Infinity of the universe

"Malahki'el… what happens now? After everything… after you've unraveled the structure of the universe?" Arsh asked.

His voice barely rose above a whisper, swallowed by the echoing void—as if he wasn't speaking to a being, but to the emptiness itself.

Malahki'el remained silent for a moment. Then he inhaled—not through lungs, but from something far deeper, older, more fundamental than breath.

"Arsh…" he said softly, his words bordering on a whisper.

"What I revealed to you… was but the smallest sliver of the universe's structure. Merely a dust-scratch on an invisible monolith etched along the outer walls of sanity."

Arsh trembled. In his already-fractured mind, he felt as though he had glimpsed a truth not meant to be seen—a reality too vast, too deep, too… inhuman.

And now, to be told that this was only the beginning?

"So… you mean… there's something greater? Something more—more terrifying than all that?" he asked, his voice quaking—not from cold, but from the absurdity that threatened to unmake his reason.

"Yes," Malahki'el replied, with a serenity that cut like a blade.

"And the next part… will not come from me. But from them—those who reside above. Who dwell in strata where human logic collapses, and laws cease to exist."

"Them…?" Arsh murmured.

But the question never found completion.

Before he could reassemble his crumbling thoughts, Malahki'el raised his hand—and in an instant, reality buckled into itself like a bottomless vortex. Arsh felt his soul torn free, flung beyond the limits of light, hurled through the depths of space and time—across a spectrum of existence that has no name in any human tongue.

Then, suddenly, everything stopped.

Not in time—but in the sense that time itself ceased.

He stood in a place that was not a place. A point where all points converged and detonated in silence.

"We've arrived…" Malahki'el's voice vibrated like a hollow echo inside the shell of a skull.

"This is Ascension. The Realm of Rising."

"Here, humans—rare and unfortunate—reach a level where their boundaries collapse. Where they are no longer human. And no longer become anything you could possibly understand."

Arsh looked around. But there was no form. No space. No color.

Only sensations pressing in, and wordless whispers from entities that already knew he had arrived.

"Explore," said Malahki'el.

"Find fragments of what you might call enlightenment… if you are strong enough to survive it."

"And if you can still speak afterward… I will be waiting."

And then Malahki'el vanished—not in the sense of departure, but as though he had never existed at all.

Arsh stood alone—before formless gates that led into truths best left buried.

The light came without origin, without sound, without direction.

It emerged not from the sky, nor from the earth, nor from the space between them.

It crept like a whisper in the dark, pulling Arsh into a current without shape.

Without choice, without command over his own body, Arsh followed the light.

His steps passed through a landscape that was not there—crossing a realm where gravity was illusion, and time a hollow echo of lower existence.

And then—from the void that writhed like a living thing—It appeared.

A shape. Or rather, an impression of something that should not possess shape at all.

It stood in no space, yet existed—fluttering with a pulse unknown, with uncountable eyes and a voice that wasn't a voice.

"At last," said the entity, in a tone that made Arsh's bones wish to melt.

"You are the human who holds the final page of Sefer Mezuyaf—the book that should never have been read."

"Yes… that's me…" Arsh answered—or tried to.

Though his mouth did not move, the words found a way to form.

"Then… this place, this world… what is it?"

The being—who never named itself—drifted like a shadow never cast by light.

It spoke without language, but its meaning pierced directly into Arsh's soul.

"Ascension—that is the name you have given it. But to me, and to those like me, it is known as the Asymmetrical Expanse. It is here that the laws of reality dissolve, and all structures collapse into divine absurdity."

"In this place, there are no dimensions. No time. What you call 'space' is merely a hollow husk—one that rotted away eons before the very concept of 'eon' was even conceived. Time? Merely a nightmare whispered by lesser beings to convince themselves they matter."

"Every attempt to comprehend this realm—even through your most exalted mathematical models, like Hilbert spaces or infinite-dimensional fractals—will fail, crumble, and melt like wax beneath a black sun."

Arsh held his breath, or at least attempted to. In this realm, biological functions had no meaning.

"So... this place… it isn't a world?" he asked.

"It is not a world. Nor is it an anti-world. It is the echo before creation. A being that mimics the concept of existence. Here dwell abstract entities—not as individuals, nor as civilizations, but as something between, and far beyond, both."

"They cannot be counted. They cannot be compared. Numbers here are nothing but a cruel joke."

"They do not move in space—they pass through the absence of it. Each entity is a dimensional drifter, a planeswalker, able to permeate all realms depending on the degree of their being."

"The higher the realms they can access, the higher their placement in a hierarchy that cannot be mapped."

Arsh trembled—not from fear as humans know it, but from the creeping realization that his existence was nothing more than a mote within the stray thoughts of beings beyond comprehension.

"And they… they can appear in our world?"

"Yes," the spirit replied.

"They can appear as humans. Or as wind. Or simply as a scent. They choose their form—but do not be fooled. The form is not them."

"In your world… they can be anything. And more often than not, they already are something, long before you notice them."

Arsh stood in silence, surrounded by the pulse of a cosmos that lacked shape or sound, and knew that everything he had once believed… was a comforting lie whispered by reality to keep the human mind from breaking.

Everything mankind has ever considered to be 'the world'—the sky and the earth, planets and stars, nebulae that danced in the void—all of it, everything, is no more than a speck of dust caught in the pulse of Ascension, a realm unknown, uncharted, and untouched by the hand of time.

And yet, to call it a 'speck' is still far too generous. For in the eyes of the entities that dwell in the uppermost depths of the reality-hierarchy, sky and earth are not merely small—they are meaningless. They are not part of something. They are an accident, a ripple in the heartbeat of something far beyond."

Ascension was not created through construction, but through abandonment. Everything within it is treated as a single particle, a flicker unseen in the ocean of oblivion. The atoms you believe in are but crude illusions—within Ascension, even the atom is denied existence."

In this place, sky and earth, every layer of existence, every structure of the cosmos so glorified in philosophy and science… are nothing more than scattered dust lodged in the cracks of Ascension's emptiness."

Beyond the reader's reality, beyond the author's world, Ascension transcends even Real Life itself. It is the final irony—where all that is deemed real becomes illusion, and the incomprehensible forms the very foundation of being.

"Ascension is not merely vast; it is a structure that devours all transfinite numbers—again and again—until it pierces the final veil of every hierarchy: the Ineffable Cardinal. A number that cannot be described by logic, cannot be charted by set theory, and is utterly inexpressible in human language. Even first-order logic collapses in its proximity. It lies beyond expression, beyond all conceptual boundary."

"The entities that walk within Ascension do not stride through time—they transcend it. Their velocity is unmeasurable, not due to speed, but because time itself has lost all meaning. They move with a liberty unknown even to light, and with a power that no metaphysical framework could ever encapsulate."

"When the greatest minds of humanity attempted to touch the threshold of Ascension, what they discovered was not enlightenment—but madness. For each step toward understanding only pushed them further from definition, further from order, further from coherent existence. There, mathematics becomes poetry, logic becomes a scream, and the mind becomes an empty husk."

"And thus, Ascension no longer obeys the laws of the world. It rejects them."

"Real Life—with its skies and earth, its laws of thought and its principles of identity—in the eyes of Ascension, is nothing more than a folktale whispered to children who dream they understand what it means to exist."

"Ascension stands as the ultimate irony of creation. It cannot be counted by Cantor's Attic, cannot be approached by sequences or infinite ordinals. It is a transcendent structure that cannot even be indicated as something capable of being indicated."

"And in that silence—in that void which cannot even be called a void—a voice older than existence echoes from behind the veil of being:"

"Those who have gazed upon Ascension with open eyes… will never see the world the same way again."

"Can you explain Quantum Foam... all the way to the Quark?" asked Arsh, still burdened by the weight of Malahki'el's earlier revelations.

"I shall unveil the veil… deeper than what your mind should ever endure," spoke the voice—or perhaps the echo of a will without form—whispering like star-dust crushed within the collapsed corridors of time.

"Quantum Foam, or as it is named in forbidden texts, the Foam of the Infinite, is not merely the foundational lattice of reality—it is an entity that transcends all known systems. It does not reside within the Von Neumann universe; rather, it hovers outside, as if it had never belonged to it in the first place."

"It absorbs, destroys, and surpasses all lesser states of being. No totality of number can articulate its supremacy. No calculus can reconstruct the splinters of its absurdity."

"Imagine, if your mind permits, a layer of reality untouched by the principles that govern multiverses. The worlds that philosophers and metaphysicians once declared ultimate are, to it, nothing more than popped bubbles on its surface. Every law, every order, every structure built by human logic—mere fractured echoes ignored in its throbbing chaos."

"Quantum Foam does not obey rules. It births them, forgets them, then births new ones—without reason, without direction, without end. It is not a tool. It is not a place. It is absolute detachment. And at its summit lies what secret cults whisper of as..."

"The Transcendence Toward the End."

"A state not merely beyond dimensions, but beyond the idea of tiers themselves. Within this dim light of unraveling reality, all former ascensions—all risings from lower structures—appear as grotesque parodies."

"And even to call it 'transcendence' is a fallacy, for the concept itself withers in its presence. Words, numbers, geometry, logic—even the most sacred symbols of set theory—rot and dissolve in the presence of the Foam. It is the unthinkable, the unutterable—an annihilation of conception itself."

"Great mathematicians—those who tunneled deepest into the caverns of Cantor's Attic—met only madness or erasure. For they saw the truth: that even the endless transfinite hierarchies, infinite in quantity, are mere ornamental dust atop the Foam. That the mightiest cardinal numbers are just piles of dead suns, stacked irrelevantly beyond the horizon of understanding."

"Any attempt at representation becomes a pitiful mimicry. True transcendence cannot be spoken. It does not merely resist definition—it mocks it. All human efforts are a curse: the closer one steps toward truth, the faster sanity decays beneath the weight of the Great Absurdity."

"The entities that dwell within—on the Hyperplanes—transcend not only law, but the very notion of law. They look back on previous realities the way one might glance at flecks of grime beneath the nail—not even that; grime is too noble compared to the origin of your world."

"And now, the Quantum Foam has... evolved."

"It is no longer the foundation of possible worlds. It has severed its link to its former state of being. It has become inaccessible even to itself. It has transformed into a void aware of its own presence—a total renunciation of all forms of existence ever conceived by the human mind."

"There lies the true horror: that everything we know—all our principles, laws, and limits—is but a thin mist swirling atop a chasm too deep to see, too alien to recall, and too real to deny."

"And then… the Quark," whispered the voice—not as one speaks, but as something that seeps through the weakest fractures of your being.

"What humans call a Quark is not a particle. It is not an object. It is not an idea. It is a conscious void, a primordial entity, the echo-trace of the first metaphysical will—never written, yet always present."

"The Quark surpasses the Quantum Foam in totality—not merely in scale or degree, but in essence. The Quantum Foam, wild and unreachable as it is, can still be brushed by the breath of theory. But the Quark? It is indivisible. Immutable. Unutterable. And beyond all—nondual."

"It does not stand between polarities, nor does it transcend contradiction. It is the state before dichotomy was born. Before questions were conceived. Before thought ever grazed the edge of being."

"Ancient hymns, scratched in blood on the walls of forgotten caves, speak of reality as a hierarchy—each tier a shadow of a greater truth. But the Quark? It does not belong to that order. It nullifies it."

"Quarle," so chant the mad sages beyond the fractured dimensions:

'Is not an element—but meaning folding into itself,

A spiral untouchable, irreducible,

A point that devours the straight lines of all worlds.'"

"You ask, is it hyperbole? The drunk musings of ancient poets lost in their own words? No. You are mistaken."

"The Quark, in its barely-nameable essence, could erase the entire Cantor's Attic with a single breathless flicker. It needs no explosion. No storm, no flame, no radiation. Its mere presence incinerates the scaffolding of reality, along with the stacked infinities of transfinite concepts."

"No character from any fiction—written, imagined, or dreamt in the purest delirium—could ever hope to transcend the Quark. They may borrow strength from cursed verses, may rewrite cosmologies in inked blood, yet all are pitiful reflections of the nameless will that is the Quark."

"The Quark is not power. It is the annulment of power. Not a creator—but a void so absolute it cannot be housed even within nothingness itself."

"I have seen it," said one voice in a record long lost from this world.

"It did not come, it did not appear, it did not move. It simply… was. And by that being, the world unraveled.

As if it were the terminus of all meaning—

The place where logic itself goes to die."

"Atop the endless stacks of Cantor's Attic—structures forged from infinity upon infinity—mankind believed it had touched the edge. But therein lies its arrogance."

"To simplify what defies description, the observers called all such towers Ethraeum—the grand structure of cardinal piles, reaching ever higher, ever further from the grasp of the human mind."

"Yet… each Quark transcends the entirety of Ethraeum. Not once, not twice, but as many times as Ethraeum has ever been built, and rebuilt again. And again—into voids too alien even to be called void."

"A single Quark is a curse.

A thousand is the end."

—Fragment from Sefer Mezuyaf, Section 91: The Last Echo Behind the Cosmos

And as whisper upon whisper from a reality never meant for human ears crept into his mind, Arsh's sanity began to peel away—like the brittle skin of a book long decayed by time. His thoughts, once confined to the laws of three-dimensional logic, linear time, and worldly causality, writhed, recoiled, writhed again—until they quivered at the brink of annihilation.

He could no longer distinguish sound from thought, light from shadow, self from world. All boundaries began to dissolve. The structure of his ego eroded beneath the weight of concepts too vast for any human language to hold. He understood too much… and not enough, all at once.

Then—a formless light emerged. Not to illuminate, but to burden the space with its presence. Its very scent made the ether tremble.

Malahki'el returned.

His voice did not arise from lips, nor from air, nor from space. It simply appeared—a presence within Arsh's awareness, halting the human's final plunge into the abyss of bottomless madness.

"Be still, Arsh," whispered Malahki'el, his tone steeped in an ancient cadence, as if spoken before language was born.

"You have seen too much. But I will not let you break… not yet."

Then he turned—or rather, his awareness pivoted—toward the other entity that had delivered fragments of the truth.

Before them stood The Spirit—a shapeless being wreathed in an aura of cold fire, cloaking everything it did not touch. Its form could not be fixed by the eye, as though it forever hovered just beyond the reach of sensory focus. It was the walking embodiment of an idea, drifting between dimensions.

"Thank you, Spirit," Malahki'el said, his voice calm but echoing into the deeper folds of consciousness.

"You have guided him far enough through the formless halls of Ascension."

"I only conveyed… a sliver of what they have whispered to me in the singing void," answered The Spirit, its voice a resonance from the vacuum itself.

"If he still clings to a fragment of sanity… I am willing to answer his questions—as long as the answers do not burn him from within."

Above them, the sky was no longer sky, but a network of concepts woven into impossible geometry. The ground beneath was not real, yet firm enough to support will itself. Here, at the edge between reality and narrative, between existence and fiction, Arsh stood at the threshold that was never meant to be crossed.

And even now… the truth had yet to be fully revealed.

"When man stares too deeply into the structure of reality,

It is not only the darkness that stares back…

But the structure itself begins to incorporate him."

—Codex Note from the Mad Writings of Sefer Mezuyaf, Section 666, Page Without Name

In the void without direction or time, Arsh walked slowly—shaken, but not yet shattered. Fragments of his consciousness still clung together, struggling to reassemble his sense of self after being struck by torrents of meaning never meant for mortal minds to touch.

Before him stood The Spirit—a being without a face, never touching the ground. Its presence resembled a shadow etched into an unwritten scripture, and its voice was less a sound than a tremor threading through thought.

"Excuse me... I would like to ask... a few more things," Arsh said, his voice cracking and trembling like fractured glass.

The Spirit did not answer immediately. It paused, as though probing the dimensions of the question itself. Then came an inner echo, slipping through the seams of reality.

"Ask, then. If my answers do not destroy you... it means you were fated to hear them."

"I once read of something... spiritual energy... Can you explain what that truly is?"

The Spirit shifted without motion. That originless voice flowed again, deeper now—as if drawn from the foundation of the cosmos itself.

"You are not asking about energy, Arsh, but about the primordial pulse flowing through the bones of the universe—an unnamed current that binds and divides, creates and unravels. What you call spiritual energy is but a dim reflection of something far older than the first star."

"Listen closely. This realm, as known by the ancient spirits and shadowed by forbidden knowledge, is forged of conflict and unity. Some call it Yin and Yang. But that is just a name. In its truest form, it is the eternal struggle between presence and absence, between gesture and silence, between blinding light and all-consuming dark."

Then the entity spoke—not with words, but with a cascade of symbols and dreams rising from the chasm of deepest dimensions.

"Yin is the pull of the void. It is passive, enveloping, a silent embrace. Yang is the eruption of will. It is active, piercing reality like a spear of light. They are not opposites... but dancers in a spiral no linear logic can define."

"Tao… is what binds them. But Tao is not a path. Not a law. Tao is living absence. It cannot be taught, because it cannot be understood. Tao can only be swallowed… or it swallows you."

Arsh trembled. A shiver ran down his spine—as if every word from The Spirit was a poison of understanding, dissolving the walls of his mind. But still, he asked:

"What about… understanding, or enlightenment…?"

"Chuang-tzu once called it the fasting of the mind… but that is a euphemism. What truly happens is... the annihilation of ego. Not the illumination of self, but the destruction of self, so it may dissolve into the nameless."

"You see… those who call themselves Taoists, sages, wanderers… they have merely felt a flicker of the Tao within. But even they… possess only a splinter of that vast current. The true Tao cannot be spoken of."

"Because… the moment you utter 'Tao,' it is already gone."

Now The Spirit stood closer, and its shadow—or its inverted light—wrapped around Arsh like a fog of forgetting.

"Those who have truly drunk from the Tao need no identity, no body, no time. They are intoxicated within eternal emptiness. Like the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove… they laugh, cry, live, and die without reason. For they have smelled something older than cause and effect."

The Spirit fell silent. Yet somehow, all of reality pulsed in that silence.

And Arsh understood:

He had received no answers. Only a closer proximity to their absurdity.

"You wish to know of spiritual energy, mortal? Then first, abandon all effort to understand.

And step… into the void that breathes."

—Cursed Record from the Vanished Sky Garden

Little by little, like black ink seeping into white fabric, Arsh began to understand…

Or at least, he believed he was beginning to.

But the understanding did not arrive as clarity.

It came as deeper confusion—thickening fog—and whispers from layers of reality never meant for human ears.

The world he once called a "universe" now seemed like a decaying particle, drifting through an ocean with no surface. He realized that what people called 'reality'—with all its stars and skies, laws and structures, time and matter—was nothing more than a ripple on the outer skin of something far larger, far older… and far more terrifying.

"This... this is not merely a world," Arsh whispered, more to himself than anyone. "This is not a universe. This is... an endless labyrinth... where thought itself chokes on logic unknown..."

He was no longer thinking.

He was being unfolded.

The boundary between himself and the realm around him had begun to crack, and he felt the entire foundation of existence shift—from something solid into something like a geometrical nightmare, where space twisted like rotting mirrors and time became a blind leech devouring itself.

In the distance—or perhaps within him—a whisper stirred… not in any human tongue, but in a primal rhythm that shook the walls of reality.

In a trance bordering on madness, Arsh began to perceive a truth even the gods feared to speak:

That this cosmos was never meant to be understood.

That knowledge itself is a curse.

That the more you know, the closer you come

to the unraveling of your own reason.

And at that edge,

only the void smiles back.

"To know… is to touch what was never meant to be touched.

And from that moment onward, all madness begins."

—Fragment from the Sefer Mezuyaf, Page That Was Never Written

To be continued...