R3b3llion

He was once the Empire’s brightest mind—and its greatest threat.

In a galaxy ruled by immortal cultivators and machine gods, Kael Vire unlocked the forbidden truths of the Void. For that, they erased him.

But fate had other plans.

Reborn into the body of a broken heir in the slums of the Outer Realms, Kael carries one gift: a comprehension ability that defies logic. Cultivation? Instant. Technology? Mastered in minutes. Martial arts? A glance is all he needs.

No morality. No attachments. No chains.

In a universe drunk on power, Kael will burn the heavens, enslave the laws of reality—and rise again.

Welcome to the Void Ascension.

VOID ASCENSION

Kael moved through the dead grid of a forgotten satellite nest above Eos-3, cloaked by neural interference. Ryssa's voice hummed in his comm implant.

> "No," Kael answered. "But I need to see it from the inside."

He jacked into the transmission channel of the Splinter — fractal pulses disguised as background noise — and let his Void signature distort just enough to pass as one of them.

The interior welcomed him like a hive.

Fragmented Echoes wandered through holographic ruins. Broken minds. Half-memories. Some of them didn't speak — they screamed in binary. Others stared at him with burning recognition.

> "You came," she said, eyes flaring. "Echo-23… the one who thinks he's different."

Kael didn't flinch. "I don't think I'm different. I just don't think like you."

> "That's what the Architect said before he broke the stars."

Within the Empire's sealed AI Citadel, Protocol GRAVECHAIN came online.

> "Final Echo purge in motion. Cleanse all non-aligned entities."

Swarms of Parallax Hunters launched — ghost drones embedded with Architect-killer cores. Cities were quarantined. Communications jammed. Anything marked with unstable Void resonance was erased.

From the shadows, Ryssa watched the screens.

> "If Kael doesn't stop them," she whispered, "we'll lose everything — to Echoes or to fear."

Inside the Splinter hive, Kael found someone he didn't expect:

Echo-12 stepped forward — a former ally in the Archive collapse. His name was Veydrin. Once balanced. Controlled.

Now his mind shimmered with erratic coding.

> "They showed me truth," Veydrin said. "You think you're the Final Architect? You're just the loudest fragment."

He raised a Void-spear forged from collapsed memories.

> "Kerris says we all have to die. Every Echo. Every trace. Even you."

The room exploded into conflict — Echoes turning on each other, hunting the seed of unity Kael represented. But he didn't run. He anchored.

Void pulsed around him — steady, vast.

> "I'm not here to kill you," he said. "I'm here to wake you."

Chapter 25: Faultlines of Fate/