Published at 6th of July 2026 6:56 am

Chapter 2241: The Move That Was Already Made

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The second age had run for what the Painter had calibrated, and at the moment the Painter had calibrated for the second age to end, Eos spoke.

"You have been very busy," his voice was low.

The Painter, who had spoken first at the start of every age and at its closing, did not speak immediately, because the Painter had been preparing the line that closed the second age.

That line had been a question, and the question had been about how Eos was bearing the effect of the Taste, but Eos had spoken before the Painter could pose it.

"You have been deliberating on the response I am to give," Eos said. "I have noticed."

The audience in the Painter’s face leaned forward. After such a long time, they hungered for Eos’s voice, and hearing it, they could not wait for more.

To them, Eos was the pinnacle of delicacy, and anything he did was to be carefully savored. After so many victories across millions of Existences, the audience no longer knew the meaning of restraint, and everything was for their enjoyment.

The Painter, after a careful pause, said, "Yes. That is part of the work, but I do enjoy it so."

"Ah... work, how interesting you phrase it in that manner," Eos said. "I have noticed how attentive you have been to the calibration, across the second age. I have learned much by watching."

"I am gratified to teach you," the Painter said, and there was a smile in its voice.

"I have been teaching you also," Eos said, and he smiled, "Have you not noticed? Or have you been too busy feasting on my fruits that you have forgotten its owner is your enemy?"

The Painter did not respond immediately because the Painter was not certain what teaching Eos referred to, and uncertainty was a thing the Painter was unaccustomed to in this game.

"Tell me," the Painter said, finally, with the silky cadence it used when it suspected that nothing it would say next would close the gap.

Eos did not answer in words. He turned his hand on the board.

®

In the Eternal Tower, in a time-layer, the Painter had stopped visiting in the long Grand Cosmic Eras before Origin had been a name, and Chronomancer Prime had been working.

To reach the fifth layer of its Origin, Prime had sent three Primordials and thousands of Old Ones to the past, and after Eos reached the tenth dimension, Chronomancer Prime had not been included inside Telos, because Eos trusted that he was among the few of his children who could survive outside the umbrella of his power.

Fury, Telmus, and Eva were nearing the sixth layer of Origin, and they believed that they were among the most powerful of Primordials, but unknown to them, Chronomancer Prime had quietly reached the ninth layer of the Origin of Time!

His talents alone were not the chief reason he could reach this level, but it was his crazy actions that brought him to this point.

Chronomancer Prime was using the example of the Primordials he had sent into the past to cultivate, but now he was cultivating himself, and he was not going into the future... he was heading to the past.

What made his journey even more interesting was that the past he was heading towards was the past of the Eternal Tower.

When Eos reached the tenth dimension and fused with Existence, he gained all of Existences memories, and so, it was useless for Chronomancer Prime to search for the history of Existence when he could easily get it from Eos, but the Eternal Tower was a different beast.

It was built from not just Existences that had been erased from the memory of Origin, but also the tenth dimensional beings who rose in those Existences.

There had only been forty-three of these Existences, and Prime went into their past, and this journey was among the most terrifying that he had ever gone through... but the results spoke for themselves.

Prime was one step away from reaching the proto-tenth-dimensional level.

This was a separate entity outside Eos, and due to his unique nature and with the assistance of Eos, who had built a Luminious Shell for him using the remnants of Enoch’s power, Prime would never be able to go far in this journey.

That was right... Enoch did not die without giving Eos one last gift.

At the moment of his death, when he called for the intervention of the Painter and received nothing, Enoch knew that it had been nothing but a disposable tool to the Painter, and in the moment of his death, he transferred the authority of his level to Eos.

Eos did not hold on to this authority for long; in fact, he barely glanced at it before the authority vanished into the Eternal Tower.

If he had held onto this authority, it would have alerted the eyes of the Painter; instead, he... copied it.

Sometimes it was better to have the blueprints than the item itself.

The Painter believed that it was safe in its tower, but Eos already had a map of this tower, and from the moment the game began, where the focus of the Painter had been on the Origin Tree, Prime had begun to infiltrate its past.

Prime was an avatar of Eos, Eos’s bloodline of skin and connective tissue, master of the living time-layers.

Chronomancer Prime did not have Eos’s voice and did not have Eos’s full attention; what Prime had was a portion of Eos’s being given a domain to operate in, and the domain Prime had been given was the time of the Eternal Tower.

The Eternal Tower had been built by the Painter in the medium of Telos before Origin had a name, and in the long Grand Cosmic Eras of its building, the Painter had moved through the Tower’s time-layers and worked, and after the Tower had been built, the Painter had stopped revisiting most of the time-layers, because most of the Tower’s time-layers were no longer relevant to the work, and the Painter, who was efficient, did not waste attention on time-layers it had finished with.

It was always on the lookout for the next thrill, and those were very hard to find. After millions of Existences, it had only gotten these thrills forty-three times.

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