Chapter 1738: Archai — the First Principles. Tenma was not woken from his slumber. Prime saw no reason for him to do so; there were too many higher-dimensional rules being wielded here, and it might lead Tenma into madness if he were to witness too much of it. Accessing his Spell Library was easy for a Weaver of spells like Prime, and he chuckled in appreciation at the depths Eva and Tenma had gone through to refine the Akashic Gate to this level. He could appreciate good work when he saw it. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎 Rowan’s Primordial Sea of Darkness had been gathering Angels of Char without his intervention for hundreds of millions of years, and before their destruction, he had assembled seven hundred billion angels. There could have been more if he had chased to draw upon the power of the sea of darkness, but he didn’t, and it was a good thing because if he had been greedy and sought more angels, the power of the Gilded Maw Spell would have been too powerful for even Rowan to endure. As time went by, the number of Angels he was passively gaining had reduced, but it did not stop entirely. Prime, accessing the Akashic Gate, discovered that of the seven hundred billion Angels on record, less than five hundred billion soul imprints were to be found inside the Reaper; the fate of two hundred billion Angels was unknown; most likely, they could no longer be recovered. There were many reasons for this tragedy, and one of them was that too many Angels perished too quickly for Tenma to handle. He had barely broken through to the fourth-dimensional level when Gilded Maw was used on Rowan, and billions of souls poured into the Akashic Gates. Although he had thousands of gates, they were not enough, and those who could not find their way into his domain were snatched by the cold hands of death. In that battle, Rowan had been covered by the green flames of death, bringing the realm of the damned close to him. This ensured that any soul that was unlucky could be easily drawn into the realm of death. Bringing out the billions of Angelic souls, Prime noticed that they had already begun transforming into the unique lifeform that was created inside the Amashic Gates, which was called the Akashic Trell. An Akashic Trell had great combat power, but they were not used in battle because they were essentially pupae, balls of potential waiting to be transformed into something new. The sleeping body of Tenma had the shape of a man, but when Prime began extracting the five hundred billion Akashic Trells from his soul, his humanoid form transformed into a fleshy-metallic hybrid of metal and magical essence, with a thousand arms and ten thousand closed eyes. His present shape would remind Rowan of the titan, Gothra’Inul. Each of the Akashic Trells was in the shape of an obsidian orb, hundreds of feet in circumference; some were much bigger, reaching hundreds of miles in circumference, because the stronger the Angel, the more souls they had to store, causing them in their Trell-like state to be massive. Faced with so much nascent potential, Prime might have become confused on the way forward, but Rowan had already given him the blueprints for the rebirth of his angels. Prime did not do much, he only made each vessel to be open to the touch of Rowan, and he ensured that every single one of them could receive as much infusion of power as possible, because he believed that what Rowan was about to create here would no longer be "angels" and the best way to prepare these souls for what was to come, was to ensure they were ready. For thousands of years, Prime toiled on each Akashic Trell, and when the task was complete, each of the Trell resembled a humanoid statue that was kneeling with hands upraised as if to beseech the blessings of a higher being. And this was truly the case. Prime had been conducting a great ritual, and arranging the bodies of these Trells was the method he used in performing this ritual. As he worked, a formless wave of summoning power was arising from the bodies of the Trells, and when he finally dropped his hands, the summoning power had reached a threshold, crossing through space and time and reaching Rowan, whose eyes slowly opened. Rowan looked at the billions of vessels lined in front of him, all waiting for a resurrection and a new beginning. His previous Angels had come from the Primordial, but Rowan had exceeded that level. So, manifesting his Will as a Creator, he turned it inward not to create life as it was known in Reality but to extrude function from his own boundless essence. Rowan had thought deeply about how to create the first of his children, and he knew they had to be special, because they would be the ones to represent his name. He would give them great power, but not the true freedom he would be giving to the rest of his children. They were to be the guardians and protectors of his legacy; they would carry his Will to the end, and in them would be a part of him that would never be taken away. The first Angels were Children of Light. On the other hand, Rowan controlled the Origin of Space, Imagination, Fate, Destiny, and Destruction. He was an Apex Omniversal Titan and a Living Reality, Eos. He was the Eclipsed Creator who controlled the Primordial Record, and the Enochian Cradle was his to master.... From all of these powers, Rowan did not intend to hold back in his first true creation. Rowan reached into the core of his own being, into the raw, screaming forces that constituted his consciousness, and began to tear them loose. A terrible pain filled his entire body as a massive shockwave burst out of his flesh, and the creation process began. This was not a crafting of clay and breath, but a terrible, glorious act of metaphysical surgery. From his capacity for Infinite Motion, he pulled the threads of kinetic potential and spun them into a being of pure, terrifying velocity—a helix of iridescent force that could weave the fabric of spacetime itself. This was not a messenger with wings, but a Weaver of Causality. This would be their soul. From his foundation of Absolute Stasis, he carved a shard of perfect, eternal silence. This fragment became a crystalline entity of geometric perfection, whose mere presence calcified possibility into immutable fact, an Anchor of Reality to prevent all creation from unraveling back into the void. This would be their body. From his Eternal Heart, he bled a storm of conflicting potentials—gravity and repulsion, creation and dissolution. This storm coalesced into a roaring, fractal maelstrom, a Force of Unmaking and Rebirth that would churn dead stars into nebulae and scoured worlds into new beginnings. This would be their essence. With a roar that shook the entire Origin Land, Rowan focused his all-seeing awareness into singular, piercing lenses that beamed his Will into the minds of his creation. His Will appeared in the hearts of all of his first creation as a silent, drifting sentinel with a million shifting senses, the Watchers at the Threshold, whose purpose was to observe the functioning of the cosmic machine without interference or pity. Rowan intended to maintain the mental sanctity of his first children, even when they were far from him... even on the other side of Limbo, his Watchers would be in their spirit and ensure they would never be alone. One by one, these new creations were drawn forth from nothing. They were not born; they were manifested. They did not sing hymns of praise; their very existence was a constant, harmonic resonance that was a fundamental part of this realm’s operating frequency—a sound that would one day be faintly echoed in the nuclear fires of stars and the spin of galaxies, in the hearts of dimensions and in the bones of all Reality. One day, they shall carry his Will to all of existence. These were the first "angels," though the term is a pale, mortal translation for what they are. They are Archai—the First Principles. Rowan did not create a separation between his Archais. There were no ranks among them; all were equal, and only the strength of their spirit and individual character would separate them in the future. A bright light had filled the entire Origin Land, hiding his actions from everyone, and when this light vanished, Rowan appeared a bit pale, but he quickly recovered. Eyes shining with anticipation, he waited for the first of the Archai to rise, and when the first crack came from their stony shells, Rowan smiled.