The place of judgment was empty.
No crowd.
No spectacle.
Just a platform suspended in layered law, surrounded by beings who had decided my existence no longer fit.
I stood alone.
Spirit cultivation does not scream when threatened.
It listens.
"Heaven has reached a conclusion," a voice declared — not singular, not plural. "Your existence destabilizes established order."
I said nothing.
"You do not cultivate," the voice continued. "Yet you exert authority. You act without permission. You kill without law."
I looked up.
"You mistake permission for relevance," I said.
Silence.
Then pressure.
Not aimed at my body.
At my continuity.
Spirit cultivation resists domination — but erasure is different. This was not force. It was negation. Heaven wasn't fighting me.
It was excluding me.
I felt it then.
Not pain.
Severance.
My spirit condensed instinctively, holding itself together without qi, without law, without anchor. For a moment — just a moment — the platform trembled.
Heaven hesitated.
Then it pressed harder.
I thought of Aurelia's hand around my finger.
Of stone dust on my palms.
Of silence that had once been enough.
So this was the limit.
Good.
If I was to end, I would end as myself.
I released restraint.
Not outward.
Inward.
My spirit folded into itself, compressing beyond heaven's ability to define it. The pressure intensified, furious now, desperate.
Erase him.
The command came at last.
The laws descended.
My vision dimmed.
My body failed.
But my spirit—
My spirit did not break.
As darkness closed in, I felt something unexpected.
Not an ending.
Displacement.
As though what heaven rejected did not vanish…
…but fell.