[Vol. 6] Chapter 255: The Eighth Day
It felt as though an eternity had passed.
Thousands of years slipped by in an instant. Like watching an endlessly long movie, a life story titled “The Spirit Fox Shrine Maiden.”
But the weight of those years was far too distant.
Violet had no intention, nor any ability, to fully inherit or absorb it.
After all, she was not Dawn.
The girl opened her eyes.
She was back in reality.
"......"
Lowering her gaze, she silently studied her pale, unchanged fingers. Just as unchanged as her soul and heart.
She was still Violet.
This inheritance and transfer had not turned her into Dawn.
The past remained in the past.
A consciousness that had already vanished, would never return.
And yet… she was different now.
At the very least, she now understood many things that had once been difficult for her to understand.
“The [Apocalypse]… What exactly is it?”
She had uncovered many truths, but beyond them lay even greater and deeper mysteries.
Just like Dawn, who had always been searching for this answer.
Perhaps the Spirit Fox Shrine Maiden truly knew nothing about it.
Or perhaps there was no way for her to convey or preserve that knowledge.
As if it was something that could never be understood, described, or recorded. An unknowable existence beyond comprehension.
And so, the [Creation of the world Project] was created to stand against this Apocalypse.
As a god who had once been human, the Spirit Fox Shrine Maiden had a profound understanding of the world's very nature.
She had personally buried countless dying worlds.
Their causes of destruction varied, yet when traced to their origins, they all seemed to be connected to that which was called the “End”. A shadow eternally looming over countless worlds.
Like the inescapable heat death of the universe. Inevitable and unstoppable.
Dawn discovered this pattern and she sought a way to prevent that ultimate fate.
Even though the world is destined to die, new worlds should have been born to take their place, ensuring that all things would not simply fade into eternal silence and nothingness.
However, at some unknown point, new worlds stopped appearing, while the old ones continued to fall into stillness, one after another.
This goes against the natural cycle of creation and rebirth.
Thus, the Spirit Fox Shrine Maiden decided to use her own divine power to attempt creation, hoping to restore balance to the cycle of beginnings and endings.
Yet, creating a world was unimaginably difficult.
Even with countless templates to reference, even with the power of a god, Dawn still encountered endless obstacles, failures, and confusion.
The struggle was a hundred times more arduous than when she had ascended to the “Hidden Immortal” realm.
She did everything she could. She shaped life and souls as perfectly as possible, even creating entirely new intelligent species capable of sustaining themselves.
With the help of her friend, the Fox God, who wielded dominion over space, she expanded the skies and the earth, restoring a dead world to make it livable once more.
She created beings, transplanted life, stabilized space, enriched the land, introduced water and air. Dawn did everything she could think of, everything she was capable of.
Yet, despite all her efforts, the act of world creation remained riddled with difficulties. She could not truly set it into motion.
A world’s most essential foundation was not its people or its creatures, but its sun and moon, its ceaseless flow of energies, and the laws that governed reality itself.
These laws formed the pillars and framework of existence, while life was merely the ever-changing tenants inhabiting them.
The death of a world occurred when its sun and moon faded and its laws collapsed.
Thus, she could not simply reuse or extend the old laws onto a dead world.
And while she could find ways to recreate the sun and moon, to create new fundamental laws from nothing. Even for the Spirit Fox Shrine Maiden, that was nothing more than a fool’s dream.
If she could truly achieve such a feat, then her existence would surpass the limits of what the word god could ever define. She would become the true “Origin”, an all-knowing, all-powerful being.
But Dawn was not the “Origin”. The legendary Primordial Light that first created the heavens and earth had long since disappeared.
As the Spirit Fox Shrine Maiden, she was merely a Guide between the Beginning and the End.
So how could she surpass the very laws and limits that defined her, to create a true world?
Dawn had never bowed to failure or setbacks.
To reach her goal, she came up with an idea.
If she couldn’t create a real sun, moon, stars, and laws of existence, then… what if she simply simulated them?
The belief that "life must have a physical form" was nothing more than a narrow-minded misconception.
In reality, Dawn had already encountered several worlds made entirely of spiritual beings, existing without physical matter.
That realization gave her inspiration.
If she could create a world where illusion and reality intertwined, then the absolute nature of existence would weaken.
It would be just like a dream, where anyone can shape their own world and create anything they desire.
The only difference was that dreams were usually fleeting and lacked clear logic.
This idea was wild and unprecedented, but it was not impossible.
Using the absolute authority she held over her divine realm, Dawn extracted a fragment of her own dreams and merged them into the incomplete world she had been modifying.
By doing so, she forged a unique realm. A world where the imaginary and the real coexisted, one completely under her control, where she could adjust everything at will.
At last, she could paint the sky with stars, illuminate the land with the sun and moon, and establish laws. Not just the ones already known, but even those that had never existed before.
Even if a concept defied logic and had no place in conventional reality, as long as Dawn could imagine it, she could create it from nothing.
These laws might only function within this world, making it a fabricated dream in essence. But for the beings who lived inside it, it was real.
Indeed, this was still not true creation in the absolute sense. But no great achievement is ever accomplished overnight.
Even the [Primordial Light] took seven whole days to forge the world.
Dawn firmly believed that such a monumental breakthrough would lay the foundation for future progress.
She decided to officially name this series of experiments [Creation of the world Project], and the world she had created, both illusory and real, was called [Illusory World].
As soon as the [Illusory World] took shape, the progress of [Creation of the world Project] became much smoother.
Taking advantage of its dual nature, half-real and half-imaginary, Dawn went a step further.
With the help of her close friend, the Fox God, she transformed the once massive and cumbersome physical world into a single painting, known as the [Heaven, Earth, Mountain, River Map].
Through this method, living beings could enter the [Illusory World] via the scroll and truly experience life within the extraordinary world crafted by the Spirit Fox Shrine Maiden and the Fox God.
It was a miraculous fusion of reality and illusion.
Originally, Dawn planned to perfect the structure of the [Illusory World] first, gradually expanding its reach, welcoming beings from other worlds to migrate there, and ultimately refining its reality. Until it became a truly complete world.
However…
Perhaps her attempt to create a world had unknowingly triggered some cosmic mechanism, disturbing something that should have remained untouched.
A terrifying force, known as the [Apocalypse], suddenly awoke.
Without reason or warning, it began to spread its dreadful influence, like a plague, accelerating the decay of countless worlds.
To be honest, even in the vast memories of the Spirit Fox Shrine Maiden, Violet could find very few records related to that nameless, formless entity.
Its true nature, whether it was a tangible being, what powers it possessed, how it manifested, was all unknown.
Its name, history, and origins?
A complete mystery.
But one thing was certain. The [Ancestral Dragon] had fallen in its shadow.
A god that should have been eternal and indestructible had perished.
The demons in the [Ancient Spirit Realm] were born from its mere will.
These were undeniable facts.
If no way was found to stop its spread, then even if every demonic creature in existence were eradicated.
The end of everything in the world would only be a matter of time.