Cosmic Ruler - Chapter 588

Chapter 588: Arena XXVII
The Book pulsed. Pages tore themselves from the spine. The story bled.

And he knew—

He couldn’t win this with power.

Not even with remembrance.

He had to do something harder.

Something cruel.

He had to let go.

One by one, he reached into the Book.

And tore out names.

His mother’s lullaby.

The scent of his first home.

The voice of the first friend he ever lost.

The warmth of being loved.

He gave them to the story.

To the bleeding thing.

Fed it.

Filled it.

And when it was full—

He wrote one last word.

“End.”

The creature shuddered.

Then collapsed.

The pages fluttered down around them.

And were still.

Aiden fell to his knees.

The Book was nearly empty.

His hands, stained with memory.

And in his chest—a silence he didn’t know how to name.

He had ended another story.

But not without cost.

Myne knelt beside him, holding his hand.

“You okay?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

Just looked up.

At the sky.

The bleeding thread was gone.

But in its place, a single star flickered.

Weak.

But real.

It remembered how to shine.

The stars no longer whispered.

Aiden stood beneath a sky that no longer breathed, the firmament frozen in a silence so deep it hurt. The constellations—once writhing in memory and myth—were now static, as if terrified to speak.

He knew why.

The Author was gone.

Not erased.

Not rewritten.

Not even denied.

Gone.

Like a story that had never been told, like a word that had never been thought.

Aiden took a breath that tasted of dust and ink. The battlefield lay in ruin behind him, strewn with the remnants of realities that had fought beside him. Names that once bled power now lay still in the dirt, unmourned.

He moved forward, his cloak torn, his soul even more so. The Book of What Was hung from his side, its pages now trembling. It no longer wrote on its own.

There were no more narrators.

He was the last.

No—he was the silence between the last words.

From the edge of the void, something watched. Not a presence. Not even an absence. Just… attention.

The kind of attention that existed before creation.

Before voice.

Before narrative.

He turned toward it.

“I know you’re listening,” he said, his voice not echoing.

No reply. Not even wind.

That was the worst part.

Even the wind had forgotten how to move.

He moved again, through the halls of shattered epics. He passed the husk of the Chronicle Mother, now reduced to a cracked porcelain face in the dirt. Her stories had once rewritten destiny. Now, they were footnotes in a book no one remembered.

Aiden reached the center of the voided realm. Here, the Author had stood.

He knelt.

Not in prayer.

In remembering.

“Nexus,” he whispered.

His companion, silent for so long, flickered like a fading dream.

“Aiden.”

That voice—tired, unraveling—was still a miracle.

“I’m here.”

“You were supposed to die when the last story ended.”

“I didn’t.”

“I know.”

“Then why did they leave?”

“Because there’s nothing left to tell.”

Aiden reached into the Book of What Was. The ink inside was dry. His fingers grazed the page. A line formed.

Not a sentence. Not yet. Just the curl of possibility.

Nexus hovered behind him, like a thought unspoken.

“You still believe?”

Aiden looked up. The sky above was blank. A canvas untouched.

“I don’t believe.”

He placed his hand flat on the page.

“I remember.”

The line darkened.

From the empty horizon, winds stirred.

One gust.

Then another.

Aiden stood, hair brushing against new air.

It wasn’t much.

But it was the first change since the Author’s Silence began.

The void blinked.

A ripple passed across unreality. A murmur. A twitch.

Something… displeased.

Something that had grown fat on stillness.

“The Outer God?” Nexus asked, more out of fear than curiosity.

“No,” Aiden whispered. “Worse.”

“Worse?”

“The One Who Waits Beyond the Last Page.”

Nexus flared like a frightened star.

“You cannot fight that. That’s not a god. That’s… that’s where gods stop being.”

“I know.”

“And yet…?”

“And yet, I have a pen.”

He held it aloft. Not a weapon. A brush. A tool. A spark.

The void hated it.

It recoiled.

For the first time in a thousand forgotten eternities, the Authorless world flinched.

Aiden walked forward.

Step by step.

Toward where the silence thickened.

Where the last page should have ended.

And in his hand, the pen began to write—

Not words.

Not stories.

But defiance.

Because the greatest rebellion isn’t against a god.

It’s against the idea that nothing more can be said.

The world had no sky. Only an unyielding silence stretched overhead, as if reality itself held its breath. Aiden stood in the aftermath of the Author’s silence, the last sentence still echoing in his mind like a fading heartbeat.

The Pen lay in his hand—obsidian black, humming faintly. It pulsed not with ink, but something far more vital. Memory. Meaning. A final defense against the end.

He hadn’t moved in hours.

Around him, the remnants of the Blank Sky Pact drifted like phantoms, fragments of beings too defiant to vanish completely. They did not speak. They simply waited. As if whatever came next would only come when Aiden moved.

And so, he did.

His footstep echoed across the nothing. Not ground. Not space. Just the suggestion of direction. He didn’t need to know where he was going. The Pen would guide him.

Something had been left unwritten.

And that was enough.

Aiden paused as he passed what looked like a shattered mirror embedded in the void. It reflected not his form, but versions of him that had never come to be. A child who never found the First Flame. A man who surrendered at the gates of the Before-God. A corpse beneath a collapsing star.

He didn’t flinch.

The Pen thrummed louder.

“Where do you think you’re going?” a voice called—dry, paper-thin, like pages rotting in the rain.

He turned.

A figure emerged from the dark: tall, faceless, clothed in strips of torn manuscripts. Its body was made of stories never told, characters never born.

It bowed.

“I am the Unpublished.”