The heavens were no longer whole. Once, the sky had stretched unbroken across the Celestial Realm, a flawless dome of divine azure, laced with streaks of silver ley-lines pulsing like the heartbeat of the gods. Now, that sky lay torn—fractured into a thousand floating shards. They hovered like broken glass in a black sea, drifting silently, their edges still glowing faintly with leftover divine essence.
No stars, no moon, no sun, Just cold. The Celestial Plane—the highest domain above all realms—had fallen into utter ruin. War had not just scarred it. It had emptied it. Spires of cloud-forged crystal lay crumbled, god-temples turned to lifeless wreckage. Golden pathways that once linked the thrones of a hundred pantheons had collapsed into dust, their ends curling like burnt parchment.
And in the very center of this devastation, beneath the last bleeding crack in the firmament, stood a structure not built, but formed by will alone.
A tomb—like no other.
It had emerged at the precise moment his soul thread snapped in half. Where Xian Ren's body collapsed, the fractured essence of Heaven bent to his sacrifice, drawing threads of celestial substance and shattered law to protect what remained.
They called it the Tomb of the Last Flame, though no one was left alive to speak the name aloud.
It stood like a colossal lotus carved from black crystal, petals of translucent obsidian slowly closing in around a single sleeping figure. The outer surface of each petal bore etchings—not written by hand, but formed from memory: battle cries, whispered prayers, grief-soaked vows. Light shimmered inside the crystal skin, as if starlight had been caught and sealed within.
And at its center, Xian Ren rested.
He was no longer divine. No longer golden. No longer burning with celestial fire. His form had cooled, pale and ghostlike, wrapped in fragments of charred robes that still retained the insignia of his godhood—a phoenix intertwined with a double spiral. Now, that emblem was half-burned, half-forgotten, crumbling into threads.
His eyes were closed and his breathing had ceased hours ago, though time had become meaningless in this place.
His limbs were still, laid neatly across his chest, fingers curled ever so slightly, as if they remembered the pain of the ritual—the tearing, the dissection, the release of a soul echo into the void beyond Heaven.
The ritual had succeeded. His soul fragment—infused with memories of cultivation, emotions of love, and the full weight of his strategic mind—had been fired through the last dimensional fissure, carrying his essence toward the crumbling world of Veylanth.
Heaven had resisted but he had endured at great cost. Now, that cost lay before the heavens in silent offering.
Outside the tomb, the landscape stretched in frozen agony. The Hall of the Ascendant Blades, once proud with statues of the Ten Origin Gods, had collapsed sideways, jagged columns snapped like broken spears. Pools of liquid aether bubbled lifelessly in shattered basins, no longer glowing, their reflections dark.
The Throne of Tian Xu, where Xian Ren had once stood victorious, now lay split in two, the crown of the King God shattered and partially embedded in the ground like a broken horn. The sigils that once pulsed with authority were dead—drained of power.
There was no wind. No sound. Just the groaning silence of a realm that had been emptied of purpose.
And still, deep within the Tomb, the last god remained drained and diminished but not forgotten.
The inside of the crystalline lotus was neither warm nor cold. Time seemed stretched, the air like silk soaked in mourning. Floating around Xian Ren's suspended body were ghostly echoes—afterimages of memory, unintentional remnants of the soul ritual. Each one flickered for seconds, then vanished.
A glimpse of Yue Ling'er beneath a moonlit cherry tree. A moment of laughter—hers—scattered like petals in wind. The last time they kissed, her fingers trembling against his jaw. The look she gave him before she sacrificed herself in his place. The moment her soul was torn away. Each fragment hovered… then faded.
As if his mind had left these pieces behind on purpose for a trail or a map or maybe it's just a prayer.
Then—without warning, yet softer than breath—a whisper stirred the air. Not from the wind, not from the gods but from beyond even soul and memory.
"I'll wait for you… even beyond death."
The voice was so fragile it could have been imagined but it wasn't.
It came from no body, no speaker. It's Just the memory—echoing, like the scent of rain long after the storm had passed.
Xian Ren's lips twitched only slightly. A faint curve—impossibly delicate, yet real. A smile, not of victory, not of regret but of peace.
The kind of peace one only finds after giving everything—even a name—to preserve a love older than time.
Outside the tomb, the firmament gave one final groan.
The last strand of Celestial Law—the binding thread that held together the order of the heavens—snapped.
A sound like a gong struck underwater echoed across the ruins then darkness fell not violently nor suddenly but like a velvet curtain closing after the final act.
The sky, once filled with divine constellations and burning moons, now held nothing.
Even the floating shards of light slowly turned dull.
The Tomb of the Last Flame began to fade from the outside, its petals turning opaque, like flower glass frosting with age.
Xian Ren's body shimmered one last time, a faint ember pulsing deep in his chest—then extinguished without any more glow, nor more essence, nor more divine flame.
What remained was eternal and unshakable stillness.
The kind of stillness that lives only in places where gods have died and hope has become the only surviving faith.
Somewhere, beyond the void…
In the world of Veylanth, a dying boy gasped his final breath but that was not here yet—only silence remained and a god who had given everything, So that love might survive what fate would not allow.
So that one soul might find another, across a broken multiverse.
So that in a dying world, hope could be reborn and in the ruins of Heaven, the Silent God slept.
To be continued…