Rage returned so violently that the moon cracked beneath him.
For a long time Kyren sat inside the fracture.
He remembered everything.
That became his anchor.
Not peace.
Memory.
He refused to let cosmic scale turn Arkin into a statistic.
Refused to let Neida become one death among trillions.
Refused to let Roselle become merely “the Virhain who raised him.” Refused to let Aiko become a coordinate he had misplaced.
The old world remained inside him.
Every ugly mechanism.
Every excuse.
Remembering was the protection.
If he forgot what power felt like from beneath, he would become another creator capable of looking at suffering from so far away that it became an abstraction.
Kyren would not allow that.
He began again.
Another god.
Another world.
Another ability.
Eventually he consumed a being capable of dividing its consciousness while preserving full identity across every division.
The ability entered Kyren.
Stacked with Argatass world-copy principles.
He created one copy of himself.
The copy looked at him.
Shared every memory.
Every hatred.
Every goal.
“Find them.” The second Kyren nodded.
Ten became one hundred.
One hundred became thousands.
Eventually millions of Kyren instances travelled across galaxies, realities and created worlds simultaneously.
They were not servants.
They were him.
Memory flowed back between them.
One found a world where inhabitants starved while rulers stored food until it rotted.
Kyren removed biological hunger from every species there.
One found a species whose mating instincts overrode consent.
He rewrote the instinct.
One found beings trapped in cycles of revenge so culturally absolute that children inherited enemies before learning names.
Kyren removed the neurological reward that made vengeance feel like completion.
One found priests ruling through terror of death.
He made the population biologically immortal and watched the priesthood collapse when its greatest threat lost meaning.
One found a world created deliberately to torture consciousness forever.
He destroyed it.
Then consumed its god.
He never told himself destruction was mercy simply because he wanted it to be.
He read memories first.
Kumo Memory had evolved beyond flesh; entire civilisations could be examined through their informational residue.
He knew what existed before deciding.
Those worlds that functioned without the mechanisms he despised were left untouched even when imperfect.
Kyren did not require worship.
He did not require inhabitants to agree with him.
He required one thing from his own creations: none would be designed around the exploitation of another consciousness.
Then he began making worlds from nothing.
Not copies.
His own.
The first possessed no hunger.
Living organisms drew usable energy directly from their environments.
No creature needed to kill another because its stomach demanded it.
The second removed biological ageing.
Cells repaired indefinitely without mutation accumulating into disease.
The inhabitants did not fear death because death was not part of their natural vocabulary.
The third had no reproductive compulsion capable of becoming coercion.
New consciousness could be created deliberately when communities chose to welcome it; no body existed as a reproductive resource for another.
Ego was absent.
Not hidden.
Not socially discouraged.
The neurological architecture that produced the need to rank oneself above another simply did not exist.
A being could know it was itself without needing another being beneath it.
Possessive lust did not exist.
Attraction could not become an impulse to own.
Greed had no biological reward.
Accumulating unused resources did not produce pleasure.
Fear of death had no evolutionary purpose because nobody died.
Revenge did not release satisfaction.
Dominance did not create euphoria.
Kyren remembered the worlds of different races.
He remembered members of different races telling themselves ego produced progress.
That suffering produced strength.
That fear created morality.
That competition required losers.
He rejected all of it.
Civilisations in his worlds still built.
Learned.
Explored.
They did not need humiliation as fuel.
Curiosity was enough.
They did not need mortality to value a day.
A day had value because experience had value.
They did not need the possibility of losing another being to care about that being.
They cared because consciousness recognised consciousness.
Kyren watched one of his first immortal beings stare at a new ocean.
For a moment he remembered himself on Eranis, unable to understand where the water ended.
He created twenty moons above that world.
Deliberately this time.
A memorial nobody living there could understand.
Another world formed beside it.
Then another.
Thousands.
Millions of Kyren selves raised their hands across realities.
Stars ignited.
Planets condensed.
Oceans filled basins.
Forests emerged without predators designed to tear prey apart alive.
Consciousness appeared without a creator demanding gratitude for the favour of existence.
Kyren did not permit temples built to him.
Whenever inhabitants discovered that something had created their universe and tried to worship him, he erased evidence of himself rather than accept devotion.
He had seen what happened when creators needed praise.
He would not build another hierarchy merely because he occupied its top.