Heaven and Earth, I Alone Am Supreme
Struck by the Brahmastra, the Sage brushed closer to the boundary of death than he ever had before.
Paradoxically, he no longer felt any pain at all.
Most of his bodily functions had ceased. His heart had stopped.
In another fleeting instant, he would meet complete death.
No—he was already dead, for all practical purposes. His soul and body had simply not yet fully separated.
Yet in that single instant before the soul left the flesh, exposure to the Creator’s Astra granted the Sage enlightenment.
Understanding of divinity. Completion of the mind-image. Perfect unity of mind, energy, and body…
At the same time, every karma the Sage had accumulated until now erupted.
“What the hell is this?”
Mara could not hide his bewilderment.
From the swamp formed by his countless slaves, a massive flower bud had suddenly thrust upward.
Anyone could see it was no natural phenomenon.
Is that a lotus?
It was enormous, yet its form closely resembled a lotus. From a distance it looked as though a lotus were about to bloom atop a mudflat.
A strange unease prickled at Mara. He felt an urge to order his slaves to burn the bud and crush it at once. He had been about to do exactly that.
—KWAAAAAAAANG!!
The bud unfurled. A lotus bloomed.
With it came a violent explosion that swept outward in every direction, blasting away every one of Mara’s nearby slaves.
“What in the world is happening?!”
Mara’s shout was nearly a scream.
A pure lotus fragrance filled the entire island.
Moments later the Sage emerged from within the lotus’s heart—naked, in his natural state.
Unlike moments before, not a single wound marred his skin, and both arms were whole and attached once more.
His body, tempered to the absolute limit as a warrior, inspired awe, yet that was secondary. Mara realized the Sage had become an entirely different being.
No. Stay calm. Measured against a god, he is a newborn. He cannot even properly wield his authorities yet! I can still suppress him if I—
—Kuuung.
The Sage took a single step through empty air.
Outwardly the footfall looked light, yet it was heavier than anything in existence; the world itself trembled.
“Wahahahahahaha!!”
The Sage laughed. He roared with laughter.
An indescribable sense of omnipotence and the spiritual ecstasy of rising in rank had half-driven him mad.
So this is what it feels like to become a god.
Power overflowed. It could not be compared to anything from his human days. He felt completely reborn.
And in truth he was. Soul and body had already become one; the Sage was now a being quite different from his former self.
“It’s not over!! I still have plenty of slaves left!!!”
A vast mudflat spread around Mara. Once more tens of millions of slaves erupted from within it.
The enormous throng that formed a human sea was grotesque in its own right, yet the moment the Sage took his second step they all burst apart at once.
“Still!!”
The Brahmin slaves unleashed a simultaneous barrage of Astras at the Sage.
Storms, flames, and earthen masses crashed upon him from every direction—power enough that even ordinary gods would not have endured.
With his third step the Sage opened his mouth. Wherever he walked, beautiful lotuses bloomed even in empty air.
The instant he took his fourth step, the Astras surrounding him vanished as if they had been a lie.
By the fifth step he already stood right before Mara’s nose.
Mara, overwhelmed by the Sage’s majesty, could not even move.
“Stay away!!”
For the first time Mara felt fear.
He even flung his own throne aside in an ugly scramble to put distance between them. Still unsatisfied, he raised a colossal wall of human flesh.
Its numbers exceeded one hundred and fifty million; ugly as the sight was, breaching it would be no simple task.
There would be no more existence as a human.
Taking his sixth step, the Sage decided he would have to strike a great many times to pierce the wall before him.
Resonating with the newborn Sage’s unconscious will, his first authority took form.
One thousand hands of light rose around the Sage and became white meteors, pulverizing the wall of slaves that barred their master’s path.
Henceforth he would live only as a god.
The Sage pointed to the heavens with his right hand and to the earth with his left.
Unable to endure the excess of pleasure, he grew far more arrogant than before.
“This can’t be! This makes no sense—it defies the natural order! You are a being who has escaped providence, ‘Siddha’!!!”
It was a cry close to a scream.
Yet denying reality and insisting the other was wrong changed nothing. Reality, as always, remained cold.
In the end the rain of fists not only punched through the human wall standing between Mara and the Sage—it pierced Mara’s body behind it and tore him to shreds.
“KRAAAAAAAAGH!!”
Mara screamed.
Even with a hole through his head and his flesh ripped into dozens of pieces he did not die, because Vishnu, while piecing together the mere scraps of divinity that remained, had granted him the attribute of regeneration.
Yet even that had limits. Once his strength was exhausted he would no longer recover and would die.
I… I have to run…
He felt no shame at the thought of fleeing from someone who had been human only moments earlier. Terror of death left no room for such feelings.
Most gods do not fear death, but that is only because the idea never truly registers with them—not because they are brave. The older gods and the Asuras had known war, yet the majority of modern gods never seriously considered that they themselves might die.
Mara was different. He had already experienced death. Even without the memory, the scar carved into his soul could never be erased.
The fear he had papered over with pleasure raised its head.
Mara opened a dimensional gate, using the authority that allowed him to travel anywhere he had once visited.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
A familiar voice sounded behind him.
Then, with an immense agony blooming in his back, Mara’s body shot high into the sky.
He rose so high that a great sun seemed to hang before his eyes.
No.
That was not the sun. This world had never possessed a sun to begin with—after all, it was a world he had created for himself alone.
Mara soon realized that what was falling upon him was not a sun but a gigantic fist shining pure white.
In his eyes the fist grew larger by the second—so vast it could cover nearly half the island they had stood upon.
“Something like this… there’s no way I can dodge…”
The fist descended.
It drove Mara into the ground and stamped him flat; the heavens and earth shook from the impact.
“Good heavens…”
Even the three sisters watching the island from afar could not close their mouths.
A short while later a colossal fist-print was carved into the island. At its center Mara lay crushed like an insect.
The shock had been so great that his flesh was already turning to ash and vanishing.
“Thank you.”
The Sage landed near the dying Mara.
“You were a worm of a creature, yet thanks to a worm like you I was able to reach a higher realm.”
He was not being sarcastic. The Sage spoke with genuine sincerity—though he cared nothing for the other’s feelings on the matter.
“Heh… heheheheheheh!!”
Mara burst into mad laughter.
The Sage waited in silence until the laughter stopped—his own form of gratitude.
Sensing that, Mara abruptly cut off his laughter.
“I… didn’t lose to you… because you are a great sage unmoved by pleasure. I lost… simply because you are a fool who can’t tell the difference between lust and aggression.”
“Well, you’re not wrong.”
“Your kingdom has fallen and your wife has been violated.”
“What?”
Completely unexpected words from Mara froze the Sage’s thoughts for a moment.
Why bring up my kingdom and her here of all places? The statement made no sense.
Yet knowing a god could not lie, the Sage could only fall into confusion.
In that instant Mara surged upright with startling speed and leveled an arrow at the Sage.
Having experienced the flash of life before death, he could now use a portion of the authorities from his previous existence.
The Sage smashed Mara’s shoulder with a fist before the arrow could be loosed, yet the arrow still left the string.
This… I can’t stop it.
Even with his Mind’s Eye he had noticed the shot, yet he still could not prevent the arrow from flying.
Examining it with his ‘Eye’ only confirmed the same fact: it could not be stopped.
How is a technique like this possible? No—this is that kind of ‘authority.’
It could neither be blocked nor dodged. No amount of understanding changed anything.
In the end Mara’s arrow pierced straight through the Sage’s heart.