Chapter 299: Death - A Gift

Authorities could be considered the most important conceptual power in all of Pantheos—at least for Gods and Constellations.

That said, Authority couldn’t be so straightforward.

As mentioned before, they were the very building blocks upon which Pantheos itself was founded.

If you picture a towering structure symbolizing the hierarchy of power, Authorities form the bedrock everything else stands on.

Laws, Concepts, Transcendent Concepts, and various other forms of conceptual power all converged into one singular essence—and that essence was Authority.

The Empress had once claimed to be Death itself... but that wasn’t true—not because she lied, but because she had been misled.

She was an Infinity being, a presence that stood just shy of matching the power of any God, Goddess, or Constellation.

Known as the Infinity Goddess of Death’s Shadow, her existence was steeped in mystery and awe.

Yet, to truly claim the mantle of Death, Dreams, or any idea that shaped reality itself, one had to go beyond the very limits of godhood—transcending the divine and reaching into something far greater, something beyond even the understanding of gods.

In the boundless realm of Pantheos, Gods, Goddesses, and the Constellations made up nearly ninety percent of the first layer of existence.

It was common knowledge that once someone fused with the entity within their star, they would become the star itself.

Take Akasha, for example; he was no longer simply Akasha Originat—he was The God of Elsewhere Dreams, the only being alive who could bend dreams the way he did.

Still, he was a God, and even he lacked complete dominion over dreams.

While not every idea had a pure embodiment—like Akasha’s Dreams or Loki’s Trickery—a rare few beings fully embodied an idea.

Beings like Luna herself.

These beings could be born into existence, but that was as rare as it gets.

To attain such a status, one would need to comprehend an Authority and then fully conquer the Dimension itself.

The Empress—or rather, the woman who had played the role for the last hundred thousand years—felt, as Akashi laid out this flood of new revelations, like a curtain was being drawn back.

Only, instead of enlightenment, it revealed the cold truth: she had been caught in a trap.

"A pawn..." she muttered, unsure whether to be shocked or furious at herself for making moves without fully grasping the game.

Unlike anyone else gathered around Akashi, Lady Calyx—the one who had treated the Smiling God as nothing more than a pawn—had not merely visited Pantheos; she had been born there.

She understood all too well how chaotic and unpredictable this place could be, and the first rule for anyone trying to survive here was to tread with the utmost caution.

In all of Pantheos, it was rare to find someone navigating not just with a plan A and B, but even a third backup.

After all, everyone knew that even the one with the weakest-ranked star might possess something powerful enough to bring entire cosmologies to an end.

But the day she sought to push beyond the limits of her godhood, the day she believed she had become Death itself, was the same day she ironically died—or so she thought.

She had honed the Authority of Death to 99%, and when she finally took that last step...

Entering the Dimension of Death, she never imagined that Death itself was already waiting for her.

Unlike rare and unique concepts, the fundamental forces—Death, Life, Fate, and the like—existed in a way similar to Luna, present yet unknowable unless they chose to be revealed.

What made such beings terrifying was their absolute dominion over their domain and their ability to dictate the progress of all beneath them.

When Calyx attempted to conquer the Dimension of Death, she wasn’t merely slain.

Instead, she was made to believe she had achieved true mastery, that she had won—when in reality, an incursion had taken place, casting her into a minor existence, sealed away and stripped of a physical form.

However, when she woke up, her status showed the Authority’s completion, and her original star had evolved into the God-ranked star it is today.

In reality, according to Akashi, all of it was merely the calculated manipulation of Death itself.

It let her evolve just enough to instill belief, then cast her aside, sealing her permanently in this state.

After a while, Calyx lifted her head.

The pond light sat on her illusory skin, making the lack of a real body harder to ignore. Her jaw worked once.

"If that’s how it is," she said, frustration and anger evident in her tone.

However, she was far from naive; she understood all too well that her situation was anything but favorable.

"There’s no way—Death would never let me take on another form, nor would it allow me to walk into Pantheos again... Is there some way for me to get out of this?"

If Akashi was only giving information... and not trying to help directly, Calyx wanted to know how she could turn her situation around.

"We—" Akashi started to say, but before she could even tell Calyx that she wouldn’t have to do much...

"Wait."

Melvin cut in, his gaze sliding over to Calyx first, eyes narrowing until the black slashes in the whites of them looked sharp enough to cut.

"If you’re not Death," he said, then turned that same look on Akashi, "and you haven’t said anything about my family—then what happened to them?"

With the Loria completely gone, Melvin’s focus shifted entirely to his family.

He had brought Calyx into Dream Land, hoping to get his hands on the one thing he believed could either bring his family back or at least show him the path forward.

But if she turned out to be nothing more than a pawn in a game far bigger than herself, then he knew he would have to find something solid to hold on to.

Hearing all of this, Akashi sighed.

"Truly," She said as she rolled her eyes and looked past them, across the peak, to the Golden Apple Tree and the treehouse sitting in the white fruit.

"Baby boy... you should really pick up the pace," she murmured, though she knew Unus’s kind of pleasure was never something that could be hurried.

Catching the hint of exasperation in her tone, Calista’s lips curved into a faint smile.

"You guys... give Mother Dream a little breathing room," she said, sweeping her gaze around the bank.

"We’ve been piling questions on her since the moment she sat down."

At that, Akashi arched a brow, a spark of curiosity lighting her features. Her eyes lingered on Calista, and a slow, warm smile spread across her face, meant for her alone.

"You know... I think I actually like you, Calista."

HUMMM!!!!

She waved her hand, and a small black notebook appeared over the water, a shadowy pen tied to its side.

It floated across the pond until it stopped in front of Calista’s chest.

"You’re a librarian or something, right? Think of this as a gift. Write anything inside, and you’ll instantly know all about it."

Calista went still with her fingers short of the cover.

Around the pond, the rest of them went still with her, Jovian’s blindfold tipped toward the pen-thread, Amaterasu’s flame-flickers caught mid-breath, Nara’s green eyes wide, even Melvin thrown off his question for half a second.

"What?" they said, all of them at once.