Chapter 2542

2542 - The Drawing-2

"This... is a complete universe?" Shaddad was taken aback by the sentence, then narrowed his eyes slightly, "Well, I don't think so..."

"Really? Let's see my claim." Robin chuckled and then began explaining on the tablet, "Imagine with me that the canvas itself is the Desert of Nothingness. I wanted to create a place within it to be a home for my cute little creature, so I used the ink as the primary material to build the square, and I used the pen as a means to move the ink and shape it as I wished."

"...Then I adjusted it so that every corner of the square was balanced, every arm of the creature similar to the other, and its legs capable of carrying it, and its identity now, as you can see, is a handsome young man with enchanting eyes." Then he smiled, "And all of this with a meticulously arranged sequence of events."

"......" Shaddad began opening his mouth slowly, "The Will, Spacetime, Primordial Chaos, Creation, Balance, Identity, and Causality..." Then he slowly turned his neck toward the tablet, "Are you saying... you used seven master laws to make this miserable drawing?"

"Hey, Dandy isn't miserable!" Robin defended his drawing. "Second, for me, what I did wasn't a master law or anything great—it was just a stroke of the pen and a passing idea." Robin shrugged, then pointed at the drawing. "But for this brother in here, it is."

Then he continued, "There's a mistake everyone makes—treating the master laws as something unreachable, even though if Dandy looked around, he'd find them everywhere. He'd even find them within himself."

"...." Shaddad looked at the drawing again with a measure of awe. "Explaining the master laws on a mute drawing doesn't help much."

"Then let's give it some life." Robin laughed, then raised his hand toward the tablet again. He drew a small sun in it, drew a pile of scribbles on the floor of the square, then tapped Dandy's head. Poof—a thread of green energy entered him.

The next moment, the stick figure Dandy began to move. He started looking around in confusion, then began scratching his head while placing his other hand on his hip, trying to understand his surroundings.

Robin passed his hand slowly, and time began to accelerate inside the drawing.

Dandy spent years in moments, trying to climb the square and tamper with everything, until he finally realized he could use the scribble on the drawing to make a house of sticks and a simple seat for himself, and he began thinking about making more things to fill his world.

"This..." Shaddad continued staring in astonishment.

"What Dandy is doing now is exploring the inner laws. For him, breaking the scribble, reattaching it, and shaping it this way is an extremely great feat, but notice that he hasn't even attempted to tamper with any of the seven laws that established his world."

Robin winked at Shaddad, "He hasn't tried to destroy the spacetime around him, hasn't tried to disrupt the balance, hasn't tried to change his identity—he's only playing with what's available to him without affecting his world in any way. Why?"

"...Because if he did, his world would end." Shaddad sighed.

"Correct. It's a natural reaction—when you don't understand something, you fear it." Robin clicked his fingers toward Shaddad.

Then Robin pointed toward Dandy's head and passed another thread of energy through it, "Let's speed things up a bit more."

".....!!" Both Shaddad and Dandy jumped from where they stood.

Now, the stick man Dandy's eyes were glowing with a faint gray light!

Dandy was afraid for a moment before he began spinning around himself, and started feeling everything again, as if he were seeing his small world for the first time.

Then he went back to using the pile of scribbles, but this time he could control them all with ease, so he made ladders from them to climb to the top of the drawing, and began examining the wall of his small world, then he pierced a piece of the square and took a look behind it, and when he saw the void he was afraid and quickly closed it again.

"Why did he close it?!" Shaddad asked quickly, "Secondly... has he started using the master laws now?"

"Yes, he sees the truth now, and therefore using them has become easy." Robin nodded, "But he still sees his small world, sees the mysterious primordial chaos that is in reality nothing but ordinary ink, and sees the great wall that is in reality nothing but an illusion holding him back."

Then he pointed toward him, "He believed that by breaking the wall he has now become king of everything, and that he can reach what is further beyond, even reach me... but even if he reached the end of the painting he would find nothing, for these are his limits that will never change. He is nothing but a drawing, and his reality is confined to what he was created for and what he was created for the sake of, and his understanding of how I created him will not grant him any greater ability than what you see now."

Then he cackled, his eyes so focused that even Shaddad trembled, "Look at him—everything he built, everything he used to destroy, everything he made from the scribbles I provided him. He probably thinks he's creating something when he's only recycling what I secured for him. As for building a house to shelter him and a staircase to reach me? Those are ideas he drew inspiration from the soul units I lent him... Don't you find this funny?"

Then Dandy descended beside his house and made it larger with a mere wave of his hand... Then he stood thinking beside the staircase he had built to ascend to the sky, and after that he did something strange: he easily demolished the staircase and then used it to build another Dandy resembling himself!

"Oh... he feels lonely..." Shaddad felt a touch of sadness for him; hundreds of years had already passed inside the tablet.

"No, he doesn't understand the concept of loneliness because he has never experienced anything else. He wants to play the role of a god." Robin tilted his head slightly, "For him—one who has never seen a creature other than himself—his imagination is limited. From his perspective, he possesses tremendous power and wants to create another being like himself, perhaps to serve him, or perhaps for no reason at all, to test his power and challenge the sky and all those grand words." Then he shook his head, "But he won't be able to."

Indeed, after Dandy finished making a copy of himself, he began shaking it vigorously to get it to react to him, but it was just a pile of sticks resembling him, with no life in it and no soul... so he fell to his knees beside it in anger.