The white Exentity, motionless before Sakolomeh, spoke without beating around the bush:
— You must stop the Resonance.
It is no longer what it should have been.
It now seeks to engulf everything to prevent you from persisting.
We have tried everything… but nothing worked.
Sakolomeh did not respond.
He simply raised his eyes, then looked around him.
The Dream had become unrecognizable.
Anarchetypes frozen in the sky, suspended like open wounds.
The primordial gods petrified on the surface of dying worlds.
Broken concepts, laws fading without being replaced.
The Dream itself was disappearing.
He closed his eyes.
And he understood.
All realities had lost everything.
Even those closest to him — or what had served as family — had been erased.
Bakuzan.
Bakuran.
Salomeh.
Hinata.
Gods, demons…
And even the one who had raised him like a mother.
Amu.
Sakolomeh opened his eyes.
His gaze was not filled with rage.
It was determined.
Thinking he would give in to anger after seeing such desolation, the white Exentity spoke again, with urgency:
— It would be better if you did not let yourself be guided by anger.
The situation is already—
Sakolomeh interrupted her with a surprisingly calm voice:
— That will not be necessary.
Do not worry.
The white Exentity remained frozen.
Something had changed.
Sakolomeh was not repressing his emotions.
He had surpassed them.
As if he had understood that, in this situation, emotions would no longer suffice.
He began to walk toward the Resonance.
It fixed him, irritated, like a totality confronted with what it could not absorb.
— So… said Sakolomeh in a measured tone,
I suppose you are not thrilled to see me again.
Yet… this time, our confrontation will be different.
The Resonance attacked without waiting.
It surged and struck Sakolomeh with an almost banal punch, yet of absolute violence.
The impact projected him out of the planet — or what remained of it.
In its passage, the universe itself seemed to erase.
The Resonance insisted.
It chained attacks, pursuing Sakolomeh through the multiverse.
Blow after blow.
Sakolomeh let it happen.
He took each strike without retaliating,
lost in a strange, deep, dangerously lucid reflection.
The Dream was now only a ruined nightmare.
He wondered then if going back was still possible.
In theory, yes.
The Absolute Resonance remembered everything.
It knew everything that existed in the Metaworld —
in the Dream as in the Chôrion.
But another question arose.
If this conflict ended…
would the Resonance still deem it necessary to repair everything?
This thought chilled Sakolomeh.
They had perhaps already crossed the point of no return.
The Resonance suddenly interrupted its barrage of blows.
It had sensed something abnormal: none of its attacks had had the slightest real effect on Sakolomeh.
At the center of its torso, the void then began to swirl.
A spiral abyss, hungry.
It had chosen another approach: absorption.
The space around Sakolomeh began to contract, a spiral energy ensnaring him like an inverted tide.
He immediately pulled himself together.
He extended his hand, firm, resolute.
— Now that, is out of the question.
The flow broke.
The absorption was annulled, as if it had never existed.
The Resonance did not yield.
The other Exentities — those it had partially reconfigured into fragments of itself — began to move.
They deployed through the Dream, converging on Sakolomeh with a clear intention: to crush him, dissolve him, correct him.
But before they even reached him…
They were reconfigured.
By him.
Their forms unraveled, their conceptual structures were inverted, rewritten, then reduced to a neutral state.
Not destroyed.
Corrected.
The Resonance remained frozen.
They were not masks of Sakolomeh.
They were not extensions of its own system.
He should never have been able to alter those entities.
A crack resounded.
The lower part of the Resonance — where a mouth should have been — cracked.
A deformed opening appeared, and from it burst a destructive ray, pure, totalizing, bearing its absolute signature.
Sakolomeh slowly raised his hand.
An identical ray formed in his palm.
The two attacks collided.
The impact was of crushing brutality:
the Dream trembled, the laws oscillated, entire strata of reality fissured under the pressure of this impossible equality.
Then…
The Resonance stopped.
It had just understood.
Sakolomeh was capable of reproducing exactly the same actions as it.
Worse still: he could imitate its unique magic, that which should exist only as an extension of the Metaworld.
The situation was becoming aberrant.
How could a bug reproduce a totalizing system?
What had really happened when it had left Sakolomeh in the non-place?
What had he assimilated… or understood?
Sakolomeh fixed it then, without hatred, without triumph.
— You see?
— How do you explain that a bug… can be coherent with a system to the point of reproducing it?
What had just happened was neither a combat, nor an imitation, nor a transgression, it was a structural coincidence.
The Absolute Resonance, avatar of the Metaworld, had not been confronted in its function, but unveiled in its limit. Until now, it believed itself to be the operating center of the code, the sole instance capable of correcting, rewriting, stabilizing what pertained to M. It was the organ through which the Metaworld recognized itself as an acting totality, but faced with Sakolomeh, this certainty had just cracked because Sakolomeh had not learned the Resonance's skills, he had neither copied nor stolen them, he had produced them, naturally, as a logical consequence of what he had become.
The paradox was there:
a being that the Resonance classified as a bug, an anomaly, a narrative residue…
acted with the same authority as a totalizing system and yet, it was neither M, nor Y, nor X.
Why does the 0 it embodies reproduce M?
The answer did not lie in power, but in position.
The Metaworld, M, acts because it encompasses.
It contains X and Y, it structures their laws, it imposes global coherence.
Its skills are not powers, but functions of containment: rewrite, erase, stabilize, reconfigure.
Sakolomeh, he, encompasses nothing, he is located elsewhere.
What Sakolomeh embodied was not the absolute 0, inaccessible and ungraspable, but the accidental emanation of the Non-Principle, that born from the total indifference of the 0. A fraction without intention, without role, without purpose and it was precisely that which upset everything because this emanation is not subject to the logic of M.
It does not need to contain to act.
It does not correct but coincides.
When Sakolomeh annuls an absorption, it is not a defense.
When he reconfigures the Exentities, it is not domination.
When he reproduces a destructive ray, it is not a copy.
It is the My0x code which, upon contact with the emanation, momentarily ceases to distinguish between function and origin.
The system recognizes a signature, not that of M but that of what precedes all structure.
It was there that the Resonance understood.
If Sakolomeh can produce the same effects as it, it is not because he is stronger.
It is because his actions do not pass through the code, the Metaworld acts through My0x,
Sakolomeh acts before My0x.
He does not modify the rules:
he acts where the rules are not yet necessary.
And that explains the ultimate contradiction:
A totalizing system can be reproduced by something that does not define itself as a system, a bug can be coherent with the All because it is not subject to the necessity of coherence.
The creatures of the Chôrion sought to be the My0x.
The Resonance sought to preserve M.
Sakolomeh, he, sought nothing.
And that was what made the Dream tremble.
For as long as a being claims the Absolute, it remains relative.
As long as a system believes itself total, it remains closed.
But what is born from the indifference of the 0
does not need to claim, nor to contain, nor to correct.
It simply acts where it is.
And at that precise instant, the Metaworld understood a truth it could not correct:
"The Absolute does not destroy systems.
It lets exist what can make them useless."
Sakolomeh then raised his eyes to the Resonance.
He did not challenge it.
He did not hate it.
He did not seek to replace it.
He existed.
And for the first time since the emergence of the My0x code,
the Metaworld had to envisage an inconceivable possibility:
That the stability of the All
no longer depend on it.