Chapter 796: 796

But the second half of the price, that was the blade against their throats. The prospect of becoming an "empty husk," a hollow vessel of gnawing, soul darkening envy, paralyzed them. To lose their status was unthinkable, but to lose their minds? To spend the rest of their now long life as a silent, impotent spectator to the ascension of others, trapped within the sterile walls of their own intellect while their potential rotted?

It was a fate far worse than death for beings who defined themselves entirely by their own genius.

Countless oracle watched as the figures they have lead freeze. A ripple of retreat moved through the ranks as the weaker-willed stepped backward, their eyes darting nervously between the glowing transcript and the looming, shadowed form of the Oracle. Others remained rooted to the spot, paralyzed by a mixture of ambition and primal fear, too terrified to move forward, yet too obsessed to turn away.

Then, the static of the world seemed to tear.

No one witnessed the physical act of her movement, for she existed in a sliver of space and time unique to her and oracle. While the rest of the seekers stood frozen through the lens of Oracle’s omnipresent gaze, she simply ceased to be where she was and began to be walk where he was.

She stepped out, a figure of absolute composure. The Oracle’s, paternal smile deepened, acknowledging the first soul who did not merely want the knowledge, but who was willing to bet her entire existence that she would be the one to master it.

The name Nwadimma echoed in Oracle’s consciousness. As she reached the door, her hand hovering mere inches from the cold, shimmering surface, a tremor passed through her, an invincle surge of waves.

Oracle felt it, too. But his shiver was not of the flesh, it was his very essence.

Before his eyes, the physical world blurred, replaced by the translucent, haunting image of a young man beckoning from the threshold of an unfathomable destiny. The Oracle’s domain groaned as the vision settled, and when he spoke again, his voice was no longer that of a mentor or a trickster. It was the voice of a herald delivering a eulogy for the age that hadn’t yet begun.

"Go then," he whispered, the sound vibrating in the marrow of every seeker present, cold enough to freeze their ambition mind. His smile stretched, losing its paternal warmth and sharpening into something hollow. "Take the alphabet of the cosmos. Translate your wills into the laws of the world. Become the "higher being" you have always dreamed of being, untethered by the chains that keep the true divinities silent and still."

The chains binding his tome began to thrash, a frantic, metallic rhythm that underscored his words, as if the very knowledge within were desperate to flee the prophecy he was about to unleash.

"But know this," Oracle continued, his eyes drifting away from the seekers, fixing on a horizon only he could discern. "Your reign has a witness. Even now, in the silent dark of a divine womb, a child is forming. A union of Nature’s growth and Death’s finality. He is the Grave-Watcher, the one who crawls toward the light of dying stars just to hear their final breath."

He leaned forward, his massive, shadowy form leaning over the collective soul of the crowd.

"To you, the Sixth Tier is a throne of power. To Him, you are merely a beautiful story with an interesting end. He is the Time-Child who seeks the company of the falling. When his shadow falls across your "World Domination," it will not be as an enemy to be fought, but as a Reaper who has come to listen to the echo of your former glory."

A short, dry, mocking laugh escaped him, rattling the very air they breathed.

"You will come to believe yourselves to be the masters of reality. But the child is coming to remind you that every law you write into the world has an expiration date. Your end is his nursery rhyme. Now... come and take your power. If you dare."

With a final, shattering crack of displaced reality, the Oracle’s massive presence evaporated. He left behind only the heavy, oppressive silence of the library’s threshold, and a gathering of "higher beings to be" now haunted by the silhouette of a child who had not yet been born.

The already suffocating atmosphere from Oracle first words, shattered like glass. His final, haunting words, a promise of a Grave Watcher and the ticking clock of their own inevitable obsolescence ripped through the crowd.

For many, the weight of the prophecy was the final catalyst, the doubt that had been creeping into their minds solidified into cold, hard logic. They retreated, stepping backward into the safety of their familiar limitations, preferring a slow life of mediocrity to a fast death at the hands of destiny.

The crowd thinned rapidly, a mass exodus of those who preferred to remain masters of their own small, safe worlds rather than that of an uncertain future.

But others stayed.

For these seekers, the memory of Osita’s power remained a searing brand upon their consciousness. They remembered the raw, visceral terror of being nothing more than a toy in the hands of a superior being, the absolute helplessness of watching their fate being dictated by another’s whim. That fear had not diminished, it had curdled into an insatiable, ravenous drive.

They looked at the massive, inviting door, the threshold to the Universal Language and saw not a trap, but their only escape from the cycle of prey.

"Whatever comes in the future can be dealt with," one of them murmured, their voice a shaky but defiant prayer. "But today, we will no longer be the ones who crawl."

One by one, with a collective, grinding resolve, they stepped forward. The silence of the library was broken by the groan of ancient stone as they pushed the door wide.

They were now walking into a forge, they know the price, the Arrogance, the potential for an empty-husk existence, the shadow of the Grave-Watcher but they accepted the bargain.

They chose the gamble of the Sixth Tier over the certainty of their current impotence. As the first of them crossed the threshold, the light of the Universal Transcript flooded out, washing over their faces, faces set in expressions of grim, terrifying ambition.

The moment the Oracle’s vision took hold, the world shifted. Ikenga vanished from his own realm, reappearing instantly beside Keles. She lay in a state of profound, unnatural stillness, a sleep so deep it bordered on a trance.

Ikenga reached out, his hand coming to rest gently against her stomach. He closed his eyes, reaching inward to sense the life within. Immediately, he noticed the change: the turbulent, psychic waves that had previously radiated from the child had fallen into a sudden, heavy silence.

Where there was once a rhythmic pulse of raw power, there was now only a calm void.

Despite the silence, Ikenga felt no alarm. As he felt the shifting energy of the womb, a quiet understanding settled over him. The child would no longer communicate through the echoes of the mind as he once had; the era of his pre-natal whispers had ended. From this moment on, he would exist as a normal babe should, wrapped in the quiet of the physical world.

His voice, once a psychic force, would remain unheard until he had grown enough to speak with his own lips.

Ikenga realized then that the violent fluctuations in time, the tremors he and his siblings had felt just before the Oracle’s vision were the child’s final act from within. It was a wordless, powerful declaration of his existence. Before even taking his first breath, the child had announced his arrival to the world, marking the world before his birth.

Ikenga gazed down at the sleeping Keles, the Oracle’s whispered title echoing in the silence of the room: "The Time Child."

"A pruner," Ikenga mused internally.

He began to dissect the child’s essence with the cold precision he uses when viewing a pawn. If his theory held, this boy was not merely a son, but a powerful synthesis, the absolute extremity of his own Nature Divinity forced into a collision with the raw extremity of Keles’s Death Divinity. Growth and decay, beginning and end, fused into a single point.

As he watched her, Ikenga’s eyes turned cold, losing their fatherly warmth for a moment of detached calculation. A chilling thought took root, he had fundamentally misunderstood his own status as an Origin God. He realized now that being an "Origin" wasn’t just a title of rank, it was a functional anchor to the laws of reality.

When he had eloped with Keles, it hadn’t been a simple act of passion or rebellion. By bringing their two opposing forces together, they had inadvertently performed a cosmic surgery. A fundamental Law of their world had been rewritten in the dark, and that rewrite was now manifesting in physical form within Keles’s womb.