Chapter 208: Quasi-Supreme
Evan had spent many years reflecting on many things while hunting and fighting the Abyss Gods across what remained of Earth, some trivial, others directly tied to his own survival.
He’d had the chance to fully explore his powers, and he came to understand something rather interesting, the concept of Space and Time was very different from the other concepts. Or maybe it was more accurate to say they existed on a completely different tier altogether.
They were unique, just like Death, Life, and the void itself.
Evan understood this well, because he’d had the chance to experiment with all five of these concepts.
They had subcategories, but they weren’t really subcategories in the true sense, not separate concepts to be learned individually, just different ways of using the same underlying concept.
Bruce actually confirmed this, telling him that the reason these five differed so much in nature was because they were the pillars of the universe, the foundational concepts around which everything else revolved.
The void was a collection of laws that determined how the universe functioned, but those laws were interconnected with these other four concepts. Without them, those laws couldn’t actually take effect, making it impossible for the void to give life to the universe at all.
Evan had never given this particular detail much thought before, mostly because he’d never noticed it, but now that he’d reached divinity and achieved a very high level of mastery over these two elements, he noticed it, and that led him to notice something else.
He could actually push toward supremacy using just these two elements alone. He didn’t need to master any other subcategory or anything else, he could attempt it directly with these two concepts he already had in hand.
They were two of the five governing concepts of the universe, which meant that, at least by his own understanding, everything else was unnecessary.
He discussed this with Bruce, and seeing that there really might be a real possibility in it, the two of them worked on it together.
That led him to work on his two elements once again, this time with the goal of finding a way to reach supremacy.
He didn’t succeed, not in months, not in years, but he kept at it, and after nearly a decade, he finally made a small breakthrough.
He had actually found a way to advance further, though not toward true supremacy itself, but toward something similar, something he called Quasi-Supreme, an intermediate stage where he’d surpassed the level a god-tier being could reach, but hadn’t yet reached the point of being considered a true Supreme.
He didn’t know what a real Supreme actually felt like, but once he reached this stage, he could sense it, it was something that seemed to register automatically the moment he crossed that threshold.
He understood he wasn’t there yet, still had a long way to go, but he also understood he was on the right path.
It was during this period that Seraphine reappeared.
That was when Evan and Bruce put their plan into motion.
Seraphine’s return was a welcome surprise, and it gave Evan exactly what he needed to make sure their plan would work.
That was how he used his power as a Quasi-Supreme to permanently seal the Abyss Gods away on Earth, completely severing their connection to the Abyss, and used his power to isolate the current reality within a fold of time and space that he created, a place where he could preserve that reality and hide these Abyss Gods away.
He could have killed them, but he understood it wasn’t worth it, killing them would only return their energy to the Abyss, energy it had spent to create them in the first place, which would let it simply recreate them.
So instead, he decided to seal them and sever their connection to the Abyss, so that the Abyss would genuinely lose a piece of itself, permanently, and weaken as a result.
To that end, in every cycle, whenever the Abyss sent more gods, Evan would capture them and seal them away in that separate dimension he had created. This went on, again and again, and the Abyss, having noticed the problem from the very first time, tried every way it could to stop it and find the separate dimension Evan kept hidden, never once succeeding.
But Evan had no intention of simply standing aside and playing warden to the sealed gods. No, after every cycle, he refined them further. With their connection to the Abyss severed, they wouldn’t return to consciousness after death, not right away, which let Evan work with the void energy radiating from them, an absurdly dense concentration of it.
All of it toward one very specific purpose, one that would guarantee their complete victory somewhere down the line.
After doing this for two cycles in a row, he finally made his move.
He used his power to create an avatar of himself, an avatar that carried the Laws of Time and Space, the very laws that maintained that dimension and kept the Abyss Gods sealed within it.
With that done, he sent his original soul, or what remained of it after using part of it to create the avatar, into the cycle of reincarnation, and so he returned to life during the third cycle.
Not as a human this time, but as a member of the dragon race.
What he hadn’t expected was that reincarnation would reset a person’s soul, erasing their memories in the process. That didn’t happen in his case due to the level of existence he’d reached, but that didn’t completely solve the problem, as the process, unable to erase his memories, sealed them away instead.
So his reincarnated self grew strong, his predetermined path of evolution shaped by his bloodline, but it changed, not because he wanted it to, but because his instincts pushed him toward something entirely different.
So his reincarnated self ended up cultivating something else, something he didn’t originally have, something that couldn’t be changed, but in doing so, he gave the concept of fire, his core concept in this life a new nature, the nature of destruction, something it already possessed but not as a separate concept in its own right.
That change caused his original concept to shift, to mutate, and ultimately to evolve into something far greater. In less than a century, he had risen to become one of the most powerful beings in that world, the strongest of his kind.
Someone even Seraphine had taken notice of.
And how could she not?
By then, he had become a god.
The Dragon God.
The one known as The Crimson Calamity.