Chapter 670 - Everything Was Because Of Iris
(MC POV)
After my apparent 'loss' in the war against the Great Ones, most of my Origin essence was left behind in the centre of the universe.
I then went and reincarnated myself in the mortal worlds, living amongst them as one of their own and just generally experiencing living as a mortal.
I managed to get through a few lifetimes normally before Iris finally found me.
The mortal me had slowly gained empathy over the years and she had found that to be abhorrent, thus the formation of her plan to 'reset' me back to how I was before.
Since her power of creation was limited and her forte laid in Ending things, she couldn't just 'make' me apathetic again.
Sure, she could End my feelings, but having no emotions is not the same thing. And it wasn't like the past me had no feelings either since I did love everything equally.
Thus, she used her omniscience to find the best future that she could influence to return me back to how I was before..
Unfortunately, the future she sought seemed to be extremely improbable, the scene she saw of me returning to my past self was extremely blurry to her, meaning it was not likely to happen at all.
But being the entity she was, she had all the time in the universe to figure out a way to fix that.
She started with just small nudges here and there, manipulating some events to go one way or another to influence the future.
Slowly, she realises that taking certain actions would make that future turn clearer and clearer, confirming that such a future became more and more possible with each of her actions.
With her future sight, she worked to make that future become a reality, but it was not always easy for her.
As Origin, I was the master of my own fate and no future could shackle me. Just a single stray thought or action on my part would be enough to derail all her efforts in returning me back to my past self.
Iris was nothing if not patient, so she never gave up even after I've lived thousands of lifetimes which resulted in thousands of failures on her part.
That was until I reached my newest incarnation on Earth.
The vision she saw was the clearest it had ever been, making it almost practically guaranteed to happen. She watched over everything down to the tiniest detail and plotted the perfect plan to make the future she desired happen.
It simply required me to reincarnate into another world so she influenced events in that world to end my life, throwing me into this world.
But as they say, 'no plan survives first contact'.
Her plan did not account for my loss in memory nor my unexpected rush at ascending to the Spiritual Plane which resulted in the crippling of myself.
All her plans for that world went up in flames just like that.
She tried to salvage it despite all that but ultimately decided it was a failure when her vision of that future faded back to being a blurry mess.
But since it was the clearest vision she saw, she decided not to completely give up on it and appeared in front of me in her dragon form when I was stuck in the Cloud Plane.
The previous times she had refrained from intervening directly since I still had my memories and would have recognised her if she appeared in front of me. With the fact that I lost my memories this time, she saw it as an unexpected boon since she could now appear before me without me recognising her.
Although, the truth of the matter was that the previous me already knew about her constant meddling but just didn't care about it since the outcome mattered not to me.
In her dragon form, she Ended the flow of time and brought us back to the past, far enough that I would be able to stick to the script she had laid out for me.
But things went out of script the moment I returned.
Once again, I did something unexpected for her when I decided to take in disciples. But since her vision of the future actually became even more clearer after that, she welcomed the change instead.
Iris also took note of Tsuki who would eventually crossover from the other world, recognising her as someone who would influence my progress greatly.
The fact remains that Tsuki was actually fated to transmigrate here after her death even without Iris's involvement and would eventually meet me too.
And since Iris already found no harm in intervening directly, she chose to appear before Tsuki and make some changes to her as well. She gave her a power similar to her own and planted the suggestion in her to create the memory potion for me.
Since the 'Origin energy' that Tsuki would use to create the potion would be Iris's energy, Iris would be able to control the world that my consciousness would drift into.
Of course, the recipe that Brendan found was provided by her too and many of the strange incidents that seemed to have no cause were also a result of her meddling.
The appearance of those giant tentacle monsters, the summoning of Lilith, those busybodies appearing here were all done by her to make me aware of Origin.
She was also the one who made Sylphy 'Fall' as a goddess. But it was more because she was quite annoyed that the reincarnator Sylphy sent here had dared to disturb me.
Things like the portal activating underneath the monster sanctuary was also done by Iris. The portal was actually a remnant left by Lilith to travel around the different Planes for fun back when she was younger and slightly more mischievous.
Iris had used that to lure me over to this Plane to set me up for this final confrontation.
The secret words in the instruction of creating liquid Origin were also snuck in by Iris. The words harbor the effect that only people that had her Origin energy could see it which meant aside from herself, only Tsuki and I could see them.
Once I drank the potion and was within the world that she made, I was on the final stretch of her plan to 'reset' me.
An unexpected problem came to her in the form of my disciples trying to join that world too.
Not wanting to fail now, Iris split the world into two parallels and dumped my disciples into one while I remained in the other one.
But since the two worlds were mirrored, she needed to keep things balanced to avoid both worlds crashing into each other so she was forced to create copies of my disciples into my world as well.
Due to the fact that she had no interest in anything in existence with the exception of myself, she never bothered to make sure the copies she made had the same memories and personalities.
Coupled with the fact that she didn't want my disciples to 'get too comfortable' with me, she didn't make a perfect clone of me for them in their world either.
Thus she needed to switch me between the mirror worlds to keep up the ruse, even throwing in those 'End Shadows' to keep us occupied and less suspicious that something weird was going on.
Unfortunately, Iris had spent most of her concentration on me so her attempts at distracting my disciples were half hearted at most. It didn't take long for my disciples to figure out what was going on and come up with plans to break out of their prison.
Elaria and Tsuki managed to figure out a way to breach the wall between the two mirror worlds, Brendan created the potion to track me, Kiyomi followed them to guard them while the rest of the girls used their powers to make the breach.
They managed to find me in the other world during that yakuza fight at the docks, which finally forced Iris to pay more attention to them and prevent any more attempts from their side to make contact with me.
But when I was at the final few moments in reaching the future she had desired for so long, her concentration lapsed momentarily and allowed my disciples to break through again, shattering her desired future in an instant.
And now… Here we are.
Origin and The End.