Ash fell like snow. The divine palace, once a beacon of celestial supremacy and order, now lay blackened—its grandeur buried beneath layers of destruction. Its vaulted ceiling had collapsed into twisted ribs of smoldering stone, casting long shadows over shattered marble. The air shimmered with residual energy, fractured golden light stuttering across scorched floors like dying fireflies.
The once-pristine Hall of Divine Authority, where laws of realms had been shaped and celestial decrees passed, was unrecognizable. The silver columns that once reached endlessly into the heavens now stood as jagged stumps, each one cracked open like hollow bones. The floor had split in dozens of places, massive scars radiating from the center like a spiderweb spun by war itself.
In the dead center of it all, amidst the rubble and flame—
Xian Ren stood over the body of King God Tian Xu or what was left of him.
Tian Xu's divine frame, once cloaked in radiance and the markings of absolute dominion, now lay twisted in a crater of melted stone. His crown—once forged from the condensed authority of ten thousand prayers—lay shattered beside his skull, its fragments flickering in and out of phase, as if refusing to accept defeat.
His chest was caved in, a wide, scorched cavity where Xian Ren's final strike had pierced through soul, bone, and law alike. A faint vapor rose from the wound, coiling upward in slow, choking spirals—mana poison. The air reeked of sulfur, blood, and burnt heavens.
Xian Ren's right hand still smoked, his fingers blackened down to the bone, veins pulsing with something unnatural. Dark mist clung to him like oil, not smoke nor shadow.
But poisoned mana, unleashed in the final moments when Tian Xu, knowing he had lost, had tried to drag the victor into oblivion with him.
The aftermath was slow, yet agonizing. The poison wasn't just in the air. It was in his soul.
Each breath Xian Ren took sounded like glass dragging through his lungs. His vision warped, not from fatigue, but from the insidious, whispering fog that coiled through his senses. At times, he saw only fire and ruin. At other times, the image shifted—the ground pulsed with phantoms. Faces he didn't recognize. Screams in a language he didn't understand.
His soul—it was screaming. Not just metaphorically but truly, audibly and faint echoes danced in the air, rising from his very core. The screams came from within his spirit sea, each one like a distorted fragment of himself struggling to stay whole under the weight of the venom.
He stumbled, his knees struck what remained of the ceremonial dais. The obsidian slab had cracked from the earlier impact but hadn't completely shattered. His blood smeared across it—divine and human, gold and red, sizzling where it met the cursed mist.
His fingers clenched into fists. He wanted to rise to breathe, to destroy the remnants of this cursed throne room and burn the celestial order down to its bones. But his soul—his very essence—was unraveling in strands.
One strand had already been sacrificed to the ritual. His name burned away. His divine spark fractured. The path of reincarnation was set but the cost lingered. The residue, like spiritual rot.
He squeezed his eyes shut, but that made it worse. Behind his eyelids: images flickered. A shattered memory interface. Fragments of realm coordinates—the precise divine trajectory where Yue Ling'er's soul had been cast—now encoded in a haze of corrupted glyphs. He had memorized them during the final minutes before detonation. But now?
They were slipping. The mana poison clawed through the core of his celestial memory, encoding vital coordinates into meaningless script. Symbols twisted into spirals. Straight lines bent into curves. Entire paths through the astral realm shattered like mirrors underfoot.
His connection to her soul was fading.
"No…" he rasped. His voice barely stirred dust.
Around him, the last of Heaven's light began to fade. The chamber was growing colder. Even the residual divine essence had started to decay. The thrones of the lesser gods stood in silence, their occupants long destroyed in the battle. The banners overhead were gone—burned in sacred fire, torn apart by soul strikes.
Only he remained and the corpse of the god he had slain. And the unbearable silence of a throne room where love had been outlawed, and fate dictated by arrogance.
He looked down at his hands again—shaking, cracked, glowing faintly from within. It was no longer god-light. It was the last vestige of his soul-thread, the tiny portion still clinging to the mortal coil, refusing to die until the fragment he'd sent out found its mark.
He was unraveling, dying but not defeated yet. He inhaled the poison, it burned his lungs. The taste was iron, ash, and something old—something that didn't belong in any natural law. Something Tian Xu had embedded deep within the final chamber. A last curse, A petty, spiteful vengeance but Xian Ren did not weep. He did not curse nor beg.
He lifted his head—slowly, every bone resisting—and stared through the collapsed ceiling, past the broken beams and curling smoke, into the pitch-black void where once stars had hung like lanterns of the gods and he swore not in divine tongue nor in mortal speech but in the pure language of will—a vibration of his soul that no realm could translate but every law would feel.
"If I must tear down every law that binds this cosmos…I will find her."
His voice, though quiet, echoed with unnatural force. The broken walls vibrated the air trembled.
The corpse of Tian Xu disintegrated in response—not into ash, but into memoryless dust. Nothing of the King God remained, not name nor power nor legacy but oblivion, at last. Outside the shattered palace, the winds shifted.
Not natural winds. But realm winds—the flows of cosmic energy that had once obeyed divine will. Now, they twisted around the temple ruins like serpents acknowledging a new oath.
Xian Ren, the god who had surrendered everything—name, glory, life—was heard. Even in death, his vow carried weight then—his body gave out.
He fell forward, hands braced on broken marble, breathing labored. Eyes burning and Soul splintering but he smiled just faintly because somewhere, through the void, across broken stars and fractured realms, his echo had already begun the journey and no law in all the cosmos would be enough to stop its return.
To be continued…