Beyond the Bloodline-Chapter 396: Cosmic Transfiguration
It started with a single line.
A small crack ripped across Miranda’s skin from the spot where Gáe Bulg had pierced her chest.
Then the cracks spread rapidly, racing across her body to the crown of her head and the soles of her feet.
A faint purple light began to seep from the cracks, racing down her limbs and releasing small eruptions of energy.
Then, suddenly, the energy exploded out of her body with the force of a supernova, erupting in a blinding flash and sending FTL shockwaves that fractured the barriers of all the universes in ZWF4105.
An energy singularity formed, Miranda’s Cosmic Hearth pouring its energy uncontrollably into her body at the centre, intensified the singularity’s reality distortion.
Her heart thudded violently in her chest, and the enormous flow of cosmic energy coursing through it gradually forced out the spear lodged in her body purely through sheer pressure and force.
Anything within her body and soul that wasn’t part of ’Mirandelinea’ was expelled by the immense Authority of the Cosmos’ Realm Progression System.
Her soul, refined over the nine stages of the Firmament Realm, tempered, expanded, and aligned with higher cosmic energy frequencies, was flooded with so much cosmic energy that not a single gap remained within it.
Beneath the cracking skin of her curling body, her cells were reconstructed, drained of old energy and filled with new, and soon her cracked skin flaked off like a snake shedding, revealing pristine skin underneath.
Miranda’s vision blurred as an immense migraine and piercing pain hit her while the spear was forced out of her body, and then a strange understanding dawned on her.
Like Jamie, Sarina, and John before her, Miranda instinctively understood, after a billion years, the true nature of exactly what Angela Cathedral had turned her into.
The mutated Cosmic Being that Angela had made her.
The holes in her body sealed instantly, her flesh regenerating in nanoseconds.
Power overflowed from Miranda’s body as the limits that had bound her for hundreds of millions of years shattered.
The energy festering within her for aeons erupted with such intensity that it overwhelmed her senses, faster than her brain could process.
The Origin Cores of her numerous Authorities within her soul greedily absorbed the excessive energy, along with the cosmic energy spilling uncontrollably from her Cosmic Hearth.
The Cores with the greatest compatibility, which she had long ago decided and set aside after passing the Law Echo realm, Cores whose law energy had been fully assimilated into her soul, slowly drifted toward one another inside her soul, like planets drawn by each other’s gravity.
Miranda’s Origin Cores, with her Violet Inferno Authority Origin Core at the centre, collided with one another, their outer shells breaking apart as the law energy inside began to mix, a necessary automatic process for the new level her existence had been elevated to.
Her Authorities of Lightning, Force, Destruction, Light, and Creation slowly blended and merged with fire.
The moment this fusion was complete and a unified expression of these Authorities was born, her Cosmic Hearth began to shrink, the entire pocket universe compressing and contorting as it distorted reality and funnelled into her body, the process continuing despite the immense pain it caused her.
Her Origin Cores of Space, Containment, Transmutation, Amplification, and Synchronisation clashed and fused, while the pocket universe was reconstructed and reforged, the energy inside temporarily poured into her body for ’safekeeping’ during the reconstruction.
But Miranda’s body, already overloaded, barely had space for this.
Because of this, her other Origin Core fusions paused, and the immense energy was consumed to strengthen her body and soul, her heart making squishing sounds she could hear as it strained to distribute the energy across her Existential Aspects, elevating them to a new level.
This was happening just seconds after the first elevation, and her existence hadn’t even adjusted to that level of power.
Stage barriers didn’t exist as Miranda’s power kept climbing, flooding the immense gulf of power before her and pushing her to another new level.
However, the energy problem worsened, because with this new level came a mandatory increase in energy, a multiplicative boost based on the energy she already had.
The Cosmic System, as if oblivious to Miranda’s already overloading energy, calculated her reserves and began multiplying them, pulling the ambient cosmic energy across the entire cluster toward her body.
Clouds of cosmic energy surrounding entire universes were ripped away and drawn to Miranda, forcing her body to mutate, continuously regenerating and breaking down as it tried to adapt to the excess power.
Her existence was pushed to the peak of this ’Supreme’ level, forcing more of the energy to be consumed to create room for even more energy to flood in, a vicious cycle that left Miranda completely immobilised as she struggled to force the fusion of her Origin Cores to recreate her Cosmic Hearth and expel the excess power.
Energy was consumed to fuse her Origin Cores, regenerate and strengthen her constantly breaking down body, and form new energy cores around her heart, and even that wasn’t enough to counter the amount flooding in.
Deryn and the two Lesser Supremes forced their bodies to flee from the swirl of energy forming a massive accretion disk with Miranda at its centre, but the rushing waves of cosmic energy pressed against them, pushing them back toward her, where her uncontrolled flames born from the fusion of her Authorities incinerated anything that came close, deliberately left untamed by Miranda to burn off the excess energy building within her.
The Masters of the ZWF4105 universes watched with pale faces, powerless as cosmic energy continued to rush toward Miranda in massive waves that could kill them if they stepped out from their hiding spots behind the universes on the far side of the cluster.
Miranda didn’t notice or care about any of it as her head throbbed while she tried to force her Origin Cores to fuse faster, to interlink them all, but even though the process was fast by normal standards, it felt unbearably slow to her.
’If I can just get them aligned...!’
She clutched her head, her body uncontrollably switching between humanoid and wolf forms, silent screams slipping from her lips.
Miranda’s mind raced as her body curled within the heart of the immense singularity, waves of cosmic energy pressing against every fibre of her being.
She traced the path she had walked countless times before, each stage of Realm Progression flowing through her consciousness.
She remembered the clarity of purpose when she had manifested the abstraction of ’who she was’ into reality, the certainty rooted in the laws she had comprehended and assimilated.
With her Second Concretization, she knew ’what she commanded’, and now she was trying to enforce that command into reality through the fusion of her Origin Cores.
The first automatic fusion, directly linked to ’who she was’, had proceeded smoothly and quickly, but this second fusion carried consequences that threatened to tear her soul apart, stretching it beyond its limits.
Her internal assertion of her command completed the fusion, but almost immediately, a new channel opened as the fused expression of Authorities began seeking elevation to a new tier.
This was a direct result of her Existence Realm elevation, meant to carve out space for more energy.
But Miranda didn’t want that right now. She just wanted to rebuild her Cosmic Hearth and get rid of all the excess energy flooding her body and soul.
That same excess energy, however, was uncontrollably flooding into the unified Authorities, pushing them to elevate their tier.
Frantically searching for a solution, she tried using the power of the first unified expression to do something to force the second one to quiet down, anything, even if it didn’t seem logically possible.
’I can force it...I’d force it like with my Concretization...!’
Her thoughts stalled as doubt slowly crept in, born from the instinctive realisation that what she wanted to force couldn’t be controlled with another power of the same kind.
She understood that trying would only make the other one react and start its own elevation to a new tier.
The realisation filled Miranda with frustration, a strained groan escaping her lips as she snapped, her rage erupting like her flames.
’Fucking listen to me, damnit! You upgrade when I tell you to upgrade!’
With sheer force of will, Miranda asserted her command.
’You are MY Dictum. You listen to ME.’
She burned that path of automatic elevation into submission.
’You become a Grand Dictum when I WANT you to. Not whenever you feel like it!’
Using the immense cosmic energy around her, she moulded the unified expression of her Authorities into the ’Command’ over reality it was meant to be, and as she clutched her throbbing head, she bellowed.
|DICTUM OF THE COSMIC HEARTH!|
The fabric of reality trembled in response to Miranda’s command. The fragments of broken space around her gathered and fused, warping and folding over her as threads of excess cosmic energy knotted together, forming a new pocket universe.
Streams of multicoloured energy spiralled outward, coalescing into dense clusters that pulsed and churned, gradually taking shape into a coherent, self-contained expanse of pure power.
As the structure of her new Cosmic Hearth solidified, Miranda opened a conduit, and all the excess energy overflowing from her body and soul began pouring into the Hearth, absorbed into her personal reservoir of cosmic energy that expanded with each pulse.
Almost immediately, the range of the accretion disk of cosmic energy surrounding her began to shrink as the energy was absorbed into her body, replacing the energy she funnelled into the Cosmic Hearth.
Still, it wasn’t fast enough for Miranda.
’Faster...faster...!’
She exerted more control over the energy to purge it from her body into the Hearth, so her body held only what it could safely contain.
And just as the desire to speed up the transfer formed, everything suddenly went silent.
All sound vanished from Miranda’s ears, even the immense roars of the storm of cosmic energy around her.
Just as her eyes widened in surprise and confusion, a voice echoed across the entire cluster.
|Dimensional Slash!|
