Chapter 2237: Escape. Silence. Absolute silence. That was the first thing Vexarion Aurendor noticed after he got... far enough. It was... strange. Yes, the silence itself was strange. It was different from the silence inside an empty room; it was... the silence of a place that... never learned to speak. There were no familiar currents in the air. No old ’echoes’ left behind by ancient cultivators. No distant pulses from high-level worlds. No faint traces of other Eternals moving somewhere far away. There was just... space. Vast, dark space... and worlds that felt young. And that thought alone made his chest tighten. A place like this should not exist. Vexarion Aurendor was an Eternal. A being who had been in this Universe for more than a million years, a being who had alliances, enemies, and debts scattered across every corner of creation. There were very few regions he hadn’t visited himself—at the very least, he had heard of them. But this? This was unfamiliar in a way that felt... wrong. Still, his mind refused to accept the worst conclusion. It didn’t even allow it. Because the worst conclusion required a thought his mind could not comprehend. Another Universe? No. That was nonsense. That was... madness. So he forced his thoughts into something he could hold. The Universe expands constantly, without stopping. It was the oldest truth of existence. Worlds are born. Planes are formed. Stars gather. Order takes shape. Empty regions... fill up. And sometimes—sometimes—new parts of the Universe appeared so recently that the living hadn’t mapped them yet. Yes, exactly. This must be a part of the Universe that was formed recently, a part that hadn’t been explored yet. That explanation was... imperfect. But it was still... an explanation. And right now, Vexarion needed one. Because if this was still the Universe he belonged to... Then it meant there was still a way out. He could return. He would return. With determination in his eyes, he stared ahead, his black wings spread wide, golden veins glowing under his obsidian skin, and he flapped his wings, increasing his speed even further. After all, slowing down wasn’t an option. Not even when his ribs ached from pushing speed beyond what was comfortable, nor when his entire body screamed to rest. Because the moment he slowed down— He remembered. That grey sky. That empty land. That laugh that... did not stop. That grin that widened even when his body was torn apart. And... And that pain. Pain that had no end. Pain that did not kill him to release him, but killed him just to bring him back again and again and... again. Vexarion remembered everything: the sound of his halo cracking, his heart being crushed, the moment his mind simply shut off because... it just couldn’t hold out anymore. "!!!" His entire body flinched when he recalled that time. "No." He whispered in a hoarse, unfamiliar voice. His own voice felt foreign to him, as if he hadn’t spoken for decades. And even now, his mind was somewhat confused; he didn’t know who he was speaking to. Maybe it was... himself. Or the Universe. Or maybe it was the empty darkness around him. He did not know, but he continued. "No. Not again." He spoke, and with his intent now clearer when he said it out loud, he continued flying. He flew until the strange region swallowed the memory of that grey land, until his breath became steady again, until the fear... stopped choking him. And then— He began to hope. At first, hope came easily. It came like an old habit. He was an Eternal of Light’s faction. He had survived wars that had turned galaxies into ash. He had been trapped, cornered, and challenged before. But... He had never stayed trapped. He had never stayed... helpless. And now he had something he did not have in that nightmare. Distance. Space. And... Time. He could now think. He could now plan. He could now... move. Without waiting, he looked through his personal dimension and took out all the call artifacts. Some of these were made for emergencies. Some for secrecy. Some were made for direct links to specific allies. He activated the first, hoping for it to work now that he was away, but... Nothing. There was no pulse, no flicker, and no... reply. But he did not give up. He activated the second. But again, nothing happened. He then took the third. The fourth. Fifth, sixth, seventh... Even the one Auren gave him—an artifact meant to work even under heavy restriction, even across sealed zones. He poured energy into it until the golden veins on his arms flared, but... The artifact stayed dead. Vexarion’s brows tightened. The memory of the artifact exploding in Sharnoth’s presence flashed in his mind, and his fingers trembled for a moment. He forcefully steadied his mind and— "It’s fine," he muttered to himself. "This region is new. The laws here must be... unstable. This is why they aren’t working." This was the explanation his mind had come up with. This region was newly formed; the Universe here was... still settling into itself. Even time itself was somewhat strange here. It was moving—of course it was; it allowed him to think, breathe, he could even count moments and sense the flow of time—but... The flow of time was... different from how it... should be. Sometimes it felt like hours passed too quickly. Sometimes it felt like his thoughts stretched too long, like a single breath carried too much space between start and end. He couldn’t explain it. He tried to measure it by stars. But even the stars here were strange. They were not arranged like the constellations he knew. They didn’t carry the same ancient patterns that most of the Universe shared. He tried to measure it by his own body. But his body was still recovering from what his mind had endured. His senses were sharp, but his emotions were... uneven. So he shrugged and blamed it on the same thing. A new region. A... young region that was not completed yet. That would explain the strange time flow. That would explain the dead artifacts. That would explain why the worlds he found felt half-formed. And he did find worlds. He found them after the first ’day’ he escaped. And no, the ’day’ he mentioned wasn’t like what mortals believed, with sunrise and sunset, but a span of time he chose to count as a day because he needed structure. So on the first ’day’, he found a world—a small planet drifting alone in the dark, wrapped in thin clouds. He landed on it carefully, wings folding behind him as his feet touched soil. The soil was... cold. Not frozen—just cold, like it hadn’t known warmth for long. He looked around. The sky was pale grey, the atmosphere was weak. There were plants, simple ones, moss that clung to rocks. Low ferns that trembled when wind passed, small... strange insects crawling in lines. Beasts, too—small, skittish creatures with thin bodies and wide eyes, running the moment they sensed him. There were no cities, no roads, no carved stone, no towers, no traces of cultivators, no... overly complicated life. All the ’living’ he sensed here were creatures that did not have a mind of their own; they only existed because... they should. They could not cultivate, they could not even think, let alone talk. Vexarion walked through that world for hours, scanning with his senses. He found a lake, a mountain, a forest that looked like it had only existed for a short time. But... he found no mind that could speak. It was clear. This world hadn’t given birth to intelligent lifeforms yet. But... He tried anyway. "Is anyone here?" He stood in the center of the forest and let his voice spread. The words rolled across the trees and... died. He tried a different method. He released a wave of divine pressure to make living things react, and they did—the insects scattered, the beasts fled, the plants shook, but... That was all. Vexarion stared at the empty air and exhaled slowly. "Nothing, huh..." He paused, finally accepting the truth. "Fine," He whispered. "Not here." With those words, he left and... He flew again. Then, he found another world. This one had oceans. Huge ones. Blue and dark, stretching farther than what eyes could see. He hovered above it and looked down. There were creatures in the water—large, slow-moving shapes that swam like living shadows beneath the surface. He dipped down and landed on a shore. The sand was black. The sky was darker here. He walked along the shore and watched the sea. Then he tried again. He sent out a pulse of light energy into the water, hoping for a reaction from anything intelligent. And this time, something happened. A huge creature rose, breaking the surface in a wave. Vexarion’s eyes shined, but the creature... it seemed... strange. It had no eyes, only a mouth lined with blunt teeth. It stared at nothing and released a deep sound that shook the water, then... it sank back down. "W-Wait!!" Vexarion called out but... He soon realized the... beast or whatever it was, couldn’t listen to him. Even if it could, it wouldn’t react to him because it... could not. It was not intelligent enough to. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞 He... He wouldn’t get anything out of it. So he... He left again and continued searching.