The Reflection may have been too exuberant in his attempt to reduce the power of Thenos and he had not anticipated the extent that the World Stele would go to in order to cleanse the corpse of its taint of darkness. It could not be helped, he did not know the capabilities of the World Stele or the resources that it could call to bear if needed, and he could not afford not to do the best that he could to ensure that everything followed the wishes of Rowan as much as possible. However, he knew that with every action made, it was normal to suffer an equal opposing reaction. He would simply have to brace for the storm ahead as the World Stele would bring all of its powers to save its master. He slept into oblivion with this thought in mind, and time passed. Eras changed and the Fate of everyone in this realm began to follow a path of their choosing. ® Even without any awareness, the Reflection knew that a vast amount of time had gone by. His dreams were nothing but battles and darkness, and he would have wished to remain in this state forever if that would ever be possible, after spending many minor eras in battles, this was the only thing he had come to love, this was the only thing he came to know, how he wished his battles would never end, how he wished his Undying Will burned hot again, how he wished… ® An intense pain roused the consciousness of the Reflection, summoning his Undying Will and giving him a measure of sentience to observe everything that was happening around the realm, and he quickly discovered that after so long the World Stele had begun to make changes across the Realm, and as his senses awakened, he saw that everything has changed, what was once familiar had become strange. It was the size of the realm that had changed so drastically that first drew his attention. Doom Star was a massive realm and could be ranked amongst the biggest individual realms at the eighth-dimensional level, but in the period when he was asleep, the size of the realm had multiplied a thousandfold and it was hard for him to even understand the breadth of the realm. This intense growth was haphazard, and it should not be able to fit into the realm without clashing with it, but a quick investigation would reveal that this new addition to the realm was being slowly destroyed under the erosion of being forcefully merged with a higher order realm like Doom Star, but this was also of benefit to the realm, for the essence of so many lower dimensional realms were feeding the dead and blighted realm of Doom Star, giving it the capability to hold life once more. It would take a frightening number of realms to be sacrificed to awaken a realm that was crushed under the fury of the Primordial Demon, but from what the Reflection could observe, the number of realms here had exceeded the amount needed to awaken it by a large margin, clearly the World Stele was going all out. Such a shocking change roused more of his attention, and he proceeded to slowly awaken more of his consciousness over the course of many millions of years to avoid the attention of the World Stele, even though in his present state of fusion with the Siren, he could be regarded as a part of the realm, and its growth also fed positively to his advancement, but this also locked him tighter with the realm, and separating himself from it would become that much harder. The consciousness of the Reflection was vast and it was able to learn what the World Stele was aiming to accomplish, as he could feel that countless souls had been dwelling inside the realm for a long time, filling the realm with light and warmth, a blessing that the Reflection once thought was forever denied to this realm, and now these bringers of light… they were dying. He saw that the World Stele bringing in multiple dimensions and souls and filling up the realm was not only to enrich this realm, it was to slaughter them when the time was right. As time passed as he slowly investigated he became aware of a hidden change in the realm. Interlaced in all of these dimensions that were being swallowed by Doom Star were fragments of a massive formation that was slowly fitting together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, and when it was complete, the Reflection realized that the focus of this entire formation was at the center of the realm. His consciousness was trying to rapidly decipher what this formation was capable of when the vast amount of souls that had been wiped out, passed through the body of the Sirens which he shared, and flowed into a new destination, the heavenly sensation of having so many souls flowing through him was nearly impossible to describe, but then he realized that this was not the pain that had awoken him because the flow of so many souls through the Sirens was a soothing comfort to his consciousness due to his dominion over the soul. He tried not to find out the reason why so many souls were perishing but he knew it was tied to this massive formation, and the best way to understand what was happening was to observe the formation, so he did, but progress was slow because this formation was frighteningly complex, yet still familiar. It was pulling himself back from observing on a micro level and looking at the formation from a macro perspective that showed him while this formation was so strange yet familiar, the answer was simple, it was because the formation was mimicking an aspect of his power that he knew so well, which was linked to the soul. This formation, among the many things that it was capable of, was a massive soul-type formation. Another intense wave of soul energy that was so massive that if not for the trust in his senses as a dominator of souls, he would think that he was hallucinating passed through the formation, and it was all he could do to stop himself from opening up his consciousness and allowing these souls to flow into him and not through him. This trend continued for nearly a million years, wave after wave of souls, seemingly infinite in number continuously flowing through him until one day it was over and no new souls passed through his body, and the silence of death that had filled this realm for so long took its place. Stay connected through freewebnovel It took a while for him to recalibrate his senses after it had been bombarded by so much soul energy passing through him, and this finally made his mind settle down to the extent that he began to ask himself where the souls were heading, and as soon as he asked that question, the answer slammed into his consciousness like a hurricane. The Reflection had spent nearly a billion years filling up the body of Thenos with the corruption of the Demon Lord’s essence and so he had a close connection with this corpse, knowing all the pathways leading to it, and when his consciousness touched the corpse of Thenos, a beam of light hundreds of light years across, at that moment erupted from it, and the consciousness of the Reflection was blasted with a degree of pain and madness that he had never felt before. That light beam carried an intense amount of soul energy but that was not the only thing that it carried, there was also darkness, it was the essence of the Demon Lord, but now it had changed and was no longer the same essence he had pushed inside the corpse. What was being ejected by that light had transformed into something irredeemably evil, and the Reflection wanted nothing more than to pull itself away from the realm, but doing so would implicate Rowan and destroy the foundations of everything that he had been working for in all these eras. He had barely begun to come to terms with the pain when more beams of light erupted from the corpse, spewing about intense burst of corrupted darkness, now this pain was so palpable that the Reflection groaned, and then he suddenly froze up when it felt a massive consciousness began to sweep through the realm, he did not need to figure out that the World Stele had heard his cries.