Chapter 39 – The Empress of the Rot

【??? POV】

I was here before the stars learned how to shine.

Before gravity decided which way was down, I floated in the void and shaped the chaos like wet clay. I watched galaxies spin up from dust and gas, bright and messy and loud. I was the architect of this reality, the silent admin watching the code compile in real-time. Everything in this universe answered to me because I was here first. It was a simple rule. Respect your elders.

Then he fell out of the sky.

He didn’t arrive with a comet’s tail or a burst of divine light. He just clipped through reality like a bad line of code. One second the sky was empty and perfect. The next second, a man was falling. He hit the ground with the grace of a sack of potatoes dropped from a moving cart.

“Ow.”

The sound rippled through the pristine mana of the early world.

I hovered above him, wreathed in shadows that were older than time itself. I expected a titan. A challenger sent by the outer gods to test my dominion. I prepared a spell that could unravel the fabric of existence.

Instead, I saw a guy in a tracksuit.

He rolled over in the primordial grass and scratched his stomach. He blinked up at the burning nebulae swirling in the sky. He looked bored. He looked like he had just woken up from a nap and was annoyed that the universe existed.

“Where is the remote?”

I descended. The air curdled around me. My presence usually drove mortals insane just by proximity. I was the abyss staring back.

“Identify yourself, interloper.”

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. He yawned. A literal yawn in the face of the primordial void.

“Is this the afterlife? Because the graphics are terrible.”

“You stand before the First. The Mother of Silence. The End of All Things.”

He looked at me. He didn’t see the infinite darkness swirling in my form. He didn’t see the eyes of a thousand dead stars watching him. He saw a nuisance.

“Do you have any pizza? I’m starving.”

The audacity paralyzed me for a microsecond. Pizza. He asked the void for pizza. Rage, hot and unfamiliar, sparked in my chest. I had not felt anger in eons because nothing had ever been worth it.

“You dare mock me?”

“Look, lady, I just got here. I don’t know the lore. I don’t care about the lore. I just want a snack.”

He stood up and dusted off his pants. He turned his back on me. He walked away. He walked away from the First Being like I was a street vendor selling bad fruit.

“Stop.”

I spoke a Word of Power. It was a sound that shattered mountains. It commanded the very atoms of the air to freeze. It was absolute dominion made audible.

He kept walking.

“Hey, is that a river? Nice.”

He ignored a command that should have flattened his soul. He didn’t resist it. He didn’t counter it. He just didn’t notice it. It was like shouting at a wall.

I screamed.

The sky tore open. I summoned a storm of meteors, each one the size of a city. I rained fire and ruin upon his location. The ground exploded. The shockwave leveled a forest. Dust choked the atmosphere for a hundred miles.

I waited for the smoke to clear. I expected a crater. I expected silence.

“A little breezy today, huh?”

He was standing in the center of the devastation. Not a scratch. His hair was slightly ruffled. He looked annoyed, like someone had opened a window on a cold day.

“How.”

“Can you keep it down? I’m trying to vibe.”

He waved a hand. The dust settled instantly. The fires went out. The craters filled themselves in. He rewrote the landscape with a gesture so casual it made me sick.

I knew then.

He wasn’t a challenger. He was a glitch. He was a mistake in the universe’s programming. He had infinite mana, infinite authority, and the ambition of a sloth.

He was a baby.

That was the part that burned the most. I could taste his soul. It was young. It hadn’t seen galaxies die. It hadn’t watched civilizations rise and fall into dust. He was a cosmic toddler with a nuclear weapon.

I hated him instantly.

I spent the next century trying to delete him.

It became a routine. A hobby. I stalked him across the continents as he drifted aimlessly. He didn’t conquer. He didn’t build. He just looked for comfortable spots to sleep.

I found him in a volcano once.

The lava bubbled around him, hot enough to melt steel. He was floating in it on a raft made of rock, snoozing. I amplified the heat. I turned the magma into plasma. I tried to boil him alive in the earth’s blood.

“Turn down the thermostat.”

He muttered it in his sleep. The volcano went dormant instantly. The magma cooled into smooth, comfortable obsidian. He didn’t even wake up.

I tried poison next.

I corrupted a spring he drank from. I filled it with venom distilled from the nightmares of dying gods. One drop would kill a dragon. He drank the whole thing.

“Spicy water. Nice kick.”

He wiped his mouth and filled another cup.

I tried gravity.

I increased the gravitational pull around his campsite until the trees flattened into pancakes. The ground buckled. Birds fell out of the sky like stones.

He just adjusted his pillow.

“Finally. A mattress that supports my back.”

Every attempt failed. Every ultimate attack was treated like a minor inconvenience. He didn’t fight back. He didn’t even acknowledge we were fighting. To him, I wasn’t a nemesis. I was just bad weather.

Envy is a bitter poison.

It rotted me from the inside out. I had worked for my power. I had spent eons cultivating the void, learning the secrets of the dark. I earned my place as the apex predator of reality.

He just spawned with max stats.

It wasn’t fair. It was a cosmic joke, and I was the punchline. He was a baby god, stumbling through a universe he didn’t understand and didn’t respect. He treated miracles like mundane trash.

I finally cornered him at the mountain.

It wasn’t The Mountain yet. Just a high peak that pierced the clouds. The mana there was rich and clean. He liked it. He decided to stay.

He built a shack. A literal shack. Out of wood.

“This is my spot now.”

He declared it to the empty air.

I materialized behind him. I was done with tricks. I assumed my true form. A towering horror of shadow and starlight, wings stretching across the horizon, eyes burning with the death of suns. I blotted out the sun. I turned the day into an eternal, suffocating night.

“Leave.”

My voice shook the foundations of the earth.

He turned around. He held a hammer in one hand and a nail in the other. He looked at my terrifying, majestic form. He looked at the darkness swallowing his world.

“You’re blocking my light.”

“I am the light! I am the dark! I am the—”

“Yeah, yeah. Move.”

He flicked his finger.

It wasn’t a spell. It wasn’t a technique. It was a flick. The kind you use to get a crumb off your shirt.

The force hit me like a collapsing star.

My form shattered. The shadows were ripped away. My wings dissolved into smoke. I was hurled backward, tumbling through the sky like a broken doll. I fell.

I fell for a long time.

I watched the mountain shrink above me. I watched his shack gleam in the returning sunlight. He didn’t even watch me go. He went back to hammering his nail.

I hit the ground hard.

I didn’t land in a meadow. I didn’t land in the ocean. I landed in the filth.

The impact crater filled with muck. The air down here smelled like rot and unwashed bodies. It was the Underworld. The discard pile of the planet.

I lay in the dirt, broken and humiliated.

I looked up at the peak. It shone like a beacon of arrogance. He was up there. Napping. Eating snacks. Ruling the world by accident.

I screamed.

It was a sound of pure, unadulterated salt. I hated him. I hated his casual power. I hated his stupid face. I hated that he treated me, the Primordial First, like a bug on his windshield.

“Fine.”

I spat the word into the mud.

“You want the high ground? Keep it. I’ll take the roots.”

I stood up. My true form was gone, shattered by his casual flick. I was diminished. I wore the shape of a woman now, cloaked in shadows to hide my shame.

I looked around the Underworld.

It was chaotic. Violent. Desperate.

It was perfect.

If I couldn’t beat the admin, I would hack his game. I would infest his world from the bottom up. I would take the trash he ignored and turn it into a weapon.

I walked into the nearest town.

Criminals lurked in the alleys. Murderers hid in the dark. They looked at me with hungry eyes. They saw a woman alone. They thought they were predators.

I laughed.

“Kneel.”

They dropped. Bones snapped. Minds broke. The shadows leaped from my skin and devoured them whole.

I claimed the dark.

I became the whisper in the alley. The secret in the dark. The Empress of the Rot.

I couldn’t climb the mountain. His presence was too thick up there. It pushed me down. It burned my corrupted skin.

So I waited.

I watched his disciples. I saw the cracks in their armor. I saw the arrogance in the golden boy, Jin. I saw the ambition.

I smiled.

He thought he was safe up there. He thought he had won. But gravity always wins. Everything falls eventually.

I would just give them a little push.

I sat on my throne of garbage and shadows, watching the distant peak. I felt the envy coiling in my gut, hot and heavy. It was my fuel.

“Sleep well, baby god.”

I whispered it to the dark.

“Your kids are coming out to play.”

And I was going to be the worst babysitter in history.