Chapter 196: Just Another Story

While the 5 strongest Witches were busy trying to figure out who or what Magna really was, he was spending his time reading a story.

It had already been hours since he started studying the drawings covering the walls, trying to piece together the story they were telling.

The drawings were crude in some places, and parts of the story were clearly missing, but Magna had nothing else to do. So he kept putting the pieces together in his head, treating the entire thing like a puzzle.

Solving puzzles was some kind of game anyway, it was fun and a good way to kill time.

From what he understood so far, the drawings began with the 5 Stages of Genesis after the Matriarch of Death had destroyed the living world.

Every living creature had died. Even the land itself had dried up and disappeared.

Unable to bear the consequences of what she had done, the Matriarch of Death had turned toward the sun and blinded herself.

"Hmm... The sun has to be a metaphor here, right?"

Magna found it difficult to believe that a goddess powerful enough to destroy an entire planet could actually blind herself simply by looking at a sun.

It had to mean something else.

It had to be like Life, who couldn’t bear the sound of her children crying and destroyed her own sense of hearing, just as Death couldn’t bear the sight of the destruction she created and gouged her own eyes out.

The drawings clearly showed the Matriarch of Death looking toward the sun before becoming blind, while the darkness that had spread across the entire planet slowly began to retreat from beneath her feet.

In the next drawing, a 3rd woman appeared.

Judging by the progression of the story, Magna assumed she had to be the Matriarch of Fate.

He knew the order because he had read about it before. Each major spell path followed the same cycle, with one path countering the next one.

Life. Death. Fate. Time. Order. Then the cycle returned to Life.

But the story itself seemed to follow the exact opposite principle.

The next Matriarch didn’t counter the one that came after her. She appeared because the previous one had left something unfinished, existing to counter the mistake that came before.

Life had created life, but when she messed things up, Death came to give peace to the suffering physical bodies. Then Death messed things up and Fate entered the scene.

It was almost like a group of friends deciding to make a pizza together, only for things to get worse every time one of them said, "Hold up, let me try."

The moment Fate appeared, the darkness covering the next drawing disappeared.

Actually, there were now two planets drawn on the wall, side by side, as if mirroring each other.

"So this is how they think the Underworld was created?" Magna stared at the 2 worlds in the drawing.

One was the lifeless planet left behind after Death’s destruction. The other was the world Life had created in the beginning.

Apparently, Fate hadn’t tried to fix Death’s mistake directly.

Instead, she had separated the 2 worlds.

One would become a place where living beings could exist without the problems that had destroyed the previous world.

The other would become a place where those who suffered could finally find peace.

Magna couldn’t help but appreciate the idea.

It was actually a good solution.

But there was a problem.

"A conscious mind craves what it lacks. And a mind that craves should not live forever." He murmured with a sigh.

Whether it was an alien, a beast, a monster, or a human, once a living being developed enough self-awareness to understand its own existence, it would eventually develop desires.

The first problem was survival.

The second was escaping pain.

And once those basic needs were gone, the next thing that appeared was greed.

Magna was able to saw the flaw immediately.

When he looked at the next drawings, he found that this was exactly where the next problem began.

Before long, the souls in the world of the dead started craving the things they no longer had.

There was no law of Time yet, so there was no concept of ceasing to exist or reincarnation.

They were simply trapped inside spiritual bodies that could no longer feel anything, drifting through an endless world with no purpose.

A boring, meaningless, emotionless eternity.

For a conscious mind, it was perhaps the worst kind of torture.

Soon, the dead began to rebel.

They begged to return to the living world, no longer caring about the pain that physical bodies would bring.

That pain itself had become something they desired.

They simply wanted to feel something again.

But the living world wasn’t doing much better.

The living were crushed beneath the endless pain of their physical bodies and the overwhelming pressure of their own emotions.

They, too, eventually began searching for a way to escape.

Some even started tearing off their own limbs because they could no longer bear the weight of their bodies.

They gouged out their eyes because they no longer wanted to see.

They destroyed their ears because they could no longer bear to hear.

The entire world became a sea of blood as immortal beings desperately tried to end their own existence.

But they failed because they just could not cease to exist.

In the end, both worlds looked toward each other and became consumed by envy.

The dead wanted what the living had.

The living wanted what the dead had.

And neither side could have it.

"Come on, just invent the concept of Heaven and Earth so they can just experience two worlds in a cycle." Magna started to feel frustration, as the solution was so simple, but they just tended to make things more complicated and chaotic.

The Matriarch of Fate in the end couldn’t bear listening to their desperate prayers and watching them suffer.

So she created another world, a third one.

A dream realm where they could at least imagine and experience the things they could no longer have.

"Oh, that’s the Fairy Hive?" Magna stared at the drawing of the dream realm.

According to what Titus had told him, the entrance to the Fairy Hive could only be found through dreams.

If this story was correct, then it seemed that the Fairy Hive had come into existence exactly this way.

But even that didn’t solve the problem.

The Matriarch of Fate soon realized that almost every soul in the world of the dead was living inside the dream realm, while the living had also started spending all their time there.

The 2 original worlds started to slowly lose their purpose.

And as their purpose faded, both worlds began to collapse along with their creators.

Magna looked at the next drawing of the woman drawn there all alone.

It was even rougher than the others, but he could still understand what it was trying to show.

The Matriarch of Fate stood there with a guilty expression on her face.

She looked depressed.

"So this is just another story about how a Matriarch messed things up."