Chapter 205: Hope Across the Cycles
The weight of that realization was something even a god like her couldn’t bear, and rather than let herself be crushed by the grief, she chose to shut herself off from the world entirely. She had no purpose left there anymore, and she had no idea what to do with her life from that point on.
She fell asleep. Her form sank into the manifestation of her own concept, a colossal tree, saturated with the energy of life, so potent it made everything around it flourish.
That tree became the heart of a vast, sprawling forest, then the center of a small group of humans, then a village, then a city, and finally a great and prosperous nation that grew up around it.
Every so often, she would stir from her sleep, waking for a few brief seconds, her mind hazy, before slumber pulled her consciousness back under once again. Sometimes she woke just long enough to see humans rejoicing. Other times, to find an entirely different city standing there, filled with entirely different people.
It happened again and again as the millennia passed. The concentration of mana kept climbing, and with it, the world reshaped itself into something increasingly unrecognizable from what she remembered.
Her memories grew fainter with each cycle, and with them, so did the pain of being left alone. At some point, she stopped waking up entirely.
Darkness became the only thing that remained with her, a darkness she sank into and never resurfaced from, until, at last, something dragged her out of it by force.
Her consciousness returned. The blurred, hazy world around her sharpened bit by bit, and what she saw was enough to shake her fully awake, a painfully familiar scene, one burned into her, one that sent her spiraling into fury.
The Abyss had returned.
It had already begun sowing destruction and chaos everywhere, void corruption spreading and twisting the land, growing more intelligent with every passing moment. The world was falling once again.
She, who had sworn off any involvement with this new world, couldn’t look away this time. She wouldn’t have wanted to, even if she could.
The tree that had once been the heart of an entire civilization, an entire nation, stirred to life, and the goddess of life appeared for the first time in this new world after so long an absence.
She threw herself fully into the eradication of void energy, and with it, every being born of the Abyss.
It didn’t go unnoticed. Increasingly powerful creatures began to emerge in response. The situation escalated rapidly, until the gods of the Abyss themselves began to appear.
She had already braced herself for something like this, and prepared to face them to the death, still driven by her fury, but something changed.
Reality itself trembled, and strange things suddenly appeared, chains that seized hold of those Abyss gods and dragged them away.
Seraphine, watching it all unfold, was stunned, not by the bizarre phenomenon itself, but because she had sensed a trace of familiar energy within it. Evan’s energy.
He was still alive.
Joy flooded her chest, and she immediately tried to trace that spatial energy, to find him, but she found nothing.
Once again, she found herself in a world that had nearly collapsed entirely, alone, with no idea what to do next.
It was then that another strange phenomenon occurred, one she recognized this time.
Reality around her collapsed, and she lost consciousness, only to wake once more in her own world, changed again. Mana concentration was far higher now, and the species populating it were no longer limited to the usual ones, entire species were shifting, evolving into something new.
This was the second time she had found herself in this position, and that told her something: Evan was still alive, and he had done exactly what he’d done the first time, reset everything.
She understood. She was in a second cycle.
This time, she didn’t lose herself to grief. She decided to actively engage with this world, not because she cared about saving these living beings, but because she realized that whatever Evan had set into motion was still ongoing. And if it was still ongoing, that meant he was still alive, somewhere.
She decided to find him. He had to be out there, somewhere. With that goal in mind, she spent the following years searching for him, and as time passed, her involvement with the world around her deepened. Eventually, an entire nation rose up around her, similar to the one from the previous cycle, but stronger, the strongest in this current world.
She poured every resource she had into finding any trace of him. That search stretched on for decades, then centuries, without ever bearing fruit.
She began to lose hope. That was when the Abyss struck again, more vicious than any time before , but this time, the world itself was far different too.
The beings who governed it had evolved. Awakened individuals were far more common now, and powerful ones among them were no longer rare. The number of dominant species had grown as well, humans were no longer the only ones.
Beasts had evolved too, and some had reached a level high enough to found their own territories and cultures, standing as equals to the human race.
But no matter how strong they’d become, they fell again, just as before. And once again, that same strange phenomenon repeated itself, the gods of the Abyss that appeared were captured by those same chains once more.
Seraphine had little hope that it would happen again. But when she saw it happen, she wasted no time. She immediately followed that trace of spatial energy, caught up to it, and used her divine power to slip inside.
She thought she’d finally located the source, but before she could do anything more, she was thrown back by a powerful force, one achingly familiar to her. It was Evan’s. But why had he pushed her away?
The answer came almost instantly. A fragment of intent reached her, settling into her mind, not words, not memories, but something closer to pure understanding.
And what it conveyed was this: he was trying to eliminate the Abyss completely.
She understood immediately what Evan was doing. He was wiping out the Abyss piece by piece, capturing its gods one by one, something she confirmed when the gods that appeared this time were different from the ones before. He hadn’t given up. He was still fighting to end the Abyss for good.
She accepted that truth, and resolved to carry out her own part of the mission.
And so the third cycle began, a world different once again, saturated with even more mana than before, and one in which, for the first time, she caught her first true spark of hope in this endless war against the Abyss.