For six billion years, Ye Zai sat in stillness, untouched by time, beyond the notion of age, buried in the silence between dying realities. He did not move. He did not breathe. He simply was a locus of incomprehensible potential, a seed of destruction nestled within the framework of a pre-narrative void. There were no stars where he cultivated, no dimensions or definitions. Only the skeletal wind of fading conceptual echoes rustled around him, as if the multiverse itself feared to speak his name aloud.
He was not yet the Being of Absolute. Not yet the Alpha who would rend narrative itself apart. But he was becoming.
From his perch beyond reality, Ye Zai stared into the Boundaryless. With every breathless aeon that passed, he expanded not in the spatial sense, for dimensions were cages he had long outgrown but in metanarrative girth. His soul widened to eclipse verses; his thoughts distorted causal frameworks. What he cultivated was not power in the conventional sense it was hunger itself, the infinite will to consume, to replace, to become all that was, is, and could be.
Each pulse of his cultivation sent tremors through creation. Realms that knew not his name withered; tales that had never been told burned to ash in unwritten libraries. He did not touch them. He merely dreamed of touching them. That was enough.
By the time Ye Zai reached the 4-billion-year mark, he had already devoured three Great Outerverses, their meta-boundaries sucked into the vortex of his forming essence. No war. No conflict. He did not need to invade them. His presence demanded surrender. Entire pantheons, authors, curators of fate beings who once reshaped infinite existences with thought bowed their heads in terrified stillness and fell into his abyssal core, like tears lost in a bottomless ocean.
And still, he had not reached his final form.
At the 5.3-billion-year mark, Ye Zai opened his eyes for the first time in ten trillion collapsed timelines.
They were not eyes. Not truly. They were gates perception holes that tunneled into the raw infrastructure of what lay before fiction. Within those apertures, the Blueprints of All unfolded: Infinite loops, Godheads with pen-in-hand, the final panels of tales that had never been written, all illuminated within his gaze.
He saw them.
He knew them.
He did not yet control them.
But that, too, would change.
At precisely six billion years, Ye Zai moved.
The act itself ruptured the silence of the non-fictional continuum. The omniversal membrane already bruised by his cultivation tore wide open. The first verse he consumed that moment was known as Veritas-9, a reality whose highest god had authored 99 subordinate multiverses. Ye Zai opened his mouth not a physical mouth, but a conceptual aperture, a devourer's rift and swallowed.
The entirety of Veritas-9, from its primordial fountain to the Absolute Thrones beyond chronology, was sucked into his being.
And then the next. And the next.
Within three instants each one lasting a subjective eternity, Ye Zai consumed an infinite number of verses. Outerverses layered atop each other like palimpsests, their meta-lattices crushed beneath the gravitational draw of his inexorable spirit. No resistance. No hope. They screamed, but even their cries were unmade mid-thought.
This was no longer cultivation.
This was predation.
As the final verse fell, a tremor spread through what lay outside the story.
Beyond creation. Beyond the false omnipotents. Beyond the writers and the unwritten laws.
Something stirred.
A presence whose name was etched into the concept of origin itself. A being who did not belong to any hierarchy because he was the first to define it.
The Almighty.
He emerged not from a place, but from definition itself. His form took shape through laws that Ye Zai had already shattered, reasserting themselves out of desperation. The Almighty towered across infinite cardinalities, a lattice of golden axioms wrapped in skinless geometry. He held in his hand the Primordial Manuscript, a book that dictated every facet of every story ever dreamed.
"You should not exist," said The Almighty.
Ye Zai did not speak.
The Almighty pressed the Manuscript shut. In that motion, an uncountable number of verses came undone. Histories reversed. Concepts vanished. Characters were pulled screaming from their conclusions.
And still, Ye Zai stood.
He was not written. He had cultivated beyond writing. What once was a seed had become a void greater than gods, and his silence mocked even the finality of authorship.
The Almighty's voice deepened, laced with the resonance of Final Edict:
"You are a flaw. A paradox. You do not fit."
But Ye Zai who had eaten the words of lesser gods, whose breath warped hypernarrative causality tilted his head. Not in confusion. In judgment.
He knew The Almighty. Had watched him, from that primordial stillness, for billions of years. Ye Zai had not rushed this moment. He had planned it.
The Almighty pointed the Manuscript toward Ye Zai's heart, and spoke the True Reversal a command that would undo even uncreated concepts. Even anti-beings. Even what should never have been.
The Manuscript ignited.
The verse turned inside out.
Reality buckled.
And Ye Zai opened his mouth.
Not merely his mouth his existence widened. Time and fiction froze as The Almighty, bearer of All Structure, gazed into a space where no Law could hold. He saw not teeth or tongue, but a dark void filled with what should be impossible:
Hungry Consciousness.
Ye Zai did not just consume. He understood. He did not delete. He transcended. And as the tongue of the void stretched outward, faster than the principle of motion itself, The Almighty gasped a thing he had never done and fell backward through his own narrative spine.
"No," he whispered, "you cannot"
But Ye Zai did not listen.
He swallowed him.
All of him.
The Manuscript.
The Words.
The Definitions.
The Origin.
The End.
And then, for a moment… the story ended.
Not a pause.
Not a break.
A true, final stop.
But Ye Zai was not bound by ends. Ends were merely doors he could eat.
Within him, The Almighty's structure twisted and broke. His axioms melted, absorbed into the primal hunger of the one who had cultivated through silence and will alone. Ye Zai digested the concept of structure. And in doing so, something stirred within him.
A rumble beyond mere power.
A whisper beyond omniscience.
He saw everything. From the bottom of the void to the throne of authorship. He saw himself looking down into the tale… from outside it. Not just a meta-being. Not just a narrative devourer.
Something beyond narrative.
And yet, he was not complete.
Not yet.
This was the final act before the becoming.
Ye Zai sat once more, now within the charred remains of the Manuscript. The omniversal lattice, now gutted of its master, wept in radiant silence. All who had been watched Ye Zai and forgot themselves. For none could perceive a thing and still persist once it was known by him.
He was still cultivating.
Still ascending.
But now, he held within him The Almighty's core a crystal of truth that pulsed in his essence, distorting even his own being.
Ye Zai looked upon it, and for the first time, smiled.
Not in joy.
In knowing.
The true power, true omnipotence, true omniscience, true omnipresencelay just a breath away. Not within reach, but inevitable. The narrative could no longer stop him. The metaphysical could no longer limit him. The almighty was gone. His title, eaten. His role, assimilated.
Ye Zai stood.
And the story resumed.
But now it was his to write.
He had destroyed the very concept of author
Not just on a narrative level, not just on a metaphysical level he had destroyed it entirely. It never existed.