Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1355: The Second Scene

Time resumed the moment the light solidified.

Under the flooding sunlight, the Oracle’s formless grip lost its sureness — blurred at the edges, soft as a soap bubble disrupted by breath. As the honest blue sky settled back into place, it replaced the thin silver light Zero had been pressing against herself with something vast and sourceless. Without the Deities’ interference, even a newly Awakened Creator was no easy opponent.

Two figures came through the broken seal at a run.

Delta had not found Epsilon. Instead it found the one who truly required killing.

Roland. The main Creator of this world.

The Oracle raised its other hand and brought it down with full force.

Nothing happened. The force dissolved before it reached him, as if it had never existed, as if the idea of harming Roland in this place was simply one the world declined to entertain.

Hundreds of meters was nothing for a Martial Artist under pressure. Before Delta could recalibrate, Roland had crossed the distance, torn the mask away, and seized the astrolabe within.

The Oracle struggled. It accomplished nothing. Zero’s presence had substantially weakened it; Roland’s presence reduced it to near absence. Being held in those hands was like standing too close to the sun — the light just kept consuming.

“This isn’t—fair—!”

Its consciousness began to unravel as the astrolabe was stripped away.

Roland held on. He understood this: whether against pure magical creatures or enemies from Erosion, the weakness always lived in the astrolabe — the revolving mechanism at the center of their being. Pull it free and they dissolved like winter ice under noon light. The power in his body surged upward to meet the moment, jubilant, as though it had been waiting for exactly this.

He had not understood the full situation when he arrived.

Less than a minute after leaving Valkries, his phone had produced the noise of a call connecting — then static, then friction, then nothing. When the line died he looked out from the tourist elevator and saw the suburb freeway wrapped in a translucent barrier, the kind that had nothing to do with technology. Something that could force a Martial Artist of Fei Yuhan’s caliber to silence spoke for itself. He had retrieved his car from the basement garage and encountered Valkries running in the same direction; he had taken her along.

He had not expected Zero to be inside after the barrier broke.

He had not expected the masked and robed figure to be an Oracle.

But the moment the identification was certain, the calculus was simple: kill it first. The Association had no solid leads on the Erosion invaders. The Oracle’s reckless decision to come after Zero had handed him an opportunity; he did not waste it.

The astrolabe came free completely. A column of white light erupted from it and swallowed him upward.

This again.

“Uncle Roland!”

From the corner of his vision — Zero’s tear-stained face. He raised a hand to tell her it was alright, and the brightness devoured the gesture along with everything else.

He was more prepared this time. He did not brace against the consciousness that pressed into him from all directions. He let it come, opened toward it, turned his attention to where it was directing him rather than fighting the current.

It’s useless to resist anyway. So. Pay attention.

“Ssssii… Ssssii…”

His vision dissolved into white. Snowflakes materialized in every direction, blurring the scene into monochrome.

Through them, barely: Lan’s voice.

“The truth is always what you understand.”

When his vision cleared, the light had already receded.

He swallowed reflexively.

Ahead of him was void — genuine, absolute void, not the darkness of a room or a night sky but the deep nothing between things. Into that void a red cavity was suspended: no depth, only width, a wound in space measurable only in astronomical units. Even trying to estimate the scale of it felt like trying to hold a river in cupped hands.

Beyond the cavity, filling the background in every direction, were specks of light mixed among the snowflakes. He could not tell whether they were real or a quality of the vision itself. Stars, possibly. Countless ones.

There was only one thing his memory offered that fit the scale of what he was seeing.

The specks of light were things that ordinary people could spend entire lifetimes counting, still not finish — and they were only the incidental details of the larger picture.

The universe.

The scale of this is genuinely inconceivable, he thought, with a recognition that was more resignation than awe.

He had believed that seeing the Bottomless Land for the first time was the ceiling of disorientation. This had not reduced the questions; it had made them deeper. If the scene before him was the known universe, what was the connection to the first vision — the pillar of light at the Bottomless Land, the Sky Lord’s civilization at the top of it? Was the ascent through the light column actually a transit to something beyond the atmosphere? The term upgrade — or elevation — would fit that reading. But neither the Radiation People nor the Match Men were built for deep space. Sharp objects and fire harmed them; they were only marginally more resilient than humans in terms of temperature and pressure tolerance. And when the beam activated, the Radiation Men who entered were never prepared for it. None of them arrived at the top already knowing.

No — that’s wrong. He rejected the reading as he formed it. Forcing a connection between the two scenes was too neat. Even setting aside every other variable, the Gods’ motivation remained impenetrable. The endless cycle of the Battle of Divine Will, the Legacy Shards that triggered evolution — none of it had been constructed to culminate in this particular moment. There was a deeper meaning. There had to be.

Something moved below the red cavity.

A thought — not his own, or perhaps his own in a way he didn’t yet recognize — moved his vision downward.

Fragments. Countless scattered fragments floating beneath the cavity. They might have been the remains of a shattered planet, or simply rock that had always occupied that space, or the rubble of something abandoned so long ago the original structure was past reconstruction. He lacked the frame of reference to know.

But they were moving.

Slowly, drawn by something he could not see, they pulled toward a single stone at the center. Each layer that formed was richer and denser than the one before, and every new addition produced visible change at the surface. The floating masses looked like debris, but their individual volumes were not trivial. The scale of it only became staggering when he stopped trying to parse the pieces and looked at what they were building.

Without a reference object the whole process appeared to move quickly. He suspected the real timeframe was a number that would mean nothing to him.

As if to confirm this, the snowflakes began to converge.

The scene was entering its end.

Before his eyes, the fragments completed into an irregular spheroid. Then — the patterned lines appeared: the same rhombus lattice he had seen spreading across the bridge sky. They proliferated across the surface of the spheroid and into the surrounding darkness, swallowing the shape until only the faintest reflection of light gave proof it still existed. When the lattice closed completely, the spheroid entered the great red cavity.

The snowflakes covered everything.

When the last of them settled, a sentence passed directly into his mind — written in no alphabet he had ever encountered, yet as immediately comprehensible as his own thoughts. Not words, exactly. A thought that had taken on the shape of language.

“This is the price.”

“From this moment forth, gravity will no longer be the force most deserving of reverence in this world.”

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