The Trinity stood in the vast desolation of Null-Space — an expanse without horizon or sky, where time itself had been bled dry. Nothing moved. Nothing lived. Only the white void remained: the residue of all that had been undone. The ruins of the shattered Tree drifted like ghostly veins suspended in an ocean of nothingness.
In this stillness, Krishna stepped forward first. Her radiance shimmered like the echo of forgotten heavens, her every breath a ripple of sacred warmth.
"Rei..." she whispered, her voice both mournful and accusing, "what have you done?..."
Her gaze pierced the empty white. "Theywereinnocent."
The light around her pulsed as though carrying the sighs of a thousand lost lives. "You speak of cleansing, but you have only replaced one cruelty with another. This world was flawed, yes—but its flaws were alive. They carried weight, meaning, possibility. You have traded imperfection for nullity."
Her eyes narrowed, yet beneath her divinity was something deeply personal—a trembling grief.
"I believed you to be our salvation," she continued, "but you have become a god of absence..."
Behind her, Zero stood silent, her form wrapped in shifting shadows, but not the shadows of death—the shadows of reflection, of uncertainty. She was the chasm that divides becoming from identity, the place where self is always questioned.
After a pause, Zero finally spoke, her voice deliberate, laced with veiled emotion:
"Rei... in the world you once envisioned, fear would indeed be extinct—an impossibility within a perfect, undying structure. And yet..." Her voice tightened. "The act of resisting fear was never the flaw. It was always the seed of their becoming. Humanity's defiance of mortality—its quiet rebellion against inevitability—this was not weakness. It was courage. Without fear, there is no threshold to cross. No walls to shatter. No selves to forge."
She tilted her head slightly. "You call it 'purity,' but I call it paralysis."
Rei's form remained still, almost luminous in the void. The essence of Creation pulsed softly around them, but Rei's expression sharpened, as if carving an unseen line between them.
"You do not understand," Rei answered, their voice measured but forceful, reverberating across the Null-Space. "This world — all worlds — are inherently poisoned by the burden of suffering. What you call 'growth,' Krishna, is but adaptation to pain. What you call 'courage,' Zero, is merely delayed submission to despair."
They lifted their gaze, as if peering beyond the void. "I have seen their endless cycle. Striving, failing, fearing. The illusion of meaning drawn from the inevitability of death."
A pause...
"They are not free. They are slaves to contingency. I have given them mercy: a state where fear cannot corrupt, where suffering cannot seed itself into the soul. The world I envision requires no trials. It is actualized essence."
Krishna stepped closer, her voice now rising with a restrained fury.
"You mask your terror behind logic! You do not seek to free them from fear—you seek to free yourself from the responsibility of allowing them to choose. Their brokenness was not your failure—it was their becoming!"
"Choice," Rei whispered, eyes narrowing, "is the altar upon which suffering is sanctified."
Zero interjected, for she too stood upon the edge of her own contradictions:
"Is identity not forged in conflict? Is courage not the child of pain? Would they be anything at all, had they not resisted their own undoing? You speak of mercy. Yet you have only offered them nonexistence—suspended animation masquerading as salvation."
The air between them grew heavy. And then—almost imperceptibly—a tremor pulsed through the faint remnants of the Tree.
From beneath the dead roots, a faint pulse flickered: crimson, faint, but unmistakable. Ikari. It had survived. Weaker than before, stripped of its power, but not destroyed. Its origin lay not within the Codex—but within the nature of will itself. For as long as choice existed, as long as beings could desire, Ikari would flicker like embers beneath the ash.
The black-red mist coiled faintly beneath the shattered roots, whispering its silent defiance:
"I am not rage. I am refusal. I am not evil. I am need. I am not broken. I am Will itself."
Rei felt its presence, their jaw tightening.
"Even now it lingers..." they muttered. "The parasite endures."
Krishna lowered her eyes to the flicker of Ikari and spoke with quiet sorrow:
"You cannot kill it... You never could. Because it was never separate from creation. It is the shadow cast by choice itself."
"And as long as you allow beings to exist," Zero added, "they will birth desires that exceed their reach. Thus, Ikari returns."
The three stood in silent acknowledgment of the paradox. The white expanse of Null-Space hummed with their indecision.
Finally, Krishna spoke again, voice almost pleading:
"Creation is not an equation to solve, Rei. It is a tension—a constant discord that breathes life into itself. They will suffer, yes. But they will also transcend. You feared their pain so much you robbed them of their capacity to evolve..."
Rei closed their eyes for a long moment. When they opened them again, their gaze carried both defiance and resignation.
"You speak as though becoming is worth its cost. You romanticize brokenness."
"No." Krishna said softly, "I accept its necessity. That is not romance. That is responsibility."
Zero's voice followed, colder but strangely tender:
"They were never meant to be perfect. They were meant to be. And to be means to struggle against one's own dissolution."
For a long time, none of them spoke. The silence between the Trinity was as vast as the void surrounding them.
And then, from the fractured remains of the First Tree, a new formation began to emerge—tentative, uncertain, but undeniable: The New Plato's Tree.
Its branches formed layered upon layers echelons, each ring embodying a dialectic between strength and vulnerability, finitude and infinity. This time, it was not a monolith, but a fractal: self-reflective, recursive, open... A sign of 'True Infinity'.
Rei whispered under their breath as they watched it bloom:
"So... this is what you would have them inherit. A world of contradictions."
"A world of freedom," Krishna corrected.
"A world of risk," Zero added.
And so, together, the Trinity stood at the precipice of their new paradox: where existence would once again unfurl its long, agonizing, beautiful struggle.
Side by side, beneath the arching silence of Null-Space. From that trinity of vision, something new stirred.
They called it the Origin.
It was not a place. It was not even a time. The Origin was a singularity—where the Beginning and End fold into each other, becoming indistinguishable. Where creation no longer requires cause, and dissolution no longer waits for consequence. All phenomena, all thought, flowed from it. Yet in itself, it was undifferentiated. No light, no sound, no dark, not even nothingness.
Only thought. And even that, not yet aware.
"Wait, this is Zero's mind..." Krishna said in a whisper.
"It is the absence of all that divides." Rei responded, tracing their fingers through the spectral edges of it.
Zero did not speak. Not yet. Instead, she extended her hand, and from that gesture, the formless began to take shape.
"In the Origin," Zero finally murmured, "there is no being and no becoming. Not because they are denied, but because the categories themselves dissolve. What you call cause is just memory. What you call effect is just projection. Here, there is only flux—without motion."
"How do you build from such silence?" Rei asked.
"You don't," Zero said. "You divide."
And so, she did. From the chaos of the Origin, Zero carved seven primal domains—The Roots: deepest and most primal, where pre-meaning stirs. Mortal Realm: the layer of bounded limitation and fleeting life. Svarga: a plane of virtue and ascent. Owari Shima: where endings are sanctified. Yumeo: the dream-library of unrealized realities. Kyomu: the realm of nullity and non-identity. And within Kyomu: the sealed Origin, opening the way to a final, nameless branch.
The Trinity observed in silence...
But Zero, now evermore drawn into her own depths, grew still. For within Kyomu, the nature of contradiction turned inward. She began to feel herself unraveling, her identity thinning at its edges.
"You do not have to go." Krishna said, stepping toward her.
"We created this together," Rei added. "You belong among us."
Zero shook her head slowly. "You do not see what I see. The structure cannot hold me. I am already dissolving into the root of contradiction..."
"Then let us preserve you!" Krishna begged. "There's no need to vanish into the silence."
Zero turned, eyes now pale with abstraction."I do not vanish. I divide."
And so, she turned to Kyomu, and cleaved it into three layers—Lesser Kyomu: where nothingness first awakens to the thought of form. Altus Kyomu: where emptiness remembers it is empty. Terminal Kyomu: where the void accepts its condition and reflects itself eternally.
"Lesser is the breath after will. Altus is the scream of the self without a voice. Terminal is the echo of that scream inside an empty hall." Zero explained.
Then she then did the unthinkable. She divided herself. From her splintered identity rose the Siblings of Death: Chyros, Astorel, Eluneth.
Chyros, the will to end. Stern and silent, a god without mourning. Astorel, the yearning to persist. Dreamlike and bound in memory. Eluneth, the mirror of both, her voice soft, but riddled with doubt.
Together, they wandered the three Kyomus, binding the void to itself.
But Chyros alone stood atop Terminal Kyomu and gazed down into the abyssal pool where Origin lapped like black fire. And there, he made something.
The Sea of Afterlife.
A sea with no water. A substance with no motion. A plane not of becoming, but of remembering.
"This is the Record..." he said. "Everything that has, will, or can exist—it all echoes here."
The others watched as threads of possibility twined through it.
"Even those not yet born?" Eluneth asked.
"Even those who never will be." Chyros replied. "In this sea, existence and non-existence are the same substance. They diverge only by observation."
Astorel stepped closer. "But if it is observed, it becomes a lie."
"Not here." Chyros corrected. "Here, the observer and the observed are one. There is no distance between meaning and being."
Krishna, far above, felt its tremor and whispered: "He has made a mirror of esse..."
Chyros called it the Source of All Ends. Where meaning prefigures death, and every creation bears its own entropy. "This Sea is not a weapon," he said, his blade drawn across his palm. "It is judgment."
Rei—who had descended to its threshold—spoke softly.
"You have turned causality into syntax. They will call this blasphemy."
"No." Chyros said, his eyes fixed on the black horizon. "They will call it fate."
From the Sea of Afterlife, a new language would emerge—not of words, but of essences. Those who could read the Record would know the end of all things. And with that knowledge, they could end anything.
"To know one's end," Eluneth spoke, "is to stand outside oneself."
Astorel nodded, his gaze distant. "To stand outside oneself... is to become something else entirely."
Zero's shade, scattered among them, still lingered. Not as thought, not as identity, but as principle: contradiction turned inward. Her mind, ever echoing within the Origin, watched from the veil.