Otto Gave Everything He Had to Buy Kallen a One-Way Ticket to Another Universe

"No," Huo Yuhao said. "He knew better than anyone that if Kallen returned to this world, she would see only a Human Realm burned to ash by his obsession. That wasn't what he wanted. He didn't want her to come back. He wanted her never to have left. A Kallen who had lived on since five hundred years ago. A Kallen who had never met Otto Apocalypse. That was the best ending he could give her."

"So he wasn't building a city or a Temple, or even resurrecting someone," Tang San said slowly. "He made himself a carving knife, used the Authority of a False God as its blade, and put everything he had accumulated over five hundred years behind it to force a new branch from the Tree's trunk. Once that branch grew, it would become an entirely new World Line. The Old World would remain the Old World. The blood would remain blood, and the ruins would remain ruins. But on that new branch, Kallen would be alive. She would live from five hundred years ago until she grew old."

"We had it wrong all along," Gu Yuena said quietly. "We thought he was bargaining with the Tree, begging it to release her. But he was cutting into it. He himself was the knife. The Tree allowed him to reach its projection not so he could make a wish, but because it was willing to let him trade himself for a new wound. The deeper the wound, the more real the new branch. And after that cut, Otto would disappear completely. He wouldn't die. He would be carved into the Tree, becoming nourishment for that new branch. In Kallen's world, his never having existed would be the foundation of everything."

"He cut himself out of history." Chang Gongwei's