The sky split open like a silent oath broken.
Across the shattered plain, palaces of jade and gold leaned at wrong angles, their foundations gnawed by crimson lightning. Banners of righteousness and banners of heresy fluttered in the same dead wind. Saints, devils, and all that crawled between had arrived for one reason.
Because Renya Kurotsuki touched the thing they swore did not exist.
He stood alone upon a broken terrace, an obsidian disc floating above his palm. The artifact was small enough to be mistaken for a mirror, its surface swallowing light rather than reflecting it. Around him, the air trembled with the pressure of ten thousand wills.
"Return the Heart," a voice thundered from the clouds — serene and merciless. "Or be unmade."
Renya's lips curved. He was thin and unarmored, robed in black as if cut from the very shadow the world cast upon itself. His eyes were pools of night with a faint ring of red — not rage, not madness, merely the clarity of a man who had walked too long without trusting anyone but himself.
"I crossed mountains of bones to grasp this," he said, voice quiet enough to force the world to lean closer. "Do you think I would let it go because you ask pleasantly?"
The clouds seethed. From the north came an orthodox grandmaster wreathed in holy light; from the south, an unorthodox matriarch whose smile promised answers no scripture allowed; from the east, a demon lord walking on a chain of skulls; from the west, a coalition of sects too afraid to come alone. Between them drifted the anxious, the opportunists, the sanctified and stained. Together, they were unanimity.
Together, they were late.
Renya lifted the obsidian disc. Whisper-thin threads of darkness bled from it, stitching across his palm, traveling up his wrist like a vow being written under the skin. A low hum began — not sound, not Qi. Something older. Something that had no name in polite scripture.
The first strike came from the heavens — a spear of light honed by centuries of worship. It hit nothing. Or perhaps it hit everything, and the world flinched.
Renya had already stepped aside, though no step was visible. Shadows thickened under his feet as if the earth wanted to keep him, to hide him. He didn't gloat. There was no need. He had stolen from every path before: from righteous manuals and unorthodox scrolls, from demonic altars and saintly hymns. He was not the strongest. He was the one who refused to move backward.
"Kill him," someone said.
The sky obeyed.
Blades of wind, pillars of fire, chains of mantra, oceans of poison. The terrace became a memory while still standing. Renya's robe tore once; a line of red appeared on his cheek, modest and precise. He smiled as if congratulating the world for at last meaning what it said.
He placed two fingers to the disc and pressed.
A ring of silence rippled outward. It rolled over the battlefield with the courteous grace of a tea ceremony and the finality of a tomb being sealed. Where it passed, techniques stumbled. Mantras forgot their third syllable. Poisons discovered they'd never been born. Even the light hesitated, as if remembering something older than shining.
"What is it?" the demon lord hissed, chains rattling.
"The part of the world that refuses to be seen," Renya said.
The second exchange was not an exchange. It was an argument between inevitabilities. They were more, and they were angry. Though the artifact drank and drank, though Renya's shadow rose around him like wings clipped from midnight, the sky learned him.
The grandmaster's spear of light returned, not as a spear but as a law: There will be no Renya. It wrote itself into the space where he stood. The law did not ask permission.
This time, the shadow could not wholly refuse.
The terrace shattered. The artifact bucked in Renya's palm like a living thing desperate to flee. He forced it still. Darkness coiled around his arm, tightened like a serpent that loved its prey too much to leave.
The world pressed down.
He understood then. Not defeat — never that. But the corridor of options narrowing to a single, elegant line.
If the heavens would not make room for him, he would leave the house.
Renya lifted his gaze to the assembly that had finally, almost, earned his respect. "You hunted me together," he said. "Be proud. Histories are written about moments like this."
"Your name will be struck," the matriarch promised.
"Then I'll borrow another."
He folded three seals with one hand, the motions so small the air apologized for noticing. The obsidian disc melted into shadow, then into a point of red at the center of that shadow, then into a single breath. Renya inhaled.
Something gave.
Not the terrace, not the sky, not even the heart in his chest. The giving was larger — like a door he'd always distrusted becoming ajar. For an instant he was both heavier and lighter, as if the world had declared him a miscalculation in its sum.
A thousand techniques fell. They found their mark, or they didn't. It hardly mattered. The shadow around Renya lifted like a cloak in a strong wind and—fled.
No, not fled.
It left the world.
As the light swallowed the terrace, as the broken palace finally remembered how to fall, Renya's body became an opinion the reality around him no longer shared. He felt himself tilt, not forward or back but… elsewhere. The artifact whispered once, like gratitude or threat. He couldn't tell.
Renya's last sight of that world was of people who had agreed on one thing for the first and last time — and it hadn't been enough.
"Better luck," he murmured, "in the sequel."
Then the darkness took him, and the darkness moved.
And the darkness opened its eyes.