Chapter 321: The Multiversal Empress of Rooted Hours

[A/N: This Chapter and the next will serve as backstory, essential if you’re interested in Sunya’s future plot.]

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For Sunya, ever since she’d been dropped into the future, it had been nothing short of a strange, unsettling feeling, almost as if she didn’t belong there at all.

At first, that’s exactly how it seemed—but what had happened wasn’t some mix-up of timelines or a frozen moment in time.

No, it was her very own physique that had triggered the incursion, sending her to a point in history when it was finally meant to be put to use.

But when she arrived, time didn’t simply shift or mold itself around her.

Instead, it was as if she had been plucked out of the continuum entirely for five thousand years and then placed into the future without warning.

This meant she wasn’t just alone—everything and everyone she had once known was either long gone or no longer existed in the first layer of Pantheos itself.

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HUMMMMM!!!!!!

One moment, Sunya was breaking apart within the Myriad Star System, and the next, a wormhole ripped through the darkness between universes, flinging her out like a body hurled against a wall.

She crashed into the void, as if colliding with something solid, and for a moment, she hung there, unconscious.

It was clear that during her journey through time, her body had already undergone much of its assimilation since being reconstructed.

Still, it was nowhere near halfway complete.

HUMMMMM!!!!!!

Before she could regain consciousness, she came apart once more in the void, red and green blood spraying from her in a wide, wet burst that lingered in the darkness between universes.

Immediately after she burst into nothing but blood, the void surged with a wave of divinity unlike anything before.

The divinity mixed with the blood, flowing into the spaces between the suspended universes until the darkness itself seemed dyed in shades of green and white.

The force then drew back to the place where Sunya had unraveled, pulling the red-and-green spray along until all that was left was a lone cocoon suspended in the void—a massive green and white shell marked with a tree sigil on its face.

While Sunya had fully undergone the final assimilation of her physique, she could never have imagined that for five thousand years, the vast expanse of endless multiverses had been searching for her—the Goddess of Eternal Hours.

Such a quest had been futile all those years, simply because when word spread of the unique physique and its bearer, she had yet to appear... as she emerged in the future.

Some moved on with their lives, but not everyone...

Pantheons were known to gain power by pushing their philosophies, and one particular Multiversal Pantheon had not only waited patiently; they had meticulously manipulated circumstances to ensure her exact arrival.

The moment Sunya’s cocoon took shape, four figures appeared in quick succession, as though everything was moving as planned.

A human man came into the dark first, jaw set, eyes already on the green-and-white shell.

A dragon woman followed; an elven man arrived third, badge halfway out of his coat. A giant woman came last, and the other three stood in her shadow.

"Five thousand years," the human man said, taking a breath that did nothing to soften his expression. "The Goddess of Eternal Hours has finally appeared."

"High Apostle," the Elven man said, finishing the motion of pulling the badge free, its money sigil gleaming on the metal, as he spoke into it without taking his eyes off the tree mark on the shell.

"The bearer of the Number One physique has arrived in sector four."

HUMMMMMM!!!!!!

The moment the words were spoken, there was no reply—only an appearance.

Almost instantly, a dragon emerged, so massive it wrapped itself around entire universes, leaving room for the rest of its vast body.

Its gold-slit eyes swept past the four Universal Kings and Queens, fixing solely on the cocoon.

"Proceed as normal," he said as he examined the tree sigil. "I will take it from here."

The human, the dragon woman, the elf, and the giant shared a single look that carried the same meaning—be it calculation, reward, or judgment—before disappearing.

The great dragon gazed at the space they left behind and smiled with far too many teeth.

"The Empress," it rumbled, its voice rolling along the curve of a universe it had once perched upon, "is going to love this prize."

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Time passed at a steady pace as the Multiversal Empress waited for Sunya to emerge. As the moments drew nearer, the void between universes was no longer so empty.

Now, thousands of dragons filled the darkness in layered ranks; the outer ring was formed by massive bodies so immense that nothing could pass without their consent.

Their wings and scales created a wall, akin to an unbroken barrier encircling the green-and-white cocoon.

Inside the wall, the others stood in humanoid form—some with spears braced against the void, others with empty hands and their full focus on the cocoon.

Their skin shared the same warm tone as the woman at the front, and their jewelry reflected the shell’s light.

The High Apostle from the first hour was still there, gold-slit eyes on the cocoon, and beside him stood their Empress.

She stood six-foot-four, dressed in thin hide and bone, with long black hair burnt red at the ends, and two black-and-reddish horns.

Her eyes were slitted and amber-colored, but the strange thing was that she had no scales on her skin. She wore jewelry at her throat and wrists that didn’t seem removable.

"Twenty-six years," she said, gazing at the tree sigil for a long while. "I can’t wait to get my hands on you..."

She tilted her head along the inner line, letting the amber rest on each watch in turn.

"We don’t know what leaves that shell... but either way, she’ll yield gracefully, or we’ll reduce her to nothing."

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While the Multiversal Empress waited outside the shell, Sunya was no longer unconscious, and she was not exactly in the cocoon either.

She floated completely naked in a void that belonged to her.

Her long blonde braid had become even longer, hanging down her slender, exposed body.

She had small, high breasts, pale nipples tight in the cold of the void, the braid itself grown heavier and longer until it drifted along the cleft of her back and over one hip when she shifted.

Behind her stood a massive tree bathed in greenish-gold light, thirty-three universes swirling in shades of white, black, and gray, with roads winding through each ring back to the smaller trunk.

In this moment, however, her focus was completely on the status menus before her.