Cosmic Ruler - Chapter 571

Chapter 571: Arena X

There was silence.

Not the absence of sound, but the hollow hush of something far worse—the silence of meaning forgotten, of memory erased.

Aiden stood alone at the boundary of what remained. Behind him, fragments of a broken cosmos flickered in and out of coherence—like a dream being forgotten mid-sentence. Ahead, only the dark.

Not darkness as in night. Not shadow. But unbeing—the encroaching tide of the Outer Gods’ final truth.

They had grown bolder.

With the Eye sealed, the Chronicle Mother slain, the Thought That Never Was banished, and the Before-God cast out, they had regrouped. Not as individuals, but as a singular force of erasure. No longer did they whisper. Now, they roared.

And still Aiden stood.

His sword—once golden and abyssal, once the fulcrum upon which fate turned—was now something quieter. Not duller, not dimmer. Just… more refined. It pulsed like a heartbeat, not against time or destiny, but against the silence itself.

He called it The Last Law.

The only remaining rule in a universe that no longer believed in rules.

Not even the Blank Sky Pact remained. They had given everything in the last war—burned through the stories they were allowed to have. Erased so others might remember.

Aiden remembered them.

He remembered all of them.

That, too, was a form of defiance.

Behind him, the sky rippled. Not stars, not space—just memory, suspended in a dying world. He saw her face there, just once—Myne, in the moment before she vanished, when she wrapped him in a blanket in a world that barely existed anymore.

He didn’t turn back. He couldn’t afford to.

Before him, the final frontier opened.

The space beyond even nothing.

And from it, they came.

They had no name, no voice. No identity. They were not born, nor summoned, nor constructed. They were what remained after everything else had been stripped away.

And now, they moved.

He felt it before he saw it.

The first tendril of unmeaning slithered through the air like static across a forgotten transmission. Where it touched the boundary, reality groaned. The world didn’t crack—it reluctantly ceased to exist, that section simply gone, as if it had never occurred.

He lifted his sword.

Its hum was not violent. It did not scream against the dark. It simply… stated its truth.

That things had once been.

That he had been.

That this mattered.

The Outer Ones recoiled, not in fear, but in confusion. The concept of something resisting them—after meaning itself had been erased—was paradox.

And Aiden was made of paradoxes.

He stepped forward.

They surged.

They didn’t move like armies. They didn’t clash like waves. They erased. With every inch, the ground beneath Aiden’s feet faded. The sky disappeared. Color became meaningless. Time paused. Sound disintegrated.

He bled.

Not blood, but memory.

Each cut from their formless limbs tore away something vital—an emotion, a thought, a moment.

The time he laughed with Nexus by the river. Gone.

The way Myne’s hand once found his in the dark. Gone.

The fury he once felt, raging at a universe that would not listen. Gone.

But Aiden held.

Because even when those things were taken, he chose to remember them.

Not because he was strong.

But because someone had to.

He lifted the Last Law and swung.

The blade struck nothing—and yet, the void screamed.

The law was simple.

That which was, mattered.

Even if only to him.

The cut split the tide. Not permanently. Not perfectly. But enough. The advance slowed.

He knew they could not be defeated. Not in the way stories often promised. There was no final blow, no glorious victory. This was attrition. This was truth.

But he could outlast them.

Not because he was better.

Because he believed.

They surged again, this time as memory-eaters. He felt them plunge into him, feasting. He screamed, once—a soundless cry, because sound had been taken. And in that moment, he stumbled.

And in that stumble, they tasted it—

—his name.

He saw it flicker above him, briefly, like a dying star.

Aiden.

And then—gone.

His knees hit the ground.

He forgot.

Who he was.

Why he fought.

He dropped the sword.

But the blade did not fall.

It hovered.

Because the Last Law was not just a weapon.

It was a promise.

And promises are not so easily broken.

From the depths of himself, something rose.

Not power. Not fury.

A whisper.

From Myne, from Nexus, from all those who had been.

“We remember you.”

It was enough.

His fingers closed again around the hilt.

He stood.

And the void stopped.

Not entirely. Not forever. But it paused—like an old god confronted with something older still.

The void asked a question.

Not in words.

But in absence.

Why?

Why resist?

Why remember?

Why fight, when all ends?

And Aiden answered, not with voice, but with being.

Because something had to remain.

Even if it was only a story.

Especially if it was only a story.

He raised the Last Law.

And wrote into the void.

Not with ink.

Not with thought.

But with existence.

A single, stubborn truth.

“I was here.”

And so the void blinked.

And did not consume.

And for that moment, that breathless fragment of time—

—the universe lived.

The sky had no color.

It was not black, nor void, nor any hue known to memory or emotion—it was absence made manifest, a sky where even the concept of “above” seemed like a dream forgotten mid-thought.

Aiden stood at the edge of that absence.

Behind him, fragments of the last bastion of reality shimmered like broken glass in slow descent, each one holding the echo of a world that once was. The Last Law pulsed through his veins still, though weaker now—like a candle fighting in the mouth of a storm.

Around him, the remnants of the Blank Sky Pact gathered in silence.

Some had faces. Others did not.

Some were shaped like humans, while others had long since abandoned such pretense. Each one had been erased in some timeline, some version of history, and yet they endured here—anchored not by fate, but by memory.