Myriad Heavens: Rise of the Rune God

Chapter 221: Chapter 221: The Gathering 2

Zeus and Odin found each other within the first hour. The history between them was long and complicated in the specific way that histories between very powerful beings who had occasionally been in direct competition tended to be. They stood together looking at the unfamiliar sky and talked anyway — carefully at first, each one measuring the distance that time had put between them, then less carefully as the afternoon went on.

"You look the same," Odin said at one point.

"So do you," Zeus said.

They both knew this was true in the way that it was always true for beings like them and didn’t mean what it would mean for someone who aged.

"The humans," Odin said eventually, looking at the constructed horizon. "You heard what Wukong said when he cut the call. Special information."

"About the exchange."

"About more than the exchange." Odin’s single eye moved to the distant glow that was visible even from here — the wormhole, permanent and steady on the horizon. "He wouldn’t have called us all here just for an event announcement."

Zeus was quiet for a moment. "No," he agreed. "He wouldn’t."

Thor and Erlang Shen ended up together by coincidence — they had both moved to the same clear space at the edge of the gathering for the same reason, which was that large gatherings were easier to tolerate from the edges. They made eye contact, made the mutual assessment that beings with combat as their primary common language make very quickly, and started talking.

The conversation covered technique, power systems, the differences between how their respective cultivation paths had developed, what the upper ceiling of each looked like. It was entirely genuine on both sides. No politics. No history. Just two people who fought well talking about fighting, which was the most straightforward conversation available in a gathering this complicated.

Ares drifted over within an hour, because he could hear a conversation about fighting from very far away. He inserted himself without asking, which was also very Ares, and the conversation absorbed him without much disruption because the common language was the common language regardless of who was speaking it.

Loki moved through the gathering with the particular ease of someone who was excellent at conversations and had no intention of staying in any of them. He talked to everyone. He was genuinely charming, which was always the most unsettling version of Loki. Several beings followed him with their peripheral awareness — Heimdall openly, others less so. At one point he ended up near Anubis, which was an unusual pairing, and they spoke quietly for a few minutes before Loki moved on. Nobody caught what they said.

Thoth and Athena had found each other within the first thirty minutes. They moved to a quieter part of the gathering and compared notes in low voices. Between the two of them they had already reconstructed a significant portion of the situation from the dimensional evidence — the nature of the space they were in, the foreign energy signature, the permanent structure of the wormhole on the horizon. Their picture was mostly correct. The parts they were missing were the parts that required information rather than observation.

"The wormhole is stable," Athena said. "Not temporarily stable. Permanently, structurally stable. Something is holding it from both sides."

"Two sources," Thoth agreed, looking at his notes. "The energy signatures are different. Same class of power but different origin."

"Two Universal Wills."

"That’s my conclusion."

They both looked at Wukong, who was still on his cliff, still eating, apparently unbothered by the increasingly large crowd of ancient divine beings who had accumulated around him.

"He’s been here a while," Athena said.

"Long enough to build a planet," Thoth noted.

Jesus and Guanyin had found each other early and settled into a quiet conversation that showed no signs of ending. The space around them had a quality that discouraged interruption — not as a ward or a barrier, just as a natural feature of two presences that were not competing with each other for anything. Several beings who moved close enough to hear them thought better of it and moved elsewhere without being entirely sure why.

Ra and the Jade Emperor met with the careful formality of two entities of similar weight who had never had cause for direct conflict and had therefore never established any real familiarity either. They were polite. They were extremely polite. They discussed things that were safe to discuss, which meant they discussed almost everything except what they were both actually thinking about.

Poseidon had returned to the constructed ocean’s edge several times during the day. Each time he stood there looking at it with the same expression of mild professional dissatisfaction. At some point he extended his hand and adjusted something in the water’s deep structure — a correction to the salinity distribution, or the thermal layering, or something else entirely. The ocean settled into a slightly different pattern. He looked at it, seemed marginally more satisfied, and walked back to the main gathering.

The oldest dragon sovereign drifted toward Wukong during the afternoon and stood at the base of the cliff, looking up.

"How bad is it?" he asked. Direct and quiet.

Wukong looked down at him. "Depends on what you’ve been doing with your time."

The dragon considered this. He was old enough that the answer to that question was complicated. He went back to where the others were waiting.

Ares declared loudly at the three-hour mark that he was bored. He said so again at the four-hour mark. And the five-hour mark. Several people told him to be patient. He gave each of them the same look.

The question that ran through every conversation, in various forms, was the same: What does inter-universal exchange actually mean for beings at our level? What is on the other side of that wormhole, and how strong is it?

Nobody had the full answer. That was what they were all here for.

After a full day, when the last stragglers had arrived and the catching-up had run its natural course, Wukong stood up.

One gesture, nothing elaborate. The gathering went quiet in stages — the quieter beings first, the louder ones after, and eventually even Ares stopped mid-sentence and looked over.

Wukong looked at all of them. This collection of every god, every ancient being, every cultivator and dragon and old power that Earth had ever produced, standing on a planet he had built from memory because the original was somewhere else now.

He took a breath and told them everything.

He started with Orion.

How he found him — a young human in the middle of an alien war that should have killed him, fighting with everything he had and still losing ground. How Wukong had stepped in not because he was obligated to but because something about the kid was worth stepping in for. How he had watched Orion take that intervention and keep building on it, year after year, until the civilization under his leadership had climbed from where humanity started to a full Type 5 on the civilizational scale. Technology and cultivation woven together into something neither path could have produced alone. The humans they had all left behind had not simply survived. They had become something none of them had anticipated.

Then the clone. How the Orion in this universe was not the original — not the boy Wukong had helped, not the man who built the civilization — but a copy. A fragment that had lived a full independent life while the real one existed in a completely different universe. How the real Orion was also Runar, a reincarnator sent by something called the Multiversal Truck-kun Institution, a soul that had moved through more than one life before arriving in this one.

Then the wormhole. How Runar built it. How it expanded to light years in diameter under Crimson Lotus’s power. How an entire solar system — Earth, every planet, the Dyson Swarm, every ship and station and living being — had moved through it in a single coordinated migration. How Wukong had guided it with his own hands, holding the gravitational coherence of the whole system while it descended through the tunnel.

Then Willith and William. The two Universal Wills meeting through the wormhole. The negotiation that resulted in the permanent bridge between universes and the inter-universal exchange now less than two months away. And what William’s universe actually was — the real power ceiling there, what galaxy-level meant on that side, how their cultivation systems differed from this universe’s mechanics in ways that made direct comparison complicated.

He told them that Earth was in the other universe now. Permanent. Not coming back.

And the planet they were standing on was what he had built afterward, because he needed somewhere to stand.

Silence.

It held for longer than silence usually held in a gathering this size.

Then Zeus spoke. "A mortal human led a Type 5 civilization."

"Yes," Wukong said.

Zeus was quiet. When he spoke again his voice had lost its usual authority — not weakened, just set aside. "We left them."

"You did."

No judgment in it. Just the fact of it, sitting in the open where everyone could look at it.

Odin hadn’t moved. His single eye was fixed on the wormhole’s glow on the horizon. Thor stood beside him with his jaw set, looking at the same point. Neither of them said anything for a long moment.

Athena and Thoth had stopped comparing notes. They were both looking at Wukong with the expressions of people whose careful reconstruction of the situation had just been revealed to be missing most of the important parts.

Ra’s solar energy had dimmed without him seeming to notice. He was looking at the ground.

Guanyin’s expression hadn’t changed — it never did, not visibly — but her hands had gone still in her lap and she was looking toward where Earth would have been if Earth were still here.

Anubis said nothing. He had spent longer than most with the weight of irreversible things.

Loki, for once, wasn’t smiling.

The oldest dragon lifted his head slowly. "The humans we left behind," he said. "They built something we couldn’t have imagined."

"Yes," Wukong said.

"And one of them moved a solar system."

"Yes."

The dragon was quiet for a long moment. Then, very low: "Good."

Jesus hadn’t spoken through any of it. He had listened from the moment Wukong started talking. He looked at Wukong now and there was something in it that wasn’t quite a question.

Wukong met his eyes. "They’re fine," he said. "They made it through."

It wasn’t the complete answer. It was the true part.

Ares broke the silence that followed, because Ares always broke silences that went on too long. "This exchange," he said. "Combat competitions. Cross-universal battles." He looked at Wukong. "You’re saying the beings on that side are stronger."

"Most of their top ones, yes," Wukong said.

Ares went through several expressions quickly and landed on something that was, unmistakably, satisfaction. "Finally," he said. "It has been too long."

Several conversations started at once after that — arguments, questions, beings processing the same information from completely different angles simultaneously. The silence broke apart into the general noise of a very large, very powerful, very complicated gathering of beings who had just been handed more to think about than they had walked in expecting.

Wukong sat back down on his cliff.

Someone called over from the crowd — he didn’t catch who. "What are you going to do?"

"Train," he said. "Two months isn’t long."

He looked at the wormhole’s glow on the horizon, steady and permanent in the unfamiliar sky.

He finished his peach.

Around him, the gathering continued.