The God of Underworld

Chapter 350 49

Hades took a deep breath, feeling every fragment of power of Azathoth fusing into him. It was a cold, chaotic torrent that tried to rip his consciousness apart, but the King of the Dead held firm.

The erratic, mindless entropy of the Primordial Chaos God was now being forced into the iron-clad structure of the Underworld's Law.

He felt his veins pulse with the raw data of a billion discarded drafts, his very skin vibrating with the potential to erase and create.

Now, he felt as if he was no longer just the Supreme Deity of a single reality; he was becoming the weight that held the Library itself together.

Then, without hesitation, he summoned his spear, Desmos, and slashed at the empty void, and a bright white tear appeared.

The jagged edges of the rift glowed with a light that didn't come from any star, but from the source of all stories.

He stepped towards it, leaving behind the wreckage of the battle between the two, and found himself in the familiar library of the author... a vast, white realm, filled to the brim with towering bookshelves and countless books.

He walked slowly, as if he was not in a hurry, fhe click of his boots on the white floor was the only sound in the infinite silence.

He walked past shelves that held the histories of worlds where magic never existed, and shelves where the stars were sentient beings that sang to one another.

He saw books bound in leather, in metal, and in light.

Days passed.

The months.

Years.

Decades.

Centuries.

Millennium.

As if time itself lost its meaning, Hades continued to walk, never once stopping, as if the journey was not just a distance through space, but a trek through the conceptual weight of existence.

And the further he walked, the more he felt the shifting nature of his own being.

He felt as if he was back in his younger years, the fire of rebellion burning hot in his chest as he looked up at the Titans.

He felt as if he became an old man, weary with the burden of billions of souls and the endless paperwork of death.

He felt as if he was just born, opening his eyes to a cold, uncaring world for the first time.

He felt as if he was about to die, the final breath rattling in a throat that had commanded gods.

He experienced many things in that journey—the birth of ideas that never became stories, the echoes of laughter from characters who had been deleted before they could speak, and the crushing weight of tragedy that had been written just to fill a page.

He saw the beauty of a thousand first loves and the horror of a million wars, but no matter what, he continued to walk, not even stopping for a second, his purple eyes remained fixed on the horizon of white, his hand steady on the shaft of Desmos.

Until finally, he reached a simple, wooden door.

It looked out of place in the grand, infinite white of the Library.

It was made of pine, slightly weathered, with a brass doorknob that had lost its luster.

There were no runes on it, no divine seals, no warnings of doom.

It was just a simple door, but he knew, by instincts, that behind this, is where the author resides.

Slowly, he grabbed the doorknob, and twisted it, before opening the door.

He expected a grand architecture, perhaps a throne made of starlight or a hall that spanned across dimensions.

He expected things beyond his comprehension—machinery that wove the threads of fate or a giant eye that saw all.

He expected to be attacked by guardians of the Word or tested by riddles of the mind.

Hades expected many things.

But he didn't expect to find himself in a dark, messy room, with scattered empty cup noodles, empty packs of chips, and bottles of colas.

The air here was stale, smelling of old salt and flat soda, and the only light came from the flickering blue glow of a monitor.

It was a scene of profound mundanity, a domestic stagnation that felt more alien to him than any monster of the void.

And, at the edge of the room, a man sat in front of a computer.

Hades stepped inside, and the moment he closed the door, the click of the latch sounding unnervingly loud, the man turned around.

He looked young, around twenty or so, with short messy black hairs and heavy eyebags that suggests he haven't slept in forever, he wore a wrinkled t-shirt and looked as though he hadn't seen the sun in years.

"Yo..." He smiled, tiredly, his voice raspy and thin. "Welcome to the real world, Hades."

Hades' eyes widened, his grip on Desmos tightening instinctively.

The contrast between the power he felt and the person he saw was a chasm he couldn't immediately bridge. "You are... The author?"

He remembered that back then, the author looked like just a bunch 1s and 0s. How did he became like this?

"Are you shocked?" The author chuckled dryly, a sound like sandpaper on wood. "You must be. The almighty author, who can decide the fate of all creations, look like a shut-in NEET who lives in his parents' basement. It's not exactly the 'divine radiance' people usually go for in their prayers, is it?"

Hades remained silent.

He looked at the trash on the floor, then at the glowing screen which showed a flickering cursor on a blank page.

The entire Hyperverse, the wars of the Outer Ones, the love of his wives, the struggle of Herios—all of it seemed to funnel down into this one, cramped room.

"I know why you're here..." The author turned back to his computer, his shoulders slouching. "To kill me and replace me, correct? You want the pen. You want to make sure the story never has to end, or at least, that the endings are fair."

Hades nodded, his voice cold and resonant. "Indeed. You have played with our lives as if they were nothing. You allowed the Black Tide to rot the foundations of my home because you were 'bored.' So, do you wish to fight?"

The author chuckled and shook his head, his fingers tapping rhythmically on the desk. "No need. I can pass on my position to you. It's a heavy thing to carry, and honestly, I've been looking for someone to take the keys for a long time. But first, would you like to listen to a story? A real one, for once."

Hades stared at him for a moment, analyzing the lack of threat in the man's posture.

He saw no hidden power, only a profound, hollow exhaustion. So after a moment of hesitation, he walked to a wall and leaned on it, his arms crossed, his spear rested on the side as he gave the man his silence, which was the only currency a King had in such a place.

The author continued, his eyes fixed on the blank screen. "Do you want to know how I became like this?"

Hades remained silent, but his attention was absolute.

"You see..." The author began to explain everything.

He didn't grow tired the way normal people do, and the reason he was like this wasn't from sleepless nights or overwork—it was erosion.

It was the slow, agonizing process of being dissolved by his own imagination, because every world he created demanded something real from him.

Not just imagination, but emotion.

To write grief, he had to feel it fully; he had to find the darkest corners of his own heart and drag them out into the light.

To write love, he had to recall or fabricate something so convincing it hollowed him out afterward.

Every character wasn't just invented—they were fragments carved from his own mind, given shape, then forced to suffer for the sake of a better story, like a father who had to kill his children for the sake of a "meaningful arc."

Over time, he stopped knowing which feelings were his and which belonged to the thousands of lives he had written.

He had been a hero, a villain, a lover, and a corpse so many times that his own identity had become a blurred smudge.

Worse, creation never stayed contained on the page, and the more detailed and expansive his universes became, the more they pushed back.

Plot holes became contradictions that gnawed at his thoughts like physical parasites, and unfinished arcs lingered like voices that wouldn't quiet, screaming for a resolution that never came.

Characters he abandoned felt like unresolved debts, their faces haunting his dreams, and entire civilizations he destroyed for narrative weight left behind a kind of guilt that didn't fade, because in his mind, in the only place that mattered, they had existed.

Being an author meant absolute control—but also absolute responsibility, with very tragedy being his choice, and every death being deliberate.

Every moment of suffering was something he decided was "necessary", and at first, he justified it as storytelling, as the pursuit of art, but eventually, it felt like cruelty he could no longer defend.

He was the one who had written the hunger, the cold, and the despair.

And there was no escape.

Because if he stopped writing, the worlds didn't disappear cleanly, but decayed.

Stories without endings twisted into something broken, looping endlessly in a torment of repetition or collapsing into a jagged nothingness.

Characters froze in half-lived lives, stuck in the moment before a kiss or the second before a sword-strike.

It was worse than killing them—it was abandoning them in a state that could never resolve.

So he created the Outer Ones, thinking that being devoured was a mercy.

But that backfired. The outer ones became unsatisfied with just devouring broken worlds and have even started devouring the worlds that the author deemed to be perfect.

Unfortunately, their existence already became a necessity in his library that destroying them would result in a much worse outcome.

So he kept writing, long after the passion was gone.

He kept writing fragmented and broken stories, so that those Outer Ones would have enough 'food' and not devour the perfect worlds.

That's why he looked like that—like something had eaten him from the inside, because in a way, something had.

Every universe he created took a piece.

Every character carried a shard of him away.

Until what remained wasn't a person anymore, just a vessel forced to continue creating, because stopping would be even more cruel than continuing.

He became the prisoner of his own creation.

Being the author wasn't power, it was being trapped as a god who could never forgive himself.

The author finished speaking, and the silence in the room felt heavier than it had before.

He looked at Hades, his eyes pleading for understanding. "Now, Hades. After hearing all that, I want to ask.... Was I wrong?"