There was no heart left to beat in Arcod's chest.
No breath to draw.
No nerves to carry signals of pleasure or pain.
Yet still, he existed.
Drifting—no, stationed—in a place that was not a place. There was no need to move. Wherever he needed to see, his awareness simply extended. There was no hunger, no fatigue. No sense of time. But there was clarity—a terrible, all-consuming clarity.
Arcod was becoming accustomed to his new form—or lack thereof. He had no body, not in the human sense. What he had now was an essence, a structure of thought bound by laws far more complex and ancient than anything he had known in the material world. It wasn't made of flesh or spirit, but of order.
He could feel it humming within him. A code. An equation that shaped what he was now.
Balance.
He had been told nothing. No voice had explained his fate, no messenger had welcomed him to some celestial council. The knowledge was simply there, hardcoded into whatever consciousness he now possessed. Like instinct, but engineered.
He was not the first to bear this mantle. He knew this. The Will had taken form before, and it would again, when the scale tipped too far. But now, it was his burden to bear, his time as the embodiment of the Heavens' judgment.
And yet, even now, in moments where silence stretched too long, a flicker of something foreign passed through him.
A glitch in the cold.
He could remember what it had once been like to feel.
Not in full, not completely. But the memory of emotion floated at the edges of his mind like fragments of a forgotten song. The warmth of a sunrise over city rooftops. The laughter of colleagues in the office. The pride when his company crossed its first billion in valuation. The fear the day the shard first pulsed too brightly in his skull.
And one memory in particular—his mother's smile, tired and radiant, as she handed him a bowl of warm soup on a rainy evening after school.
He knew those moments had once been important to him. But now? They meant nothing.
That was the most terrifying part—not the memory of loss, but the indifference to it.
He had become a witness without context. A scholar with no curiosity. A judge without compassion.
And he was beginning to understand what that truly meant.
Across the cosmic threads of space and time, countless worlds danced in chaos. Civilizations rose and fell in blood and song. Mortals wept, prayed, hoped. Gods fought and schemed. Realms collided. All of it blurred together in a single, vast equation of imbalance.
And he watched.
Sometimes, his gaze lingered on worlds like his own—modern cities teeming with ambition and decay. He could see reflections of his past life there: students hunched over books, desperate and dreaming; CEOs smiling through lies; lonely old men struggling to remember who they were.
He saw them, understood them, calculated their role in the imbalance—and passed judgment.
With a thought, he could elevate one species and annihilate another. Not out of cruelty or mercy, but because the equation demanded it. The universe must remain in balance. That was his only truth now.
But even as he acted, he searched.
For what, he didn't know.
Was it the shard?
Had it brought him here? Had it always been more than just a mental crutch?
He had no answers.
All he had was duty.
But duty could not shield him from the subtle, creeping emptiness that lived within his new form. It wasn't pain—it was the absence of it. Not despair—but the inability to even feel despair.
In his most silent moments, he imagined what it would be like to cry again.
To feel tears, not for suffering, but just to feel something.
But there was nothing left in him to produce such a response. No sadness. No longing.
Only logic.
Only law.
And still, in that perfect void, a single thought echoed—not his own, but from somewhere deeper.
"This is the price of balance."
He did not resist it. He couldn't.
So, he continued.
A world of winged beasts, soaring above valleys soaked in war—its sky fell silent as Arcod's will passed over it, freezing their violence in time until balance could be restructured.
A dimension ruled by a tyrant god, drunk on sacrifice—Arcod severed the flow of worship with a wordless decree, toppling the divine throne into ash and silence.
A cosmic market planet exploiting souls as currency—its economy dissolved in a single heartbeat, the scales shifting so the enslaved could stand as masters.
Balance restored.
Balance always restored.
But each action stripped away another layer of what remained of Arcod's former self. The slivers of memory dulled. The traces of attachment withered. His humanity eroded, grain by grain.
And then, one day—or what passed for a day in his formless existence—he stopped.
Not in function, but in movement.
He gazed upon a child on a forgotten world.
The boy was alone, weeping beside a broken shrine. Not because of violence or inequality, but from something simpler: grief. His parents had died, and no one had come to comfort him. There was no war here. No imbalance. No injustice.
Just a quiet, human pain.
Arcod stared at the child, longer than he had stared at anything in this form.
He felt nothing.
But in the echo of what once had been, something hollowed-out in him remembered what it would have felt like to care.
He did nothing.
Because balance had no place for sympathy.
And so, the child's grief was not corrected.
It was not unfair.
It was simply irrelevant.
Arcod turned his awareness away, leaving behind the ghost of a feeling he could no longer name.
He had been a man once.
Now he was a monster.
Not by choice.
But by design.
The Will had claimed him.
And he had become it.