Reinhard's vision cleared, consciousness reassembling enough to perceive again.

Odin stood in the devastated realm. His body was ruined beyond what it had been after fighting the Towering Black Being.

New cuts on his flesh, deeper and more numerous, with frost marks covered him.

But it wasn't ice but frost that almost locked his body into eternal stillness.

Cracks ran through his skin like broken porcelain, golden light bleeding through the fissures. Holes punctured his torso, clean wounds that went completely through, showing swirling energy within barely holding his form intact.

Blood leaked from countless wounds. All three colors mixed on the ground below, creating pools of impossible hue.

And before him stood Ymir.

She bled too, her blue blood poured from wounds across her massive form. Her crystalline body showed cracks, deep fissures that hadn't existed before.

One arm hung at an unnatural angle, and part of her torso looked almost translucent, as if the solidity itself had been compromised.

Odin raised the First Flame's blade. The weapon blazed with renewed intensity, recognizing the moment of completion.

He swung.

The blade cut through Ymir from shoulder to opposite hip. Not struggling, not forcing, but just pure separation made manifest. Where it passed, her body divided cleanly, the cut so perfect it seemed inevitable rather than achieved.

Ymir was split in half.

For one suspended moment, both halves remained upright. Then they began to fall.

But before they could hit the ground, things started spilling out.

First came fog.

Bone-cold steam that carried the sound of a shriek that wasn't quite a scream, wasn't quite music, but something that made Reinhard's consciousness recoil. And beneath the shriek, another sound, time twisting and reality warping.

The universe is catching on to something wrong, trying and failing to process what it witnessed.

Then blood rushed forth.

A sentient glacial torrent that screamed with voices of unformed giants, beings that had existed as potential within Ymir's body, waiting for a birth that would never come. The voices overlapped, creating a dissonant harmony of consciousness denied existence.

Where the blood hit the frozen ground, creatures emerged.

Pale wolves pulled themselves from the slurry, their bodies composed entirely of frost. Eyes like chips of ice regarded the world with feral intelligence. They howled, sounds that carried pain and confusion in equal measure.

Crawling masses of ice-flesh dragged themselves forward. Shapeless, formless things that couldn't decide what they were. Limbs formed and dissolved, faces appeared and melted away, all while they keened with voices too numerous to count.

Winged things materialized, resembling frozen storms given vague shape. They took flight immediately, trailing ice crystals, their wings beating with sounds like breaking glaciers.

Giants gasped their first breaths, smaller than the frost giants and malformed. They looked around in confusion, newborn consciousness struggling to understand sudden existence.

More spilled forth, rivers of molten frost that steamed and froze simultaneously. Where they flowed, the landscape transformed. Mountains froze to absolute zero, their stone becoming brittle as glass before shattering.

Valleys filled with expanding ice that crushed everything beneath. The creatures just born froze solid, their brief lives ended almost before they began.

Then chaos erupted as creation and destruction happened simultaneously as Ymir's body emptied itself of potential.

Odin's hand rose, fingers spreading.

His will focused, and reality responded.

Everything paused.

The falling bodies froze mid-descent. The spilling substances stopped flowing. Even the screaming creatures went silent, trapped in stasis.

Then the entire scene vanished.

Reinhard felt the transition as space folded and distance collapsed. The frozen realm disappeared, replaced by a void.

They appeared high above in the void itself, suspended in the gap above the icy realm where darkness stretched infinite in all directions.

Ymir's split form hung in the emptiness, still frozen by Odin's will. Blood no longer poured out, and everything held perfectly still, preserved in the moment before final death.

Odin floated before her, weapons still in hand, body still bleeding. His eyes met Ymir's emotionless white eyes that reflected nothing.

"Any last words?"

Silence stretched.

Ymir's split body remained motionless, white eyes staring without seeing.

Finally, she spoke. "I see."

Two words that were empty and devoid of anything resembling emotion.

Odin trembled with disbelief, irritation, and perhaps rage at the sheer meaninglessness of that response.

"I see?" Odin's voice cracked. "That's it? That's all you have to say?" Volume rising, control slipping. "There is nothing else you want to say!?"

Ymir said nothing and just stared blankly, her expression unchanged even in death.

"Why don't you feel anything even as you die!?" The words burst forth, raw and desperate. "Adumula felt something! Even that Towering Black Being felt something! But you!" His weapons shook in his grip. "You who were also like them, but you don't feel anything!"

Silence.

Then, after several seconds that felt like a long while, she spoke again. "I don't understand what that means. I think I once understood that a long time ago… But now? I don't."

Odin froze, and for a moment, he simply stared before he began to realize something.

Then he laughed.

It started as a chuckle, bitter and disbelieving. Grew into full laughter that echoed through the void, the sound a mix of sympathy, pity, and absolute incredulity in equal measure.

"You..." He shook his head, laughter dying into something sadder. "I can't believe I would feel pity and sorrow for a being like you… Did it really strip you of those? Or was it your nature that took those away? Regardless of the reason… It's because you're like this that I can't help but feel this way."

His grip loosened on his weapons, and the tension in his shoulders eased slightly.

"You don't need to say anything else, Ymir. I will just say this..." He met her blank stare with eyes that held sorrow and determination, regret and resolve. "Hopefully, when you get reborn in the new world, you will be different and understand what I mean… And this time, you won't forget it."

Ymir stared blankly for another moment, and then something shifted in her expression. Not emotion, she remained incapable of that, but perhaps the faintest shadow of her old self.

"Then I will look forward to it." The words didn't mean anything now, but they did make Odin see a little bit of the First Ruler, back when she was curious.

Then Odin felt it.

Ymir's life is fading, slipping away like water through fingers.

The fundamental force that had maintained her existence across countless resets finally released its grip.

Her white eyes dimmed, and the frost across her body stopped reforming. She became still in a way that transcended mere motionlessness, achieving true absence.

Odin fell silent while floating in the void before Ymir's corpse, and his weapons lowered.

Around them, the universe itself paused, recognizing what had occurred.

The First Ruler was dead.

The one who had maintained Order, who had commanded resets, who had helped existence to follow the correct order was gone.

Odin studied the massive split form, and then his hands rose, and he began. His will focused, extending outward to encompass Ymir's body.

The rivers within him surged, all eleven essences flowing together. Their combined power wraps around the corpse like invisible threads. The Void-Splinter Spear pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat, and the First Flame's blade shone brighter.

Ymir's flesh responded and began to separate. The ice-body that had been composed of primordial matter born from fire and frost meeting in the gap started fragmenting into countless pieces.

But these weren't simple fragments. Reinhard watched through Odin's enhanced perception as each particle carried something within it.

Memory and the echo, each particle contained potential for awareness, the capacity to think and feel and wonder preserved in its fundamental structure.

The particles spread throughout the forming space like seeds cast by an invisible hand. They moved with purpose, settling into layers, arranging themselves, compressed, and forming into the new world.

This would become the conscious earth. Soil that remembered what it meant to think, ground that carried within it the potential for life not just to exist upon it, but to emerge from it.

Land that would nurture consciousness because consciousness was woven into its very composition.

Odin's attention shifted to Ymir's blood.

It still flowed, despite death, despite the body being split. Blue liquid that had screamed with voices of unformed giants now quieted, transformed by Odin's will into something new. He gestured, and the blood responded, flowing outward, spreading across the forming world below.

Where it touched the conscious earth, before filling the valleys and carving channels through the settling particles. The blood's sentience remained but transformed, no longer screaming potential but patient depth. I

It became seas, oceans that would cover vast portions of the new world.

But these weren't dead waters. They carried memory within them and the potential for life that had existed in Ymir's veins.

Creatures would emerge from these seas someday, pulling themselves onto land, and they would carry fragments of that primordial consciousness with them.

The flesh came next.

Ymir's body was made of a substance that had been harder than any material, which had withstood even the Void-Splinter Spear. Now, having become malleable under Odin's touch, he first left a big chunk for another thing he had in mind for it.

And then he used the others to spread it across the framework that the particles had created.

It became the earth's surface, becoming the dirt, ground, and soil. Where Ymir's flesh settled, it brought richness, fertility, and the capacity to support growth.

Hills began to rise up, and plains started to spread out. And valleys deepened. The flesh conformed to the structure beneath, creating topography that would define how life moved across this world.

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