Right after the Heavenly Emperor dropped, something clicked.

With drums humming in the deepest part of his being, the cracks spread, and it finally broke.

First his memories, and then his power.

It all crashed into his being at once.

At first, the memories were unbearable, and as moments passed, he got used to them.

Some seconds passed, and apathy took over.

His body began to crack, fissures appearing on his skin, and blackness oozed out of them.

Soon, the skin began to melt, but he felt no pain.

No, he was above all of that.

With his memories regained, his powers unsealed, pain was a foreign concept to him.

He was the Emptiness.

. . .

When there was nothing, he was.

In the absence of everything, he was.

In the beginning, there was only emptiness.

Matter formed with an aberration of power—born out of pure void.

Soon, the matter gathered, and stars and planets took form.

They collided, they were destroyed, and they aged enough to perish back into the void. Worlds were made and worlds were erased.

Amidst the never-ending cycle of life and death, one thing was always constant.

The Emptiness.

It remained consistent. It remained forever.

The Existence took its domain from time to time, only to prove itself brittle and fragile, crumbling over the tides of time.

While the Existence blinked in and out, the Emptiness was always there.

And when nothing remains for too long, it gains consciousness.

In this case, it was Ozul, or the name it had received in the mortal form this time.

It had existed for so long that with consciousness, it also gained emotions.

Ozul gained emotions.

’He’ was alive, witnessing countless histories, the never-ending passage of time. He had to bear through everything.

At first, it was torture to be alive for so long.

And as time passed, the torture continued. It tormented him every time something caught his interest, only to perish with the tides of time.

Sometimes, it was a tree. Another time, it was a beast.

He got attached to sentient beings as well as objects. Given enough time, anything could be loved.

Yet, without fail, they always disappeared, leaving only memories of what he once held.

Unable to do anything, he learned to use his infinite power to make things happen. He would create shells to transfer his consciousness temporarily, only so he could interact with others, with mortals doomed to die.

It was a brief passage of time in which he was actually happy.

But as always, that time passed as well. Those whom he adored, those whom he cherished, died. The world was destroyed, and life ceased to exist.

And once again, he was left with nothing but ashes to stare at. Nothing but emptiness, his own being.

It was lonely.

It was unbearably lonely.

To always be the one left alive, to always be the one left to wallow in sadness.

Unable to take it any longer, he knew there was no other choice but to kill himself.

And he did exactly that. He tried to kill himself. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t. He simply couldn’t will himself to disappear. He had enough time to try countless times.

The only way he found, after trying for so long, was to have someone from the Existence kill his consciousness.

Being the very personification of Emptiness, he was a concept, and concepts don’t die.

He was never born, and thus, he could never die.

Still, if someone from the Existence could kill his consciousness, he could very well be ’dead’ for a few Timeless Folds1.

He would gather again. But he wouldn’t feel those Timeless Folds passing. And if he couldn’t feel those Folds, it wouldn’t be unbearable anymore.

He just had to get someone from the Existence to kill him every time his consciousness gathered.

Putting this plan into motion, he began to stage his own deaths in new worlds he helped to shape.

Many times, the worlds that formed in the vast, never-ending universe were not powerful enough to kill him, even when most of him was sealed.

So, he had to shape them himself. Build them so they had a power structure that could allow someone to kill his consciousness.

Even better, he shaped the Existence to create sentience, an executor. Shaped it so it was essentially the most powerful being in the created Existence. Only so that a sentient being could kill him when the time came. And he did that.

He performed the same steps again and again.

Learning from his mistakes, he would create another companion each time to make sure the seal was not preemptively damaged, allowing his memories to surface.

...

In this iteration, the executor was none other than the Heavenly Emperor.

The companion was Jinx.

He put himself in the vessel of a baby, of Ozul Ashfall.

Haste on his part allowed the markings of the seal toT appear on his limbs at birth. Mistaking those markings as work of evil, his ’father’ at that time called him the Devil’s spawn.

In the usual iterations, he would have been born fine.

A little odd, maybe, but not with such a fate—a fate that doomed him to search for answers to the ends of the world.

Another mistake was spending a little too much time with the executor, his ’son’, the Heavenly Emperor.

It made the executor grow attached, unable to bring himself to kill him when the time came.

’This... was a failed iteration,’ Ozul thought, watching over the entire firmament again.

Memories of the countless Timeless Folds he had to bear resurfaced.

In them, there were many times he had fallen in love. There were times he had destroyed so many in his wrath. There were times when he was so happy.

But each time, every time, the images faded and he was left alone.

...

He is not a man, nor a god. He is the hush before breath, the silence after sound.

Worlds rise and fall within him, their ashes adorn his hollow crown.

Alone at the heart of eternity, he walks a corridor without a door.

Forever the emptiness,

Forever the curse,

Forever, and nothing more.