The Primordial Record

"Have you seen anything quite like this before?" The Watcher frowned, her eyes flickering from one position to another, trying to come to terms with the new changes they were witnessing.

Three Tower Masters stared at the bodies of hundreds of billions of people, who stood in silence, only their breathing indicated that they were alive, but everything about them was dead, their glassy eyes would give a dead fish a run for the money.

They were all naked, and despite their bodies glowing with a robust vitality, the cold air of death around them was so strong that even the void seemed to freeze.

Silas Black a Tower Master of the Magus Supreme World, twisted time to return to the moment before the unknown entity had first struck, around Trion and the location where the Universe Will was taken.

He was strong enough to reach through the shroud of time and reverse it even inside a material universe and it helped that the universe Will was dead and nothing could hold him back.

As a Tower Master, his reach was not strong enough to reverse time for an area as vast as this calamity had imposed which was almost a hundred thousand light years in diameter, he could barely reverse time over a space that was a million miles in circumference, a pitiful number but creation was always harder than destruction and going back in time was ten times harder, but with the assistance of the two other Tower Masters with him, he could expand that reach to seven million miles.

They began to fish through time in an attempt to resurrect the mages that had fallen. They did not need to resurrect all the dead, but they should be able to resurrect all the Mages that had died, especially the Archmages. Although an Archmage would be reborn inside their Tower when their mortal bodies perished, it would be quite difficult to transport all of them to this universe.

At least that was the plan, but when they turned back time to naturally start the resurrection process, the result was as expected, the Archmages had all returned alive but every mortal was lost

Ignoring the fact that trying to rewind time in the area of the universe that was destroyed by the mysterious being was harder than it should have been, the people who came back were empty vessels, all hollow, rendering their efforts futile.

To understand more of this strange occurrence, the Tower Masters kept resurrecting the dead until they had collected billions of people, but they could only bring back their bodies from the hands of time, their souls were gone.

When the vortices appeared in the universe, in an attempt to learn something about this new entity, they sent a portion of the newly resurrected Archmages, which turned out to be a mistake.

Silas Black drew one of the bodies forward, this body was an Archmage and was one of the scouts sent into the unknown vortex to investigate what was happening inside of it. Andar would have recognized this Archmage, it was the two Star Archmage Lucius Gyfron The Pioneer of Treasure, one of his teachers.

He was not the most powerful Archmage Andar had come across but he was one of his favorite teachers due to the manner he chose to instruct his disciples.

He had died from the unknown attack in the universe that had stolen the universe's Will and he had been resurrected without any problems and was tasked to investigate what was happening inside the vortex, the Three Tower Masters had discerned when the Archmages they sent all perished barely bringing back any valid data, but this was a normal occurrence when trying to deal with the unknown.

From the pulsation of power they had felt alongside the Universe Will, they knew they were dealing with something that was both incredibly precious and also dangerous and the Tower Masters had expected that they would be resurrecting their forces hundreds if not thousands of times before they could pierce through the mysteries behind this unknown entity.

This was the normal pace of battle, however, what was not normal in the slightest was the fact that every Archmage sent into the vortex could no longer be resurrected, their bodies became nothing but empty hollows, all signs pointing to the true death of their souls.

Aeris the Tower Master in white took the body of Lucius Gyfron from Silas and pressed her sharp fingernails into his scalp, ripping off the top of his head to expose his pulsing brain. The eyes of the Archmages twitched, it would seem that without souls their bodies still responded to external stimuli.

She pushed a finger into the brain and fished for his Spirit Matrix, slowly withdrawing it to reveal a strange fleshy item that resembled metal and was vibrating with energy and an eldritch glow.

The Watcher gaped as she saw the Spirit Matrix, "That is impossible, his Matrix had already merged with his Tower millions of years ago, what could reverse this process?"

"This is getting more interesting," Aeris giggled, "Let's find out."

Throwing away the body of Lucius, her eyes which had no pupils inside them but were nothing but a blank white seemed to penetrate the Spirit Matrix of the Archmage

It did not take long for her to sigh and place the Spirit Matrix into a specialized storage device and she dragged a dozen Archmages to her side and performed the same ritual, extracting their Spirit Matrix from different sections of their brains. She became more confused and excited with every further experiment she was making before she discarded the final body and smiled with fascination,

"I will need to return to my Tower to confirm all my findings, but I think I know what happened, but what I can't tell you is how it happened. It is like seeing a fish grow wings and fly, I can tell you…"

"Stop with your meaningless dribble Aeris," The Watched chided, "If you have not noticed, the Demon King has not emerged from the vortex also, if this is not a plot from the Abyss, then that means a similar fate might have befallen him, and if his soul was also shattered it would take decades for him to reforge himself again. I don't know about you but the last time I checked, we are not more durable than a Demon King."

Wrenching the souls of Immortals from the grip of a Supreme World was not unheard of, but it would require a power that transcended the material dimension, but they were inside the material universe

Aeris rolled her eyes, for beings of power that had lived as long as they did and controlled Will, death was not strange to them, it even fascinated them, and Aeris was a long lover of death. What was happening here was not supposed to be possible and this did nothing but thrill her senses, but she also understood the concerns of the Watcher and promptly gave her findings.

"The souls of every dead mortal here are gone, but that is normal for an attack of this scale to shatter the soul of a mortal to nothingness alongside their bodies, but as you all saw this attack was quite useless against our Archmages until they entered the vortex."

"The how of their deaths is not possible for me to discover at this moment, we could barely discern anything in the final moments if their lives, but what I believed happened to them was that their Souls which had already melded with their Towers were drawn away from the Magus World and destroyed somewhere that this vortex leads to, the time reversal only showed us the intrinsic state of their being after this process has already been completed, they are truly dead and there is no way to reverse this process."