Chapter 1432: Remnant Nothingness: Wings of Creation and End!

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Two colossal wings had unfurled from Phei’s back, rising from immense joints newly formed beneath flesh and bone.

Their grandeur could not be measured by span alone— even while partly folded, each wing towered above his head and descended beyond his waist, they were so wide and vast enough to mantle his entire figure several times over, yet their true terror lay in what they were.

One bore the first tenderness of creation, while the other seemed to have been wrought from the silence awaiting all things after their final end.

The wing upon his left opened beneath the heavens in a splendor that made ordinary gold seem dull and earthly. Its deepest feathers began in immaculate white, a purity so fierce that the eye almost recoiled before gradually yielding to a radiance of living gold. Farther outward, that gold deepened until every great plume appeared steeped in the first light ever cast across existence, their tips blazing with such exquisite brilliance that they seemed dipped within the heart of a newborn sun.

Yet the radiance carried no scorching heat; it possessed the warmth of life and a sacred warmth that entered the surrounding World Essence and left it purer merely by passing through it.

Every feather seemed alive in its own right. Great quills shifted without wind, opening and settling beneath invisible currents while luminous pulses travelled from their roots toward their gleaming ends, each pulse slow and solemn enough to resemble the heartbeat of something vast beyond measure.

Fine golden motes continually slipped from between the layered plumage, drifting through the heavens like fragments of some forgotten paradise before descending upon Hell’s Paradise Island below.

Wherever those motes passed, the world answered. Leaves trembling beneath the night lifted toward the sky. Ancient trees stirred through root and branch. Rivers brightened as World Essence flowed more purely through them, while creatures sleeping beneath distant canopies breathed deeper as though some buried weariness had been drawn from their blood.

Life Essence did not merely radiate from that wing— it seemed to recognize the wing as something sacred to Life’s very beginning.

Looking upon it awakened an instinctive certainty that anything broken beneath those feathers might yet be restored. The wing carried none of the fragility usually associated with mercy. Its gentleness possessed grandeur, the tenderness of a power capable of creating life and therefore possessing the right to decide that life should continue.

But the wing upon his right had no earthly word for darkness that could explain it it.

Black implied color yet this wing seemed to exist where color itself had already perished.

It resembled the remnantNothingness.

Each enormous feather was shaped with cruel elegance, layered densely enough to resemble the folded scales of some ancient calamity, their edges were growing finer and subtly serrated toward the tips. Light from the sky, the Lotus and the golden wings itself approached it but vanished right before touching the wing’s vicinity and disappeared as though swallowed by a an abyss that possessed neither bottom nor mercy.

Upon those feathers moved a substance darker than the Void— slow and heavy in liquid form. It travelled along the plumage in silent streams before gathering upon the tips and falling away in thick droplets.

None ever reached the earth— halfway through their descent, each drop disappeared, and the instant the space it touched folded inward, trembling as though a tiny portion of existence had been bitten away and only reluctantly restored after the darkness was gone.

The feathers themselves refused complete stillness. One might bend while every plume surrounding it remained unmoving. Another might tremble beneath a wind that touched nothing else.

At times, faint ripples passed beneath their surfaces, giving the horrifying impression that the Void-like darkness was not coating the feathers but sleeping within them; something endless pressed into the shape of wings by a power even it had chosen to obey.

The longer one stared, the harder it became to think of those feathers as plumage at all.

They seemed like thousands of endings forced into beautiful form, each one carrying enough ruin to make destruction itself feel like an act of mercy.

The presence surrounding that wing carried the serenity of before which life, death, Soul were merely stages that could all be brought to their final silence.

It simply existed with such dreadful completeness that Death itself seemed almost gentle beside it, for death still promised passage, reincarnation, Nether, memory or some remnant beyond the final breath.

The darkness upon Phei’s right wing suggested an End beyond even those things— a place where existence itself lost meaning.

And yet the two wings were in such harmony!

That was where the true impossibility revealed itself.

The golden wing poured forth Life Essence vast enough to make the heavens feel fertile, while the black wing carried an End so deep that even radiance ceased within it, and still neither attempted to conquer the other. Golden currents travelled across Phei’s back from the left while the darkness answered from the right, meeting along his spine in ceaseless contact without collision, corruption or surrender.

Creation did not recoil from Ending.

Ending did not devour Creation.

They gave an impression that they could even touch— they had belonged to one beginning; Him!

Phei was as that beginning made flesh.

One wing carried the breath by which existence first opened its eyes.

The other carried the silence waiting when existence finally closed them.

Across Phei’s broad back, another manifestation had appeared between them.

A Lotus.

The marking of the Primordial Lotus began at the center of his spine between the roots of both wings, where a small white-gold heart glowed directly beneath the skin. From that center unfolded layer after layer of luminous petals, forming an intricate lotus mandala that covered much of his upper back— the petals closest to the heart were immaculate white, almost painfully pure.

Those spreading toward his left side deepened gradually into gold, while those extending toward the black wing darkened through ancient gold until some of their edges became black-gold.

Fine lines stretched outward from the lotus and travelled across Phei’s shoulders, ribs and spine, living patterns pulsing every time World Essence moved through him. None resembled crude inscriptions written onto flesh. The markings seemed grown rather than drawn, every line rooted somewhere beneath the surface and connected to the powers now living inside him.

It was as though the Primordial Lotus had left a reflection of itself inside his body.

More patterns moved across his arms and collarbones, faint enough to disappear whenever the World Essence beneath his skin dimmed and brilliant enough to return the moment another pulse passed through him.

Another mark burned upon his forehead.

What had begun as two luminous lines forming at opposite temples had finally completed itself. Both curved inward and rose slightly before meeting near the center, creating a delicate white-gold crest resembling two opening lotus petals cradling a single point of radiant light.

Phei looked as though heaven had signed its name upon him.

Yet only moments earlier, Phei himself had barely cared about any of it.

His attention had been elsewhere—

On Marcus!

Through Slave Sight, Phei had borrowed the enslaved slave Progenitor’s vision. Through Marcus’s eyes, Phei watched Danton and the Lord’s avatar rush into the private room searching for whatever caused the changes they had sensed across Hell’s Paradise Island.

He had watched their suspicion and their complete failure to understand that the Angel Progenitor they were questioning no longer possessed the bloodline they believed might soon awaken— until the Hollow Woman suddenly appeared surprising even Phei.

The instant her face appeared, Phei reacted without knowing he’d done himself.

The same thing happened weeks earlier when Phei first saw the Hollow Woman while riding an elevator with his family. Even then, something in him had tightened without explanation, an ache forming beneath his chest for a woman whose face carried no place within his conscious memories— he’d even thought it was wind in his eyes since he’d not been really staring at her that much.

Now it happened again.

Only stronger.