Chapter 1715: Grafting Nightmares Burning all his soul in an instant should have killed anyone else, but Rowan had long learned to live without a soul, as to him, his soul could be seen as a clone and not the entirety of his being. He could afford to live without a soul, but for this battle, his soul was too important to be extinguished, at least not until he was assured that Primordial Soul was dead. Three strikes ago, he had already mastered Realm’s Butcher Onslaught to a sublime level, and when he made the final infusion that burned what was left of his soul, he had mastered this technique beyond perfection, reaching a state that had exceeded the limits of this technique. This was not a simple achievement, and Rowan, before this battle, would never have believed that he would be able to achieve something like this, because with the power and complexity of this technique, mastering it was equal to mastering a law to its Origin state. Yet, Rowan did not just master this technique; he did it in the midst of battle, and he only had seven opportunities to learn and perfect it. Seven great strikes were all it took. Many factors were responsible for such a profound accomplishment. The first was that he was fighting a Primordial, and the stakes could never have been higher. Barely a decade ago, in real time, he thought his greatest battle would be against the Throne of Primordial Demon, and now he was fighting a true Primordial. The second reason for his progress was that every usage of this technique was killing him, and in the midst of such a stimulating battle that had driven his focus beyond the limits, his comprehension seemed to have broken through into a new realm. You are what you eat, and for Rowan, he had been eating the Primordial throughout their clash, learning, adapting, evolving, and it was happening so quickly that it was easy to miss if one was not paying attention. Mastering Realm’s Butcher Onslaught to the limit meant that even when his entire soul was lost, he was able to recreate it in a new form, which would slowly transform back to his dimensional soul, albeit that it would be slow. Rowan had essentially created a loophole where there was none. In the absence of his soul, tens of billions of Hollow Titans he had gained during his understanding of Space Origin, flooded the missing part of his being, and they began conducting a ritual of transference, where they gave everything to their Creator, releasing a pale wisp of radiance that served as the primordial building block for his soul. In a moment, the tens of billions of Hollow Titans had exhausted all their essence, and they retired back into Rowan’s body, but there were more Hollow Titans, emerging from his bones to fill up the void of his soul. A single spark appeared inside his body, and a new soul roared to life. It was a powerful soul, bright with all seven lights of emotions, but a slow golden transformation began to spread throughout the soul as it transformed into a dimensional soul. All this took place very quickly inside Rowan’s body, but in a short while, he had already regained one percent of his previous soul power. It was not a lot, but it meant that with time, he could continue using his killing technique without limits, and if he could keep using Realm’s Butcher, then it was inevitable that he would reach a point where he would no longer need to sacrifice his soul to utilize this technique effectively. With one part of him focused on recreating his soul, the other was concentrated on his Revenant Incarnation, whose task of killing a Primordial needed all of his attention. Inside the body of the Incarnation, the battle had reached a feverish height. The implosion of power had created a swirling vortex, not of darkness, but of absolute null. The Anti-Core. This was in response to the move by Primordial Soul. Rowan had watched and learned from the final move made by Primordial Soul; her utilization of primordial laws had reached a point where he could only watch in awe, but it was all he needed to furiously grow and catch up. The creation of the Anti-Core solidified his control over the Origin of Space, Fate, and Destiny inside of him, pushing them to new heights and advancing his entire power base. What he had created here was a perfect vacuum where not even the concept of feeling could exist. It wasn’t destruction; it was uncreation, and with a roar that could shake all of creation, the tidal wave of raw soul-energy from Primordial Soul hit the vortex. The forces were at a stalemate for a moment before the wave of Anti-Life overcame the power of the Primordial and crushed her dreams, swallowing them under a relentless tide of red. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎 It wasn’t absorbed; it was erased. Vast swathes of captured lives, histories, loves, and losses simply... ceased to be. Not destroyed, but unmade, retroactively negated as if they never were. The Primordial core-heart screamed, a sound that made the heavens of the Origin Land weep blood. Fissures raced across the core of the Primordial. Souls from long-dead Realities trapped within her were dissolved into silent, formless static before winking out. The loss wasn’t just power; it was meaning. It was the deletion of Chapters from the book of existence. "BOOM!!!" The core of the Primordial exploded, and there was such a rush of power that it tore the Revenant Incarnation in two. Focused on killing the Primordial, there was hardly any time to adjust to the rush of power that emerged from her dissolution. A weakened form of the Primordial slipped out from Rowan’s body like a stillborn baby emerging from a wound in its mother’s stomach. Rowan growled with rage, knowing that this was a tactic by Primordial Soul to fight for her life, and he had failed to anticipate it. The raw energy shed by their clash – the dissolving souls, the negated emotions, the shredded concepts – rained down into the Origin Land below. It fed the chaotic scar created from the dead laws from their clash. Rowan felt a change in the earth and instantly understood the plans of Primordial Soul, but it was too late to change it. Tentacles of pure, unstable potential, iridescent and shifting, thicker than continents, surged upwards, not to attack, but to caress, to taste. If it had been an attack, Rowan’s senses would have felt it, but like him, Primordial Soul was learning, and she had seen a blind spot in his defenses. One brushed past the Primordial’s wounded flank. Where it touched, her form mutated. Translucent parchment skin sprouted chitinous plates etched with insane, non-Euclidean patterns. A weeping sore blossomed into a secondary mouth filled with needle-teeth that gnashed and chattered in a language of broken angles. He could not allow this to happen, and so Rowan attacked. Another tentacle, drawn by Rowan’s violent output, lashed towards him. He seized it, not to repel, but to wield. He tore the end off, the severed tip writhing and screaming with the voices of unborn nightmares, and jammed it into the wound of the Incarnation left by Primordial Soul as she escaped her cage of flesh. The nightmare-tendril grafted onto the Incarnation, becoming a new, thrashing limb that spat bolts of chaotic energy that warped space and time around their impact points. A piercing scream blasted from the body of the Incarnation, who was fed with all the power of souls that Rowan had recreated, and its powers transcended into a new and terrible state. The graft changed the Incarnarion on a fundamental level. His pure, focused violence became infected with Primordial Soul’s chaotic potential. His strikes became unpredictable, spawning random pockets of warped reality – bubbles of accelerated time where moss grew thick on the Primordial form in a fraction of a second, zones of reversed gravity that tore chunks of soul-stuff from her, spheres of pure madness that made trapped souls within her turn on each other. Primordial Soul, reeling from the loss of her core’s energy, from the mutations, from the relentless, adaptive assault, saw the truth, and a shriek of despair and disbelief erupted from her soul. It wasn’t just that Rowan was stronger. It was that Soul was fragile. She was fragile! Soul required context, meaning, and memory. It was the story written on the blank page—Rowan the eraser, the null, the page itself, indifferent to the story. What about the chaotic energies of the soul? They were the potential for both, but drawn to the entropy Rowan embodied. He was becoming a vortex, not just of destruction, but of unmaking, amplified by the very chaos of a Reality warped beyond its pure nature. Primordial Souo shrieked, "I created this... I created this madness... is it not beautiful?!" Despite being continuously torn apart by an Incarnation that had exceeded all scope of meaning, Primordial Soul fought on, a symphony of desperation. She condensed the remaining power of her core into a single, shrieking lance of pure identity – the defiant "I AM" of every soul that ever existed. She ignored the ravages of the Incarnation and drove it towards Rowan, but with a flap of his wings, Rowan changed places with his Incarnation, who absorbed the blow with its core. For a moment, the Anti-Core pulsed as its operation slowed—the sheer, concentrated force of being pressed against the edge of uncreation. The faces of heroes, lovers, artists, thinkers, children—countless expressions of existence—flared bright against the swallowing dark.