Chapter 296: 1st Reincarnation

Chapter 296: Chapter 296: 1st Reincarnation

Inside the tiny three-inch sphere of reality he had carved out of the Blank Domain, Neo struck the anvil of his will a second time.

?He compressed his focus, demanding that the colorless void yield a second spark of platinum fire. Yet this time, the nothingness did not crack. His conceptual spine groaned under the suffocating silence, and the single platinum spark hovering inside his chest flickered in warning.

?Neo opened his eyes and exhaled slowly.

?"It is not a matter of effort. The first spark ignited because it consumed the entire existential momentum of my first life. Everything I experienced from the moment I woke up as a mortal gamer to the moment I claimed the Tree of Eternal Origin was the kindling required to light a single flame."

?He looked down at his hands. To wield True Creation was to force nothingness to become something. However, as the fifteen-dimensional God of Origin, Neo was already the totality of all things. A vessel that was completely full could not experience the desperate, primal hunger of an empty soul fighting to exist. You could not strike a new spark of beginning while standing at the absolute end of the road.

?Above his head, the tip of the First Root glowed with warm rainbow starlight. Standing at the very bottom of the interior crystal trunk, looking down through the transparent floor into the Blank Domain, were Zestia, Noir, and Moon.

?Neo rose to his feet inside his small bubble of platinum reality and projected his voice upward into the crystal root.

?"I cannot forge the remaining sparks by sitting in meditation down here. True Creation cannot be synthesized from existing laws. Each spark requires the birth of a completely unique willpower that rises from zero and shatters the ceiling of its existence."

?Zestia knelt on the crystal floor above him, resting her gauntleted hand against the transparent barrier separating the fifteenth dimension from the Blank Domain.

?"Then how do you intend to ignite a trillion of them. Even if you create mortal avatars and send them into the Omniverses, an avatar still shares your divine consciousness. It would just be you pretending to be weak."

?"An avatar will not work. To deceive the Blank Domain and generate genuine sparks of True Creation, I must leave my physical body and my Origin Crown here at the root to anchor our family’s dominion. Then, I must sever a tiny, unawakened fragment of my true core, wipe its memories clean, and cast it into the cycle of mortal reincarnation."

?Noir stepped forward, her six midnight wings folding tightly behind her back as she processed the sheer scale of what he was proposing.

?"You are talking about dying and being born as a true mortal a trillion times over. Without your memories, without your Divine Crucible, and without your fifteen-dimensional authority. If you fail to awaken in one of those lives, or if a stray calamity kills your mortal vessel before your will matures, that fragment of your core will be lost."

?"My instincts will remain etched into the bone of my soul, even if my mind forgets," Neo replied calmly. "Every time that mortal fragment reaches the pinnacle of its reality and defies the void through its own strength, a new spark of True Creation will ignite and return to my real body down here. Because I control the temporal flow of the Tree of Eternal Origin from the fifteenth dimension, I can compress millions of mortal years into a single heartbeat of the Blank Domain."

?Moon brought her hands together in prayer, her silver eyes shining with quiet understanding.

?"The Path of a Trillion Samsaras," Moon said softly. "To become the Ultimate Existence, the creator must walk as the created across every walk of life. We will guard your true body at the root, beloved. Go, and we will wait for every spark you send home."

?Neo smiled up at his three queens. He sat back down in the lotus position within the Blank Domain, closing his eyes as his platinum core stabilized the three-inch barrier around his true vessel.

?With a silent command, Neo pinched off a microscopic shard of his true spirit. He stripped it of the Origin Law, stripped it of Universal Synthesis, and washed away every memory of his wives, his children, and his throne. Only one nameless, stubborn trait was left inside that naked spark of soul: the absolute refusal to bow to any limit.

?Neo released the shard upward into the First Root.

?For his very first reincarnation, he did not send the soul into a chaotic realm of magic and monsters. He sent it along the familiar thread of causal resonance he had tested only moments before, dropping the soul backward into the timeline of a quiet blue planet called Earth, two hundred and fifty years after a ten-year-old boy named Toby had woken up at his desk.

?In the year 2276 of the Terran Calendar, Earth was no longer a polluted rock trapped by its own gravity.

?Encircling the lush, emerald globe were three colossal orbital rings of gleaming white metal and crystallized geometry. Ships powered by Tesseract Fold Drives flickered in and out of existence every second, connecting Earth to ten thousand thriving colony worlds across the Milky Way.

?At the highest tier of the Prime Orbital Ring, inside the private medical sanctum of the House of Reason, a baby boy was born.

?The infant did not cry when the doctors lifted him from the birthing pod. Instead, the newborn opened a pair of remarkably clear, dark eyes and stared straight up at the glowing six-dimensional medical arrays hovering above the ceiling, as if evaluating their construction.

?Outside the glass wall of the delivery suite, Julian, the only son of the legendary Grand Savant Toby, paced nervously across the floor. Beside him stood Toby himself. At two hundred and sixty years old, Toby looked like a calm scholar in his mid-thirties, dressed in his customary simple dark sweater, with the frayed black shoelace still visible beneath his collar.

?The chief medical officer walked out of the suite, his brow furrowed in deep confusion as he looked at his holographic tablet.

?"Director Julian, Grand Savant," the doctor said, bowing respectfully before hesitating. "The mother is completely healthy, and the boy’s physical body is structurally flawless. However, our diagnostic arrays have encountered something we have never seen since the dawn of the Probability Era."

?"Is he sick?" Julian asked, stepping forward anxiously.

?"No, sir. He is... empty. Every human born in the last two centuries naturally resonates with the fifth-dimensional zero-point field your father established. It is what allows our citizens to interface with Fold technology and live for centuries.

Yet when we scanned your son’s cellular matrix, the fifth-dimensional energy did not just fail to register. It actively vanished the moment it touched his skin. According to our instruments, your son is strictly three-dimensional. He has zero dimensional aptitude."

?Julian’s face paled. In a civilization built entirely upon higher-dimensional mathematics, being born locked in the third dimension was equivalent to being born blind, deaf, and paralyzed.

?Toby, however, did not look troubled. The moment the baby had taken his first breath inside the suite, the small, iridescent crystal resting against Toby’s chest had pulsed with a sudden, unmistakable warmth. It was the first time the crystal had reacted to anything since the night the Wise One had placed it on his desk two and a half centuries ago.

?"Let me see him," Toby said softly.

?Toby walked into the medical suite and took the swaddled infant from the nurse’s arms. As the old savant looked down into the baby’s quiet, impossibly deep eyes, Toby felt a strange vertigo. With his eighth-dimensional perception, Toby could see the branching probability timelines of every person he met.

He could see a million possible futures for his son Julian, and a million futures for the doctors in the room.

?When Toby looked at the baby in his arms, he saw zero timelines.

?There were no branching paths of probability attached to the boy. The sixth dimension simply slid off the infant’s skin like water off polished steel, completely unable to calculate what the child would do in the next second, let alone the next century.

?"You are not locked in the third dimension at all, are you, little one? The instruments cannot read you because the scale does not go high enough."

?Julian walked up beside his father, looking down at the quiet baby with heavy sorrow. "I am sorry, Father. Everyone expected the grandson of the Grand Savant to inherit your mind. Have you thought of a name for him?"

?Toby smiled warmly, gently touching the infant’s tiny hand.

?"Call him Neo," Toby said. "Because he is going to show us something entirely new."

?Fourteen years passed on the Prime Orbital Ring.

?To the trillions of citizens of the Terran Federation, young Neo was known with quiet pity as the "Flatline Prince."

?At the Academy of the First Lesson, where the brightest youths of the galaxy gathered to master spatial folding and sixth-dimensional calculus, fourteen-year-old Neo sat at the very back of the amphitheater. Around him, teenagers effortlessly wove floating mandalas of glowing geometric light between their fingers, bending gravity and pulling zero-point energy straight from the fifth dimension to power their personal forcefields.

?In front of Neo sat a simple wooden desk and a stack of paper notebooks filled with handwritten ink. He could not use a holographic neural slate, because every time he touched a fifth-dimensional device, the probability circuits inside the machine shorted out and went dead.

?"Neo, would you care to demonstrate the fourth-dimensional extrusion of a standard vector?" Instructor Vance called out from the center of the floor

?Several students in the front rows snickered. Sitting among them was Cassian, the seventeen-year-old prodigy of the Mars shipyards, who had already mastered seventh-dimensional tether theory.

?"Do not bother asking him, Instructor. If Neo touches a spatial array, he will probably drain the backup generators for the entire sector again. Some bloodlines simply skip a generation, or two."