There was a law older than civilization.
Older than the gods.
Older even than the infinite web of worlds scattered across the linear dimensions.
*Everything has an origin.*
Every soul, no matter how insignificant, possessed a starting line—a birth, a creation, a localized spark of probability. Even the divine weren't exempt from the rule. An origin wasn't just a beginning; it was proof. Proof that you belonged in the grand architecture of reality.
And yet... there was one guy who didn't have one.
Leornars.
No first breath. No homeworld. No parents, no creator, no birth certificate logged in the infinite lattice of information particles connecting all of existence. Technically speaking, Leornars had never actually been created.
He started out as a glitch.
Deep within the forgotten depths of the Link Realm, a microscopic tear had formed in the metaphysical fabric during some long-forgotten cycle of cosmic creation. An anomaly. A mistake. Where non-existence should have remained silent, something stubbornly refused to vanish into the void.
Then, the worlds started dying.
Whenever a dimension collapsed or a universe met its end, discarded remnants rained down into the void. Accumulated information scattered. Erased souls dropped residual fragments into places reality no longer bothered to acknowledge.
The anomaly devoured all of it—agony, memories, concepts, probability, dead civilizations, and the lingering thoughts of forgotten souls.
Naturally, reality noticed.
The laws of existence tried to fix the error. The anomaly was erased—and it came back. A dimensional shift crushed it—it returned. Reality-enforcement protocols purged it—it returned anyway. Higher entities stepped in, wiping it out completely—only for it to reappear.
Thousands of times. Millions. Billions.
The concept of death lost its meaning. Which left the universe with a glaring, uncomfortable problem: *How do you permanently delete something that was never created in the first place?*
So, the anomaly adapted. It remembered. The void gained awareness, awareness became thought, and thought blossomed into full consciousness.
Then came the most dangerous development of all: emotion.
And the very first thing it learned to feel was pure, unadulterated hatred.
It looked up—past the endless worlds, past the Link Realms, past the Silver Seas and Silver Towers—straight toward the center of creation: Goddess Minum.
To the anomaly, existence was nothing more than a heartless machine. Worlds were generated, assigned stories, and discarded the moment they fulfilled their purpose. It despised the goddess running the show from her high throne.
*If the system refuses to acknowledge me,* the anomaly resolved, *then I'll make it impossible to ignore.*
It needed a physical vessel. An origin story. Something the system's security checks would register as "legitimate."
So, it turned itself into a parasite.
It learned to slip into physical worlds, hijack newborn bodies, and stitch together fake histories. Fake parents. Fake memories. Fake destinies. When the universe scanned the host, it saw a perfectly normal baby with a valid soul and a assigned probability line.
*System Check: Passed.*
Except for the monster lurking behind the infant's eyes.
Once inside, the parasite began hunting. It targetted genuine heroes—the "chosen ones," the protagonists blessed with narrative weight—and devoured their probability. Their destinies became his food; their stories, his ladder.
Eventually, the parasite claimed a name for itself. Not a name given by a mother or written in the cosmic ledger, but a title carved out of pure spite.
*Leornars.*
The name of a disease.
They eventually caught his original vessel.
Deep within a Silver Tower, suspended inside the infinite silence of the Link Realm, Leornars' primary body floated inside a stasis pod. The tower didn't glow with divine runes or hum with energy; it was merely a monument of pure, heavy silence.
Inside the pod, pale skin cracked with hairline fractures, leaking raw, unformatted data into the gel. His eyes were closed, looking for all the world like a corpse.
He wasn't dead.
His brain functioned as a central processing hub, distributing his consciousness across quadrillions of thought-threads spanning countless realities. The main shell was locked in a cage, but his minds were already out in the wild.
And one of those threads opened its eyes.
*Waaah! Waaah!*
Rain lashed against the wooden roof of a small cottage on a backwater world, far removed from Earth Prime.
"He's... he's breathing!" a woman sobbed through tired tears, holding her newborn close. "My baby..."
Overhead, the local reality-enforcement logic quietly swept the room. It constructed a biological blueprint, registered a fresh soul, and assigned an origin point.
*Scan complete: Valid birth. Valid mother. Valid probability.*
The system's immune response shifted away, completely satisfied. The camouflage had worked flawlessly.
Deep inside the infant's mind, something smirked.
*Another fake address,* Leornars thought, watching the wooden ceiling beams with cold, unblinking eyes. *Another eighteen years to kill.*
The woman held him tighter, whispering soft, affectionate words. They meant nothing to him. She was just part of the background props, this world merely another pit stop.
He would grow. He would wait. And when the time was right, he would find this world's protagonist—just like he had done with Kurumi, just like he had done with Sahara. He'd eat their plot armor, steal their destiny, and climb another step up the ladder.
Until he finally made it back to the Link Realm to pull the Goddess off her throne.
Far above the lower dimensions, where space-time folded like origami, a woman suddenly halted on a bridge made of crystallized logic.
Emalian Seers Avantris froze, her hand dropping instinctively to the hilt of her sword. The silent winds of the Link Realm stirred her hair.
*This feeling...*
It was subtle—almost imperceptible—but her instincts flared. It was the same cold, rotten sensation she had felt during the Xnivdriac convergence. The unmistakable stench of something that shouldn't exist.
She looked down toward the lower realms, her jaw tightening.
"...He just took a breath," she whispered to the endless wind. Her grip on her blade tightened. "Somewhere down there... the Pathogen is awake."
Down in the cottage, the baby quietly closed its eyes to sleep beneath the falling rain.
The universe thought a child had just been born.
It was wrong.
It wasn't a birth. It was an incubation.
And high above the stars, the throne of God began to creak.