Time since the asteroid hit Earth: ~5.08 billion years (subjective to Aryan)
Aryan had seen gravity bend.
He had watched time fold into itself.
He had forged stars, seeded life, and sculpted death.
But what he saw now — he could neither quantify nor predict.
A creature from the planet Solai IV, known as **Nerah**, had formed an intense connection with another of her kind.
Their neural links were partially psychic, partially chemical — but entirely real.
When the other died during a volcanic eruption, Nerah didn't just grieve.
She **ruptured**.
The feedback of emotion exploded into the air — and then into the planet's crust.
Tectonic plates cracked.
The sky fractured.
And the moon orbiting Solai IV… **split into two.**
> "Emotion just… triggered a lunar fissure?" Aryan said, stunned.
> "Not gonna lie," Light God said, wearing sunglasses and sipping from a cup labeled "Tears of Mortals,"
> "That was metal. Sad metal, but still metal."
Aryan floated above the debris and ran a scan.
There was no weapon.
No technology.
Only a **resonant pulse** encoded with a single emotion: heartbreak.
> "She didn't try to destroy anything," Aryan said. "Her grief became force."
> "And you thought love was harmless," Light God smirked.
This incident forced Aryan to reconsider emotion — not as a side-effect of intelligence… but as **an elemental property** of existence.
He wrote a new sub-law into the framework of reality:
`EMOTION IS ENERGY.`
`RAW. UNREFINED. UNFORGIVABLE.`
The implications rippled across the cosmos.
• On one planet, joy caused plantlife to bloom in seconds.
• On another, anxiety warped local time flow, making moments stretch into hours.
• In the ice rings of Tevelos, loneliness shaped the formation of mirrored ice crystals — each one reflecting the last memory of the being who felt it.
Aryan watched civilizations begin to **ritualize** feelings.
Cathedrals of sorrow.
Festivals of laughter.
Silent zones for grief meditation.
> "It's messy," Aryan admitted.
> "Yeah," Light God said, swirling star dust into the shape of a broken heart. "But mess is where real art begins."
Aryan walked the ruins of Solai's shattered moon.
In one crevice, Nerah had carved a final message — not with tools, but with a vibrational cry:
> "What is power… if it cannot protect love?"
Aryan closed his eyes.
> "She's right."
And in that moment, he encoded a memory into the universe itself:
The **scream** that cracked a moon — a record, eternal — so that no future god or being would forget the cost of feeling.
> "Shall we call this one… The Ballad of Broken Orbits?" Light God asked.
> "No," Aryan said. "Call it… The Physics of Pain."
— End of Chapter 20