This was a world where mysticism bled into reality—where Beyonders transcended mortal limits and the boundaries of divinity thinned like paper soaked in oil. Here, the Great Creator stood at the apex, alongside the Pillars who upheld existence, the eldritch Outer Deities lurking beyond the stars, and the ancient gods whose echoes still whispered through forgotten ruins.
It was the Third Epoch.
The time remembered as the Age of Calamity.
A divine war erupted like a cataclysm carved into history. Darkness and lightning clawed at the skies. The Sun—not a star, but a god—fell. Corruption swept across the land like a plague, devouring nations, unraveling the old world. From the sacred waters of the East Sonia Sea to the ancient Eastern Continent, the Calamity surged. Ninety-nine percent of all living things were annihilated. Oceans turned into dead zones where the spiritual and physical warped into poison, and the land became indistinguishable from the Abyss.
A betrayer rose from the storm.
He crowned himself god, stealing divinity not through ascension but by usurpation.
Yet stolen power carries a price.
He fell—cast down from the heavens with all the sins of a dying world shackled to his soul. His divine eyes dimmed, his mind frayed by madness.
Under the looming shadow of Death, and before the stillborn eye of eternal Night, the one once called the God of the Sun—a transcendent, quasi-Almighty being believed to be the chosen heir of the Omnipotent Creator—sensed it.
A gaze.
Something ancient.
A stretch of gray fog, intangible and endless.
A presence watching from beyond the Spirit World, above time, from a place that did not obey the laws of gods or men.
"Lord of the Mysteries…?"
The words left His lips like a dream slipping into waking thought. Confusion laced the divine murmur. Space warped. Time twisted.
He reached for truth.
But before His mind could pierce the veil, the golden blood of godhood within Him dried, and a sea of Darkness swallowed His form.
The God of the Sun fell.
And so ended the Age of Radiance.
Thus began the Age of Calamity.
The divine order shattered. Peace proved an illusion. Chaos reigned. Even the scribes of history did not bother to count the innocent dead. The names of the weak, the lost, the drowned—were swept away in silence.
Even the faithful ascetics of the Sun perished alongside their god.
And who, in the long echoes of eternity, would mourn a nameless elf swallowed by the Storm?
---
"Cough! Cough—cough!"
Agony.
The sound tore from his throat as instinct wrestled with drowning.
Eli Walker—a man whose name once belonged to another world—clutched his torn chest. Pain bloomed in waves, his lungs filled with seawater. He choked, spat, convulsed. Panic threatened to consume him.
Then... breath returned.
Not through lungs.
Through something else. Alien. Inhuman.
Somehow, he was breathing underwater.
His wide, bloodshot eyes dropped to his abdomen—a hole, jagged and oozing, pierced straight through his stomach.
Water had likely drained through the wound. If not, he might never have woken.
"Am I... Eli Walker? Eli Tempest? Eli Aether...?"
His thoughts swam. Names blurred. Lives folded into one another like pages soaked in ink. But one thing was certain:
He had died.
And now... he was back.
"This world... is this really Lord of the Mysteries?"
The name echoed not as fiction, but as law. As truth.
Memories surged. In this universe, the path to godhood was paved by 22 Beyonder Pathways, each one an archetype etched into the foundation of reality. Each led from Sequence 9—the beginning of supernatural evolution—up to Sequence 0, the seat of a god.
But beyond even that—
Above Sequence 0—
Lay the realm of the Outer Deities.
To even approach their domain, one must not only command a divine Pathway, but also fuse with a Sefirah—a metaphysical concept representing a fundamental symbol of the cosmos.
The closest any being had ever come to becoming an Outer Deity on Earth...
Was the Ancient Sun God.
He had inherited the authority of the Almighty, one of the three Pillars that upheld the world. From birth, he had been linked to the Sea of Chaos, the Sefirah of infinite possibility.
In the twilight of the Second Epoch, he eliminated the ancient gods—consumed or destroyed them—and recovered five divine authorities:
Sun, Storm, White Tower, Visionary, and Hanged Man.
He was the last to qualify for succession.
But the tragedy was inevitable.
The first generation God Almighty had never truly died.
The would-be heir was cast down.
The Ancient Sun God fell.
His authorities fragmented—Storm, Sun, and White Tower eventually claimed by new masters.
As Eli recalled this vast, incomprehensible history, his cold, broken body began to stir. Blood surged once more. His heart pounded with renewed strength.
A grin tugged at the corner of his lips. He turned to the dissipating gray fog beside him and gave a shaky thumbs-up.
"The Celestial Worthy is awesome."
The Almighty had left contingencies.
And so had the Celestial Worthy—the enigmatic Lord of the Mysteries, an Outer Deity whose fingers still threaded through fate.
"...So I wasn't reincarnated. I was transmigrated," he muttered bitterly. "Lovely."
"I'm not even the original soul in this body. I didn't even get an angel-rank start."
"Couldn't you at least have dropped me on one of the Celestial Worthy's three Pathways?!"
He clenched his fists.
"If I'm not on His Pathway, how do I access His Sefirah? How do I get to the gray fog?"
He snorted instinctively, only to cough. Still underwater.
In his first life, Eli Walker had a family. Stability. When he transmigrated to a broken Earth, he didn't despair. He had named himself Eli Tempest, intending to use his knowledge to rise, avoid disasters, and cheat fate.
Then Earth exploded.
He became Eli Aether, an elf singer—a civilian, a Sequence 5 Beyonder of the Storm Pathway.
Then he died in the Calamity.
"All that planning. All that effort."
"I was just guarding the reservoir for a few days!"
"My fishing rod...!"
Now... ghosts.
Around him, vengeful spirits and bloated corpses drifted beneath the waves, drawn to the living aura he exuded.
Eli narrowed his eyes.
"You came to mock me?"
"Well... I didn't die. Sorry."
"You're just going to have to become my experience points."
A translucent armor of illusive scales manifested across his limbs.
His left hand stirred the water, controlling the currents to stall the undead.
In his right hand, a bolt of lightning sparked to life.
"Fishing with explosives..."
The lightning burst into a web of silver serpents, crackling through seawater like a living net.
The undead burned—scattered into ashes that faded into the abyss.
---
Eli felt the currents shift.
The sea was temporarily silent.
The elf's memories helped him map his location:
South of the Forsaken Land of the Gods.
Southeast of the Sonia Sea.
East of the South Continent.
Even here, in a remote stretch of water, the divine war's shadow had reached.
He looked to the horizon.
The East Continent—dead. Madness reigned there.
The South Continent—soon to fall to Death's rise.
The North Continent—home to the Storm Church. And to them, an elf of the Storm Pathway was a remnant of the past regime.
Even seeking out other elves meant death.
His only answer now lay in the mystery surrounding him.
The gray fog still lingered—reluctant to leave.
Eli raised his voice, called out to what might yet remain in the mists, to the one who would answer riddles and ride chaos like a steed:
> "Arrodes!"
---