Time had become a battleground. For seven days, the First Emperor and the Jade Arbiter clashed across the continuum, and with each strike, reality itself trembled. Mountains rose from plains only to crumble into sand. Rivers flowed backward and forward simultaneously, carving impossible paths through lands that existed and unexisted at once.
Soldiers watched armies that vanished mid-battle. Civilians glimpsed towns where streets warped into labyrinths that led nowhere. Birds froze in the air, their wings rigid as if caught in the imperceptible tension between existence and erasure.
Zheng's blindfolded eyes did not need to see. He felt the Arbiter's chi coil like a constricting serpent around every mortal and immortal being within a hundred miles. Each pulse was a claim of authority, each shift a judgment on the unfolding of fate itself. Shen Yu's presence was vast, relentless—an embodiment of Heaven's mandate.
Yet Zheng did not falter. Pain had become his language, and empathy his weapon. Every strike of Ethereal Lock carried the weight of millions of lives. The Arbiter struck back with the precision of divine law, reshaping cause and effect, enforcing the natural order with an iron hand.
"Surrender, Ying Zheng," the Arbiter whispered, his voice layered over countless echoes of reality. "The Cycle demands it. Defiance is death."
"Then the Cycle is broken," Zheng replied, tone unwavering. "And I will carry its consequences for those who cannot."
On the first day, time bent around them, erasing the memory of the clash from all observers. By the third day, landscapes themselves rebelled, mountains replacing cities, forests swallowing plains, rivers running uphill as if to escape the judgment descending upon the world.
By the fifth day, the First Emperor's arms and legs felt as though they were forged of stone, each strike a thousand-fold burden of every life he had ever touched. Pain tore into him from the Arbiter's counterattacks, but he did not yield. Every soul he had judged, every chain he had woven, became a source of strength.
The sixth day bled into the seventh. Shen Yu, the Jade Arbiter, had begun to see cracks in the boy's resolve, though he could not perceive the true depth of Zheng's endurance. For Zheng, victory was never about dominance. It was about bearing the weight no one else could carry.
On the seventh day, as the sun fractured across impossible skies, Zheng struck with Ethereal Lock, chaining the Arbiter's chi in a grip no divine power could escape. But rather than destroy him, he condensed Shen Yu into Eternal Chi, folding the Arbiter's essence beneath the imperial throne.
The chains hummed and shimmered, not in malice, but in judgment and mercy combined. Time sighed. Reality exhaled. The heavens trembled, acknowledging a king who had endured the impossible and emerged unbroken.
Zheng rose, sweat and blood soaking the silk of his blindfold. The battlefield was silent except for the echo of broken time. No army cheered. No god descended. Only the First Emperor, blindfolded and unbowed, remained.
He had not erased a god. He had judged, and in that judgment, the world remembered what it meant to bear responsibility.
And for the first time in history, even Heaven understood that there was a mortal who would carry all pain, unflinching, until the very end.