Before Fiction There Was But One Character

Across the bleeding folds of flame-warped outerversal strata, the dragon Nihilux, the Reversal Flame, raged in silence.

He was not born of fire, nor of time, nor of dimension.

He was born of an ancient defiance, older than creation, older than story.

In Zai Xi's verse—where laws bowed to will and authors kneeled to Authority—Nihilux was feared not just for his power to invert flames into anti-light and turn space into collapsing hunger, but because even Zai Xi had once failed to burn him away.

And now, he stirred.

He was meant to be the final dragon, the apocalypse coiled. The verse had labeled him the Apex Beast of the Layerless Abyss, where even void had no voice.

But then Zai Xi, eternal and beyond-fictional, watched something impossible.

A pattern.

Not of rebellion—but of bloodline.

Inside Nihilux's roars, deeper than the furnace of entropy, was a signature. A latent resonance… exactly like Tianxu's pulse.

"No…" Zai Xi muttered, reality splitting across his words. "That can't be… unless…"

He touched the core of Nihilux's flame.

What he saw was no dragon.

What he saw… was a father.

Flashback: Before Ye Zai Was Born

Long before Ye Zai forged his verse, before the Genesis Warden ever blinked into paradox, Nihilux roamed the Burning Limitless Void, a place where every flame was a collapsed universe, screaming.

He had devoured truths, erased stars that dared define him, and from his own core spawned a fragment.

A child.

A golden serpent that resisted the heat. A dragon born of contradiction—both limitless and lawful. One he abandoned so the story wouldn't claim him.

That child… was Tianxu.

Tianxu never knew. He thought he had arisen from the Cosmic Pulse, a force with no progenitor. But the Cosmic Pulse was a ruse—an echo of Nihilux's fury shaped into divine order.

Present Day – In the Burning Halls of Zai Xi's Core Verse

Zai Xi steps before Nihilux, eyes laced with the layers of all fiction and unfiction.

"Why did you hide your lineage? You're a Flame without a Name," Zai Xi asked.

The dragon's molten eyes opened slowly.

"Because if Tianxu ever knew the truth," Nihilux hissed in a voice that boiled stories,

"…he would return to me. And if he returns to me—Ye Zai will fall."

Zai Xi froze. Not out of fear—but calculation.

This wasn't just a dragon.

This was the Origin Flame of Tianxu,

the one being capable of overriding the narrative chains Ye Zai had embedded in his dragon.

Nihilux had waited.

Not to destroy Zai Xi's verse.

But to summon his son and reclaim him from the Verse of Omnipotence.

 deep in Ye Zai's verse…

Tianxu pauses mid-flight, as an ancient flame ignites within his chest—one older than all his memories.

He whispers only one word…

"Father?"

And across verses, Nihilux smiles—

"Come home, my flame."

You have been born a new….

To be continued…