Cosmic Ruler - Chapter 568

Chapter 568: Arena VII

The fracture lines were spreading.

He could feel them—hairline cracks not in the ground, but in the very concept of reality. Something pressed in from beyond, not with force, but with denial. As if the world itself was being told it had never existed.

It started in the sky.

One by one, the stars blinked out—not dimmed, not collapsed, but unwritten.

Aiden exhaled.

They were here again.

The Outer Gods.

And this time, they did not descend as monsters or minds. They came as undoing—a chorus of negation echoing through space and time.

Aiden clenched his fist.

He had faced the Thought That Never Was.

He had touched the Before-God.

But this… this was different.

These invaders weren’t trying to kill him.

They were trying to erase the possibility that he could have ever been born.

The sky screamed.

Reality folded in on itself, rippling like a memory misremembered.

Aiden moved.

His body blurred across the span of universes, golden-aether threads trailing behind him. His sword—now a concept more than a blade—manifested in his hand with a whisper. It didn’t shine. It asserted.

And still—

It wasn’t enough.

Whole constellations dissolved behind him as an Outer Song reached crescendo. Time unraveled like rotted silk. The very laws he’d once bent now fled from his grasp, retreating into the shadows of things that had never been written.

Aiden snarled.

“𝘐 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥 𝘯𝘰.”

His voice struck like thunder through the chorus, and for a moment, the song paused.

Just a moment.

But it was enough.

He reached within himself—not into power, but into memory. Into bonds and battles, regrets and victories. Faces rose from the depths. Myne. Nexus. The companions from timelines long erased. The Blank Sky Pact.

They had once stood beside him.

And some still remained.

Scattered. Lost. Forgotten by all but him.

He reached for them.

And they answered.

Not with words.

But with resonance.

The void trembled.

One by one, figures stepped into the half-born world—beings who had no name, no history, no place in any story.

Forgotten heroes.

Erased legends.

Rewritten gods.

They emerged like ghosts from the ink of torn pages, drawn by the one force the Outer Gods could not negate:

Remembrance.

Aiden stood tall as they gathered.

The sky hissed. The Song resumed—stronger, angrier. But now, the Forgotten had a rhythm of their own. One not dictated by narrative or prophecy. One born of pain and survival.

A counter-melody.

A march.

He turned to face them, dozens now, hundreds flickering into being across the broken realm.

“This world will not fall,” Aiden said. “Not to silence. Not to erasure. Not to gods who never bled for what they tried to control.”

He raised his sword.

Golden threads burst outward, binding each of the Forgotten.

Not as chains.

As memory.

A covenant of those who should never have existed—and yet still did.

The Pact pulsed.

And then they sang.

It wasn’t music.

It was defiance.

The Song of the Outer Gods faltered, shrieking in dissonant agony as the sound of unwritten wills tore through it like wildfire. Where the Outer Ones unmade, the Forgotten remembered. Where the Others denied, the Pact affirmed.

Reality screamed.

And then it fought back.

Aiden launched forward like a comet made flesh, sword cleaving into the veil between realms. Each stroke was not a cut, but a claim—a declaration of “This happened. We were here. We matter.”

Behind him, a general of lost truths wielded a spear made from the bones of extinct stars.

To his left, a woman of smoke, whose tears rewrote timelines, dissolved an Outer Aspect by weeping it into paradox.

To his right, an eyeless child drew with chalk on the ground—and each sketch birthed a new law of physics.

Together, they rewrote the silence.

And still, the Outer Gods descended.

They could not be numbered.

Could not be seen.

They had no form, only rejection.

But even rejection could be resisted.

Aiden met one head-on—a void spiral that erased the meaning of “left” as it approached. His sword shimmered, adapting mid-thought, transforming into a lattice of axiomatic resistance.

They clashed.

And for a moment, all direction returned.

He could feel it—the battle reaching across every edge of his soul, echoing into every forgotten corner of the universe.

This was no longer a war for survival.

It was a war for meaning.

The ground beneath him cracked, but did not break.

The stars returned—some twisted, some new—but present.

And still the Forgotten sang.

The Pact held.

But the cost was rising.

For every step forward, a piece of their borrowed existence was burned.

Aiden knew what that meant.

If they won—

They would vanish again.

Not in defeat.

But in peace.

He saw them, one by one, fading even as they fought. Some smiled. Some cried. None regretted.

They had finally mattered.

And in the center of it all, Aiden stood.

Sword outstretched.

Eyes full of fire.

Heart full of ghosts.

Facing gods who had never been born.

And he whispered—

“For the world we chose.”

Then he struck.

The stars had not returned.

Even after all they had won, all they had lost, the sky remained blank.

Aiden stood at the edge of a crumbling ridge, staring out into a horizon that no longer obeyed the rules of space or time. What lay before him was not a world—it was a canvas scraped raw by denial. The landscape twisted, flickering between concepts. A forest that was once a city. A river that remembered it had once been fire.

Behind him, the Blank Sky Pact waited.

They had marched through the wreckage of countless false timelines, struck down the Chronicle Mother, and survived the impossible presence of the Thought That Never Was. Each of them bore the scars of unraveling, the residue of nonexistence clinging to their forms like ash.

But they stood.

Still forgotten by reality. Still undefeated.

Still Aiden’s.

The earth below his boots pulsed faintly—echoes of memory, or perhaps the dying breath of a world that had once known solidity. Here, on the outermost border of remembrance, reality itself thinned. A place where even truth could no longer take root.