.
The event was beginning. An ascension beyond cultivation. Beyond magic. Beyond eternal.
A history no one had reached, and a catastrophe no one truly understood.
They had already named it, because naming was how fear became manageable.
Outworld Tribulation.
Not a test measured by the cosmos. A trial that surpassed the universe itself.
Above the citadel, the universe opened. Not like a door. Like a wound.
A hole tore through the structure of existence, ripping at elements, causality, and spacetime.
The tear widened into a rapture, and their universe of trillions of light years felt split in half.
Light spilled through. At first it looked warm, almost divine, a call that reached every livable star.
Across the realms, inhabitants looked up and felt it on their skin like a blessing.
Then their bodies began to change.
Still smiling. Still blissful.
Joints slipped from sockets as if bone had grown tired of its own arrangement. Ribs burst outward, hardening into crooked cages.
Armor, muscle, and bone clung together in shapes that should not have stood. Skin puckered, then slid away in ragged strips.
Radeon did not remain seated. He erupted.
His Dharma Form flared into being, a golden echo of himself that spanned billions of light years, twelve arms fanned out behind him.
Twelve hands thrust into the fabric of reality and tried to force the crack closed.
The light struck him. It did not merely mutate him. It tried to assimilate him.
His power was being pulled into something larger, something hungry, something that did not care for names.
He named the unknown in his mind. Outworld Blight. Radeon understood. It was time to go all out.
The golden form began to crack. Beneath it, eyes opened. Mouths yawned. Hands emerged where no hands should be.
He had been holding back. Tore through the shell, and for a heartbeat, the void seemed to recoil.
Those hands twisted through realms. They ripped worlds loose from spacetime like teeth pulling meat from bone.
One after another, realms were torn free and flung toward destinations even Radeon did not know, coated in his Eldritch energy, so reality would bend around them instead of breaking them.
Evacuation by violence. Mercy by destruction.
The mouths scattered across his monstrous body consumed what remained.
Stars. Light. The fabric of spacetime. Lastly, the Lotus of Chaos and Order, the anchor of the Neumann Universe.
The cosmos collapsed inward, its edges disintegrating through the zone of nothingness beyond.
The Outworld Blight pressed harder, trying to claim him entirely.
Radeon fought it in silence, not with pride, not with hope, but with calculation.
His mind ran simulations down to the quantum level.
Billions of outcomes flickered through him in a storm of possibility.
Most ended the same way. Mutual destruction.
Then one thread remained. Self destruction, with a small chance at a second chance.
Radeon ignited everything.
His monstrous form warped and distorted, teeth and eyes and faces collapsing inward.
He drove it all into a single bead of light, clenched it tighter, tighter, until the bead hardened into a black seed.
Then he let that singularity fail. The void bloomed one last time.
A flower with no creation. A light with no salvation.
Only the final radiance of Radeon, made for ruination.