I Am Zeus - Chapter 253

Chapter 253: Power Up
The descent into Tartarus was less a journey and more an unraveling.

Zeus did not walk down gleaming steps or ride a chariot into the depths. He simply stood at the mouth of the chasm, a jagged tear in the world behind the throne room that few knew of and fewer still dared approach. He took one last look at the fading twilight over Olympus. The colors were already dimmer, the air thinner. Metis had begun her work.

Then, he stepped off the edge.

He did not fall. The world fell away from him. The light of the upper realms vanished, swallowed by a gloom that was older than darkness. He passed through layers of reality—the bustling mortal world, the quiet fields of Elysium, the mournful banks of the Asphodel Meadows, then the shrieking torment of Tartarus proper. He ignored it all, a stone sinking through troubled water, aiming for the very bottom.

He landed on something that was not ground. It was a surface of absolute black, not because it was dark, but because it absorbed all light, all sound, all concept. This was the foundation. The place before the prison, before the Titans, before anything had a name. The air didn’t move. It was heavy, thick with the silence of things that had never been born.

Hephaestus and Hades were already there, waiting.

They looked out of place. Hephaestus, the master of forges and fire, stood awkwardly on the non-ground, his tools gleaming with a light that seemed offensive in this void. Hades, in his element of endings, seemed more comfortable, but even his eternal stillness was tense. This was beyond his domain. This was the place where domains went to die.

“The core is linked,” Hephaestus said without preamble, his voice flat. No greetings. There was no time for them. He gestured to a complex, glowing apparatus that seemed to be drawing a thin, golden thread from nothingness—the vital energy of Olympus itself. “The siphon is active. The mountain… feels it.”

Zeus could feel it too. A faint, cold ache in his own spirit, a connection being stretched thin. He nodded.

Hades pointed a pale finger at a specific point in the nothing. “The anchor point. This is where the weave of the death-realms is thinnest. We can punch a hole here. But it will not be gentle. And it will not want to stay open.”

Zeus looked at the spot. He could feel the chaotic energy inside him stir, pushing against his ribs, eager for the void. He could, with a great exertion of will, force a domain into existence here. He could shape the nothing into a sanctuary of accelerated time. But Metis was right. To do so would drain him, leave him weakened at the very start of his long cultivation. He would be spending his capital before he even began to save.

“I am not going to create it,” Zeus said, his voice echoing strangely in the void.

Hephaestus stared. “What? Then why are we here? This machinery… the siphon… it’s all to power your shaping.”

“No,” Zeus said, his eyes fixed on the anchor point. “It is to power the unshaping.”

He understood now. He couldn’t build a house in this void. He had to convince the void to make a room for him.

He walked to the center of the designated area and sat down, crossing his legs. He closed his eyes, shutting out the concerned faces of his brother and his son. He reached inward, not for the familiar storm, but for the new, hungry thing that had taken root in his soul.

He didn’t command it. He invited it.

He let the chaos unspool from his fingertips, a dark smoke that did not rise but poured outward, pooling on the non-ground. It didn’t build. It eroded. Where it touched, the absolute blackness of the foundation became something else—a deeper black, a hungry black. It was like watching acid eat through metal, but in reverse, creating a space by emphasizing the nothing that was already there.

Hephaestus gasped. The machinery he had built groaned in protest, the golden thread of Olympus’s energy flickering violently as it was fed not into a construction, but into a consumption. The void was drinking the light of heaven.

“He’s not making a domain,” Hades murmured, his eyes wide with a rare shock. “He’s asking the Primordial Chaos to make one for him.”

It was a dance, not a dictate. Zeus poured his will, mixed with the stolen vitality of his own home, into the chaos, and the chaos did the rest. It was a living thing, and it was remembering its old shapes. Walls of swirling grey mist coagulated from the void, not solid, but real. A floor formed, not of stone, but of hardened silence. A ceiling of churning, starless potential sealed them in.

There was no light source, yet they could see. The air became thick, syrupy. Time itself felt different—sluggish and heavy.

Hephaestus checked a complex dial on his apparatus, his face grim. “It’s working. The temporal dilation is… extreme. A year in here is less than a heartbeat out there. But the drain… Zeus, the drain is catastrophic. Olympus will be a ghost of itself in a week.”

Zeus did not open his eyes. “A week is all I need.”

Inside the newly-formed pocket dimension, a thousand years would pass. Outside, only seven days. The math was terrifying. The cost was unimaginable.

The final step was the seal. Hades stepped forward, his own power of endings rising to meet the nascent chaos. He didn’t fight it. He guided it. He spoke words in a language so old it predated speech, and the swirling mists of the walls stilled, forming a seamless, impenetrable barrier. It was a one-way door. Nothing could get in. And only Zeus, if he succeeded in his transformation, would be strong enough to get out.

The work was done. The domain was complete. It was a perfect, terrible egg, hidden in the deepest dark, feeding on the life of the world above.

Hephaestus looked at his father, a profound sorrow in his eyes. He gave a short, sharp nod, a craftsman acknowledging a job finished, however horrific. Then he turned and, with a touch to his machinery, vanished, returning to a mountain that was already beginning to sicken.

Hades remained a moment longer. He looked at Zeus, sitting perfectly still in the center of the impossible room, the dark energy already beginning to cocoon him.

“Do not get lost, brother,” Hades said, his voice the last clear sound before the silence of the domain became absolute. “The dead are one thing. What you are becoming… I do not know if even I could find you.”

Then, he too was gone, melting back into the shadows from whence he came.

Zeus was alone.

The silence was immense. It was the silence of a universe before the first word. The air hummed with potential, with the raw, unformed power of chaos. He could feel it pressing against his skin, seeping into his pores. It was time to begin.

He didn’t move. He simply let go.

He stopped restraining the chaos within him. He stopped being Zeus, the King of Olympus, the God of Thunder. He visualized himself not as a ruler on a throne, but as a barren plain, and he let the storm of un-creation wash over him.

It was not pain. It was unmaking.

His memories began to fray at the edges. The face of his first wife. The taste of ambrosia. The feel of lightning in his hands. These were concepts, structures. The chaos did not like structures. It gently pulled them apart, not to destroy, but to return them to their component parts. Sensation. Emotion. Potential.

He saw Hera’s face, not in anger or love, but as a collection of light and shadow, a pattern that could be rewritten. He felt the thrill of his first thunderbolt not as a triumph, but as a vibration of power, one frequency among infinite others.

He was being scoured clean. The god he had been for eons was being dissolved, his history, his personality, his very self, broken down into fuel for something new.

Centuries passed in the blink of an eye. The grey walls of the domain witnessed a transformation that had no spectacle. There were no roaring energies, no blinding lights. There was only a man, sitting in the lotus position, slowly becoming less and less human, less and less divine, and more and more… fundamental.

He was becoming a vessel. An empty cup waiting to be filled with the ocean of nothing that had existed before something. He was learning the language of the void, and the first lesson was to forget every other word he had ever known.

Outside, on Olympus, the sun rose on a new day. But the light was weak. The flowers on the slopes had begun to wilt. Ares shouted for his father, demanding a strategy, and was met with a cold, empty silence from the throne room. Confusion turned to fear. The rumor began to spread: The King had abandoned them.

But deep in the foundation of all things, inside a bubble of stolen time, the King was fighting the only battle that mattered. He was wrestling with the beginning of everything, and he was losing, on purpose, so that he might learn how to win.

End Of Volume.