Chapter 43 : The Will of the World

Elden did not react to her words.

It was not a rejection, nor was he incapable of understanding what she meant. He simply listened, much as one might listen to a voice drifting from somewhere far away, allowing it to pass without feeling any need to respond.

The Will of the World had not expected an answer, either.

Although her existence resembled Elden’s in certain respects, the essence of her being was fundamentally different from his.

She had not been born from a trial, nor had she been shaped by the experiences of a single individual across countless successive lives. She had come into existence naturally within the universe, born from the immense accumulation of chaos energy within a small region of space.

Small, of course, by the standards of the universe. By the standards of the beings living within it, that region was vast, encompassing entire star systems and galaxies.

And within that expanse, life had begun to take shape.

Creatures emerged, lived, and eventually died. Their souls passed through successive cycles of death and rebirth, their former structures dismantled and reconstructed so that they could begin new existences. Memories were erased, consciousness was reset, and each life began anew without any conscious recollection of what had come before.

Yet something remained from those countless cycles.

The old memories did not return to their owners, and the souls did not directly retain awareness of their previous existences. Nevertheless, traces of those repeated processes accumulated over time, leaving behind something that could no longer be reduced to a single soul or an individual lifetime. Those traces gathered across immeasurable ages until, eventually, they transcended the limits of the phenomena that had produced them.

From that accumulation, the Will of the World was born.

She had not appeared suddenly as a complete being. ,Rather, her existence had developed gradually until she became capable of perceiving the world from which she had emerged and influencing its cycles. As time passed, she eventually reached the level of beings known as Great Rulers.

Her beginning had been a happy one.

She had no reason to complain. Life flourished within the world to which she belonged, souls continued their endless cycles, and the world itself fulfilled its role within the universe's grand cycle. The Will of the World watched her children being born and growing. She saw the weakest among them learn to survive, the fiercest confront danger, and the wisest discover new ways to understand their own existence.

She watched them evolve.

Among them were those who trembled before the first storm they had ever encountered, only to grow into beings capable of protecting others from such storms. There were creatures that knew nothing but fear, yet gradually learned to trust others. She watched her children make mistakes, learn from them, suffer losses, and eventually return to life in new forms.

She was content.

She needed nothing more than that.

But as the ages passed, a strange question gradually took root within her existence.

Why could her children continue to grow while she remained the same?

They learned from their experiences, acquired new abilities, and surpassed the limits that had once defined them. Yet she, who had sheltered them all and provided the environment in which they could exist, did not develop in the same way.

The question did not arise from envy. She did not wish to seize what her children possessed, nor did she regard them as rivals. She simply wanted to grow as well, to become greater and stronger, not to surpass them, but to protect her world more effectively, preserve what she had built, and provide her children with a better environment where they could grow and thrive in safety, with greater opportunities for a more prosperous future.

Then she began to think about the future.

What if the world under her care continued to expand? What if life within it grew more complex, giving rise to creatures that her current abilities were no longer sufficient to shelter? What if the day came when she could no longer protect her children because her strength had failed to develop quickly enough?

She did not want to wait for that day to arrive.

And so, she began absorbing the chaos energy from which she herself had originated.

At first, the changes were limited. The world showed no noticeable signs of disturbance, and the cycle of life and death continued uninterrupted. The energy was available in immense quantities, and the Will of the World saw no reason to believe that using it would lead to trouble.

As time passed, however, her capacity to absorb it increased.

Her existence grew, her will expanded, and her ability to influence the world she nurtured became greater than ever. For the first time, she felt that she was making progress, that she no longer had to remain a distant observer, watching her children grow while doing nothing to advance herself. Now, she could finally do something for her own sake as well.

After an immeasurable number of years, she succeeded.

She had become greater and stronger.

It should have been the happy ending to her story of growth. What she did not know was that her transformation had made her visible to an existence so far beyond her that she could not even begin to comprehend its magnitude.

The Will of the Universe.

To the boundless universe, the Will of the World was merely one tiny component among countless others scattered throughout its immense body. She was not a unique phenomenon deserving of special attention, nor was she an entity that had somehow escaped the system governing existence.

In its eyes, she was simply another being within the grand cycle.

She had been born, and she had grown. One day, she was supposed to die, her components returning to chaos and contributing to the emergence of another world after her cycle had run its course.

The universe did not need to hate her to allow her existence, nor did it need to love her to sustain it. The Will of the World was no different from any other creature living within its boundless body.

But she had begun consuming chaos energy at an accelerating rate.

Her growth depended on a resource that formed part of the universe's overall equilibrium, and the more her capacity to absorb it increased, the greater her impact on that balance became. What she regarded as a means of developing herself and protecting her children appeared, from the universe's perspective, to be a growing disorder spreading throughout its body.

The difference between them had nothing to do with their intentions.

The Will of the World had no desire to destroy the universe, nor was she attempting to challenge its authority. She simply wanted to grow, to become capable of providing her children with a larger and safer home.

But good intentions could not change the consequences.

The disturbance began small, then gradually spread.

The universe noticed what was happening and observed the world in which this entity had emerged. Even so, it could not penetrate the barrier surrounding that world to reach the Will of the World directly. The barrier remained intact while she continued absorbing chaos energy, driven by a fear that had begun to creep into her existence after she realized that something far greater than herself had taken notice of her.

For the first time, she felt threatened.

She did not know the full extent of the power watching her, nor could she completely understand its nature. Yet she recognized that her growth had attracted the attention of an existence she could not confront through strength alone.

Rather than stop, she accelerated.

The more frightened she became, the more chaos energy she absorbed. And the more energy she consumed, the wider the disturbance that had attracted the universe's attention in the first place became.

She wanted to survive.

Yet her actions were making survival less and less likely.

The universe observed this escalation until it concluded that the disturbance would not cease on its own. From its perspective, this was not a conflict between two wills, nor was it a disagreement that could be resolved through mutual understanding. It saw an imbalance within its grand cycle, an existence that continued to expand at the expense of the very system from which it had emerged.

A disease did not need to be evil to become dangerous.

Nor did a disturbance need to hate the body in which it lived to threaten it.

Eventually, the universe made its decision.

If the disturbance could not be contained, it would have to be eradicated.

And so, it dispatched the beings who would become known as the Purifiers.

Their mission was not to negotiate. They were not expected to understand the Will of the World's motivations or appreciate the love she felt for her children. They had been sent to eliminate the disturbance and restore the world to the course it was meant to follow within the grand cycle.

And with that, the world was condemned to destruction.