Deep within the Sea of Universal Origin, an enormous mound the size of light-years floated in the void.
At this moment, countless cracks had already appeared across its surface. Through those cracks, one could glimpse the interior space of the Nightfall Society and the many great True God avatars trapped in despair within. Every member of the Nightfall Society had now realized that death was inevitable.
Those whose true selves had already ascended to eternity outside the seal were still fortunate. But those whose true bodies had perished would have their paths completely severed.
The Chaos Holy God gazed through the rifts into the Nightfall Society, yet held not the slightest hint of contempt toward these avatars.
Because He understood the true nature of the Nightfall Society. Its purpose was not merely to protect the reincarnated avatars of eternal beings, but to serve as the seal of the primordial universe's remnants.
If one day that seal failed, and the evil sealed within broke free from the Nightfall Society—
That evil would merge with the bodies of the members inside, turning them into vessels of sin. Each member represented a form of future evil capable of rampaging through the universe. And all of these evils were enough to threaten eternal beings.
Across the universe, the Chaos Holy God summoned the other three.
The Dimension Holy God arrived first, followed shortly by Rosen and the Ancient God.
However, the Ancient God did not come in person, but sent an eternal-level avatar called the Dark Sun. Whether His true self was genuinely weakened in divine origin and still healing in slumber—or fully healed and simply feigning weakness—remained unknown.
"When the seal of the Nightfall Society breaks, we'll work together to move its world fragments to the edge of the universe," the Chaos Holy God said, manipulating the eternal divine artifact, the Chaos Cauldron, to hover in the void.
From the cauldron poured endless currents of chaotic energy, within which countless worlds could be seen emerging and vanishing.
As the Chaos Cauldron descended upon the Nightfall Society—now on the verge of collapse—the last thread of sealing power was shattered. Space and time twisted, forming a black hole that sucked in all fragments of the Nightfall Society and hurled them toward the edge of the universe.
Rosen did not hesitate and immediately fled. Staying near the Chaos Holy God meant he could be attacked at any moment.
The key problem was that the Dimension Holy God might not help him. As long as the Chaos Holy God didn't strike to kill, the Dimension Holy God would gladly observe his true nature. If he delayed his escape, it could become a problem. Besides, Rosen was still curious to see what exactly was sealed in the cosmic graveyard.
Rosen teleported to the middle section of the universe, entered the Mysterious Study Room, and activated the Eye of the Creator.
His vision extended to the end of the universe, where he saw that many avatars of the Nightfall Society still lived within the fragments. His gaze quickly locked onto the old fisherman's avatar, because that one had already been replaced by his eternal avatar using the Ten Thousand Transformations Divine Law.
The interior space of the Nightfall Society was not large. To live comfortably within, members had to expand space themselves.
However, after the seal broke and the Nightfall Society collapsed, the internal space of each fragment began to expand infinitely. Some even grew larger than eternal worlds, filled with nothing but endless, turbid primordial power.
The old fisherman's avatar had no time to react before his body was flooded by that endless primordial force.
The final sensation transmitted from this eternal avatar was that its eternal will and origin were thoroughly polluted by the primordial power. It rapidly grew stronger, enough to jump from the level of a great True God to that of an eternal being. At the same time, it lost all reason and became pure madness.
Just as Rosen tried to sense the state of the old fisherman's avatar more carefully, he suddenly felt primordial power appear out of nowhere in his own sea of consciousness.
The primordial power sealed in the primordial universe's remnants had traced his eternal avatar directly back to his true self.
He quickly began cycles of temporal reincarnation to purge the primordial power from his sea of consciousness, and soon severed all connection with the old fisherman's avatar.
Only then did Rosen breathe a sigh of relief and stop the time loops. Even he had been affected through his avatar—those newly ascended eternal beings, many of whom had avatars in the Nightfall Society, would not be so lucky. Even if their eternal wills weren't corrupted, they were sure to suffer major consequences.
From his sea of consciousness, he extracted a sliver of his eternal will—specifically, the last one that had been tainted.
He wanted to study it and find out just what kind of evil could even corrupt primordial power itself.
In the True Realm of the Ancient Gods, hundreds of millions of scientific sequence beings gathered within the Scientific Universe.
This was one of the few non-kingdom powers in the Ancient Gods' True Realm. The Scientific Universe was not a real universe, but neither was it fake. It was a virtual universe that fully replicated real-world laws based on a virtual world framework.
All invention and creation-related sequences across the Ancient Gods' True Realm could log in to the Scientific Universe to access the latest cutting-edge knowledge.
With the combined wisdom of countless beings, the virtual steward—an intelligent lifeform born from the Cube Civilization—had already ascended to immortality.
After successfully advancing to the Immortal level, the Virtual Steward gained a very special ability.
All extraordinary beings in the virtual world could fuse their divine essence with the Virtual Steward and thereby draw upon a portion of its power. If they were true gods who possessed the Will of a True God, they could even fully wield the Virtual Steward's entire strength within the virtual world.
Through this, they could use the Virtual Steward to grasp the Eternal Will—something only immortal godfiends could master.
This significantly enhanced the extraordinary power available to scientists, allowing all scientists to collectively develop their scientific systems with the Virtual Steward as the core. If any being under Rosen's command had the greatest potential to ascend to the Eternal level, without a doubt, it would be the Virtual Steward.
After Rosen's corrupted Eternal Will was cast into the virtual universe, all research-based extraordinary sequences began studying the phenomenon of "Twilight Sin."
Of course, Rosen himself was the core of that research. With the power of a true Creator, he could elevate the Scientist Sequence to the Eternal level.
Still, that didn't prevent the Virtual Steward and countless scientists from providing him with endless inspiration and research directions. His mastery over the Eternal Scientist Sequence came solely from his powerful extraordinary strength. When it came to actual research, he served best as a central tool.
At first, Rosen believed the remnants of the Primordial Universe must contain many things.
For instance, remnants of primordial life, extraordinary resources from the Primordial Universe era, or ruins left behind by ancient civilizations.
But none of these were found. There wasn't even a single plant—only barren desert-like fragments of worlds and an almost endless sea of corrupted primordial power. According to research, everything in the remains of the Primordial Universe had been devoured by primordial force.
This primordial force was the Origin Power of the Universe—the very source of all primordial power in the cosmos.
The Universe's Origin Power devoured everything sealed by the Twilight Society. Inanimate objects were digested completely, but the lingering remnants of primordial life—perhaps even the will left behind by the Universe itself—became entangled and polluted the Universe's Origin Power.
Immortal beings mastered Eternal Will, and Eternal beings still mastered Eternal Will.
As for primordial beings, they could no longer wield the Eternal Will.
Primordial beings wielded the Undying Will, which was the ultimate refinement of both Immortal Will and Eternal Will.
The will of immortal godfiends did not decay. If unaffected by external forces, it could persist in the world indefinitely without eroding on its own.
Eternal beings' Eternal Will, built upon the foundation of immortality, gained the added property of permanence. It was not only impervious to internal decay, but also incredibly difficult to erase through external means. This allowed Eternal Will to endure in the remnants of the universe for billions of years.
Immortal and Eternal Will were already incredibly powerful, but there remained a qualitative gap when compared to Undying Will.
Undying Will was truly indestructible—both mentally and physically eternal. As far as was known, no external force could destroy it. In theory, primordial beings were truly undying and indestructible.
But that didn't mean Undying Will was invincible. After all, nothing in existence was absolute.
Undying Will could theoretically be destroyed—just not by any force currently known within the universe.
So if Undying Will was eternal and unerasable in the cosmic domain, how were the primordial beings declared fallen?
The answer lay in the distinction between their existential and personal selves. At the level of existence, primordial beings were indeed undying. But at the personal level, they could still be "killed."
If the memories contained within Undying Will were completely destroyed and could never be recovered, then even if that Will lived a new life and formed new memories, would the resulting being still count as the original primordial entity?
On another front, although Undying Will couldn't be destroyed, that didn't mean it couldn't be divided.
If a primordial being's Undying Will were split into a thousand, ten thousand, or even a hundred million pieces, and those fragments were stripped of their memories and infused with new ones, would the resulting entity still be one life—or countless new ones? And if the memories weren't erased but merely divided, would it still be considered the same self?
Through his study of the corrupted Origin Power of the Universe, Rosen gradually uncovered a terrifying truth.
In the Old God World, the divine essence of all beings ultimately stemmed from the Old Gods. In essence, they were all avatars of the Old Gods.
Even now, after becoming an Eternal being, Rosen—by tracing the source of his life—was still just one of the Old God's many fragments.
If this was true in the Old God World, then what about at the scale of the universe?
Rosen and the others, with the help of the Cosmic Origin Seed, had done everything in their power to hurl the fragments of the Twilight Graveyard to the edge of the universe.
This ensured that the evil beings formed by the Twilight Society's members would start their destruction from the periphery of the cosmos and work their way inward.
Even so, despite their utmost efforts, a few fragments still remained in the Sea of Cosmic Origin.
The evil beings in those fragments had already begun threatening the Heart of the Universe.
But their numbers were far too small to pose a true threat. The Heart of the Universe instinctively retaliated and erased those evil entities, then reclaimed the Universe's corrupted Origin Power tainted by Undying Will.
Rosen, whose Eternal Will was now fused with the Heart of the Universe, seized the opportunity to uncover even more of the universe's secrets.
Within the universe, both matter and spirit were not fixed—they gradually increased over time.
Material growth was manageable, not particularly slow. But the growth of spirit was incredibly sluggish.
This meant that, after the birth of the primordial beings, the universe rarely gave rise to new life. Most spiritual essence had already solidified into Undying Will. Thus, intelligent life during the era of the primordial beings was exceedingly rare. There was nothing like the flourishing intelligent civilizations of the current universe.
It was said that "from a whale's fall, all things are born"—when the Old God fell asleep, their body became the source of all things, giving rise to the countless life forms and civilizations of the Old God World.
So too did the fall of primordial beings and the dispersal of their Undying Will across the cosmos perhaps lead to the birth of Eternal beings. In that sense, all Eternal beings were actually reincarnations of the primordial beings. Even the lowest goblin, in tracing their origins, shared the same root as Eternal beings.
The fall of primordial beings led to the birth of Eternal beings, and only after Eternal beings perished could there be an opportunity for the rise of diverse civilizations.
The so-called Chaos Holy God and Dimensional Holy God, believed to be reincarnations of primordial beings, differed from the Old Gods in one key aspect: the Old Gods did not inherit the memories of the primordial beings, while these two inherited fragments of those ancient memories.
Now, deep in the souls of all beings in the universe lay traces of Undying Will—but these wills did not contain any memories from the primordial beings. They were pure, memoryless strands of Undying Will.
In contrast, the members of the Twilight Society—whose Undying Will had polluted the Origin Power of the Universe—carried fragments of the primordial beings' memories. But these were far from pleasant; they were filled with negativity, chaos, madness, and an overwhelming desire for destruction.
Since all Undying Will shared a common origin, so too did the Eternal and Immortal Wills derived from it.
Even the Will of a True God, and weaker divine consciousness or mental energies, contained the faintest trace of Undying Will.
In theory, if one could master Undying Will and reclaim fragments of it, they could absorb the Undying Will of other intelligent beings to strengthen their own. Ultimately, this could allow their Eternal Will to transcend and evolve into Undying Will.
Rosen did the calculations. It would be extremely difficult to become a primordial being using this method.
He couldn't control Undying Will on his own; his ability to sense it relied entirely on the Heart of the Universe.
With the Heart of the Universe, he could indeed reclaim the Undying Will from evil beings.
But that wouldn't benefit him—especially since the Heart of the Universe, having lost the Universe's Will, currently lacked self-awareness. If it absorbed too much Undying Will, it might eventually regenerate a new Universe Will, making it impossible for Rosen to ever possess the Heart of the Universe again.
This was likely why the Chaos Holy God and the others had begun creating a new batch of Eternal beings.
Even if Rosen hadn't destroyed the Destiny Bookshelf and triggered the Heart of the Universe's awakening, the unsealing of theNightfall Society was only a matter of time.
Instead of devouring the Undying Will of intelligent beings to evolve into primordial beings, the Chaos Holy God and the others had clearly chosen a different path.
The Eternal Will of immortal godfiends could ascend by merging with the Will of a supermassive Eternal World.
In the same way, the Eternal Will of the Chaos Holy God and the others could ascend by transforming into the Will of a newly born universe.
There were two paths for Eternal Will to transcend. The first path was virtually impossible.
But after careful thought, Rosen believed he might be able to walk both paths simultaneously.
Although he couldn't sense Undying Will directly, with the help of the Heart of the Universe, he could feel it—because he was the only existence that the Heart of the Universe did not reject. Even after endless years, the Chaos Holy God and the others had still failed to fuse their Eternal Wills into the Heart of the Universe.
Only Rosen—who had refined the acquired Origin Seed and transcended its limits—had gained partial legitimate inheritance rights to the Heart of the Universe.
Still, there was one major problem to solve. Though the Heart of the Universe could absorb the Undying Will embedded in the corrupted Origin Power within evil beings, this Undying Will was far too dangerous and tainted with negativity. If Rosen absorbed it as-is, it might backfire and pollute his Eternal Will instead.
So it was imperative to find a way to purify it—cleansing the madness and negative impulses before it could be safely absorbed.
Rosen thought of the Hymn of Natural Joy and the Lament of Natural Sorrow. Perhaps the power of these two compositions could help him achieve his goal.
(End of Chapter)