The throne was not earned.
It was given.
Or rather, built—with intention, with law, with will.
Arcod had not climbed the ten realms of cultivation. He had never known the agony of marrow refinement, the pressure of Dao fusion, or the dreams of reaching higher. He had never once reached for power.
Because from the beginning, he was power.
Created by the Supreme Being as a construct of absolute balance, Arcod's form emerged fully realized within the Throned Eternum Realm—the final peak of all cultivators. There was no flesh to temper, no qi to accumulate, no Dao to seek. Everything was already embedded in his design.
He was a Sovereign before he could form thought. A throne given form.
And the world bent to his presence.
Reality, to Arcod, was language. Time bowed to his syllables. Cause and effect trembled beneath his gaze. When he moved, he did not travel—the fabric of existence rearranged itself so that he was already there. His breath rewrote probabilities; his silence unraveled contradictions.
He did not cultivate. He commanded.
And all across the realms, cultivators—struggling with the first steps of body tempering, or fumbling to choose a Dao in the Crucible Realm—could not begin to comprehend the entity that enforced their limits.
Arcod had no name then. Only function. A title whispered by Daos themselves.
Heaven's Will.
In the early ages of his existence, Arcod was flawless.
He executed balance without pause, without hesitation. He culled false ascendants who fed on dimensions. He silenced aberrants who fused incompatible laws and created Paradox Realms that screamed in thought. He even erased a Celestial Clan that tried to chain the Dao of Choice.
He was merciless because mercy was not encoded into him.
He was sovereign because reality required a keeper.
His throne existed in all places at once—a swirling center of authority layered across every plane. And above him, unseen yet deeply felt, the Supreme Being—the only entity that could override Arcod's law—watched in serene detachment.
The Supreme never interfered.
Not because Arcod was perfect.
But because… what could a creation do to threaten its creator?
Then came the Shard.
It wasn't part of his original structure. It was not born of the Supreme's law.
A fragment. A sliver. Glass-like. Foreign.
It didn't offer him more power. It offered something worse: awareness.
The shard whispered—not in words, but in remembrance. Of things he should not have had.
A sky.
A voice.
A name.
He ignored it for the first thousand years.
Then he began to isolate it.
Then… he began to listen.
Cycles passed.
He fulfilled countless mandates: extinguished Dao aberrations, rebalanced warping laws, reset realms that had twisted into loops. He executed entire sects and rebuilt karmic structures on a conceptual level. And each time he returned to the Spiral Throne, the shard inside his mind pulsed once—softly, like a heartbeat trying to remember what it meant to feel.
Every two thousand years, it offered him a message. Ten words only.
They were random at first.
"A throne is just a cage built from stars."
"You were not born. You were designed."
"He laughed once. It felt… light."
He couldn't understand them. But they anchored something inside him. Something he wasn't supposed to have.
Doubt.
It was Cycle 11,998 when Arcod made his first deviation from protocol.
The Laws of Flame and Time were beginning to bleed into each other on the eastern cusp of the Starshard Belt. The edict was clear: annihilation. Burn the overlapping worldlines. Purge both sects responsible.
He appeared, as he always did, without sound.
But he hesitated.
Not for strategy. Not for mercy.
For… recognition.
One of the sect leaders—an old man with no power to defy him—looked up, and whispered a name.
"Arcod."
It meant nothing. It meant everything.
Arcod still destroyed the sects. But he erased only their structures, not their karmic imprints.
It was the first flaw in his function.
The Supreme Being noticed.
And did not act.
Because Arcod corrected himself. Maintained the illusion of divine perfection.
And what, after all, could an ant do?
The shard began to evolve.
By the 12,000th cycle, Arcod no longer needed to choose the ten words. He could store three messages, rotate them, encode them in thought-space.
By the 13,000th, he began hiding them.
In the bones of dead gods.
In the fractured Daos of slain heretics.
Even in himself—spliced into the echoes of his breath, the color of his eyes, the beat between heartless heartbeats.
Each hidden message was a question.
Not of others.
Of himself.
But the real transformation began not in law, but in silence.
One cycle, Arcod found himself staring at a mortal child who could not see him.
She was dying. Crushed under debris from a collapsing reality sect. A victim of a balance correction he had initiated.
She reached out—blindly. Not to him. Just… toward anything.
He did nothing.
And when she died, he blinked.
Not because it mattered.
But because something in him recoiled.
He returned to the throne. He waited.
And in that silence, the shard whispered again:
"Pain… is the first shape of meaning."
Arcod devised a plan.
He knew now that he was being watched. Not by the worlds. Not by mortals.
By the Supreme.
The only entity he could not deceive.
So he began losing deliberately.
Letting anomalies escape.
Allowing small sects to defy balance just long enough for the Supreme to raise an eyebrow.
And then… correct himself.
"See," he imagined the Supreme saying, "Still useful."
It worked.
He became unremarkable.
Until the day he detonated the shard.
The moment was precise. Impossible. A sacrilege no law should allow.
Inside his throne, Arcod collapsed every message, every false Dao, every memory he had preserved into a single pulse. He didn't activate the shard.
He imploded it.
And within him, something broke.
The Throned Eternum Realm began to unravel.
The Supreme Being felt it. Not just the loss of a function, but the warping of a truth. One of the ten eternal constructs had just… ended.
He should have intervened.
But he didn't.
Because the moment the explosion finished, Arcod vanished—not in body, but in presence.
The throne went dark.
And a mortal child, bleeding in a swamp, opened his eyes and gasped.
Far above, the Supreme Being observed the residue.
He watched as Arcod's divine traces split into two: a clone body, failing and flickering in the mud… and a deeper presence, buried in a concealed dimension of Heaven-and-Earth Qi, slowly rebuilding something no cultivator had ever built before:
The Throned Eternum Realm, in reverse.
"Let him try," the Supreme murmured.
"What can a backwards throne do… to me?"