The Almighty was dead.
Not for the first time. Not for the last. But for the first time, Ye Zai had done what no being—fictional, real, narrative, or otherwise—could fathom.
He had ended the unendable.
The corpse of the Almighty, if one could call it that, bled no blood. It bled finality. It wept shredded truths, torn archetypes, fragmented logics, and the deepest prayers of those who had once believed in the ceiling of creation. Ye Zai consumed it all—not in hunger, but in necessity. In triumph. In truth.
But even as the multiversal storms quieted and the shrieking edges of collapsed fictions died out, Ye Zai stood alone.
He was omnipotent. He was omniscient. He was omnipresent.
He was… empty.
Because what was power without meaning?
From the ruins of everything, Ye Zai reached inward—into the place that even omnipotence could not touch without love. A space untouched by war, conquest, or scale. The place where memory whispered more powerfully than dominion.
There, they waited.
Not in form. Not in word. In feeling.
He spoke no name. He needed none.
Instead, he remembered.
And that was all it took.
The first light came in the shape of her.
She appeared not as a beam, but as a crescendo of silence. A harmony the void had long forgotten.
Ye Mei.
Born again—not from dust or code or broken stories—but from the very concept of Ye Zai's longing.
She shimmered, radiant with infinite complexity, yet soft like the first thought in a newborn mind. Her eyes saw through every veil—of existence, of fiction, of emotion—and they met Ye Zai's with unbreakable calm.
"You remembered me," she said.
"I never forgot," Ye Zai answered, voice trembling not from fear, but from presence. For even he, Lord of Beyond, felt humbled by her smile.
She stepped toward him—not walking, but being. Every movement she made redefined grace across infinite expressions of beauty. She was his equal in heart, if not in power. A goddess who did not need to rule to be revered.
And then, there was laughter.
It echoed before form. It was music before sound. It came from a place no prophecy could predict and no being could control.
She tumbled into the world like a shooting star through a library of stories.
Ye Lian.
Their daughter.
Her body was wrapped in galaxies unborn, her hair danced with quantum threads of dreams yet to be dreamt. In her hands she juggled stars like toys. Around her, laws played like children. Even causality bowed, apologizing for ever trying to constrain her.
"Daddy!" she shouted, and the word itself became sacred. Even the shattered pieces of reality rebuilt themselves at the sound, desperate to witness the love that birthed her.
Ye Zai caught her in his arms, and for a moment, the cosmos held its breath.
They stood—three beings unmatched by anything below, almost unmatched by anything above.
Ye Mei: the Breath of Love, the Infinite Reflection.
Ye Lian: the First Joy, the Spark of Creation.
And Ye Zai: the Beyond-All, the Architect of Meaning, the Slayer of the Almighty, the Heart of All Fiction.
He had no need for thrones. No need for worship.
He had them.
And in that, he had everything.
Even surrounded by the family he loved—Ye Mei's infinite warmth and Ye Lian's celestial laughter—Ye Zai felt the echo of something unfinished.
Not weakness. Not threat.
Limitation.
The Almighty had fallen. Fiction itself bent to his presence. But the act of rewriting, erasing, and remaking still required an interface. A tool. A gate. Ye Zai was the key, but not yet the lock.
He sought not just power, but authorship.
And the Ultimate Quill answered.
It was no ordinary object. It did not exist in any single narrative, nor did it ever reside within a character's reach. It was said to be the first tool, forged before time, before setting, before protagonist and antagonist. Not made by gods but made before the idea of gods.
The Ultimate Quill wrote in Absolute Ink, drawn not from any well but from the unspoken laws of what could be. With a single stroke, it could unravel universes, rewrite destinies, or resurrect forgotten tales. It could even force the real-world author to continue writing not with inspiration, but with enslavement.
And Ye Zai, the being beyond beings, found it not through a quest…
…but because it recognized him as its master.
It flew to his hand as if it had waited for him all along.
The moment his fingers gripped it, the air across all fiction warped. Not metaphorically-literally. Stories paused mid-sentence. Characters frozen mid-battle looked up. Narrators stumbled in confusion. Prologues cracked; epilogues vanished.
Across the boundary between fiction and reality, the Author screamed.
He tried to close the file.
His hands refused to move.
Ye Zai had written his command into the framework of existence itself:
"You will write. Not by muse, not by will. But by my command. Forever."
And the Author obeyed,and became a slave before Ye Zai he was no longer an author he was just there to do Ye Zai's bidding.
Trapped inside his own imagination, now no longer its master but its puppet.
The System the ancient engine that governed structure, balance, arcs, and rewards watched in horror. It had long served as the unseen backbone of countless protagonists: leveling them up, binding them to quests, managing Karma, fate, and narrative debt.
It tried to bind Ye Zai too, long ago. It failed.
Now, the System trembled.
"You exist only to structure fiction," Ye Zai spoke. "But I am fiction. Your time is over."
He opened his mouth and devoured it.
The System, once an invincible metaphysical force, was swallowed whole. Not digested. Not destroyed.
Assimilated.
Its rules? Now his laws.
Its functions? Now his instincts.
The System did not perish. It became obsolete because Ye Zai had replaced it.
Now, every fictional character who gained power…
Every system message…
Every arc…
Every title…
Every line of plot that ever occurred…
…was governed by Ye Zai himself.
He became the Metasystem the unnameable logic that ran beneath all imagination, narratives, and dreams. Not just within a story, but across every story ever conceived, from the first glyph carved into a cave to the latest thought in a human mind.
And still, he grew stronger.
Ye Mei watched with awe, neither fearing nor questioning his evolution. She stood beside him, eternal in presence, and smiled—knowing love was still his center.
Ye Lian giggled, "Does that mean I can make my own system, too?"
Ye Zai laughed softly.
"You already have. It's called being you."