Cosmic Ruler - Chapter 574

Chapter 574: Arena XIII

The void had grown quieter.

Not in peace. Not in stillness. But in anticipation.

After the Naming, the pressure changed. The endless hush that once devoured sound now seemed to wait—like something listening. Not just hearing. Listening.

Aiden stood at the edge of a memory not his own, feet resting on the fractured spine of a dead constellation. The stars beneath him pulsed faintly, echoing names long lost. And beyond that horizon, the void trembled.

“It remembers now,” murmured Myne, her voice barely above the breath of existence. “We woke something.”

Aiden nodded slowly. The first word—the naming—was not merely defiance. It was declaration. In a realm where forgetting was power, to name was to bring light to shadow, to scream into a silence older than creation.

He could still feel it—the reverberation of that name, etched in his mind like flame on old parchment.

They had called the void’s heart Nullith.

And Nullith… was listening.

Behind him, the Blank Sky Pact stirred uneasily. Beings who had once existed beyond time and now wore forms stitched from fragments of memory looked toward the boundary between what was and what could never be.

“We should move,” muttered Cael, the former Watcher of Lost Paths. “It is stirring again.”

“No,” Aiden said. “We wait.”

There was more here.

The echoes were returning.

Not all of them were kind.

Far across the unfolding nowhere, the light of broken timelines began to ripple. Faint pulses—heartbeat rhythms in the dark. Some glowed golden, others bled shadow, but all of them moved toward a singular point.

The First Word had become a beacon.

And those drawn to it were not only survivors.

They were seekers.

And devourers.

Aiden watched as the fabric of forgotten reality unraveled ahead, revealing something ancient—massive, layered, and incomplete. A throne that had never been sat upon. A crown that had never been worn.

The remnants of a truth that predated kings and gods alike.

“We’re not alone,” Nexus said beside him, scanning the rupturing space with his spirit sense. “Something’s coming. Several… somethings.”

“More of the Outer Gods?” Myne asked, readying her blade.

“No,” Aiden whispered.

He recognized the rhythm.

These were not attackers.

They were called.

The Pact turned as the first one arrived.

She came as mist first—soft and silver, singing in tones older than any language spoken by mortals. Her form coalesced slowly into that of a young girl with no face, only threads of sound where eyes and lips should be.

Aiden knew her name before she spoke it.

“Aria,” he said. “The First Singer.”

She bowed her head.

“Called back from silence,” she replied, her voice echoing across every direction at once. “You spoke the First Word, and it sang through me.”

Others followed.

From void-rivers and collapsed realms they came. Forgotten entities. Voices lost in the chorus of time. Ideas that had once nearly become gods but fell short of recognition. The Blank Sky Pact grew—not just in number, but in significance.

Each of them remembered.

And in remembering, they brought reality with them.

But not everything that heard the Word came in reverence.

Some came to erase it.

It began with a crack.

Not a sound, but a feeling—as if the mind itself split for a moment.

Then the sky—not the real sky, but the place where memory projected its stars—ripped open.

And from within…

A presence crawled through.

It had no form, only absence. Where it moved, color drained. Where it touched, thought scattered. A reverse-fire, burning meaning rather than matter.

The Unremembered God.

A force Aiden had only glimpsed before, now made manifest.

It did not speak.

Its arrival was a question that denied answers.

But Aiden’s sword—alive now with the First Word—responded. Not with defiance this time.

With invitation.

The clash was not of blades.

It was of meaning.

Aiden stood at the boundary, his sword raised not in threat, but as a banner. Around him, the Blank Sky Pact did not charge.

They sang.

One voice after another. Fragmented, flawed, and raw. But real.

Names, memories, songs, failures, loves.

Each of them added to the song of resistance.

And the void hated it.

The Unremembered God convulsed, its form cracking, shifting. It had no defense against identity. Its only power was forgetting.

But now, remembering had returned.

The song intensified.

Aria rose into the air, her thread-mouth opening wide, spilling harmonics that twisted the void into golden threads.

Aiden’s sword pulsed once more.

This was not the time for war.

It was the time for a Reckoning.

He stepped forward.

The First Word burned bright in his chest.

And he spoke.

“Nullith,” he said, voice firm, resonating across every echo. “We remember you.”

The void howled.

The Unremembered God writhed.

And something broke.

A deep, sonorous bell tolling through the emptiness, announcing not death…

…but arrival.

Aiden didn’t smile.

There was no joy in this.

But there was purpose.

He turned to the Pact, their forms shining brighter than ever, forged by resistance.

“We’ve opened the door,” he said quietly.

Myne’s voice was sharp. “To what?”

“To the last part of the war.”

A silence fell.

Then Nexus said what none of them wanted to.

“To the gods behind the void.”

The First Word had not just summoned allies.

It had pierced a wall.

And behind it—

The true Outer Gods waited.

Not the ones who destroyed worlds.

The ones who created the void itself.

The ones who existed before even forgetting had meaning.

The Final Chorus.

And now…

they were listening, too.

The silence changed.

It no longer smothered.

It vibrated.

Like the last note of a song hanging in the air, trembling across every strand of reality. The First Word had not only pierced the veil—it had sent a message far deeper than the Blank Sky Pact had ever dared reach.

Now the silence replied.

Not with words.

Not even with thought.

But with presence.

Aiden stood still at the edge of a concept not meant to be reached. Behind him, the growing army of the remembered—a tapestry of forgotten gods, half-formed legends, songs without singers—held the line of resistance.

Before him, the air fractured.

Cracks formed in every direction. Not cracks in matter or time—but in definition. Where the void had once merely unmade, now it sought to rewrite.

Reality’s anchor groaned.