Chapter 1: The End of All Things
The world once bathed in the light of progress.
Cities that pierced the clouds, machines that needed no hands, and minds that lived more in the digital than the physical. Science had triumphed. Technology reigned. Children grew up with AI tutors whispering equations and poetry in their ears. People traveled through teleportation gates as easily as one might step through a door. Disease, hunger, and even aging were problems of the past.
But prosperity came with arrogance. And it only took one star to end it all.
Thirty years before Ethan Walker was born, the world changed.
Jacob Walker, Ethan's father, had been the most celebrated mind in human history. A genius in quantum physics, interstellar engineering, and genetic programming. He had once been hailed as the second coming of Einstein. His company, Walker Conglomerate, was the pinnacle of technological achievement. And it was his ambition that doomed the world.
It started when Walker Conglomerate discovered an anomaly—a star not cataloged by any known database. It radiated a strange signature, not on the electromagnetic spectrum but something else entirely. Readings showed infinite potential, boundless energy, and an unsettling stability. The temptation was irresistible.
They called it the Ascendant Star.
The plan was simple: harvest its energy and usher in a new age of limitless power. What came back wasn't energy. It was something else. Something that didn't fit into any known model of physics.
They named it Null Energy.
Null defied reason. It couldn't be measured through conventional means. It wasn't heat. It wasn't light. It wasn't sound or kinetic force. It just… existed. And yet, it moved. Reacted. Chose. Scientists called it useless. Dangerous. Some called it a hoax. But Jacob Walker saw something no one else did.
He saw a warning.
Null wasn't a power source—it was a symptom. A sign that the universe itself had reached its limit. That reality was beginning to break down. Technology, he theorized, had reached an event horizon. The laws of physics themselves were unraveling, not slowly, but imminently.
His solution was madness—or brilliance.
The body had to evolve. Humanity needed to become more than dependent beings bound to technology. They had to become vessels capable of surviving the collapse. He spoke of adaptive evolution, self-sustaining biology, consciousness unshackled by machines. And he began his final experiment:
His son.
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Ethan Walker was born into a world already trembling.
Even as a child, he was a prodigy beyond comprehension. By ten, he was rewriting quantum logic structures. By fourteen, he was assisting in theoretical null-matter experiments. At seventeen, he was his father's equal in intellect, if not more.
But Jacob Walker's obsession had grown dangerous.
He stopped caring about humanity. About civilization. About ethics. All that mattered was ensuring his son became the perfect being—capable of surviving not just the collapse of Earth, but the collapse of everything.
Then came the Event.
It began slowly. Devices ceased responding. Networks went down. Artificial intelligence faltered. Teleportation gates collapsed. Fusion reactors destabilized. Within weeks, the collapse of technology became global. Governments fell. Power grids vanished. Entire megacities became graveyards of silence.
Then came the mist.
A glowing fog that shimmered with unnatural light, appearing at the edges of fallen cities. Scientists tried to contain it, study it—but it was alive. They named it Mana. And it was rewriting reality. Not like Null—passive and incomprehensible—but active and invasive. Mana could be shaped. Touched. Even used, though no one understood how.
By the hundredth day, the Earth had changed forever.
And in a hidden underground bunker powered by unstable cores, Jacob Walker initiated the final phase.
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"Wake up!" Jacob's voice cracked with urgency.
Ethan sat up groggily on the cold steel platform, blinking at the blaring lights and shaking walls.
"Father—?"
"No time," Jacob snapped, hauling him from the bed. "Into the pod. Now!"
The towering cryogenic chamber loomed behind him, its surface alive with tubes, needles, and robotic limbs twitching in anticipation.
"Wait! What's happening—?!"
Jacob shoved him inside. "The fusion is ready. The Null must be merged while your body is still malleable."
Needles shot into Ethan's skin. A burning cold flooded his bloodstream as nanites and serums injected simultaneously. His bones locked, his muscles stiffened, and his eyes widened in terror.
"Father, please—!"
"You'll survive," Jacob said, his voice breaking with emotion. "You must. You're the only hope. The only vessel that can endure what's coming."
Then he whispered, almost reverently, "I've seen it, Ethan. A universe reborn. You'll be the first. The foundation."
The chamber closed.
Agony erupted inside Ethan's body as the Null Energy was injected directly into his core. It was like swallowing the void—like being unmade and remade simultaneously. Every atom in his body screamed.
Then came the impossible.
As the collapse reached its peak outside, something ancient answered the call of Null.
It wasn't Mana.
It was Aether.
Aether—the primordial force spoken of only in whispers among the most powerful beings of the Supreme Universe. A force never meant to exist on Earth. Yet, somehow, impossibly, it was drawn—not to the planet, but to the boy within the pod.
The interaction was cataclysmic.
Null and Aether collided and entwined. Not opposites, but parallels. Two impossible forces bound together in a body that should have died—but didn't.
Jacob realized too late.
"No… No! Null isn't energy—it's—"
His words were lost as his body began to dissolve in the storm of energy. He reached for the emergency console with his last breath and slammed the cryo-seal protocol.
The pod froze. Time stopped.
And the world ended.
---
Two hundred years later, the Earth was no longer Earth.
The Event had pulled it into the Supreme Universe—a reality layered above the one humans once knew. Planets there were ranked by their resources, their energies, their power. Earth was now a mid-tier, unranked planet under the dominion of Emerald, a Stellar-ranked world ruled by the Elven race—beings of great beauty, talent, and cultivation.
But Earth was anemic. The Aether that might have empowered it had been drawn away—devoured during Ethan's transformation. Only scraps of Mana remained. The rest of the universe flourished with energy beasts, cultivation sects, and cosmic empires.
Earth remained a backwater.
Its people clung to survival through scraps of crude magic-tech and faded memory. They feared the Elves who descended from time to time, bearing gifts and punishments with equal whim.
But beneath the crust of the dead world…
Something stirred.
---
Ethan's pod cracked open with a hiss.
For the first time in two centuries, he breathed.
And choked.
His lungs burned with unfiltered air, his body trembling with weakness. His muscles were thin, his skin pale. He stumbled forward and collapsed. Crawling, he reached a broken pane of reflective glass.
What stared back was not a man.
It was a boy.
Eight years old—maybe less.
"What…?" he rasped. His voice cracked. "Why…?"
He staggered out of the ruined lab, into the wilderness beyond the bunker. The air shimmered with dense Mana, more than he had ever seen. It pressed against him like an ocean, crawling into his skin, tasting his essence.
Then his body began to change.
The energy within him—silent for so long—reacted.
Not with violence. With purpose.
By nightfall, he had regressed to six.
By dawn, he was four.
His bones reshaped. His blood refined. His cells optimized, compressed, perfected. It wasn't regression—it was evolution in reverse. His body was breaking down to rebuild itself, harmonizing with the new world, recalibrating.
He walked aimlessly for an entire day, confused, hungry, and alone. With every hour, he became smaller. Slower. Softer.
By the end of that journey, he was a one-year-old baby.
And that's when he was found.
---
The noble who discovered him was Viscount Darius Valen, Lord of a minor territory in the Kingdom of Allitia. The Valen name held land but little prestige. When the noble found the unconscious child alone in the woods, naked and surrounded by ash, he took it as a sign. A miracle.
He brought the child home.
He named him Ethan.
And so began Ethan Walker's second life—reborn not as the son of Earth's greatest scientist, but as an orphan in a world of magic, monsters, and noble bloodlines.
But the world had no idea what had just returned.
And it would never be the same again.
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