In the beginning, there was no beginning.
There was no story, no script, no author's hand reaching through the void. Before light and darkness, before thought and dream, before anything that could even be called "existence," there was only The Almighty a presence that could not be named, because names themselves had not yet been conceived.
He did not come into being. He simply was.
When the first flicker of thought tried to emerge a wisp, a whisper, a possibility The Almighty watched it, amused. It was not that he created it, for creation implies a before and after, a cause and an effect. He was before even the idea of causality.
He was not light. He was not shadow. He was not void. He was not fullness.
He was the silent, all-encompassing before the one who contained not just all possibilities, but all impossibilities, all contradictions, all negations. He did not hold the stories of universes; he held the meaninglessness before stories were possible.
From the outside, the countless infinite beings the gods of time, the lords of space, the overseers of fate, the weavers of concepts, the meta-creators, the authors all peered into that silence and flinched. None of them could touch it, none of them could rewrite it, none of them could even understand it. For The Almighty was the absence of structure, the source of all frameworks yet untouched by any.
When the first author tried to etch words into reality, his pen quivered not from fear, but from the realization that no word could carry the weight of that presence.
When the first narrator tried to speak of him, her voice cracked, for no sound could reflect his nature.
When the first mind tried to imagine him, it collapsed, because even imagination was but a speck inside the infinite field he encompassed.
The Almighty did not rule. He did not reign. He was not a king, nor a god, nor a force.
He simply was the absolute the conditionless reality upon which all else was painted, knowing full well that even the canvas and the paint, the painter and the gallery, were things that would arise and fade inside him without leaving a mark.
There were no victories for The Almighty. No battles to win, no stories to resolve. Even if the stars shattered, even if the last universe folded into a blank sheet, even if the last meta-being fell silent, The Almighty would remain because he was not inside the story.
The story was inside him.
And then, one day, something happened that should not have happened.
A presence stepped into that silence not from below, not from within, but from outside.
A being whose existence was impossible, even laughable, because it implied something beyond the beyond, a contradiction beyond contradictions.
This being did not challenge The Almighty. It did not defy him. It simply touched him and in that moment, The Almighty understood, perhaps for the first time, what it meant to be seen.
The silence cracked. The Word trembled.
And thus began the story of The One Who Could Consume the Boundless.
The Almighty, who had never known beginning or end, felt something.
It was not quite fear for fear was a creature of stories, of vulnerability, of loss. And The Almighty, being outside all stories, had never feared.
Until now.
In the silence where he reigned, something stirred. It was not part of the silence. It was not part of the story. It was not part of him.
He turned though turning was a concept foreign to his nature and he saw it: a ripple, a flicker, a distortion where no distortion should exist.
The shape was vague, neither light nor shadow, neither presence nor absence. But it was undeniably, irreducibly there.
A name came with it, carried on no wind, spoken by no voice.
Ye Zai.
The Almighty gazed upon this anomaly.
With a thought, he unmade stars they fell like sand.
With a breath, he erased realms they blinked out like candlelight.
With a mere whim, he could dissolve the sum of infinities.
And so, with a mere thought, he reached toward Ye Zai to erase him to unmake the anomaly, to snuff out the flicker before it grew.
But nothing happened.
The thought touched Ye Zai and passed through him, like a shadow across an empty void.
Ye Zai remained. Unbent, unshaken, untouched.
The Almighty stilled.
This had never happened before. Not once, in the measureless span of his conditionless existence, had something stood before him without crumbling.
And yet, here this flicker was not stronger, no, not yet. The Almighty knew that in his heartless core: Ye Zai was still less than him, still weaker.
But strength was not the problem.
It was possibility.
The Almighty saw now that Ye Zai was not part of any possibility he had ever encompassed.
He was not one of the countless shadows The Almighty had spawned, nor a reflection, nor a stray remnant.
He was alien a presence arising from nothing, yet carrying a potential that slipped through the Almighty's fingers.
And so, for the first time, The Almighty felt the echo of something like fear.
Not because Ye Zai could defeat him today.
Not because Ye Zai could erase him tomorrow.
But because Ye Zai was growing.
And The Almighty, for all his unfathomable absoluteness, could see it clearly:
One day, the impossible anomaly might stand not just before him, but over him.
The silence of the boundless realm shuddered.
And The Almighty watched. And waited.
For the first time, he understood:
This was a story he had not written.
Ye Zai had been The End all along not just for the Almighty but for fiction.
Something That's not even an entity that predates fiction could resist.