Cosmic Ruler - Chapter 570

Chapter 570: Arena IX

The silence was not peace.

It was absence.

After the confrontation with the Thought That Never Was, the Blank Sky Pact drifted through the void that remained—a scar of space where meaning once stood. There were no stars here, no remnants of time, not even the remnants of memory. Only a slow, steady hum remained, pulsing like the breath of a dying god.

Aiden stood at the edge of it all.

His cloak, forged from the threads of severed fates, barely fluttered in the stillness. His eyes, long since blinded, saw more than ever—threads of potential, cords of collapsing dimensions, echoes of lives that had never been. Spirit Sense carved through the void, but even it trembled at the borders of what lay ahead.

Behind him, the remnants of the Blank Sky Pact floated in silence. The Architect of Ash, bound in gold-rimmed flame. The Severed Knight, who had once slain a god that never lived. The Children of the Quiet Unmaking, whose forms rippled between forms never permitted to exist. Each a paradox, each a survivor.

Nexus hovered beside him, spectral form flickering in and out like a stuttering candle. “This is it,” it said. “The last Anchor.”

Aiden nodded.

Before them, suspended in the abyss like a wound refusing to close, was the Anchor—a colossal structure unlike anything forged by gods or men. It did not shimmer. It did not pulse. It simply was. An immovable pillar of what remained real in a universe now fraying at the edges.

It was ancient. Perhaps the first thing that had ever been created. Perhaps it had created everything else.

And now, it was dying.

“The Outer Gods will come for this,” said Myne quietly. Her voice was raw from too much silence. “It’s the last thing holding this layer of reality in place.”

“They already are,” said Aiden.

He could feel it—just beyond the veil, pressure building. The silence was thinning. The gap between stories was closing, and through it, something vast and eyeless stared back. The same presence they had felt behind the Chronicle Mother, the Thought That Never Was, and the Watcher. All the masks were fading now.

There was only the Abyss.

The Pact gathered at the base of the Anchor. It was not stone or light or essence, but something deeper—a principle, a law that everything else had been built around. And now, with everything else fallen or devoured, it stood exposed. Its foundation cracked. Its truth eroding.

“It’s not just reality they’re after anymore,” said the Severed Knight. “It’s the concept of consequence.”

“They want to erase even the memory of cause and effect,” muttered the Architect of Ash. “So that nothing will have ever happened.”

Aiden knelt, one hand resting on the Anchor.

It was cold.

Not physically, but existentially. The kind of cold that came when meaning was stripped away. When no one remembered a thing had ever existed. And still, it endured.

He closed his eyes.

And for a moment—he remembered.

The moment he shattered the Herald.

The moment the sea of fate unraveled.

The moment he chose to let others define the new world instead of becoming its god.

He remembered every step since.

And he remembered why he fought.

Not for dominance. Not for power. Not even for revenge.

But to keep the story from ending.

To let it continue, even if it was no longer his.

Behind him, Nexus stirred.

“They’re close,” it said. “Closer than we thought.”

The void quivered.

At first, it looked like distant stars blinking in and out.

Then, they moved.

Not like ships.

Like ideas.

A mass of impossible forms, screaming in silence, descending like a thought too ancient to comprehend. The Outer Gods had found them. Not the ones with names and roles, like the Chronicle Mother or the Before-God.

These were the pure ones.

Unformed.

Unspeakable.

Untouched by narrative.

And they were legion.

One of the Pact shuddered and fell.

No attack. No strike.

Just a forgetting.

One moment they were real.

The next—they had never been.

Aiden rose.

His sword pulsed to life in his hand, the golden-abyssal edge flickering with authority even the void hesitated before. It was no longer just a weapon. It was Remembrance. It was Rejection. It was the refusal to be unwritten.

“They’re trying to erase the Anchor by collapsing all memory of it,” Nexus said, horror barely contained.

“We won’t let them,” said Aiden.

He turned to the Pact.

“This is the last stand. We are the only ones left who remember the world that was. If we fall, then the story ends here.”

The Architect of Ash bowed its horned head. “Then we burn bright enough to scorch memory into the void.”

The Severed Knight raised their blade. “Until the last line is written.”

The Pact surged forward.

Aiden led the charge.

And the void answered.

Shapes poured in—grotesque abstractions that defied space. Entities made of inverse color and thought. Creatures with no form but a hunger to erase. They did not attack like warriors. They unwrote. They dissolved memories, reversed choices, devoured identities.

And the Pact defied them.

Each member bled story.

Each wound told a tale that refused to vanish.

Aiden moved like a comet made of rebellion.

His sword did not slash—it declared.

Every swing reasserted the Anchor’s place.

Every clash wove a new thread of continuity into the unraveling void.

But it wasn’t enough.

For every Outer God erased, two more took its place. For every tale the Pact told, another was silenced. And one by one, even the greatest among them began to flicker.

The Architect fell, reduced to a question no one had asked.

The Knight vanished mid-strike, their legend collapsing under the weight of forgotten consequence.

Even Nexus screamed as something ancient reached inside and pulled the thread of its existence loose.

“Aiden—”

Gone.

Only Aiden remained.

His sword heavy.

His limbs aching.

His thoughts filled with the screams of lost possibilities.

But he did not yield.

He could not.

The Anchor flickered.

Reality cracked.

And in the moment before it broke—he heard them.

Whispers.

Not from the Outer Gods.

But from those he had saved.

The world he had allowed to choose its own path.

They remembered.

Even as the Pact fell, even as the void surged, they remembered.

And it was enough.

Aiden raised his sword one last time.

And he wrote.

He carved defiance into the void.

He etched remembrance into the bones of unreality.

He declared a new law:

We remember.

And the Anchor answered.

It blazed.

Not with light, but with story.

The last law ignited.

And the void screamed.