Bakuzan walked on the incandescent golden floor of the Primordial Library. Each step resounded in the void, as if space itself held its breath.
A shiver of energy crossed his body — here, even the void seemed to observe.
— Stop...
The voice vibrated in the air, deep, ancient, almost familiar.
Bakuzan slowly turned his head… and his eyes widened.
Before him, a silhouette of unreal perfection advanced.
It was Isissis II — a secondary gleam of the great Isissis, one of its oldest reflections. Its gaze was of liquid gold, burning with divine curiosity.
— You… whispered Isissis II, approaching slowly.
There is something strange about you. Like a resonance… an echo that is familiar to me.
It's as if… we are bound.
Bakuzan straightened, his face impassive but his gaze grave.
— That's correct.
I have fused with the essence of the first Isissis.
Isissis II's breath caught. A wave of disbelief crossed the void around them.
— You… fused with him? he repeated, astonished.
How is that possible?
Bakuzan averted his eyes, a shadow slipping over his face.
— I regret… but I cannot tell you.
Isissis II lowered his head slowly, sighing like a tired god.
— Very well.
Then tell me, why are you here?
— I need answers, Bakuzan replied calmly.
And this library… holds what I need to continue my quest.
A silence fell. The guardian's gaze grew sharper, almost suspicious.
— You know, Isissis II continued, that any being of secondary divine level may consult the external library.
Why come here, into the golden heart?
Would you not… intend to alter a story, is that it?
Bakuzan shook his head, firm.
— Not at all.
I seek to understand, not to alter.
A slight smile passed across Isissis II's lips — a smile without warmth.
— It's better this way. To modify a story here is to alter the very existence of all that depends on it.
This library is the origin and end point of all causal narrations. Even a whisper here can change a world.
Bakuzan felt the weight of his words, that cosmic heaviness that accompanies the awareness of the irreversible.
He understood then why Isissis II was the guardian: after the first Isissis, he was the most powerful of the autonomous avatars, a being capable of detecting the slightest distortion in the fabric of narratives.
Under his watch, no entity had ever dared to alter a single word of what was written here.
Isissis II finally shrugged.
— Follow me, he said simply.
If Shylty allowed you to enter, there is nothing to fear.
The name echoed in Bakuzan's mind.
Shylty…
Then the outer guardian was none other than Shylty II, the second fragment of the Madhurya. A being who guards the very boundary of the Library… That explained the heavy access. Very few entities in the whole Multiverse could even breathe here.
The doors opened slowly.
A golden light swallowed them, soft and infinite.
Bakuzan followed the Guardian into the silent sanctuary.
And suddenly, space stretched to infinity.
Before him opened an universe of floating books, suspended in luminous spirals. Each volume vibrated with its own consciousness — as if the stories knew they were alive.
Here, no magic could exist.
The laws of reality were suspended, frozen.
Only resonance persisted, intangible, unchanging — the vibration of the pure essence of a being through the void. Bakuzan knew: this place was made to forbid any corruption, any confrontation, any chaos.
— Do you understand now why I watch, Isissis II said, without turning around.
Here, even the concept of error has no right to exist.
Bakuzan inclined his head slightly.
— Yes. And I have no intention of disturbing this sanctuary.
Isissis II made a sign with his hand.
— Then do what you came to do, and leave.
The Library never liked visitors too curious.
Silence fell again, sacred, almost oppressive.
Bakuzan stepped into the golden sea, while the world's stories thrummed around him, like stars whispering their memory to eternity.
Isissis II raised his hand.
His voice, deep but contained, reverberated in the library's golden light:
Isissis II
— Wait, Bakuzan…
The traveler's step halted at once.
Around them, the infinite rays of the library barely trembled, suspended in an immobility that seemed to listen.
— I perceive your resonance. It is still too lively… too high.
Its amber gaze narrowed. Diminish it. Here, the slightest intention pulses in the Place's Verbe. And a pulsation too powerful can bend a History.
Bakuzan understood immediately.
He closed his eyes, and his resonance — that silent chant emanating from his essence — reduced until it became a mere conceptual whisper.
The golden halo around him shrank, dissolving into the gold-near-vacuum tint of nothingness.
He now understood why magic, powers, and conflicts — all that depends on an active will — were denied here:
in this space, a single emotion could alter the text of existence.
He had not come to influence, only to understand.
Before him, the books stretched to infinity — floating, breathing almost, like sleeping souls in the light.
Bakuzan moved slowly, placed a hand on one of the suspended volumes, and let his consciousness open.
He did not read:
he harmonized.
His entire being melted into the Library's fabric.
For a moment, he felt the concurrent flow of billions of stories, entire worlds scrolling through his mind like a cosmic breath.
And then… he saw them.
The stories of Sally and her father.
Their stories continued to be written — proof that they still existed somewhere, in a temporal layer or a level still active.
But the writing of their lines was fractured, pierced by voids.
Between each paragraph, gaping silences, without place, without name, without echo.
As if an invisible hand had torn out the essential passages, leaving only a skeleton of narration.
And it was not an isolated case.
Bakuzan felt his resonance troubled.
Millions of stories bore the same narrative wound:
beings suspended, held by an anonymous entity, erased without dying.
A shiver went through him.
He knew this mark.
A too-organized silence.
A too-clean void.
He knew who could do this.
His fists clenched, his resonance trembled with a nearly furious gleam — before he restrained himself again.
He had found what he sought.
No need to go further.
Bakuzan turned away and rejoined Isissis II, his expression now calm, almost solemn.
— I thank you… sincerely. You allowed me to consult what others would have defended to the point of destruction.
Isissis II:
— And I thank you for resisting the temptation. You altered nothing. Few are capable.
Bakuzan nodded slowly.
Then, after a short silence:
Bakuzan:
— Tell me one thing, Isissis…
His gaze grew graver, almost cutting.
If a being — let us say an individual — were held prisoner by a Chōshinku entity… and someone attempted to free him by changing History right here…
He paused, studying the infinite shelves that murmured softly around them.
— What would happen?
Isissis raised his eyes, and for a brief instant, the golden veil around him seemed to fracture, revealing an endless interlacing of narrative lines — moving texts, breathing, pulsing like ink veins in space.
"The Library records all that can be known, all that can be.
But the Chōshinkū… the Chōshinkū is what denies the very possibility of being known.
It does not destroy narratives — it destroys the notion that a narrative can exist.
It is an active negation of the verb to exist.
A Chōshinkū entity has no book here. Not even a silence inscribed.
It is an absence so perfect that it makes the memory of the world bleed."
Her voice grew heavier, as if speaking through several metaphysical planes:
"Then imagine what it means to tame that, Bakuzan.
You do not hold a beast. You hold a non-being.
And the moment you would pretend to understand it, the Library itself would send the book back to nothingness."
A heavy silence followed.
The golden corridors around them seemed to have lost their glow, as if even the light feared naming the Chōshinkū.
Bakuzan stood motionless. His golden pupils reflected the thousands of volumes suspended in the void, each vibrating with a story, an existence, a voice — and he understood that a single attempt to capture all this could reduce it all to absolute nothingness.
He clenched his fists.
Bakuzan lowered his eyes, a shadow crossing his gaze.
"This idea… is too suicidal for those I seek to save."
He breathed in slowly, then lifted his head toward Isissis II, a glimmer of resolve piercing the veil of his thought.
"So I will return to my first plan.
Thank you nonetheless… Isissis II."
He then turned, brushing against the great Library door. It opened with a sigh of gold and silence.
Without another word, Bakuzan rose gently, leaving behind the infinite shelves to plunge again into the golden void.
His body dissolved little by little into the light, toward the portal that would return him to the causal world —
where existence, at least, still accepted to have meaning.