Chapter 1780: The Great Push Primordial Chaos had focused all of his boundless, chaotic power on the tiny, ordered thing. It was an overreaction of cosmic proportions. It was the universe screaming to erase a single, incorrect decimal point. He did not merely strike it; he poured into it the full, screaming weight of everything he was—all the random chance, the infinite probability, the unbridled potential for change. Rowan thought it was like trying to extinguish a candle by throwing the sun at it. The Primordials had great weaknesses, but you needed to be strong enough to exploit them. He did not feel pity or exhilarated at what he was about to accomplish, only a dull sense of satisfaction that was flavored by grief... if only he had been strong enough at the beginning, so much loss and sorrow would have been avoided. The Centipede of Certainty was designed for this. Its entire existence, its unbreakable law, was predicated on this single moment: Be destroyed by Primordial Chaos. The moment Chaos’s power touched it, the concept of its death was realized. The law was fulfilled. And in that fulfillment, the concept executed its final, devastating function. The energy Chaos expended was not absorbed, nor reflected. It was consumed by the certainty of the outcome. The infinite, chaotic power had no possibility but to be used for the one thing that was absolutely certain: the Centipede’s destruction. In doing so, the energy itself was forced to become orderly. It was channeled, focused, and transformed from a wave of random destruction into a single, coherent, and inevitable result. The backlash was not one of power, but of existence itself, targeting the core of Chaos’s being, and this resulted in a shockwave that would have destroyed the entirety of the Underverse if the Archai had not been strengthening it. Primordial Chaos, the embodiment of "maybe," had been forced to participate in a sequence of absolute "must." His chaotic essence had been momentarily forced into a rigid, causal chain with a predetermined conclusion. For the first time in all eternity, something had happened to him that was not random. It was fated. It was certain. The effect was catastrophic to his being. His form, a storm of possibilities, shuddered and convulsed. The nascent stars in his essence winked out, not in explosions, but in silent, mathematical corrections. The lightning of chance froze into static, predictable patterns. The billion eyes glazed over with the film of inevitability. He was stunned, not in the sense of being dazed, but in the sense of being defined. For a nanosecond, an aeon in Primordial time, the concept of Chaos was contradicted. The infinite dice he constantly rolled all came up snake eyes at once. The discordant symphony of his existence hit a single, sustained, perfect note. The roar of a billion probabilities died in his throat. The chains of entropy that bound him to the Gate of Oblivion flickered, their chaotic energy momentarily subdued by the wave of absolute order that had just passed through their master. The storm of his form grew still, coalescing into a temporary, almost solid shape of shock and confusion. "Wha...?" The concept was a feeble sputter, a single, unadorned question mark in the void. It was the opening. The only opening that would ever exist. ® The Incarnation of Rowan did not hesitate. He had not blinked during the entire exchange. His every atom, his every thought, had been focused on this precise moment. The moment of absolute, paradoxical stillness in the heart of the storm. His main body tweaked the Incarnation, the same way he had done to the centipede, giving this body a single law and purpose before pulling back. The Incarnation fully accepted this change, and at the moment Primordial Chaos became stunned, he moved. He did not run or fly. He applied force. Not against Chaos, for that would still be useless, the mass of a Primordial when viewed in a lower-dimensional sense, such as force or weight, could be considered infinite. What Rowan did was to apply force against the concept of Chaos’s position. Multiple Origins whose focus was on severance pulsed out of the Incarnation, and the entire Underverse seemed to flash as if a bolt of heavenly lightning had crossed its expanse. These laws of severance cut the possibility of Chaos remaining anchored. It severed the "maybe" of him recovering his wits. It imposed a new certainty to replace the one that had just faded: the certainty of movement. Rowan’s Incarnation planted his feet on a solid fragment of a long-dead concept and pushed. He put the weight of his will, the memory of the slain Primordial Soul, and the silent screams of a thousand annihilated realities into the motion. His hands did not touch the chaotic form. They pushed against the space that contained it, against the probability field that defined its existence. It was like pushing against the idea of a mountain. For a moment, nothing happened. The innate resistance of a Primordial was immense, even in a state of stupefaction. Then, the new certainty took hold. The severed possibilities collapsed. The only remaining reality was the one Rowan was enforcing. Primordial Chaos moved. It was infinitesimal at first—a shudder, a slide backward toward the swirling iris of absolute black. Then the movement gained a terrible momentum. The Archai in the distance looked upon this scene with great shock and wonder, their bodies trembling under the ephemeral shockwaves of Rowan’s Will pulsing throughout the entire Underverse. For as long as they lived, they would never forget this moment. Rowan’s body, in comparison to that of Chaos, could not even be compared, like a single atom against the immensity of the universe. Yet this one atom was pushing an entire universe! The Chains of Entropy bounding the body of Chaos, their power still dampened from the conceptual backlash, strained. The Gate of Oblivion, a passive, hungry maw, began to exert its own pull. Chaos was not just being pushed; he was being accepted. Rowan’s plan was going towards fulfillment. If he was going to be killing a Primordial, it could not be inside the Underverse. This place was too fragile for this sort of thing, and the other Primordials were not far; he did not want them to hear the sound of Chaos’s dying screams. Luckily for him, Primordial Chaos had placed himself beside one of the places where Rowan could butcher him with relative ease. The stun on the Primordial began to wear off. The eyes of dying galaxies flickered back to life, filled with dawning, universe-shattering horror. The storm of formless matter began to churn again, not with random creativity, but with panic. "NO! THIS... THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE... THE BALANCE! I AM THE GUARDIAN OF EXISTENCE! ROWAN ALL OF SPACE WOULD COLLAPSE WITHOUT MY WILL!" The voice was less a boom now and more a screech of tearing reality. Rowan did not answer. He kept pushing, his muscles straining against a metaphysical weight that would have crushed a galaxy. Veins of void-energy stood out on his neck. The armor on his arms cracked under the strain. Portions of Primordial Chaos entered Oblivion and then experienced the odd feeling of being nothing and something at the same time. The part of Chaos that was aware looked through Oblivion and could not find Primordial Soul, and with the omnipotence of a Primordial, when given enough information, Chaos came to a single conclusion. Primordial Soul was dead! "YOU! SOUL’S KILLER! IT WAS YOU! YOU HAVE TRICKED ME. YOU HAVE TRICKED ALL OF US!" The realization was its own fresh wave of agony for the Primordial. His great sacrifice, his noble stand, had been a farce. He had chained himself in the path of his own destroyer. Chaos began to fight back. He tried to dissolve the space Rowan was pushing against. He tried to rewrite the laws of motion. He tried to generate a probability field where Rowan had never been born. But it was too late. He was too close to the Gate. The influence of Oblivion was a null-field that canceled out his power. His chaotic creations withered and died before they could fully form, sucked into the nothingness. For so long, the power that kept Primordial Soul in check was beginning to tear him apart. His rewritten laws unraveled into silence. The closer he got to the Gate, the less "possible" his escape became. Rowan was not just pushing him physically; he was shepherding him into a zone where his very nature was invalidated. The Chains of Entropy snapped. One by one, the bonds he had woven to block the Gate broke, not from strain, but from irrelevance. They were chains of something, and they were being pulled into a place where "something" had no meaning. The final feet were the hardest. Chaos was now a whirlpool of desperate, fading energy, screaming against the dying of his light. His form was being stretched into a single, thin stream of protesting reality, funneled into the Gate. Rowan gave one final, monumental shove, a silent roar of effort tearing from his lips. Primordial Chaos’s screams were cut off not by distance, but by definition. They didn’t fade; they were deleted. The last flicker of his form, a final, defiant spark of random energy, was sucked into the absolute black. And then, there was silence. The Gate of Oblivion swirled, unchanged, unmoved, unconcerned. It had consumed a fundamental aspect of existence and was no different for it. Rowan stood on the edge, his hands still outstretched, breathing heavily in the non-air. The deed was done. This Primordial was now contained. He felt no triumph. Only the vast, cold silence of the void, now deeper and more complete than ever before. He had saved existence by making it immeasurably quieter, emptier, and smaller. He was become the killer of Primordials, the un-maker of eternity. Yet, this Incarnation was too weak to fully kill a Primordial; he would leave it to his main body. The Incarnation turned his back on the Gate of Oblivion, the place where Chaos was not, and had never been. The weight of his actions settled upon him, heavier than any armor. The silence was his to bear now. Alone. He walked away from the brink, leaving only the endless, hungry stillness behind. He took a couple of steps before falling to his knees, and he smiled before collapsing to dust as he remembered the screams of despair from Primordial Chaos. The Archai bowed to the remains of the Incanation before they vanished.