Nicholas paused, letting his words hang in the air. The Grand Immortals stared at him, their ancient faces caught between suspicion and something that might have been dawning comprehension.
"You think you know how to replicate it," Laozi repeated slowly. "The universe. You claim you could build another."
"I claim no such thing," Nicholas said. "Not alone. Not with my resources alone. But together? With your cultivation, your understanding of the True Spirit, your millennia of accumulated wisdom?" He spread his arms. "Yes. Together, I believe we could replicate the mechanism. Perhaps even build something new."
He began to pace, his threads weaving patterns in the air as he spoke. The Array's silver light dimmed slightly, no longer a threat but a visual aid, illustrating his words.
"Let me explain what I found," he said. "When I pierced the wall of our universe—when I first looked out into the void—I expected to find nothing. Emptiness. A blank canvas waiting to be filled. And in a sense, that is what I found. But I also found... something else."
He gestured, and the silver light shifted, showing a sphere—a representation of their universe, its boundaries marked by a shimmering membrane.
"On the surface of this sphere—on the wall of our reality—there are holes. Vortexes. They are not tears or weaknesses in the fabric. They appear to be... structures. Deliberate. Designed."
The image zoomed in, showing one of the vortexes in detail. It was a spiral, like a galaxy condensed to a point, spinning slowly at the edge of the universe.
"At first, I thought they were energy intake mechanisms. Some form of cosmic respiration—the universe breathing in energy from the void to sustain itself. And indeed, energy was flowing through them. An exotic form—so subtle that even my senses could barely detect it at first, visible only at the very edges of the vortexes where it swarmed most concentratedly before entering our reality."
The Grand Immortals leaned forward. Even Tongtian, still bound by his brothers' authorities, seemed to be listening.
"But then I studied the wall itself," Nicholas continued. "The fabric of the universe's boundary. And I discovered something interesting. The wall has its own energy absorption abilities. It doesn't need the vortexes to breathe. It can draw in the exotic energy across its entire surface, slowly, steadily, like skin absorbing moisture from the air."
The image shifted, showing the membrane pulsing with a faint, rhythmic light.
"So what are the vortexes for?" Nicholas asked rhetorically. "Accelerators. They are intake accelerators. They take the natural absorption of the wall and concentrate it, focus it, speed it up. The universe uses them to feed more efficiently, to draw in more of the exotic energy than it could through passive absorption alone."
He turned to face the Grand Immortals, his grey eyes gleaming.
"I wanted to understand this energy. What was it? Where did it come from? Why did the universe need it? So I did something... risky. I split off a strand of my own True Spirit—a fragment of my soul, smaller than anything I had ever created before—and I injected it into one of the vortexes. From the outside."
Nuwa's serpent tail coiled tighter. "You sent your soul into the void?"
"A fragment of it," Nicholas said. "A thread. And what I learned—"
"THEY ARE SOULS."
Taishang's voice cut through the Court like a blade. The Grey Truth around him flickered wildly, and his ancient face—usually so calm, so composed—was split by a grin that was almost manic. His laughter echoed off the pillars, sending shivers through the Divine Immortals who watched from the edges of the Court.
"They are souls!" Taishang repeated, his voice rising. "The vortexes—the energy—don't you see? As within, so without! Our souls are interior cosmos! Each soul, no matter how small, acts as its own universe—a microcosm of the macrocosm! It attracts the energy of the great void, draws it in, and then..."
He paused, his eyes blazing.
"And then it releases that energy as faith! As Qi! As the raw stuff of creation! And in order for the universe to receive that energy, to process it, to make it useful—it fulfills a wish! A desire! A prayer!"
Nicholas lifted his brows. A smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
"Indeed," he said. "Quite correct."
Taishang's laughter subsided, but his eyes still burned with something that might have been excitement or madness or both.
"You understand," Nicholas continued, "what this means. Our souls—the True Spirits of Dominators and Grand Immortals—are not merely powerful. They are qualitatively different. A normal soul is a candle. A cultivated soul is a bonfire. But our souls? The souls of beings who have achieved our level?"
He gestured, and the silver light showed a comparison—a normal soul as a small, flickering point of light; a cultivated soul as a blazing star; and then his own soul, and the souls of the Grand Immortals, as something else entirely.
"We are black holes," Nicholas said. "Worth a billion normal souls. Our gravity warps the fabric of reality around us. Our hunger draws in energy from the void at a rate that dwarfs anything the universe's natural vortexes can achieve."
He let that sink in.
"This is why we can perform miracles. This is why our authority is absolute within our domains. We are not merely shareholders in the company that is this universe. We are majority stakeholders. Our souls are so vast, so dense, that the universe has no choice but to bend to our will. We have bought our shares with centuries of cultivation, with faith accumulated and refined, with the slow, patient work of transforming ourselves into something greater than what nature intended."
He paused, his grey eyes sweeping across the Grand Immortals.
"And this is my proposal. If we can find a way to replicate the wall of the universe—if we can understand the mechanism that allows this reality to absorb and process the energy of the void—then we can build our own. Not one universe. Not two. As many as we wish."
He spread his arms, the threads of his form glowing with silver light.
"Each of us could form our own company. Each of us could be the majority shareholder in our own reality. We would not need to fight over the resources of this single universe. We would not need to compete for the faith and Qi and souls that flow through it. We could create our own. And then..."
He smiled.
"And then we could leave each other alone. Not as rivals. Not as enemies. But as strangers that could very well never meet again, alone with our worlds in the infinity of the void outside of reality."
The Grand Immortals stared at him. The silence stretched.
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