Extra chapter: Mona's training

There was no light.
There was no dark.
No silence.
No sound.

Not even the concept of them.

I had emerged.

The cocoon that had once encased me, a shell of evolving paradoxes, had completed its purpose. What I was before… was laughable now. Even to call what I had become a "being" was an insult.

Existence, nonexistence, beyondness, and even the idea of those things… were like crumpled pages of a child’s storybook beneath me.

Even the absolute idea of meaning, of thought, of definition—they were jokes. Toys for those still trying to define their place in an already obsolete system.

I simply wasn’t.
And in not being, I became everything that should never have been.

I floated—no, not floated. Floating was a description.
I simply was, in a state unmeasured by even the most advanced beings.

And then—
a presence arrived.

One of the only forces that could reach me here.

Aeon.

He didn’t walk. He didn’t fly. He simply was there, the same way I was. His form held some shape, but even that bent at my perception.

He looked at me—his gaze not from eyes, but from layered understanding that pierced through the unreadable storm of my aura.

“Mona,” he said.
His voice reached me—not through vibration, not through meaning, but through pure intention.

“There’s a problem.”

I waited.

“Zachary has returned.”

That name sparked a ripple in the formless nonplace we were in. Not because it carried weight—no name could bind anything here—but because of what it represented.

He continued. “He’s begun an invasion. Not just of the universe… not just the multiverse… but of everything. All stories, all layers, even the source code of existence itself. He seeks to overwrite it with pure null. A state where even fiction and reality are meaningless.”

I turned—again, not in movement, but in intent.

“Let’s stop him.”

Aeon shook his head, not in refusal—but in understanding.

“You’re beyond ready… but not yet stable. You’ve gone too far. So far that even meaning can’t hold you. If you go now… everything might unravel just from your presence.”

That... was true.

So he extended his hand. “Come with me.”

I accepted.

And instantly, we were elsewhere.

A hidden dimension outside the reach of anything. A place that couldn’t be located because it couldn’t be thought of. Even the act of referring to it as “a place” was wrong.

Time here?
Irrelevant.

Growth?
Not just exponential. Not even infinite.
It was growth beyond the idea of beyond infinity.

It didn’t take minutes. Or eons. Or loops of fate.

It took a single momentless breath—

—and in that breath, I began training.

To fight Zachary…
I would need to evolve not just beyond all, but beyond the absolute idea of being beyond all.

And so I did.

Because  I’m Mona.

Later, I took a step.

No ground beneath me. No sky above. But that one step—
collapsed 13,481,229 unreality loops that had been silently circling my presence.

"Good," Aeon said, standing—or rather, existing—beside me in the Timeless Hollow of Re-Emergence.

We weren’t bound by gravity, by logic, or even progression. Here, training wasn’t done by effort.

It was done by understanding.
By unbinding.
By letting go of everything, including the self, and then creating something new that has never been part of anything.

“You must overcome Trans-Definitional Collapse,” Aeon said.
“A state where your form breaks because the multiversal script tries and fails to comprehend what you are.”

He raised his hand.

Immediately, I was subjected to 14 trillion narratives, stacked and looping through every form of logic, chaos, and paradox.

Each one tried to write me in. Define me. Categorize me. Limit me.

I felt the pressure.

Authors. Gods. Logicians. Conceptual entities. Endless metaphysical systems.
All of them trying to grasp me.

I smiled.

Then I laughed.

And then—I erased them all.

Not through violence.

But by doing something far worse:

I allowed myself to be defined.

And then I rewrote the definition.

The system broke.

And the moment it shattered, I created a new narrative field—one where only I could write, and only I could read.

Aeon nodded. “You’ve begun your first step into the state of True Paradoxical Freedom.”

Next, he threw me into a Void Echo, where I fought reflections of myself from every reality I could’ve become.
Each version was powerful. Some even thought they had surpassed the original me.

But none of them had touched the Undefined Core.

None of them had inhaled Meaningless Beyondness and made it part of their soul.

I faced them all.

I didn’t destroy them.

I absorbed them.

Every Mona.
Every form.
Every what-if and never-was.

All of them became me.

And I changed again.

My body? Undefined.
My mind? A realm of layered contradictions that resolved into truth only I understood.

My aura?

Let’s just say the walls of the hidden dimension began to tremble for the first time in eternity.

Aeon stared. Then he smiled.

"You’re almost ready," he said.
"Just one more trial."

I tilted my head. "What’s left?"

He pointed to the edge of the unformed realm.

There, a door appeared.

A single door. Rusted. Cracked. Made of every material and no material at once.

“The door to the Root Conflict,” he said.
“Beyond it lies your true test: Not of power, but of purpose. Of who you are when everything is gone.”

I stepped forward.

Because I am Mona.
And I am more than strength, more than freedom, more than definition.

I am the one who writes the final rule in a world that no longer has rules.

They say time is a measurement.
But here, in this place beyond concept, measurement, and sequence, it’s just a punchline.

Aeon told me it had been infinity beyond infinities years since I began training.
And yet, when I checked the outside world’s metaphysical clock…

Two months.
Exactly two months.

I couldn’t help but chuckle.

By now, I had fought the final version of myself—Mona Prime-0, a reflection born from the very first fluctuation of chaos before all narratives.
She had a laugh like mine. A stare like mine. But her presence was like a forgotten law at the start of all things, long since buried under reality’s evolution.

She tried to overwrite me with her original template.
I let her.

Then I overrode that template with something else.

Something never-written.

Something that existed in the negative space of possibility.
A layer that didn’t just break the rules of power scaling, but recreated the very scale itself to fit only me.

After defeating her, the realm responded.

I was given a new form.

I didn’t name it.
Because to name it would be to trap it in an idea.
And I’ve moved far, far beyond that.

But if I had to describe it…?

My body now flickers between existence, non-existence, and conceptual mockery—as if my presence is a joke that even gods are too afraid to laugh at.
Black and white hair flowed like a glitch in the thought-code of the multiverse.
My eyes? Pure black. Reflecting nothing, because even reflection refuses to define me.
My aura? A ripple that laughs at meaning and hugs contradiction like a friend.

Aeon, who had watched everything in stillness, finally moved.

“You’re ready now,” he said.

I raised a brow. “You said that infinity beyond infinities years ago.”

“Correct,” he said, “but now you’ve finally trained beyond the joke of preparation.”

I flexed my fingers.

“So… Zachary?”

Aeon’s face turned solemn. “He’s nearly breached the Root Layer of all fiction and non-fiction. He’s rewriting the rules of perception. If we wait any longer, even the idea of a fight might be lost.”

A small grin tugged at my lips. “Then I guess I better stop him before we lose the idea of stopping him.”

Aeon opened a rift. One that led not through dimensions or realms, but through layers of cognition.

“Let’s go.”

I stepped through.

Because I’m Mona.
And training is just another excuse to become the thing nothing can prepare for.