The Cosmic Law book was vast yet finite, its 108,000 pages each detailing a fundamental law of the universe. As he scanned the laws of Time, Space, and Causality, a crushing realization settled over him once more.
The simplicity he had hoped for was an illusion.
He now saw them for what they were: not mere laws, but a living, breathing root system. From these 108,000 core Laws, reality branched into infinite complexity.
One Law of motion governed both a falling apple and a spinning galaxy. A Law of connection bound atoms into matter and souls into bodies.
Changing one thread risked unraveling the entire tapestry. His plan to "simply rewrite" the rules seemed like the naïve wish of a child trying to edit a god's diary.
Mastering all 108,000 Laws, from their most basic principles to their infinite complexities, was the only way to accomplish the task.
"Fortunately, I have the key," he murmured, his focus turning inward to the crystal orb humming within his soul-sea. Without it, mastering even a fraction would be a near-impossible undertaking.
The only other path was to embrace his role as the Universal Will fully, to let the laws seep into him osmotically over eons.
But that path was a surrender. It would mean allowing the last vestiges of his fragile humanity to slowly dissolve into an impersonal universal will.
Determined, he started with the Law of Time. The moment his consciousness touched the page, the celestial river diagram dissolved and he found himself standing in a dark void—the dimension of the River of Time.
Looking around, he saw the river: a vast, shimmering current of liquid light flowing continuously through the void. Its surface glittered with countless constellations that illuminated the void with starry light.
Countless tributaries of varying sizes branched and forked from the main flow. Each one was a shimmering "what if" of reality, as well as a "what if not."
He instantly understood them as potentialities, ghostly echoes of unmade choices and unrealized futures. He could see that most of these tributaries were fading away.
As for the main river, it was mostly serene, but he could see disturbances; violent eddies and chaotic rapids where the Primordials waded. Their immense power churned the flow of causality.
Some were submerged deep in the current, while others swam slowly toward the bank with great effort.
To truly understand, he knew he couldn't just observe, he had to feel it and become part of its flow. With that decision made, he stepped from the bank and plunged into the current.
The sensation was instantaneous and overwhelming. The river wasn't just liquid; it was pure bliss. For a moment, he wondered if he was the only one experiencing this bliss.
But when he glanced at the Primordial phantoms, such as Vastoth and Timorath, he saw only struggle and immense effort etched into their faces.
Glancing at the primordials submerged in the deeper currents, he wondered about their purpose and why they did not seek the shore.
The crystal orb within him flared to life, cutting off his wandering thoughts. Its Infinite Understanding ability acted as a divine compass through the complex river.
It instantly mapped the impossible currents and showed him how a single choice in one era could create a tidal wave of consequences millennia later.
After what felt like tens of thousands of years, his first epiphany arrived. He realized that time was not constant. In regions of immense gravity or magical density, it pooled into deep, slow-moving lakes where eons passed in the blink of an eye; in empty voids, it rushed forward in a frantic torrent.
He discovered whirlpools where the flow circled back on itself, and closed timelike curves where effect could precede cause, revealing that time was not strictly linear either.
He paused to study the paradoxes these curves created, watching as the universe struggled to resolve them, a process that sometimes spawned new physical laws or spatial anomalies.
He swam for what felt like an eternity, surfacing to process the torrent of insights before diving back in, again and again.
His breakthrough came when he entered a minor tributary at random, a future where a single Primordial chose peace over war and reigned alone.
He didn't just see it; he lived it. He felt the relief of civilizations that would never be scorched, as well as the weight of a decision that saved countless lives.
He experienced that moment from the perspectives of the peacemaker, the warmonger, and the neutral stars bearing witness to it all.
With absolute certainty, he felt how a single ripple of intent could cascade into a tidal wave, reshaping the cosmos over millennia.
As his comprehension reached seventy percent, a new epiphany struck him. Time was not just an endless march; it was a reflection of perception itself.
He realized that rewriting its laws wasn't about forcing his will upon it. Rather, it was a delicate process of resonance. He had to align his consciousness and frequency with time's fundamental nature.
In order to command time, he had to learn to flow with it first. A single misstep could unravel the futures of all his creations, a risk he found utterly unacceptable.
As his understanding deepened, he began to sense a cunning nature within the Law of Time itself. He realized that some of his previous enlightenment had been false—elegant illusions projected by the law to mislead and prevent him from mastering its true mysteries.
This discovery was so unsettling that he paused his progress, floating silently above the river as he pondered its implications.
"Do all of them possess awareness, or only Time? Perhaps this sentience is inherent to the structure of fundamental law itself."
His mind churned, but no clear answer emerged. He decided to simply continue. The truth would reveal itself in the doing.
After what felt like two million years, Lex finally achieved complete mastery. Deep within his soul sea, a circular gem—a Law of Time Gem—naturally formed, proving his absolute mastery.
The once unfathomable maze of the time river and its tributaries now lay before him with the clarity of a still pond.
He no longer saw chaos, but rather, perfect, intricate order. The Law of Time had become an extension of his being, a natural faculty of his will, akin to moving a limb.
The chaotic time threads around him wove themselves into patterns at his mere intent.
With complete mastery, he discovered that a single thought could accelerate the universal flow, condensing the life of a star, which spans billions of years, into a single, brilliant flash.
Another thought could impose absolute stasis, freezing an entire galaxy in a single moment. He could reverse the flow of time for the entire universe, though doing so would drain vast amounts of Origin Energy.
For Lex, however, the orb's power transformed such a cataclysmic expenditure into a minor logistical consideration.
He returned to the Blank Point via the cosmic law book. Standing before it, he raised his hand, and the white void instantly responded.
A vibrant purple time thread coiled into existence before him and slithered through the space like a living serpent. With a flick of his finger, he unraveled it.
The single thread instantly fractured into a constellation of shimmering fragments, each representing a different possibility or moment.
"Finally, time is no longer a barrier," he murmured, his voice calm in the absolute silence. "But a force to be wielded."
Yet, as he stared into the countless futures glittering within the threads, a sobering understanding settled over him. This power was absolute but not without a price. To reshape time was to accept the consequences.
Fortunately for him, he was an exception. As the Will of the Universe, he stood outside the flow. No ripple could touch him, and no consequence could bind him.
He was utterly free.
Yet, he realized that absolute freedom was a kind of prison, a profound burden for a conscience that still remembered what it was like to be human.
Though he knew no law could judge or chain him, the memory of his humanity and his experiences as a mortal served as his anchor. They kept him from becoming a capricious god, a force of pure, unpredictable will.
The weakness he had once considered his greatest folly was now his greatest restraint.
"Power without consequence," he thought, "is the most dangerous illusion of all."
After mastering the Law of Time and bending its threads effortlessly to his will, he turned his attention to the second page of the cosmic law book. It was time to master the next pillar.
He shifted his focus to the Law of Space, instantly grasping its fundamental differences from the Law of Time. Time was a living stream, always in motion.
In contrast, space was a vast, rigid framework, the deeply anchored foundation upon which all of reality was built. Space defined the boundaries, distances, and dimensions of existence.
To truly understand it, Lex plunged himself into the page.
He instantly materialized in an endless expanse of cosmic dust and nascent nebulae. Newborn stars flickered in the distant depths, their light a faint glow against the interstellar haze.
Here, in the deep, silent void, space existed in its rawest, most unfiltered form.
He sat in a lotus position, his crystalline body a tiny, glowing beacon in the overwhelming vastness. He closed his eyes and extended his consciousness, willing it to merge with the silent fabric of space around him.
In response, the crystal orb within his soul pulsed with a soft, steady light, resonating with his intent and amplifying his comprehension.
As his awareness expanded and sank deeper into the cosmic fabric, its true nature began to unfold before him.
"So this is space," he murmured after a timeless period of study. "Not a void, but a structure."
He had known abstractly that space was layered, but now he perceived it: endless, overlapping veils of reality, each one distinct yet perfectly intertwined with the others.
His consciousness extended into the second layer, a realm of scattered cosmic dust where shimmering particles danced like silent fireflies. Pushing further, he reached the third layer, a place of profound silence and absolute darkness.
Its vast emptiness exerted a faint, tangible pressure on his consciousness.
The next layer was a turbulence of invisible winds howling with the spectral remnants of collapsed stars.
Each layer was a distinct reality: some vibrant and thrumming with potential; others barren and lightless, each a universe unto itself.
The deeper he delved, the more he understood. The cosmic fabric was mostly woven from these dark, silent voids, the true foundations and hidden architecture that bound all realms together.
With each layer he comprehended, another unveiled itself in an endless process, like peeling back the layers of an onion.
The crystal orb illuminated the subtle connections between the layers, revealing how they overlapped, interacted, and breathed as one.
In one layer he witnessed several circular pocket dimensions folding into one another. Some were dying, while others were evolving. He felt space stretching and compressing like a living lung.
He observed pocket dimensions forming like transient bubbles within the vast, layered whole.
"This is why space seems endless," Lex mused. The thought echoed in the quiet of his mind. "It's not merely vast. It is layered, multifaceted...infinite in its depth and direction."
This comprehension was a slow journey spanning hundreds of thousands of years, but Lex persisted. With each new layer, he drew closer to the fundamental truth of space itself.
After one million years, a second Law Gem—a deep blue Law of Space Gem—materialized in his Soul Sea and settled beside the Time Gem.
Although he had mastered the Law of Space, his victory felt hollow; he had invested far too much time.
It should have taken only a hundred thousand years. Yet, each time he thought he had reached the final layer, a new one formed. The layers seemed endless, from the first to the thousandth to the hundred-thousandth, with no sign of a conclusion.
Only after piercing the millionth layer did the truth unveil itself. He realized it was all an illusion: It was a grand, defensive labyrinth conjured by the Law of Space itself.
Of the millions of layers he had traversed, only 108,000 of them were real. The rest were intricate "safeguards," illusions, and mental mazes designed to exhaust and confound any potential master.
This defense mechanism was reminiscent of the Law of Time's subtle attempts to mislead him, which reinforced his theory that the Laws possessed their own immune system.
As he pieced the clues together, the true purpose of the "safeguards" became clear. This was the nascent universe's innate defense; an automatic reaction to protect its integrity from internal corruption or a will it could not control. Yet.
The realization was stark. It was not conscious malice, but rather a base instinct, like white blood cells swarming a pathogen. An all-encompassing, instinctual, universal will would have recognized this and bypassed the illusion without hesitation.
It would not have wasted a million years in a maze of its own making.
The thought should have been a relief, a simple explanation for his arduous journey. But instead, a flicker of defiance ignited within him.
The clarity that followed was sudden and sharp. He didn't just dislike the idea; he despised it. It felt like a demand from the cosmos itself, an imperative from his role as the Universal Will, urging him to shed his humanity and become the pure, instinctual entity the universe was meant to have.
It was a command to complete the transformation he had resisted since his rebirth.
But as he contemplated his fragile identity in the dark silence of the first layer, a new worry took shape within him.
What would become of his creatures? When they sought to master a law, would they become lost in the endless corridors of illusions forever? Would they ever achieve mastery? Are the other laws this difficult? Or are the laws of the universe only targeting him?
If it took the Universal Will, armed with the crystal orb, two million years to master two laws, then comprehending even a fraction of one law would require eons of study beyond mortal comprehension for them.
Perhaps only a being blessed by a perfect convergence of fortune, talent, and power, like the primordials, could ever hope to grasp a Law in its entirety.
An idea surfaced, offering a sliver of comfort: "Perhaps I can design it so that mastering one Law accelerates comprehension of the others, leveraging their inherent connections."
Yet, he knew this wouldn't make the task easy; it would only make it less impossible. It carried its own danger, too.
For a moment, Lex felt the urge to simplify these cosmic trials for his creatures. But his greater "will" pushed back instantly. Simplifying the trials would devalue mastery itself and undermine the balance on which the universe operates.
He concluded that this problem and his identity problem required deeper contemplation. For now, his path was simple. He had to master the remaining laws; he would worry about the struggles of gods and mortals later.