The moment his soul merged back with flesh, he felt the universe inside himself without even trying to look. Everything lay a thought away ~ planets, star, the delicate dance of evolution he'd set in motion. His suppressed spirit sense began expanding further, a side effect of the soul transformation.
But more than that, he felt... diminished. After experiencing near-omniscience within his universe, returning to this constrained form felt like squeezing an ocean into a teacup.
His mastery over law had crossed the 63rd realm for most principles. More than enough.
Time to go.
With a thought he transformed back to pure law energy and appeared in empty space. Once again, he placed his hands against the seal and made his choice:
"Retrieve the system's leftover seal and energy."
The moment those words crystallized into intent, existence itself quivered. From the far corners of higher dimensions, reality began rippling inward ~ folding, collapsing, slow at first, then accelerating into a cascade of disintegration. Laws that had held for eons simply... stopped. Yet for the beings within three dimensions no one noticed, may be except for a select few alien civilizations.
He had no time for explanations. No grand gesture. No parting fireworks for his wives, though they'd probably hoped for something more dramatic. Only a silent decision echoing across dimensions.
He willed himself back into human form ~ solid flesh, flowing blood, constrained soul. The shape he'd once worn. Before the reality of the past disintegrates, space shimmered around him.
His body reformed while his soul ~ enriched beyond mortal comprehension ~ descended through layers of dimensional fabric. A force pulled at him, not gravitational but conceptual, dragging his existence across the border of known dimensions. His form unraveled into pure information, swept beyond the architecture of law itself into a realm no longer bound by observation or cause and effect. Beyond the barrier of universe which now restarted its expansion as seal is taken away.
But it wasn't over.
As he breached that final threshold, something ruptured. An anchor snapped. His departure caused destabilization ~ a subtle singularity from which reality began unraveling. Not in the physical dimension. No stars exploded, no worlds shattered.
But time itself started coming apart.
Moments simply... ceased.
The last thirty-two Earth years were wiped from existence. Every memory, every footprint, gone. A blank void carved into time's stream. Yet reality refused to remain incomplete. It began stitching itself together again, desperate to heal the wound from the energy of timeline collapse and universe expansion.
Slowly, a new past emerged from the present.
The minds of conscious beings ~ their fractured memories, biased narratives, incomplete recollections ~ rewove history's fabric backward. From the present moment, the past regrew like scar tissue, shaped by consensus of memory rather than objective truth for the universe to re-stabilize.
And then timelines met. The segmented past rejoined with the re-calibrated now. Information restructured itself. Logic self-corrected. His exit ~ unseen by most ~ became a metaphysical singularity, a junction where possibility bloomed into infinite branches.
New timelines sprouted like wildflowers.
In one thread, scientists from the distant future traveled back to investigate the anomalous cosmic tremor that had altered universal constants in a single instant. In another, his sister wandered Earth for years, desperate to find her vanished brother, never believing he was truly gone until she met his variant, which itself derive into another set of timelines where he only has memories of this life but no recollection of his wives or simply fell into madness or backlash or death in space.
When he ascended it did retain the information of his memory. But to meet the world level the logic, memory, existence and spatial position last known rewired back to earth as per new timelines. The variants of his wives didn't had that luxury.
His wives doesn't exist in the most of the new futures and in most new pasts, they die due to unknown causes. They were taken inside Chaos world bead, a month before reality collapse. As their selves were not found at time of collapse the two people's memories didn't get taken into account while restructuring so timeline variants of Hye Won, Yue Lan became people who were unrelated to future Han Chen variants.
Back to his sister, Ruo Xi, she became a public protector in one reality inspired by heroes in comics, even fought against alien invasions thousands of years into the future, using cultivation gifts to reveal higher realms to the world. Other times she turned into a renowned scientist. In darker branches, she vanished into shadow, hunted and feared ~ criminal, rebel, ghost story whispered in academic circles.
In one timeline, she bore children ~ twins ~ never knowing their father's identity. In others, she became a monarch ruling from the shadows. She lived for thousands of years in most.
Their parents aged and passed in nearly every branch before the next century and a half concluded. Without the spark of Ruo Xi's talent, constrained by advancing years, their cultivation simply... stopped. Time spared no one. Their passing was quiet, unremarkable.
The world moved on, as worlds do.
But Han Chen saw none of this cascading chaos. He only had the spatial and temporal record of the timeline collapse, his return ticket if possible in future.
He was no longer of this world, nor of any world following the old laws. He had passed beyond the boundary of form and name, carried into horizons unknown ~ the first being from lower reality to cross over intact.
And there, in the endless elsewhere, his journey continued into realms that had no names, following paths that had no maps, toward destinations that existed only in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
The first.
But perhaps not the last.