Unconcerned about everyone’s stunned eyes, Jasmine stood still as the pools of black ink and white ink kept spinning around her body nonstop until... they started wrapping around her form tightly.
Then, her skin began to change... black lines formed across it, like mesmerizing tribal tattoos that moved slowly back and forth.
Her dress stretched longer, turning into a black gown that brushed the ground... the edges of it dripped with dark ink that vanished as it touched the sand.
Her hair changed next... half of it turned white, the other half black... both sides flowing down her shoulders freely.
When she opened her eyes, they looked like two swirling drops of ink, spinning slowly as if alive... even the inked black mark around her right eye emerged, painting almost an exact image of N’ibby, but in adult form.
"...So, this is what it’s come to," she said softly, "I have been trying my very best to keep her away from entering another Reality Limbo... where the real and the illusion are interchangeable concepts... but you just had to push her, you just had to make me work... and I hate working."
As she spoke with her depressed soft voice, black and white ink began to drip from her fingers... but instead of falling into the ground, it spread around her in circles, forming two massive glowing runic sigils above her head.
One black, one white.
The outer rings were covered in looping symbols that continually rewrote themselves every few seconds, never settling into a single shape. However, the only thing constant was the two runic letters.
The black one inside the white sigil was a circle with a tiny dot in the center, and other dots circling it nonstop, seemingly showing the flow of creation, appearing as ’ ⟐ ’.
As for the white runic letter inside the black sigil? It was the opposite... an inverted triangle with a broken ring behind it, flickering in and out of existence while erasing its own outline... a constant loop of vanishing and reforming, appearing as ’ ⟠ ’.
It was like both sigils served an interchangeable concept... two opposites of one end, two faces of one coin.
The moment they manifested, Jasmine lifted her brush into the sky and uttered indifferently, "Primordial Tree of Creation and Erasure, reclaim a third of this dominion as mine."
Her words rang akin to a heavenly decree across the dominion... echoing twice, no more.
Before the stunned mad emperor and the Daywalkers could react, the dominion started shaking nonstop like the Rift of Binding Laws was under great strain from an authority higher than it.
Then, a giant tree began to grow forcefully behind her and the Daywalkers on the far end of the dominion... its roots half black, half white.
The trunk also split into two colors, twisting together until the branches reached high above, giving birth to leaves in the shape of one of the two sigils: the sigil of erasure and the sigil of creation.
Once it was born, a third of the dominion around Jasmine and the Daywalkers started changing from a dried desert to an infinite sea of whiteness.
It was like the sky, the desert, everything was erased, leaving a third of the dominion as one giant blank page... even the fiery pillars locking the Daywalkers were erased, freeing them.
"..."
"..."
Everyone froze... no one said a word.
Even the Mad Emperor stopped his attempt to possess Arthur’s body, his burning eye narrowing in dismay at this ludicrous sight.
"Jasmine..." Shia whispered, her eyes reflecting nothing but confusion.
The girls and the rest of the Daywalkers shared the same look, having no idea what had become of Jasmine or what she was anymore. The fact that she was speaking was already a shocker to them, don’t even mention the rest.
But Jasmine didn’t look at them... her eyes were locked on the Emperor. She raised her brush, which had a glowing white tip, and pointed it at him.
"Erase," she said coldly.
The sigil of erasure behind her flashed.
The moment the Emperor saw the brush pointed at him, his dormant instincts screamed at him... No hesitation, he threw Arthur away and leaped back.
Good thing he moved fast... the entire area he was around had turned into a pool of spreading whiteness... like Jasmine had literally erased everything in that specific location, leaving nothing but pure emptiness, but it wasn’t void.
Then, Jasmine snapped her fingers... in an instant, Arthur appeared beside her, already unconscious...
She reached out and brushed her hand across his forehead... the wound that had nearly killed him vanished without a trace... both physical and spiritual.
The moment it was fixed, Arthur regained consciousness and opened his muddled eyes slowly.
"...Jasmine?" Arthur’s pupils thinned in bewilderment after seeing her current peculiar appearance.
Jasmine didn’t answer... she snapped her finger and all the Daywalkers found themselves standing near each other. Then, she turned her brush towards them.
A single ink dot was fired in their direction... the moment it reached them, the black drop transformed into a giant black sphere, sealing them inside of it.
Only then did her deadpan eyes land on the Emperor.
"What... what are you?" He demanded, his mouth tightened.
When Jasmine ignored him, he narrowed his gaze, focusing his sight... his vision zoomed in until he could see her DNA itself, formed of black and white sigils weaving together in an eternal dance.
His eye went wide in disbelief.
"That... that’s impossible," he muttered. "Those are the marks of a pure-blood heir... but how, and to what... wait."
That’s when Azhukar recalled Jasmine calling the tree behind her the Primordial Tree of Creation and Erasure... this jerked his memory, recalling one of the oldest myths in the universe.
The Myth of the Ancient Inkrith Race... one of the first races born in the universe, a race that was believed to have been the one painting life into the universe under the fellowship of none other than... The Primordial Tree of Creation and Erasure.
However, the myth didn’t say what happened to them... only that the tree and its people had all disappeared once the job was finished, once the universe was painted into life.
Now... here he was, facing off against someone who seemed to wield the same mythical powers. He couldn’t believe it, his mind refused to... but the truth was right before him.
However, before he could call her out for it, Jasmine’s voice resounded across the dimension.
"I don’t need to fight you..." she said, "I just need to save them."
She waved her brush in a circle, drawing a glowing ring of white ink around the giant black sphere, where the Daywalkers were trapped.
Then, she whispered, "Sever..."
The rings suddenly expanded into another white sphere around the Daywalkers... then, she teleported inside of it before it was cut away from the Rift of Binding Laws under the authority of the Tree behind her.
Just like a magic trick, they vanished, leaving behind a wilting tree with its leaves carried away by the wind.
"..."
Azhukar stood frozen, rigid as stone, utterly unable to comprehend what had just happened. The moment Jasmine made her move, everything he thought he controlled slipped through his fingers; her powers were unlike anything he had ever faced, so wild and overwhelming that they caught him completely off guard.
But now... his eye illuminated brighter and brighter with hunger.
"She can rewrite existence itself..." He whispered. "She can unmake the laws of creation..."
A slow grin spread across his face as his heart started beating rapidly in exhilaration.
"Those powers... they’re beyond the Radians... no, they are beyond anything I have ever seen... If I were to wield them, to become her... People of the Stars? They will be the ones wishing to join my side!"
Instead of being fearful of Jasmine’s powers, Azhukar’s greed and ambition for divinity were at it again... he could tell that Jasmine must not have full control of her powers, which was the reason she left instead of fighting him.
As much as she tried painting herself as invincible... he saw through the disguise. Her transformation had a limited timeframe and maybe some grave consequences, as he knew that the universe was a fair place.
If someone like her could tap into a dominion while she wasn’t ready to wield it yet, it only meant that she had crossed a line that shouldn’t be crossed.
Swiftly, he canceled his dominion, his body and soul receiving an agonizing backlash, but he didn’t care. He gritted his teeth and swept his gaze toward the sky... toward the white sphere drifting rapidly in the direction of the massive shadowy tear that was still devouring his planet.
"Inkrith Heir!! You’re mine!!"
Without hesitation, his body burst into flames as he launched himself upward, chasing it through the thousands of mini spatial tears and planetary rubble.
The world around him crumbled as both he and the white sphere were swallowed by the black void, sent straight inside the Shadow dimension.
It wasn’t anywhere random... the moment the dimension changed, Azhukar found himself amidst a celestial river of matter... bigger and longer than a string of galaxies stitched together.
The river of broken matter was falling toward the dark heart of the Shadow dimension... the true depths, where nothing could escape... where everything; light, matter, and time was being devoured alike.
"Shit... the Death Tree is throwing us straight to the Hungering Dark ?! Why? Doesn’t it start at the back of the celestial rivers across the dimension?!"
Azhukar’s expression turned slightly white at the sight of hundreds of celestial-like rivers spanning for eternity as they all headed towards a single destination... The Hungering Dark.
From afar, it looked like a storm made of pure night... a spinning vortex so vast it swallowed entire skies. The center spun endlessly, a chaotic spiral of black ink that seemed to devour light and color alike.
At its core, there was a hole... a bottomless mouth that stretched downward forever, giving the illusion that space itself was being drained into it.
Around it, long rivers of celestial matter flowed like dim streams in reverse. They weren’t falling... they were being pulled, stretching broken planets, shattered stars, and cracked moons the instant they neared the vortex.
Everything that had ever been touched by the Tree of Death... every cursed world, every corrupted sun... was fated to end here, stripped of color and swallowed whole, sent to a lower realm no one dared to visit or think about.
The Hungering Dark didn’t destroy... it simply took. And Azhukar knew it would keep taking until there was nothing left to take.
He realized he had only a brief window to act and retrieve the Inkrith Heir before reaching the zone of no return... the Hungering Dark’s Event Horizon, where not even a single photon of light could escape.
"INKRITH!!"
He screamed into the nothingness as his body was set in blinding flames, speeding rapidly in the white sphere’s direction... the orange flames were getting twisted by the pull, but he didn’t care, his eyes affixed on the white sphere that was flying toward its damnation.
Unbeknownst to him, his scream faded into the distance, dying fast... and yet, someone had heard it...
’Is that them?’