In an instant, countless angels were torn apart by the raging storm and divine flames unleashed by the Taiji Diagram.
Wings filled the sky.
Ash drifted across the battlefield.
Within that sea of ashes, countless tiny lights rose upward and streamed toward the depths of Heaven.
Those were the souls of the fallen angels.
Jehovah could grant life, but he could not create souls from nothing.
Every angel had once been a mortal believer who had ascended to Heaven and undergone divine transformation beneath God's blessing. When they died, they returned to their original state as purified souls and flew back toward Heaven once more.
At least, that was what should have happened.
Only a handful made it back.
Most of the souls that touched the elemental forces unleashed by the Taiji Diagram were annihilated alongside their bodies.
Nothing remained.
The few souls that escaped were merely the lucky exceptions.
The sight nearly drove Jehovah into a frenzy.
Those souls were precious.
He had spent countless years gathering and refining them from among his faithful followers.
And now they were being erased by the millions.
Then the Chaos Bell turned toward him.
DONG!
A blinding radiance exploded from Heaven itself.
The sound resembled the first vibration that had echoed through existence at the birth of the cosmos.
It carried an indescribable majesty.
A finality that transcended destruction.
This was not merely a sound wave.
It was information transmitted from a higher dimension.
A declaration of annihilation.
Where the bell's toll passed, everything ceased to exist.
Jehovah's expression changed dramatically.
Without hesitation, he invoked his omniscient and omnipotent authority once more.
"I am the Heavenly Father."
"I command you."
"You shall not harm me."
But before the Chaos Bell's toll, even the authority of omnipotence seemed insignificant.
Jehovah was erased.
The Allied Pantheons were erased.
Ra was erased.
Heaven was erased.
Everything vanished.
Then, moments later, Jehovah returned.
What reappeared was barely recognizable.
His physical form no longer existed.
He had become a tiny fragment of light.
A weak flickering glow suspended in endless darkness, so fragile it seemed capable of extinguishing at any moment.
Strictly speaking, he had died.
Only one of his authorities had saved him.
The God who claimed eternal life possessed the power of resurrection.
Just as Jesus had risen after death, Jehovah had returned from complete annihilation.
The Chaos Bell had destroyed him.
His authority had brought him back.
Yet unlike legendary figures who emerged from resurrection stronger than before, Jehovah returned in a pitiful state.
He was weaker than he had been at the dawn of his existence.
His divine power was nearly exhausted.
His authorities had dimmed.
Even Heaven itself stood on the verge of collapse.
And none of that was the worst part.
What truly terrified him was something else.
He could feel it.
The power of his omniscient and omnipotent authority was slipping away.
The corrective force of reality had begun its counterattack.
Among all the gods of the world, Jehovah had always been unusually obsessed with expanding his faith.
To increase the number of believers, he had repeatedly ignited wars between religions and gods alike.
Countless lives had been sacrificed in the process.
Many deities had never understood why.
Gods were supposed to stand above mortal desires.
Why would Jehovah care so much about faith?
Why wage endless conflicts over it?
Only Jehovah knew the answer.
In his doctrines, believers were often called the flock of God.
That term revealed exactly how he viewed them.
A shepherd harvested wool from sheep to sustain himself.
Jehovah harvested faith.
And what he sustained through that faith was the immense power of his omniscient and omnipotent authority.
It was a peculiar ability.
Its strength did not depend solely on power.
It depended on existence.
You could possess power beyond all gods.
But if nobody knew you existed, if your existence had little impact on the world, then altering your reality would be effortless.
A single sentence could rewrite your fate.
But if billions praised you.
If billions cursed you.
If your existence had become intertwined with the operation of the world itself.
Then even if you were utterly powerless, reality could not be altered so easily.
Not even omnipotence could casually rewrite such a being.
To ensure his authority always stood on the stronger side of that equation, Jehovah had chosen a different path.
He transformed his name into a symbol.
He spread belief in himself across vast portions of humanity.
How many people worshipped God?
How many prayed to him during moments of despair?
How many begged him for help when suffering threatened to consume them?
Most of those prayers accomplished nothing.
But that didn't matter.
Every prayer strengthened his existence.
For thousands of years, countless believers had provided an endless stream of existential weight.
That weight allowed Jehovah to manipulate reality itself.
But now everything had changed.
Billions could praise him.
Billions could pray to him.
Billions could remember his glory and his miracles.
None of it mattered anymore.
The moment he used his damaged causality authority against the Taiji Diagram to alter an impossible reality, his fate had already been decided.
The authority was breaking apart.
Hovering on the edge of total collapse.
That alone would have been disastrous.
The true horror was the correction imposed by universal law.
Causality had always been a double-edged sword.
For ages, Jehovah had held the hilt.
He had never truly appreciated how sharp the blade was.
Now it was cutting into him.
And it was far too late for regret.
Countless strands of causality wrapped around his existence.
The burden was unbearable.
Without his authority to contain them, all the distorted realities he had forced into existence over the ages flowed back into him like poison.
Jehovah began forgetting.
Important things.
Vital things.
His power.
His authorities.
The miracles he had performed during his first descent into the mortal world.
The legends and myths he had carved into history.
Gods did not forget.
A divine being remembered everything it had ever experienced.
If Jehovah was forgetting, there was only one explanation.
Those events were no longer real.
Their existence had been erased by twisted causality.
Everything he had accomplished over thousands of years was being wiped away.
Reduced to nothing.
This was the future he had always feared.
The fate he had struggled for ages to avoid.
Yet now, he could no longer escape it.
"No... no... NO!"
"I am the Heavenly Father!"
"I am the Supreme Lord!"
"You cannot do this to me!"
"You cannot!"
"I command you!"
"Come back!"
"Come back!"
The final divine decree echoed from the flickering light that remained of Jehovah.
It was his last act of resistance.
His divine power had long since run dry.
His shattered causality authority could barely function.
But there was still one thing he could burn.
His divine status itself.
And for this final command, he was willing to sacrifice even that.
...
Read up to 100 chapters ahead and access exclusive novels by joining my Patreon!
patreon.com/Zyxxar