"Old bastard Demon Shree Yan, surrender! You can't escape! The plains are surrounded. Your end is here!"
"You used me as a tool! You slaughtered my entire clan! Today I'll watch you die!"
Their voices crashed together rage, grief, hatred a storm of human fury.
At the center of it all stood Shree Yan.
He did not move. His robes, darkened by battle, stirred in the wind like a torn banner at the end of a fallen empire.
Around him lay a silent field of the defeated. Yet his face remained calm, carved from indifference itself.
In his eyes, there was no fear.
Only emptiness.
The world exploded in light, and then all was still.
Centuries seemed to fold, and somewhere above the city, a man stood at the edge of a roof, staring at the horizon as if the heavens themselves had called him there.
"Drop the gun, Thunglung Dungma! There's nowhere left to run!"
Police sirens wailed below. Red and blue lights flashed against the concrete walls. Officers had formed a perimeter around the building, weapons raised but hands trembling.
"Your crime is patricide!" one officer shouted. "Don't make this worse!"
Thunglung Dungma stood at the edge of the rooftop, wind clawing at his clothes. His face was pale, but his eyes burned with something deeper than fear.
"That man," he said, his voice shaking with years of buried pain, "was my hell. Ending it was the only justice I ever had."
No one answered.
No one stepped forward.
The distance between him and the world felt wider than the drop below.
"If no one will listen," he whispered, his voice sinking into hollow calm, "then this is where my story ends."
The city seemed to hold its breath.
Then he stepped forward.
The world blurred.
The world collapse.
Across another world, under another sky, Shree Yan slowly turned.
His voice drifted across the battlefield, low and distant.
"Above ten thousand peaks, the blue heavens once stood clear."
A pale ray of light broke through the clouds, brushing against his white hair — hair that carried the weight of centuries. His eyes were endless voids, deep enough to swallow fate itself.
"Today, dark clouds seal the sky,
and even mountains fade into shadow."
Before him lay the world shaped by his hands a path paved with ambition, sacrifice, and countless fallen enemies.
"One cultivator walks the forbidden road alone.
Looking back, he sees
a thousand fallen,
and a river that will never run dry."
The wind passed through the field like a funeral sigh. No one dared interrupt.
"Such is the price of defying the heavenly order."
He lowered his gaze, not toward the living, but toward the weight of all that lay behind him.
"Yet the cultivator speaks."
His voice softened, but it carried into every trembling heart.
"I do not regret the demonic road I have walked.
This body may fall upon the journey,
but my will shall never kneel.
If death blocks my path, I will laugh at death.
If the heavens judge me, I will defy the heavens."
A faint smile touched his lips.
Then a warrior shouted, voice cracking, "Demon! Heaven itself has written your death! Hand over the Rana and we will grant you a painless end!"
"So it is written:
Those who walk the demonic path fear not the end,
for their will burns brighter than fate itself."
Silence followed heavy, suffocating.
Slowly, deliberately, he raised the sacred and forbidden Rana to his lips and swallowed.
Shock rippled through the army.
"Now," he said softly, "how will you take it from me? It is already part of me."
"Kill him!"
They charged.
Shree Yan did not defend.
He simply watched.
For one still heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then light began to seep from beneath his skin.
Cracks of brilliance split across his body.
In the next instant, a sun was born from his chest.
Blinding radiance devoured the battlefield. Sound, earth, and sky vanished inside a single, absolute flash.
As his form dissolved into light, Shree Yan's final thought was cold and certain:
If I must die, I will not die alone.
BETWEEN DEATH AND REBIRTH
Darkness.
Then light tore through it.
Within that light stood a figure.
It had no true face, only shifting shadow, except for one thing.
A smile.
Too wide. Too still. Too knowing.
Thunglung Dungma stared at it, unable to move, unable to breathe.
Then the figure vanished.
And so did the darkness.
Return in past .
Where am I?
Wind tore at his clothes, biting through to his skin. Each siren wail struck like a hammer against his ribs. Yet even as his knees threatened to buckle, his grip on the railing did not falter.
Memories not his own flooded him — sharp and icy, as if carved into his mind. Shree Yan's life — the victories, the betrayals, the endless hunger for power — pressed against him like a tide, forcing him to learn what it meant to walk a path beyond mortality.
In their place remained a deep, endless darkness.
For ten full minutes, he did not move, learning the weight, the breath, the pulse of this body.
Then understanding struck like ice through the spine.
This body once belonged to Shree Yan.
That life had already ended.
This was an empty shell left behind by a fallen existence.
Why am I here?
Who sent me?
He pressed a hand to his chest.
Deep inside, he felt it.
Not emotion.
Not memory.
An obsession.
Eternal life.
The original owner had failed to grasp it.
Thunglung Dungma's new resolve hardened into something unbreakable.
If Shree Yan could not reach immortality, then he would.
And somewhere, in some unseen place, a shadow with a smiling face was watching.
One day, he would find it.
And he would demand answers.