Thunder rolled like the sky was being split open from throat to belly. A monstrous conch-blast rippled across the world, the sound thick and wet, as if blown through blood. The being's laughter followed immediately in raw, triumphant, deranged, cracking the heavens and shaking the ruined cliffs.
The Being threw his head back and screamed with mirth, as if the sky itself needed to hear him.
"Hahaha—HA! I told you! From the beginning, I said I'd kill you!"His voice twisted between gloating and feral."Heretic bastard… finally… finally you died!"
He had to stop, panting hard."Thuu… thuu…"His breaths came sharp and wet, but his grin only widened.
After a few moments, he straightened and spat toward the sky.
"I warned you, didn't I? If you surrendered everything willingly, I would've forgiven you. But no—no, you stubborn fool. And yet…"He placed a hand on his chest, feeling something loosening."…thank you for your service. The curse that chained me - ended. Your death freed me. Ended my unknowing curse."
He exhaled shakily.
"My power… my authority… all of it will returning soon."His voice grew thicker, drunk on the feeling."I will stand again at the pinnacle of this plane. And beyond that, the higher realms await. And I will enjoy every step."
His eyes shifted toward the demoness's severed, dried head.He lifted it slightly, letting it hang like rotted fruit from a vine.
"Demoness," he murmured, "your plan failed. But in the end… we still won."His laughter cracked the air."All nine hundred thousand of the, dead! Sacrificed! Their power, their lives, their inheritances, consumed!"He shuddered with twisted delight."And now… now I will take that woman's last power from boy's skull. From now on, demoness, we are finally free."
Dark runes crawled up his chest, glowing and pulsing like eggs about to hatch. His flayed skin peeled back in strips, revealing the vapor of his stolen divinity rising like steam from a freshly opened tomb.
Lightnings were splitting the sky.
The demoness hung from his side like a corpse sewn onto him, her eyes closed, limbs limp, hair stuck to her skin with dried ichor. He jerked her by the chin, lifting her deadweight face.
A flash of irritation twisted his expression. "Tch. You really became what you feared, dead weight. She drained the last scraps of your strength while dying."
His gaze snapped toward the boy's melting head lodged in the melting tori gate. The wooden arch had dissolved into a skeletal frame of black sludge, dripping onto the heartless sea below.
The being's face contorted with disgust and envy. "That wretched woman… giving her inheritance to a useless brat. That puny boy who can barely keep his soul intact.But why didn't I get any piece of it?" His lips curled, exposing teeth sharpened by rage. "Why? What if I enter his consciousness now… yes… he's barely started his cultivation path. His soul will be full of cracks. I can pry open every corner."
He stared at the demoness, who was still remained silent. His fingers clenched, veins pushing against his half-melted wrist. "Speak, damn you. How do I get inside his head?"
Silence.
But something was wrong, he felt it. He suddenly saw towards the torii gate which was melting faster. The man's skull was sinking into itself like soft wax, turned black, growing darker, denser. Only the mark on his forehead still glowed, a single white point, pulsing like the heartbeat of a new born star.
The Being took a step back as shock flashed across his face in something deeper realization.
"You… you both..."His voice cracked with fury. "Both of you are daughters of filth…!"
His rage spiralled, uncontrolled. "And that boy—"His teeth bared. "That horrible little bastard!! All of you deserve the worst deaths imaginable!"
He shouted in uncontrollable anger towards sky. "I promise myself, when I reach the top," he hissed, "I'll drag you all back into existence. One by one. And I'll chain you as slaves of mine."
And on that destroyed boy's face…
there was a genuine smile.
The dust that had once formed the flowers of the Heartless Sea slowly settled, drifting downward like dying ash. Their petals, those that had not dissolved entirely, were swallowed by the dark water.
Then the sea changed. No more blossoms, no more illusions of warmth. Only a vast, pitiless ocean remained. A Heartless Sea, surging with awakening hunger. Waves rose, slow at first, then violently crests climbing like teeth. Lightning burst through the sky, tearing clouds apart in stuttering flashes.
Each strike illuminated the mountains around them—
—just in time to show them collapsing.
...
The cavern where everything had begun was no longer a cavern. Each stone seemed to pulse like the throat of an animal swallowing something too large. A wave of pressure rolled out from its depths
A rock, burst upward in a single violent sweep of wings. It slammed a boulder the size of a fortress into the mouth of the cavern, sealing it. Echoes died fast. Yet the cliff above remained drowned in shifting white mist, refusing to let anything be seen.
The Being, skin peeling in long curled strips that drifted like scabs of shadow, started climbing. Every step scraped him, every breath blistered him. The higher he climbed, the thicker the fog grew, until it pressed against his eyes like wet clay. At last, after clawing upward for what felt like hours, he realized he could not see the summit.
So he came down again.
When he reached the base again, his eyes, those ravenous pits glowing like torches placed too deep inside skulls, fell upon boy.
"Hmph." The Being's voice slithered out like a blade dragged over bone. "You were right—an enemy carries only enmity. And for that enmity, I came to harvest my spoils. Don't blame me in whatever limbo you wake in. Dead men have no right to anger."
His hungry gaze only kept at him, staring for his power. The secret shimmer of him which even his Authority couldn't touch.
He stepped closer.
Halfway there, the torii gate, still melting, still sagging like a candle left too near a furnace, suddenly stopped. The dripping froze mid-fall. Time seemed to tighten like a knot.
A flash of lightning split the fog, but there was no sound. Only light, hard and cold like a surgeon's blade.
The Being paused. "Why… is it drying so slowly now?"
The demoness remained silent. Her severed head hung from the gate's beam like a shrunken celestial relic, her lips cracked, her once-luminous eyes glazed white.
He clicked his tongue. "Are you truly dead? If so, good. Then your strength now returns to me. A pact is a pact, after all."
He stared at her. Her skin had dried into a parchment mask clinging tight to bone, a horrifying mockery of her former beauty. The halves of her soul that lived behind her eyes were gone. The emptiness inside her skull felt like a haunted life.
For a moment, a very small moment, doubt flickered across his mind.
She helped me. If she's still alive…
Then he crushed that thought.
"No," he whispered. "Let her die. It's more convenient."
Before he could form another thought, a sudden shift in the air made every nerve in his body stiffen. A faint sound cut him off. Something whisper-light. A flutter. A shift in the dead air.
A single flower drifted out of nowhere, the petal-thin boundary between realms tearing open for only an instant. It glided past his arm like a ghost seeking a home.
He snatched it.
He ripped those petals one by one in irritation. But when he reached the stamen, anger dissolved into cold horror. "Toys? You're sending toys at me now?"
The stamen twisted—and a face blinked back at him.
Her face.
Then the faces of the nine hundred thousand men he had devoured across his long wars—bleeding, wailing, accusing, layered over each other in impossible folds.
Then finally, his own torn body from the moment she had nearly killed him.
He recoiled. The flower turned black.
"Get away—" he hissed, burning the blossom to ash with a twitch of his fingers.
Rage swallowed him whole. He stormed toward the man beneath the torii gate, the man's head still tilted forward, face still lit by that soft, impossible smile.
The Being trembled in fury.
"So you smile at me now?" he spat. "Demoness—tell me. What should I do with him?"
Silence.
He laughed, cracking, hysterical. "You think death frees you from our pact? Fool. Even dead, we are bound. You cannot keep your power from me. Not after all the tricks you played in the last war."
His hands formed a sign. Lines burned across his skin, carving themselves with sharp white light. On the demoness's forehead, the twin mark ignited.
Light split her skull with a dry hiss.
The Being's body peeled apart again, half god-flesh gleaming like molten moonstone, half human draped in rotting black cloth.
Their mouths opened in unison.
From the demoness's cracked lips, from her sunken eyes, from the hollow sockets of her skull, energy poured out like a storm of screaming light. It dragged itself through the air toward his mouth, threads of her essence ripping out of her flesh like ribbons torn from a corpse.
A new seal snapped open on the man's forehead, the glowing spot blooming into a spiral of symbols.
He raised his hand.
From his palm, an orb materialized. Not light. Not energy. Something else. Something wrong. A sphere composed of thousands of tiny black leaves with red veins, pulsing and shifting. They tore themselves free, fluttering out like insect wings cracking open.
One leaf exploded. Then another.
The orb in his hand kept swelling, petals exploding outward in spasms of red-black veins. Below the cliff, the sea boiled as an ocean of flowers crushed beneath the waves. The tops of the blossoms, the few still struggling above the surface, suddenly surged upward. Thousands of blooming heads burst free like drowning hands reaching for air, racing toward him in desperation.
They tried to stop him.
They failed.
Now that the demoness's drained power threaded through his body, the petals couldn't even touch him. Each bloom that neared him turned brittle, cracking apart mid-air like glass exposed to flame.
He snorted and seized the boy's limp head by the hair, lifting it as if holding a dead animal.
"What is this pathetic attempt?" he mocked, leaning close. "Infinite blooming… in what? A heartless sea? Is that what you named it? Fool. Your 'sea' was eaten by the real sea. Even your body was eaten. A creation with a name that turns into its own punchline."
The head's faint smile did not fade.
That irritated him most.
"But don't worry," the Being hissed. "Once I'm done stealing your strength… I'll use it well."
He raised his finger and stabbed it into the boy's forehead.
The skin dented, then split.
Blood, thick and smooth like melted chocolate, oozed out, coating his finger. He pushed deeper until his entire fingertip disappeared inside the skull.
For a moment, nothing happened.
The world seemed to hold its breath.
Then he blinked.
On the second blink, everything changed.
The cavern, the torii, the mists, they all vanished.
He stood on an endless sea painted in impossible shades of blue. Above him stretched a sky so clear it felt hollow. The air was warm but wrong, like a memory of sunlight instead of actual light.
Five islands surrounded him, each at a perfect distance from the centre, like points of a celestial compass. Each island was different—colours, atmospheres, shapes.
He recognized this place instantly.
A grin spread across his cracked lips.
"Oh… this," he breathed. "His inner world."
He turned in a slow circle, savouring the sight. "That idiotic brat had no idea how to seal his soul… and didn't even bother locking these places down. Absolutely worthless. A child playing at cultivation."
He chuckled, then laughed harder, arms spread.
"Five inheritances… all just sitting here? Ahahaha… What a gift! What a glorious gain!"
He scanned the islands greedily. "Let's take hers first. Then his. Then the rest."
His gaze locked onto one island drenched in night. The entire landmass glowed with moonlight; plum blossoms drifted upward like reversed snowfall. A silver pathway shimmered across the water, leading directly to the shore.
"That must be her power," he whispered. "Plum blossoms. The moon. Night eternal. Ha… ha… at last it's mine."
He took his first step forward.
He didn't even reach the second.
A force, silent, ruthless, slammed into him and launched him backwards like a fired cannonball. He flew across the sky, skidded across the water's surface, and rolled until he lost count of how many times his body bent, cracked, and folded.
When he finally stopped, the world had not changed.
He was still standing at the centre of the sea, equidistant from all five islands.
He blinked, confused.
He stepped forward again.
The islands drifted away, smoothly, eerily, like reflections on disturbed water, always keeping the exact same distance from him, no matter how fast he ran or how slowly he approached. The horizon twisted in a Doppler-like ripple, everything stretching away from him as if rejecting his presence.
Then he heard it.
A cough.
Soft, deliberate, behind him. A chill crept up his spine.
He spun.
A boy sat beneath a tree where black leaves grew on one side, white leaves on the other. A cracked third eye, half white, half black, glowed on the boy's forehead, its eyelid split down the centre like a yin-yang reversed. His other eyes were closed, yet somehow he saw everything.
Before the Being could speak, a flute sounded and that sound spread across the entire sea, vibrating through the water, through the sky, through his bones.
He turned sharply to locate the source.
A woman sat on a plum tree branch high above him, shrouded in night. Her silhouette flickered between forms: sometimes human, sometimes illusionary.
Then footsteps approached him from the sky itself.
Plum leaves curled into bridges beneath each step she took, bearing her weight like worshipping petals. She walked on the blossoms that bent beneath her feet.
It took him too long to understand but when realization dawned, it hit like a hammer.
He looked from the demoness's form to the woman advancing toward him, then back again.
"You—" his voice cracked, shifting from disbelief to panic. "You bitch… How are you both alive? How dare you drag me into an illusion? What is this place? Why does it feel like—like—"
"Like your doom?" she finished calmly.
Her smile was not kind.
"You already know where we are," she said. "So why pretend ignorance? Or is stupidity your final refuge?"
He snarled. "You, shut up, You think I don't know your trick? My power source was always stronger! In our last war, I only used her because—"
She cut him off with a slight tilt of her head.
"Yes. I know. You needed her to defeat me." Her eyes lowered to the dead demoness's dried skull. "And so the moment you drank her power, your death was sealed."
"What—?"
"This power is not yours, or, not it was," she said. "And now that you've stolen her strength… if her head burns—" she glanced upward, where a faint flame flickered on the torii mark "—you die before your body can descend back to the real world."
His heart lurched.
For the first time, real fear clawed into his expression.
Then woman's gaze drifted to the boy beneath the black-and-white tree.
"Tell him," she murmured.
The boy exhaled, slow and tired, as if carrying a weight far older than his small frame.
"So," he said gently, "you were with a god who was about to die… but both of you were interrupted, cut apart by her. I am talking about human part."
The Being's eyes narrowed, trembling with unwilling recognition.
The boy continued, voice calm, almost conversational.
"For survival and for greater power, the two of you merged. Forced together. Cursed together."
His fingers brushed the bark of the half-light, half-shadow tree. "And so she is cursed because of you. But the curse has lifted by me."
The woman nodded without taking her eyes off the Being.
"Now," the boy said, "we must destroy your real body. Only then can this twisted remnant of you be erased for good."
The Being's throat tightened. He stared at the boy, the one being in this place who did not fear him.
The boy opened his eyes for the first time, just barely, and smiled.
"Don't look so nervous. I'm only listening to confirm whether my understanding of the story is correct or not."
The Being's breath hitched. Something ancient, something instinctive, whispered danger.
With eyes closing again, the boy bowed his head politely.
"I am sorry," he said softly. "I won't be providing hospitality today. You came to my home, I know… but I will not serve you. She will handle your entertainment. Also your curse was lifted by me, so it's my duty to help you... either to seal you or kill you"
The moment the words left his lips, every instinct inside the Being screamed.
He leapt aside on pure reflex—
But it wasn't enough.
A line of pain ripped across his torso.
A gash opened, long and precise, as though the air itself had sliced him. Golden-black blood gushed out, steaming where it touched the sea beneath him.
When he looked up, the boy had already drifted several meters away, seated again beneath the two-toned tree, with closed eyes.
Then the sky changed.
Two moons rose, one pale, one dark.
They appeared on either side of the woman, rotating like blades sharpening each other.
Recognition stabbed the Being's mind.
Her technique.
"Lunar Plum Mirage Codex: Maiden Treads the Petal Between Moments."
He steeled himself to draw power, to summon even a fragment of his Authority—
The boy's voice drifted across the horizon, quiet but absolute.
"This is my domain. I do not permit it."
Those words hit harder than any blade.
The Being froze. His heart hammered in panic.
In this place, his power wasn't just sealed—
it didn't exist.
He spun, searching for escape, only to realize he was standing at the exact border where day met night.
Half of him bathed in blackness, half in blinding white.
He ran toward the light but darkness feared him leaving.
He turned back slightly.
The woman stood high in the sky, her silhouette framed by the twin moons. Her sword arm traced arc after arc, the steel humming in a perfect circle around her.
One moon above her head.
One moon below her feet.
The sky itself held its breath.
He knew this technique. An attack beyond ordinary senses.
A strike that only existed in the spaces between moments, yet he could do nothing.
She lowered her hand.
The world shattered.
From the moons downward, a crack burst through the realm, like a mirror kicked from inside. The fracture sliced through him in a single line. He didn't even feel the blade; he only felt the after.
Blood bubbled up his throat.
His body split.
Half of him fell into darkness.
Half into light.
He gasped but no sound came out.
The woman did not pause.
Her next technique unfolded with terrifying grace.
"Plum Blossom Path:
Falling Plum Without Snow."
Silence fell.
Petals gathered around him, hundreds, thousands, appearing like snowfall from a sky that wasn't snowing.
They drifted near his broken form, soft and harmless at first…
Then the petals sharpened.
In a single instant, they sliced.
His limbs were severed, clean, surgical cuts, legs falling one way, arms another. The petals moved through him with no resistance, as if reality parted for them but not for him.
The demoness's head tumbled from where it had been fused to him.
As it rolled free, the memory of a battle long ago punched through his mind: the moment she had sliced herself from the godly half inside him, leaving him unable to fuse again unless he clung to the mortal man he had consumed.
And now—
Now she had cut herself out once more.
The Being screamed internally as he felt his power draining, pouring out through every severed vein. Something vital was missing. Something central.
The green gem, glowing faintly inside her skull.
His breath froze.
He lunged for it, desperation overwhelming him. If he could seize it, if he could reclaim even a fragment—
But he had forgotten someone.
Forgotten the quiet, calm boy who had been watching from the distance.
A flare of light tore across the sky.
It streaked past the Being's fingers by the width of a hair—
and hit the demoness's head squarely.
Her skull ignited.
The green gem shattered between flames.
Her head turned to ash in a moment, burning away like dry paper held over a rising torch.
The Being froze.
His outstretched hand trembled in the empty air.
To be Continued...