The sky was white.
Not bright. Not pale. Just... white—the color of silence coming after a scream.
No clouds, no sun. Only the flat and suffocating whiteness of a world that had totally forgotten how to feel was there.
Ren Ardent was on the scaffold, his wrists tied in transparent wire.
An audience of glass-faced citizens was looking up at him from below—thousands of eyes not reflecting anything. Each face was the same, made from the same indifferent mold. Their expressions were motionless. They didn't even murmur. They just waited, as if they were watching the inevitable execution of an equation.
The banner of the Logic Cathedral was over the stage, and it was a fractal sigil shaped like an open eye that fluttered. Three Judges were on metal thrones underneath it, and their minds were wired directly to the city's Central Consensus.
"Ren Ardent,"
the voice of the Cathedral said—a voice that was formed by the simultaneous sound of thousand throats and was perfectly steady, without any tone.
"You are accused of emotional corruption and heretical reasoning. What is your plea?"
Ren's lips were parched. He could feel the iron of his own blood, still fresh from where they had cut his Resonance Thread.
He wanted to talk. To laugh. To scream that it was all useless.
Yet in this world, even laughter was a crime.
"I plead... " His voice broke—hoarse from hours of interrogation. "I plead alive. "
The crowd did not respond. After all, emotion was illegal.
The Judges' light eyes shone with a very pale light.
"The answer was non-binary. The sentence was valid."
The scaffold started vibrating. The fractal sigils were gathering up from the ground below Ren's feet — the absolute reason, the luminous code. The execution of the Fold of Reason was Cognitive Disassembly.
His physical body would not be killed. His contradiction would be wiped out.
Ren shut his eyelids.
While still being white, memories came to the surface — broken, incorrect, and unbelievable.
A sky painted blue.
The sound of a mother's voice.
A city with a rain and exhaust fumes mixed fragrance.
A planet where people did the full range of emotions from crying to healing — Earth.
It was not right for him to remember it. The Nine Folds did not even have an idea of what "Earth" was.
"Perhaps," he uttered, "I am not meant to be here."
The Judges moved their heads as if they were machines.
"Incorrect assumption. Belonging is of no concern."
The light below him intensified. The hum became a low vibration that resonated with his bones and made him feel afresh.
Ren sensed his thoughts coming apart, fiber by fiber.
Numerals. Signs. Ideas. Everything was ripped away.
Even discomfort started to turn into form.
But then — something got past the stream of reason.
A paradox.
One heartbeat that refused to be counted.
You can't wipe out what you don't comprehend.
The vibration faltered. The entire Cathedral momentarily dimmed, just a little bit — enough for one Judge to twitch.
Ren beamed.
He had not done it in years, but now he felt something. Not the feeling of hope. Not the feeling of joy.
The feeling of defiance.
"Tell me, Judges..." he spoke through blood and static, "if the logic is perfect, why then are you afraid?"
The scaffold disintegrated before they could give their answer.
Light shot out, and the white sky was turned into a structure of fractals that were dying within themselves.
Ren got down.
The man managed to go through the fragments of the Fold, through a thousand mirrored realities, through his own screaming thoughts — and finally into silence.
When the moment came for him to open his eyes, he was on the cold concrete floor, under a sky that was divided between white and black. The air was slightly metallic and dusty. The condition of his body was normal, but the situation of the world… had turned over.
The upper part of his body was facing a mechanical angel with one half showing the rust of old iron, while the other half had eye lights gone bad and flickering faintly.
"It is a pleasure to have you back," it said. "Your paradox has been stored in the archives."
Ren breathed out, seeing the trail of the vapor from his lips. "I am not your paradox."
His hand went to his chest. A pulse was felt under the skin — a black stain that looked like a spiral shape, but one that was collapsing inward.
Paradox Seed detected.
The angel took a pause. "That pattern is not to be seen; you must not—"
Ren's gaze roamed up, and his eyes were like fire rustling ashes of what had once been a great flame in this world.
"Then perhaps," he whispered, "it is about time someone rewrites the rules."
And at that very moment, under the infinitely White sky, the very first ever Paradox Cultivator was created.