Myriad Heavens: Rise of the Rune God

Chapter 233: Chapter 234: The First Match

The first pairing appeared in the holographic display above the arena.

It showed a Supreme from Willith’s universe fighting against one of the ancient gods from William’s universe. In William’s terms, that ancient god sat at the galaxy realm.

Before the fight started, the arena itself was worth describing. From the outside, it looked like a small compressed sphere floating above the platform. It was small enough that a person could walk around it in just a few minutes. But from the inside, it was an entire galaxy. William had built it specially for this exchange. He had compressed a full empty galaxy into a contained space. This made it look manageable from the spectators’ view, but it gave the fighters inside plenty of room to move at their true speeds without destroying anything outside the barrier.

The crowd watched everything through viewing constructs that broadcast the interior of the arena in real time.

Eira walked into the arena first. She was a tall woman and one of the older Supremes in Willith’s delegation. She had studied Rene’s framework and understood the mechanical gap between the two sides. She walked to her position without any arrogance. Her cultivation base ran steady, adjusted as much as she could manage after three days of exposure to the higher pressure of William Universe.

Apollo took his position across from her.

From inside the galaxy-arena, they were separated by several light years of empty space. But from the spectators’ perspective outside the compressed sphere, they looked only a few centimeters apart.

The match began.

They crossed the distance between them in less than a picosecond. To understand how fast that was, remember that light takes roughly one hundred thousand years to cross a standard galaxy. Eira and Apollo crossed several light years of that space in a fraction of a trillionth of a second. Their speeds went beyond anything that had a simple number attached to it. They simply moved, and they were already there.

The match began.

Eira opened with one of her strongest technique immediately. She had no interest in feeling him out — she knew the gap and she knew that the longer the fight ran the worse the suppression would work against her. She pushed everything into the first exchange.

Eira used her Soul Fracture Palm technique. It drove forward with her full Supreme output. The technique sent fractures spreading through the soul and cultivation base of anything it touched. It completely bypassed physical defenses. The attack landed cleanly on Apollo’s chest.

The shockwave from a single Supreme-level technique hitting a galaxy-realm divine being at that speed did exactly what shockwaves at that scale do.

Every single matter in the galaxy(planet, suns, asteroid etc) ceased to exist. They were not just destroyed — they were completely disintegrated. The matter that made up every celestial body in the entire compressed galaxy turned into energy in the first instant of the shockwave’s expansion. Stars collapsed and then were gone. Asteroid fields turned into light and then became nothing. The spatial fabric cracked across the entire interior from edge to edge. Fracture lines spread outward from the impact point at speeds that reached the galaxy’s borders in the same picosecond the attack landed.

By the time the first exchange ended, the galaxy-arena contained nothing but two beings and empty cracked space. All matter in the galaxy was gone after just the first exchange.

The crowd outside watched through their viewing constructs in complete silence for a moment.

Apollo had not moved backward at all. His galaxy-realm output met Eira’s technique right at the point of contact, and the fractures closed before they could spread. The mechanical difference between their power qualities was clear right away. It was not just raw force, but the density and character of the energy itself. This energy operated on a fundamentally different basis. Eira felt it in her hands the moment her technique landed.

She reset in zero time and came back with her Void Current Strike. This technique converted kinetic force into spatial distortion. It attacked the space around Apollo rather than Apollo directly. She drove it forward at speeds that lapped the galaxy’s interior multiple times before the technique reached its target. The distortion field wrapped around the entire volume of the arena.

Apollo read her move perfectly. He sidestepped through a dimension fold that covered ten light years in a single step. Then he responded with raw galaxy-level force. He used no technique — just pure output directed at Eira’s current position. He knew exactly where she would be before she even arrived there.

The strike hit her across fifteen light years of instantaneous travel. The impact sent her flying backward through the cracked spatial fabric. She tore through seventeen layers of fractured space before she could stop her momentum. Each layer shattered around her as she passed through it. The debris turned into energy on contact with the force she carried.

She stabilized. She was still standing.

The cracked spatial fabric around them was now collapsing in large sections. Big chunks of space itself folded inward and disappeared. The structural damage from the exchange was too great for the arena to repair on its own. William had to actively maintain the barrier from outside to stop the interior from simply ceasing to exist.

Eira looked at the destroyed galaxy around her. It was empty, cracked, and collapsing piece by piece.

She had expected this. She pushed forward again.

Then Apollo raised his hand.

He activated Solar Sovereignty.

Light erupted from his palm, but it was not ordinary physical light. It was the divine expression of a being linked to the sun, truth, and perfection since before recorded human history. The light filled the entire galaxy interior in the same instant it was released. Every corner of the cracked empty space became saturated at the same time. It moved at speeds that made normal light look completely stationary.

The remaining spatial fabric that had not already collapsed began to come apart under its warmth. It did not happen violently. It happened gently, like old structures finally given permission to stop holding themselves together.

Woven through this light, invisible to almost everyone watching, were traces of something deeper.

Eira felt the power balance shift the moment Solar Sovereignty activated. Her defenses, built to handle Laws and Rules, found nothing to hold onto. The principle traces woven into Apollo’s innate ability moved through her defensive structures without engaging them at all.

Three exchanges passed in total. Each one covered light years in fractions of picoseconds. Each impact created destruction that would have ended entire Galaxy spanning civilizations if any matter had still been left to destroy.

Then Eira went down.

At the end of the fight, the arena interior was a collapsed empty nothing. There was no space, no matter, and no structure left. Just two beings floating in the compressed void that had once been a full galaxy.

William quietly rebuilt the galaxy for the next match. It took him about two seconds.

The arena crowd erupted in cheers. It was not mocking. It was the genuine noise of a combat crowd that had just watched something real and powerful.

Eira got back to her feet. She nodded once toward Apollo and walked off the arena floor with her head held level.

Runar had watched the entire fight.

He had known the outcome long before the first technique landed. The outcome was not what held his focus.

The moment Solar Sovereignty activated, his full attention locked onto what was inside it — the principle traces.

Every ancient god and ancient cultivator present carried fragments of principles woven into their innate divine abilities. They had not comprehended these consciously. Instead, the fragments had accumulated naturally over millions of years of existence. These principles had settled into the fabric of their being through sheer age and depth of identity. Each one was different. Each one carried something real.

Runar read Apollo’s Solar Sovereignty and identified:

Principle of Radiance — the truth underlying light as a fundamental expression of existence. Not physical light, but the concept of revelation, of things being made known. About 3% present in the trace.

Principle of Truth — fragments of the deeper law governing the relationship between reality and perception. What things actually are versus what they appear to be. About 2% present.

He filed both away and expanded his perception outward to the rest of the arena. He read every ancient god and cultivator at the same time. Their innate abilities were visible to his perception even when they were at rest.

He saw Odin’s All-Sight with traces of the Principle of Omniscience — the law governing complete knowledge — and fragments of the Principle of Fate, the relationship between what is known and what must occur.

Thor’s Divine Thunder carried traces of the Principle of Inevitability — the law that certain forces, once set in motion, cannot be stopped — and fragments of the Principle of Judgment, the truth underlying consequence.

Zeus’s Divine Authority held traces of the Principle of Dominion — the law governing the relationship between power and legitimacy — and fragments of the Principle of Order, the structure underlying organized existence.

Anubis’s Death Walk contained traces of the Principle of Transition — the law governing movement between states of existence — and fragments of the Principle of Finality, the truth governing endings.

Guanyin’s Boundless Compassion included traces of the Principle of Harmony — the law underlying the resolution of opposing forces — and fragments of the Principle of Mercy, the truth governing the relationship between power and restraint.

The Jade Emperor’s Celestial Mandate had traces of the Principle of Hierarchy — the law underlying ordered systems of power — and fragments of the Principle of Heaven, the truth governing the relationship between higher and lower existence.

The Oldest Dragon’s Primordial Breath carried traces of the Principle of Origin — the law underlying the first expression of things — and fragments of the Principle of Eternity, the truth governing existence across unlimited time.

Medusa’s Petrifying Gaze held traces of the Principle of Stillness — the law underlying the cessation of motion and change — and fragments of the Principle of Permanence, the truth governing things that cannot be undone.

Ra’s Solar Descent contained traces of the Principle of Creation — the law underlying generative force — and fragments of the Principle of Cycles, the truth governing repeating patterns across time.

Nezha’s Lotus Flame included traces of the Principle of Rebirth — the law underlying renewal after destruction — and fragments of the Principle of Defiance, the truth governing resistance against what should be inevitable.

Erlang Shen’s Third Eye carried traces of the Principle of Perception — the law underlying the relationship between observer and observed — and fragments of the Principle of Penetration, the truth governing what can be seen through and what cannot.

Runar read all of it in the span of just one match.

He settled back and thought to himself: What a haul. And the tournament has barely started.

He already had four principles at peak comprehension. The fragments he was reading now were like seeds — incomplete and partial. They would require his own comprehension work to develop into full principles. But they were real and diverse. He had collected more of them in one afternoon than centuries of isolated cultivation would have produced.

He kept reading.

Willith’s projection was doing something different with the same information. She watched Solar Sovereignty activate and felt the principle traces with the perception of a Universal Will. She could not comprehend principles the way cultivators did. But she could absorb the traces and weave them into her origin. As her origin became more complex, the next generation of geniuses born inside her would gain access to new paths that had never existed before.

She absorbed everything quietly and said nothing about it.

William was watching entirely different things. He focused on Eira’s techniques — Soul Fracture Palm, Void Current Strike, and her defensive structures under Apollo’s pressure. These were approaches that his universe’s unified system had never developed. Every technique that activated in the arena went straight into his comprehension.

His academic minority, scattered through the crowd, were doing the same thing in an explicit way. They took notes and shared observations through cultivation links. A running analysis built in real time.

His combat majority were watching the fights and picking future targets.

A young fighter from William’s side leaned toward his companion. "Did you see that Soul Fracture Palm?"

"The soul-targeting technique. Yes."

"We don’t have anything that works like that."

"No."

"I want to fight whoever uses it next."

His companion looked at him. "The woman who just used it is a Supreme. You’re only galaxy realm."

"I know," the young fighter said. "That’s why it’s interesting."

William rebuilt the galaxy arena in two seconds, and the second match pairing appeared above it.

Erlang Shen walked in. His third eye opened as he took his position. The divine eye scanned his opponent and the arena at the same time. From outside the compressed sphere, the crowd watched through the viewing constructs as the interior galaxy registered the scan and every remaining structure in it shivered.

Across from him, one of Willith’s mid-level combat practitioners took position. This being specialized in a Law combination that William’s universe had no equivalent for. His fighting style had been built entirely around the mechanical advantages of Willith’s system.

Runar noted the principle traces in Erlang Shen’s Third Eye and filed them away.

Then he turned his attention to Willith’s fighter and read what that side’s system actually looked like in motion.

Still going, he thought.

He kept reading.

Willith kept absorbing.

William kept noting techniques.

The exchange continued, match by match. Each fight produced something that every significant being in the arena was using for their own purposes at the same time.

The tournament was the surface. The deep comprehension happening underneath it was the actual event.