After an exciting round of throwing figuratively-warm bodies — game pieces — at each other, La-Ti eventually emerged victorious. It was a hard-fought battle, as evidenced by the fact that they were so evenly matched. However, now that Gaius had the chance to witness the tactics both of them used, as well as a general overview of the strategies that had been employed, the Abyss Sovereign was reasonably certain that he was going to win the next round.

He was particularly confident in winning too, given that he was going to coordinate with Isabelle to knock out La-Ti first. It would make the perfect plan — Isabelle and Gaius were going to align with Nakama’s goal first, and then turn on Nakama after La-Ti was defeated.

A perfect plan, if nothing else.

“Nice try,” Nakama replied, a giant grin on her face.

Gaius stared at the gameboard, where his and Isabelle’s territory had been swallowed up with absurd ease, and felt his face twitch. “How?”

Isabelle didn’t have any words for the upsetting upset either.

As Nakama revelled in her victory, Xanadu, who was watching from the sidelines, called out. “Gaius, Isabelle, can you two come over for a moment?”

Gaius tilted his head, and then walked over. “Is something the matter?”

“It’s about me, actually,” said Xanadu. “I’m just wondering what might just happen to me after your plan succeeds, actually. Right now, my existence is in limbo — I’m only here because reality believes I should be here. This deception is enforced by the perception of Orb’s people, but if you plan succeeds…”

“Ah. Right. Let me ask Weiwu…oh.” Gaius twitched. The great god’s passing, as well as that of Oculus, hadn’t quite fully registered in his mind yet. “Right. I…I wish I could give you a definitive answer too, but there’s no one else for me to ask now.”

Right now, he was incredibly cognizant of the fact that there was no one he could ask for help anymore. The Chanter of Innocents had been a teacher through and through, but there were still so many things he didn’t know. The same went for Oculus. Even though their time together was short, both Weiwu and Oculus had been more than just teachers — they were also friends.

Controlling his emotions tightly, Gaius closed his eyes and started to think of a solution. In the previous month or two, he had vaguely felt a shift in how his mind worked — he could now consider multiple angles or distinctly separate ideas with absurd ease.

His speed of thinking was a lot faster too, along with a whole bunch of quality-of-life improvements. All these, however, were clearly the basic abilities of great gods and whatnot, which allowed him to quickly come up with solutions to problems he never expected.

“Alright.” Gaius nodded. “I have an idea. In the past, your existence was fading away because the connection between the Crying Abyss and Orb was weakening, right? The force that allowed you to overcome…entropy was dwindling, and there was no way to replenish it.”

“Entropy?”

“Yeah. You could think of it as the corrective force of Orb, but other than being the wrong answer entirely, that’s how it works,” Gaius replied. “Anyway, back then, the Crying Abyss was protecting you and your companions from being corrected out of existence. However, as your task seemingly reached a conclusion, the channel between the Abyss and Orb shrunk, which lowered the amount of primordial divinity everyone had access to.”

He paused. “Now, however, I am both the channel and the Abyss. But five months later, the Abyss will cease to exist. Linking you to the Abyss won’t do much good either.”

“That sounds bad,” said Xanadu, “but you sound like you have a plan or two.”

“That I do,” Gaius replied. “I’m just bracing myself for the pain. The Crying Abyss is a miraculous entity. It is self-sustaining, even on the constituent level, which means that even small bits of it will not die out.”

“Wait—”

Before Isabelle could complete her sentence, Gaius had connected his mind to the extra-karmic entity known as the Crying Abyss. Back then, in the true Orb, he had assumed the enormous rift hanging in the sky to be the Abyss, but after the festival of creation kicked off, he now knew the truth.

That was but a representation of the Abyss on Orb. The real Crying Abyss existed in a separate…dimension, one infinitely close to the mind. In fact, before he became the only channel to it, anyone could access the huge trove of power with the correct thoughts and wills.

Beneath the feet of everyone’s mental self was a conceptual channel to the Abyss. By thinking thoughts that resonated with the Abyss itself — thoughts that contained extreme, negative emotions — one could tap into its power.

That was also how will-cleaving worked too. Vowing to forsake certain actions or to live by a certain ideal was simply attaching negative thoughts to the forbidden actions, stirring up the will of the Abyss. In turn, that created a channel in which the stray energies of the Abyss could be made use of, a miniscule channel where purified ether could be drawn from.

This was the truth behind Orb’s cultivation. If he didn’t get it wrong, in the timeline where Xanadu came from, Domains and Fiefs never existed.

A small pinprick of pain followed as Gaius pulled out two little cells of the Crying Abyss. His mind swept through them, scattering any remnant thoughts or emotions that had been concealed with his own will.

Reopening his eyes, Gaius muttered, “Huh. It’s not that painful after all.”

Two dots of pure darkness burned in his hand, and without much preamble, he willed one over to Xanadu, whose eyes widened immediately.

“That’s—!”

“A permanent solution to your problems,” Gaius replied. “You might have a better understanding than me when it comes to using this.”

“What about the other?” Xanadu asked.

“The other?” Gaius rubbed his nose, and then gave it to Isabelle, whose eyes turned round immediately. “If we succeed, and you feel up to the task of living forever…use this.”

Isabelle held the small ball, eyeing it curiously, and then smiled. “Time to dig in, then.”

“Huh?”

Before Gaius could make sense of her words, she popped the little ball in her mouth and swallowed it.