Chapter 1236: The Third Presence: The Void’s Open Eyes

Across the ocean, through storms and over an immense distance that would have taken ordinary mortals days to cross, until the frozen realm of Anarctica approached the edge of her perception; then Maya’s awareness was swallowed.

The transition possessed no resistance... she could perceive the continent from afar in matter of seconds: its ancient glaciers, murderous blizzards and the immense dead Titan buried beneath winter older than human history but in that next instant, Anarctica vanished; something filled the place where it had been, a blackness so complete that calling it darkness felt childish.

Shadow required light somewhere nearby.

The Void required nothing.

It inundated Anactica with a coldness that made temperature irrelevant. Flesh and matter no longer seemed important enough to threaten.

The cold severed connection itself of life, light, distance and the ordinary certainty that one thing existed beside another disappeared inside it.

The Dead Winter Realm had always been hostile to life but now death itself seemed too alive for what had awakened there.

Maya’s expression changed as her perception pressed farther but there was nothing to hold.

Anarctica was gone.

The continent it was on presumably continued existing, yet every ordinary confirmation of that existence had been erased by the fury of the Void. Maya found no storm, glacier, mountain or Coffer. Not Titan corpse that had burdened the land with the weight of forgotten ages, and not even the 11 World Transcendents’ sign of live burned through the dark.

An entire region of the Earth Realm had become an absence.

And then something opened its eyes.

Two points of white appeared inside the erasing Void where nothingness only existed.

They were impossibly bright and yet they illuminated nothing.

White lightning moved within them, flashing behind pupils that could barely be called pupils. Each pulse made the surrounding emptiness seem deeper, as though the radiance existed only to expose the illimitable black that had devoured everything else.

The eyes became the only visible things within the absence consuming the wholeness of Anarctica.

Maya saw them... Lucienne and the tattooed woman saw them from the ocean.

Three expressions answered the same sight.

Concern entered Maya’s face.

Lucienne smiled as dangerous amusement touched the Monster’s features as her earlier stillness gave way to the unmistakable pleasure of someone witnessing an event she had awaited for far too long. The darkness around her thickened, yet compared to what had opened its eyes over Anarctica, even Lucienne’s power looked almost willing to behave.

The woman over the ocean remained inscrutable as water continued streaming from her blue hair while she watched the same distant awakening. Her face remained hidden, and whatever emotion crossed it belonged only to her.

But Sienna felt something none of them did and her body went rigid.

The connection between herself and Phei had always been unmistakable. Distance could stretch it across continents or realms and concealment could bury either of them from the rest of existence, while laws, formations and ancient powers interfered with almost every ordinary method of perception but their bond remained inviolable.

Two souls connected beneath everything else.

But while that bond had always contained two presences; hers and Phei’s... something entered it...

Sienna’s sovereign violet eyes widened.

The third presence did not force itself into the connection like an intruder breaking through a sealed Soul Realm and tearing crossed the bond and there was no sense of something foreign attempting to seize what belonged to them:

It had awakened inside a place that had apparently possessed room for it all along.

Sienna stopped breathing.

The presence was vast.

Dangerous did not begin to contain it. Her Nether instincts recoiled while recognizing something they could not classify, and the Death within her stirred with such violence that every nearby shadow began trembling.

It did not feel like Phei or Sienna:

Yet beneath those differences lived an ineffable intimacy too deep for rejection; the third existence stood inside what had always belonged solely to the two of them, neither stranger nor invader, impossible to accept and equally impossible to deny.

Then it looked through the bond... Sienna felt its attention.

The weight of that single awareness passed through her soul, and every violet flame in her eyes contracted. For one terrible instant, she felt something immeasurably ancient awaken behind Phei’s existence and discover her standing there.

It knew her.

And the recognition contained no introduction, curiosity and no need to understand what she was; it touched Sienna’s soul with the familiarity of an existence that had always known precisely where she belonged.

Her Nether answered and black-violet power poured from her body but it did not enter the room and the walls did not crack and no pressure descended upon the people sleeping nearby...

...Instead everything flowed towards Anarctica.

Death followed.

Both powers crossed impossible distance through her bond with Phei and entered the third presence. Nether vanished into the Void like a river returning to an ocean it had forgotten, while Death followed with an inexorable obedience that made Sienna’s soul turn cold.

She had not commanded either power to leave her.

They went willingly... Sienna stared into the darkness.

She could feel Anarctica again.

She perceived the frozen continent through it, through the numinous existence whose white eyes burned inside the absolute black... and what Sienna felt there made her fingers slowly curl.

The World Transcendents remained trapped within the Void.

The Blood Elf, Gorgon, two female Vampires, Undead Queen and Ancient Naga were all still there, along with the Dragonkin and the remaining Chained. Beings who had spent centuries or millennia cultivating themselves beyond worlds now floated inside a power vast enough to make fourteen stages of superiority feel painfully irrelevant.

Each carried enough strength to erase ordinary nations.

Inside the Void, they felt small.

Their power had not vanished but the difference resembled torches struggling beneath the bottom of a lightless ocean.

The third presence was waking.

Every moment of awareness granted it greater definition. Nether flowed into one side of its existence and Death into another, while something from Phei occupied its centre, wounded, furious and so thoroughly bound to the awakening that Sienna could no longer determine where one ended and the other began.

The white eyes brightened before their lightning spread through the Void.

Sienna felt the trapped World Transcendents stirr and their instincts awakening beneath pride and cultivation, yet there was nowhere to flee. Distance had ceased possessing meaning around them.

Every direction led deeper into the same absence.

Sienna would’ve understood why Lucienne had smiled she had seen her do.

Sienna almost never felt mercy.

Mercy demanded a softness she had possessed little use for even before remembering what she truly was. Enemies remained enemies. Threats were removed and the universe had never offered her kindness merely because suffering had become excessive.

Yet standing there with sovereign violet blazing inside her eyes, feeling Nether and Death pour through her bond with Phei and disappear into the thing awakening within the Absolute Void, Sienna experienced something remarkably close to pity.

For everyone trapped in Anactica with him.

Because whatever had just opened those white eyes was—