Chapter 406: The Collectors Move
In the vast, infinite universe — among the billions of realities within the omniverse — one world no bigger than Earth's moon exists.
A green world, with lush emerald forests stretching to the horizon, shimmering lakes reflecting twin suns, and mountains that reached so high their peaks brushed against the fabric of the stars themselves.
A young, nameless world that had existed for only two hundred years, and yet it was already teeming with life and magic — all thanks to its creator.
Lora, the Goddess of Animals and Farming.
She was gentle and kind, her laughter the first song the winds ever carried. Wherever her feet touched, flowers bloomed; wherever her tears fell, rivers formed. She sculpted every creature with loving hands — from the smallest winged insects that drank morning dew, to the mighty beasts — only in her eyes — that roamed her open plains.
...
Far away, on a distant hill, a ripple in space and time stirred — a disturbance in the fabric of the multiverse itself. A small, imperfect portal shimmered into existence.
Ripple. Ripple.
A second appeared. Then a third. Then a fourth.
Then, with a sound like cracking glass, a line split down the middle of the rippling veil — opening a wound between worlds. The crack spread, glowing white-hot, until it tore itself wider and wider, a doorway to another reality.
Step. Step.
From the portal emerged two figures. Two women.
One was tall and beautiful — a red-haired woman dressed in a black office suit, her heels clicking softly against the grass. Her crimson hair caught the sunlight like liquid fire. She had one good green eye that scanned the horizon with the calm authority of someone who had crossed countless worlds before, while the other was hidden behind a black eyepatch.
This woman was the same one that Odin visited before, the one called Madam X.
Beside her stood a smaller woman, blue-haired, barefoot, her attire shifting between forms as if unsure what to be — a simple dress, a traveler's cloak, and then nothing more than threads of light. Her expression was soft, curious, almost childlike as she stared at the alien sky above.
The taller woman adjusted her tie and sighed before pulling a cigar out of thin air and lighting it up. The blue-haired woman turned toward her, watching curiously.
"Hey. It's been a while since I've done this," the woman, Madam X, said, tapping her finger against the end of her cigar.
"Yes, it has. Five minutes." The blue-haired woman tilted her head. "Though I'm not sure how I feel about your smoking habit. It's not healthy for you."
"Tch... What about your constant nagging? That's not healthy for me." The woman scoffed, puffing out a cloud of smoke. "Don't you ever stop?"
"Of course I do," the blue-haired woman replied with a small smile. "You're just too stubborn to notice."
"Fine. Let's just do what we need to do and move on." Madam X rolled her eyes before taking a deep breath of her cigar. "This is a beautiful world."
"Yes, it is," the blue-haired woman said, glancing up at the sky. "Tearing it apart will be... exciting."
Madam X exhaled a slow plume of smoke, watching it twist and fade into the warm air. The scent of her cigar felt wrong in this place — alien, sharp, industrial — as if her very presence poisoned the serenity of this newborn world.
She glanced helplessly at the blue-haired woman beside her before raising her left hand, tapping on her electronic bracelet, and going through the data she collected this past week.
For some reason, no matter how hard she tried, Madam X couldn't find information about the goddess Morgana; if not for the arena fight that went viral in the forums, she would think that the goddess doesn't exist.
And yet that's impossible. She couldn't even find a trace of the goddess in the records of any realm. It was as if she simply popped into existence the day after the arena match.
She even used her authority as a Collector, searching in the Nexus network, and what she found was even less than what the public knew about her.
[Name: Morgana / Goddess of Sex and War / Rank: Iron]
That's the only information that the system could give her on the mysterious sex-obsessed goddess. Madam X went an extra mile to ask for help from a hacker friend who works in the Nexus system to try and find more about her, but the answer she received was... nothing.
Madam X exhaled another thin stream of smoke, the ember of her cigar glowing faintly against the emerald breeze. Her single green eye flickered with irritation as she scrolled through the holographic data projected from her bracelet. Lines of divine code, broken glyphs, and corrupted signatures danced before her like mocking ghosts.
Nothing.
"Still can't find her?" the blue-haired woman asked softly, her bare feet sinking slightly into the grass.
"Not a damn trace." Madam X gritted her teeth. "It's like she was born yesterday — literally."
She flicked the hologram to expand the data column, the faint hum of the device breaking the quiet air. "No birthplace, no records, no prior incarnations. The Nexus only lists a name and a rank... How the hell does a goddess not exist on record?"
"I don't know." The blue-haired woman shrugged, crouching beside a flower and watching it tremble in her presence. "Perhaps she's not a goddess."
"Then what is she?" Madam X looked at her sharply. "The fuck is going on here?"
Two possibilities: either the Nexus itself was trying to protect Morgana, or this goddess was a primordial that pretended to be a low rank.
What Madam X didn't know was that the reason for Morgana not having a record, especially regarding her world, was that 'officially' Morgana doesn't exist.
Before ascension, Morgana was a Night Mother, a primordial bloodline; she had two souls, hers and Victoria's. Moreover, she spent ten thousand years as the high queen of the Unspoken Realm, where the Nexus network couldn't reach.
And after ascension, her divine body was crafted by the faceless judges with the help of the Keeper of the First Memory, Anamnesis, who made sure that Morgana stayed out of the records of the Nexus.
As the only being that could give birth to him, Anamnesis would never risk Morgana being discovered by anyone, let alone by the primordial gods. And the only way to do that was to make it so that she simply did not exist.
As for why Madam X couldn't find the coordinates of Morgana's world — simple: Morgana doesn't have a world. She only inherited Lilith's world.
A world that was already in a state of conflict between multiple gods. Yes, Morgana is connected to the world's core, but in general, she was just an additional player in the war of the world, nothing more.
So her world, Elytheum, cannot be accessed by normal means until Morgana fully claims it.
"Sigh..." Madam X took a long drag of her cigar before letting out a thick cloud of smoke. The haze curled in front of her face like a veil, hiding the frustration in her lone green eye.
"Look, I don't care what she is. We just need to find her, deliver her to Odin, and get the artifact."
The blue-haired woman's expression didn't change, though her voice carried the faint hum of static — like radio interference bleeding into reality.
"You do realize this violates six Nexus regulations and at least three multiversal treaties, right?"
"Hehe." Madam X gave a humorless chuckle. "Please. The Collectors break laws every time they breathe. I'm just doing it more efficiently."
She took another puff and exhaled toward the twin suns. "Besides, Odin doesn't pay cheap. He wants this goddess, and he wants her now, which means we can get an instant payment. Don't tell me you're not excited about that."
That artifact is their only chance to recover their lost states as gods.
"Still," the blue-haired woman murmured, running her hand through the grass, "if the Nexus finds out, they'll classify this as interference. They don't take kindly to agents acting as mercenaries."
"That's why you're here, isn't it?" Madam X smirked. "To erase the evidence if it goes wrong."
"Of course." The smaller woman tilted her head with mock innocence. "I can just blow this world to dust if need be, and no one would remember it."
"Cute." The redhead flicked ash from her cigar. "Now let's visit this goddess and ask her nicely about her friend."
"Hmm." The blue-haired woman tilted her head, thinking of something. "X, can I break her? Just a little, maybe a few limbs?"
"No." Madam X frowned. "We need her to spill out the location of her friend."
"Fine, but what about the rest? Her followers?"
"Do what you want." Madam X waved her hand. "I don't care about insects."
"Yaaaay!~" The blue-haired woman jumped up and down in a tiny circle as if the grass beneath her feet were a trampoline. "Thanks, X... you're the best!"
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