Chapter 297: Chapter 296 – Balance

Luna stood before a singular star system. 

For many years she had watched this star system take shape under her guidance. She had constructed the physical laws, and with her influence, this star system pulled itself together and took shape. 

The result was a pair of stars that rotated around each other, along with three planets that orbited this binary system. 

The planets had gone from dust clouds, to small asteroids, to celestial bodies riddled with craters and primordial lava. But over time, they cooled into blossoming exoplanets. 

Then came the elements that she sprinkled through the crusts and molten cores. The massive oceans, the tectonic continents, and the pin sized islands. 

With Luna’s command that grew more profound every year, the miracles of Creation and Life likewise grew more frequent and varied. 

There was only one thing Luna had to make peace with, and she had done so long, long ago. 

There was no cheating the process of growing a galaxy. And the constraints that Time placed on forging her existence with that of the Archons could only be circumvented so much. 

The result…

Millions…

And billions of years…

Luna aged alongside her blossoming galaxy. The process to accept the concepts from the Archons was not a fast one, and so for many of the first hundreds of millions of years, Luna was unable to even get a star to form. 

As Oraios and Yao said before, nothing would happen without her direct command. She was responsible for forming every physical law, every atom, every element, every speck of dust, every planet, and every star. She herself drove the growth and development of the entire galaxy, not a single particle moving without her explicit command. 

She herself must act like the concepts, be the concepts. She was no longer borrowing their power and wielding it like a sword. Instead, her very existence must become that which allows the physical universe to function. 

That’s what it meant to be an Archon, to become Creation and Life. 

Luckily, after the first several thousand years, Time began to become skewed in Luna’s mind. She experienced its passage, but unlike when she was young, years didn’t feel so long. 

By now, even a million years wasn’t an incomprehensibly long period of time. 

As for what was going on in the main universe… she didn’t know, and she didn’t think about it much. 

She just kept accepting the power she was being given and focusing on developing her galaxy. 

Now though, after approximately 6 billion years of development, Luna was finally about to infuse higher concepts into her galaxy. 

Up until now, she had merely been constructing the celestial bodies themselves. But with the foundation set, she could finally begin to grow something on top of it. 

Life. 

There were the materials and physical energies. 

Then, there was the magical counterpart. Mana, Flux, Aether, Dust. 

Luna had wished to put these things to use for a long time. Specifically, she wished to create Life itself. 

And now, she finally could. 

The Archons forged Luna with the concepts as they became necessary, constantly growing her from the lower concepts to the higher concepts. There were different levels to the concepts, after all. They didn’t wish to start from the top. 

So Luna’s galaxy grew as she learned the process of its growth. She learned the laws, how they interacted with each other, how they mixed through materials, how they operated at different scales, and more. This all accumulated into the galaxy she had now. 

And now, with the celestial bodies developed, she could grow something atop them. 

She started with the simplest form of life. From her own body she spawned a single celled organism with a sprinkling of RNA. 

It was an organism that operated purely according to the laws of physics, reacting to its environment, not proactively operating. Yet, this thing could procreate automatically, absorbing elements from its surroundings and constructing more of itself. 

With a suitable location in the form of hot springs on a tropical island, surrounded by all the necessary elements of life, this little spawn began to rapidly grow and multiply. 

However, it didn’t just grow. Some of the cells randomly died, and others mutated. 

This was Chaos at work, disorder that randomly twisted causality and usually brought about destruction. 

But with destruction came regrowth, and the potential for something to change. 

Change and development through conflict. This was possibly the most fundamental concept behind the evolution of a living universe. 

It was why a universe couldn’t operate strictly with Order, nor with strictly Chaos. A universe with only Order would become nothing beyond what it already was. And a universe with only Chaos would drive itself to nothing. 

One was the lack of change, and the other was nothing but change. 

With these two things, a universe that grew was possible. 

With growth, both Order and Chaos would become more pronounced. And in the end, they would produce something like the main universe that Luna came from. With two factions, Heaven and Hell, that represented the concepts and their clashing through battles between angels and demons. 

It was so simple, yet so enigmatic. 

In the moment though, Luna saw these two profound concepts clash through the mutation of a rapidly growing cluster of cells. 

And with that, she waited. 

Millions of years passed, and the cells only spread beyond the small puddle she had left them in. 

But Luna wasn’t just leaving them there to randomly mutate. She actively attempted to guide their mutations into other forms, giving these cells all kinds of functions and their life forms got increasingly complex. 

She was the driving force behind life and its growth. She herself was battling the chaos that constantly sought to ruin her little creatures. 

And after tens and hundreds of millions of years, she saw more and more results. 

Bacteria, amoeba, and other microscopic organisms. Their functions were far more complex than before as they began to get carried beyond the little puddles and inserted into other environments, which introduced more chaos. 

But with more chaos came more order. Luna’s power constantly grew alongside her creatures, and while her creatures never grew beyond the stability she could provide, the chaos also couldn’t kill anything within that threshold. 

A balance that continued to scale through the years. 

And it only scaled faster as Luna’s acceptance of the concepts came quicker. 

She continued to evolve Life, as well as spread it across her galaxy. 

From planet to planet, each one more unique than the next, she planted the seeds of Life that spread and grew with her support. 

Multicellular organisms began to form, as well as macroscopic organisms. 

It didn’t take billions of years to evolve with her deliberate hand in the mix By repeatedly combating Chaos and taking advantage of destruction to induce change, Luna was able to constantly grow her creatures. 

They became more complex, in both body and intelligence. Some grew to hunt, others grew to hide. Ecosystems began to form as more and more creatures with wild variations were generated. 

Luna watched as millions of years kept passing. She watched the evolution of creatures while each of her planets continued to shift in their own tectonic patterns. New ecological challenges were introduced, but her creatures kept adapting to fit the challenge it was presented with. 

Bigger and bigger they grew, until her little spawns had grown feet to traverse land, and mutated plants had spread their roots to eat at the minerals on the dry dirt. 

It was more exposive than when she first started. As the mutations became larger, her expertise likewise grew. Luna was both inducing the change in her creatures and learning from it. 

From algae, to fungus, to bushes, to trees and flowers. 

From little lake spores, to amphibious reptiles, to soft land walkers. 

Generation upon generation, year after year. 

Luna became more eager as Life blossomed in her galaxy. 

And finally, after millions and millions of years of evolution and change…

The first primordial humans began to roam her planets. 

………

For how many billions of years had she repeatedly died?

Iris didn’t know, nor did she care. 

Time had become irrelevant now. 

The desire to annihilate and kill that damned Archon was the only thing that compelled her ego. 

To become Annihilation itself. Without form, without prejudice. The most equal form of destruction and ruin. 

At first, Iris had merely died and revived, repeatedly and without fail. Every single time she died, she would experience a small bout of eternity before coming back to be killed by the cyclops once again. 

This had repeated an uncountable number of times. And over time, subtle changes took place as her body, her existence, was reformed. 

Or, it would be more appropriate to say that she had been reduced to something without form. 

She no longer had a soul. 

She no longer had a mind. 

She no longer had a body. 

She herself was becoming Annihilation and Death incarnate. 

The only form she retained was that of her ego.

She didn’t need anything other than her Will and the concepts that were being integrated into her very existence. 

After all, a soul, a mind, a body, was form and structure that only limited her. And any kind of form was contradictory to Chaos. With Chaos, there were no bounds. 

And every time Iris threw away the mortal shell that she used to be, she became more and more able to stand against that cyclops. She was able to resist his Annihilation, and Death was no longer degrading. If anything, she learned to relish in the chaos of nothingness. 

The time between her deaths grew shorter. 

Her power grew stronger. 

First it was survival.

Then it was retaliation. 

So many years passed. 

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And as Luna’s galaxy began to grow and thrive with new Life, Iris similarly underwent certain bursts in growth. 

Until finally…

“DIE!!!”

Iris opened her maws wide, and tore the cyclops apart. 

With unbridled violence and no other thought than killing the man in front of her, Iris ripped the cyclops to shreds, her power of annihilation reducing his existence to nothing and sending him to Death. 

He also attacked, wounding Iris just as much. Both of them were reduced to the smallest bits in mere moments. 

But for the first time. 

“...I won.”

Iris remained alive just long enough to see the cyclops disappear. 

Then, the lingering power from the cyclops’ attack wiped her out. 

Within moments, both of them escaped death and returned to their all too familiar black space. 

For the first time in billions of years, they didn’t immediately attack each other. 

Iris snarled. 

“I’ve finally surpassed you.”

“But you don’t yet have everything.”

The cyclops took a stance, no longer arrogant, but not showing any form of backing down. 

“So come and take it.”

“I’d do it even if you begged me not to!”

Iris charged, and began battle once more. 

She never died again. 

………

2 billion more years passed. 

Luna sat in that space of nothingness. 

In her hands, was her child galaxy. 

Her omniscient gaze pierced every atom, every photon, and every ripple of energy throughout the entire galaxy. 

And upon the planets, she gazed upon the civilizations that built themselves with their sentient wisdom. 

No longer was her galaxy filled with mere animals. 

She had created true Life, that which could evolve itself and attain higher power. 

She infused magic into some, and directed others toward metal technology. They grew over thousands and thousands of years. 

Until some became almost identical to Earth, and some became centers of catastrphic magical power. 

They thrived in the fruits of their intelligence. They grew with each passing day, only reaching higher and higher. Some even went beyond their star, trailblazing a path toward new homes and new opportunities for prosperity. 

Given enough time, they would conquer the galaxy. 

And every single one of them were Luna’s creation, her children. 

She allowed every single one of them to exist, and in a way, they were no different from her own hands and feet. 

After all, she herself was the concepts that upheld the function of this galaxy. She was the foundation for its existence. Without her, there would be nothing. Therefore, she was everything that existed upon her. 

A true god. 

Compared to merely comprehending the same concept, it was an insurmountable difference. 

Luna was now beginning to understand how truly powerless she had always been. 

But that didn’t matter. None of it did. The only thing that matter was ehr galaxy, and her role to play. 

Luna continued to grow her galaxy, making it more prosperous, more lively. 

But for a while now, she had already begun to notice something off. 

Chaos had weakened. 

It wasn’t exerting much influence. Ever since she began to create Life, it had slowly gotten weaker, until now when it barely had a place in her galaxy. It surely couldn’t break through her Order. 

While it was fine at first, Luna began to notice stagnation in her galaxy. 

Her people were reduced to complacency. Rulers became tyrants, their power unchecked. Populations dwindled as civilizations turned to dystopias. Nobody wished to challenge the difficulties that late with gathering more power, or developing technology. They were contented with doing nothing, staying where they were, and indulging in the luxuries that had been accumulated by those before them. 

There wasn’t enough Chaos to balance the unchanging nature of Order. Not enough ruin to compel growth. Not enough destruction to compel strength. 

But Luna couldn’t introduce Chaos. That was her opposite. She could only continue to infuse order into her galaxy, continuing as she always did, never deviating from her path. 

But that didn’t mean she didn’t see the problems. 

It wasn’t an issue with morality or sympathy. 

It was because she knew the balance had been broken. 

She knew how crucial Chaos was. 

That was when her galaxy froze. 

Luna held her galaxy atop her palms. 

But now, there was another person in front of her. 

“...Sister.”

Luna gazed at Iris, who had suddenly appeared. 

Iris no longer retained her form. She was now merely a mass of pure Annihilation and Death, looking like a black hole that sought to ruin everything. 

Of course, Luna wasn’t any lesser in power. She was Iris’ opposite. She looked the same as she always did, dressed in a silver blue robe with draping silver hair and a pristine face. She was the epitome of beauty and grace. 

These two people stood opposite to each other, the galaxy between them. 

Iris took a look at the galaxy, and in an instant she realized the problem with it. 

“Too strict. Too pompous. Not enough fire and death.”

“...”

Luna said nothing, but she also didn’t stop Iris as she reached out her own hands. 

And her power was infused into the galaxy. 

Iris’ Annihilation and Death spread among the lights of life. 

Stars began to explode, black holes formed and swallowed nebulas whole. Planets began to crack. 

And civilizations began to burn. 

Revolution. 

War. 

Epic battles. 

Evil. 

And Good to fight it. 

Both of them watched as the galaxy was turned on its head. Iris’ Chaos matched Luna’s Order perfectly. 

And finally, the galaxy was once again allowed to prosper and grow. 

Through this, Luna confirmed something in her mind. 

Order and Chaos were not synonymous with Good and Evil. 

Too much or too little of one spawned evil. 

It was only with a balance did one finally find Good. 

And because of that…

Luna couldn’t allow Iris to leave and remove her influence from the galaxy. 

And likewise, Iris wouldn’t allow Luna to control the galaxy as she wished. 

The two struck a balance with each other, realizing their necessity. 

And when they came to this conclusion…

The Archons reappeared.