While the Demon King Ouyang sobbed to the window, a knife of light cut the horizon—a meteor streaking like a burning tear.

On the bed, Xi watched his hunched back, unease rising like cold tide. The meteor’s path looked dead-on for them. Closer. Then closer. And Ouyang still didn’t see it.

Soon, the streak fell—

Thud.

“Ah—!”

The meteor punched a bloody hole in Ouyang’s forehead, red trailing down like rain from a split cloud. Xi knew, bone-deep, that if he hadn’t stood at the window like a human shield, that thing would’ve smashed into her.

Seeing him like that, guilt pricked her like thorns in wind.

“Ouyang, are you okay?” He turned, and the wound was a crimson mouth. On anyone else, that would’ve been the end. Only a so-called Demon King could wear death like a scratch.

“Fuck! Which damn god tossed their trash from the sky? Don’t they know this screws people over? Let me find out who. If I don’t strip his temple bare, I’ll write Ouyang backward!”

He roared at the stars, blood ticking onto the floor like a leaking clock. The sight made Xi’s stomach twist, but she steadied her breath like a reed in breeze and dabbed the blood around his brow with a handkerchief.

“Hmph. A woman’s heart is the deadliest. You’re thinking of sneaking a punch into the wound and finishing me off, aren’t you…”

Ouyang’s smile was cold as frost on glass.

“You…” Xi bit back the heat, then swallowed it like bitter tea. He’d been sunk in grief, then got brained by heaven’s garbage. Anyone would lash out. She got it.

When she said nothing, Ouyang simply closed his eyes and let her clean the wound. He was a Demon King, after all. Even now, she couldn’t kill him. Worst case, he’d sleep another age like a stone under snow.

The instant his eyes shut, birdsong and flowers rose around him. Iridescent mists rolled like silk, and rainbow bridges arched across the sky like jeweled ribs. So familiar. So painfully familiar.

This sky. This earth. That place. The place he’d ached for through the sealed years.

Home?

Ouyang ran forward, and each step leaped a thousand miles like lightning over plains. He had no sense of hunger, no weight of breath. The sky never changed; time here felt like water without banks.

Ahead, a black silhouette swelled, like a mountain pushing out of haze. It was a city—vast as a continent.

“Starry Citadel. The Starry Citadel of eternal stars!” He sprinted harder, a comet in the streets. The instant he crossed the walls, the firmament flipped. No blazing sun. No blue, no cloud.

Only a vault of night, jeweled and endless. Meteors fell without end like shining rain, and massive comets flashed by with long tails like ghostly banners.

“Starry Citadel. A sky brimming with stars, for eternity…” he murmured, and his eyes blurred again like windows in drizzle. The capital’s buildings were strange as dreams, but the avenues lay empty, a festival after the lanterns burned out.

He drifted the streets alone, a lone shadow on a sea road.

“They left. Everyone left… and I’m the scrap forgotten at the end of the stars…”

His mind was fog on a river. He stopped asking why he was here. He stopped caring about the impossible. Suddenly he bolted out of the city like a bolt splitting the dark.

A long time passed. Then longer. At last, his speed ebbed like tide.

“I’m an idiot… Who walks anywhere here? Teleportation arrays. Find the arrays.” He steadied his breath. “If I find that place, maybe they left something behind.”

Clarity returned like dawn. This wasn’t an illusion. It was too exact, too lived-in. No illusion could recreate that place.

He ran who knew how long—maybe a hundred years, maybe a thousand, like seasons turning in a snow globe—and found himself back at the Starry Citadel. The stars were unchanged. Old faces had become mist.

Inside the city, he found the teleportation hall. Once, arrays had been crammed here like stars in a cluster. Now the auxiliaries that even gods avoided were gone, washed away by the river of years.

He went to a forgotten corner, to two ordinary platforms. Two wooden placards sat beside them.

Origin Continent.

Fatebound Old Town.

In the past, countless spellwork would’ve been whirring around these two like fireflies. Now, only dust and silence.

“Origin Continent… I don’t know much, but they said all beginnings and endings flow from there. Their last battlefield should’ve been the Origin Continent.” He fed energy into the Origin Continent array. He waited, breath caught like a leaf.

Nothing. It stayed dark as a dead ember.

“As I thought… the final battlefield. That continent must’ve been ground to particles. Even the space coordinates erased. How could an array still reach it…”

He shook his head, then set his hands on the Fatebound Old Town array. Gold rose where he touched, a dawn ripple across its face. In a breath, the whole platform lit like a sunlit lake.

“This power… the First Imperial Princess, of course…”

He wiped the damp at the corner of his eye, stepped onto the light, and let it take him.

The gold fell away. He stood in a small town. Houses sat in neat rows like chess pieces, but weeds had shouldered through stone, and tiles had split like dry earth. An ordinary town. Ordinary homes.

Time had gnawed many things to threadbare. Cicadas sang in the lakeside tree like summer bells. A breeze combed the willows and made their ribbons sway. Dandelion fluff drifted like white snow.

Like the Starry Citadel, the old town was empty as a shell.

“I remember the Sage of Truth lived to the south…” Ouyang didn’t know where to go, but his feet moved like a compass. In memory, the Sage of Truth was wisdom itself, a galaxy of thought. Maybe he had seen it all coming.

Creak.

He pushed the rotten wooden door and stepped in with a heart like a drum. The room was bare. Only a wooden table. On it, a crystal ball.

At the sight, joy burst through him like sun through cloud. The Sage’s crystal ball!

Tears he’d dried returned like spring water. “I wasn’t abandoned. I wasn’t abandoned! They remembered me!”

He set both hands on the crystal. White light flowed out like mist, the air warped like heat over stone, and countless images rose like stars surfacing.

“So that’s it… This is the gift you left me… I missed you in the end, but I’m not alone. With your blessings, I’m not alone. I, Ouyang, am not alone.”

Hugging the crystal ball, he wiped his face, while those drifting scenes wrapped him like a quilt of old light.

He tapped one image. A figure surfaced.

“Ouyang, be happy every single day. In the far future, we’ll meet again!” It was a friend from rookie days. They’d once snuck around together, counting who peeped on more girls, crowning the winner king.

When others found out, they spent years in solitary like moles underground.

“Ouyang, you peeping maniac. I don’t wanna leave you a message, but since you’re one of us, I’ll be magnanimous and say a few words…”

Twin pigtails framed her face. She was the one who ratted them out. He’d hated her then; now the memory warmed him like tea on a cold night.

“Kid, even alone, stand tall. Anyone guided by me, Kaimedi, won’t ever get crushed by loneliness!” The blond hulk gave him a giant thumbs-up like a pillar.

“Uncle Kaimedi…” Ouyang’s voice broke like ice underfoot. Of all of them, Kaimedi cut deepest. As a rookie, he’d been Ouyang’s guide. For an orphan, he’d been a father-shaped lighthouse.

There were many images, many blessings. Some didn’t even know him, yet they still left words. Most told him to be strong and brave. A few shouted to drink and laugh when they met again.

The phrases repeated like waves, but in their faces he saw care, bright as stars.

“Ouyang… right? You’ll see this many years from now, but I believe we’ll gather again…” A long-haired beauty appeared. She’d been his goddess once—strong, gentle, and radiant. Thinking of the girls he’d chased, the hot-blooded years he’d burned, he felt younger by a decade, like spring had walked back in.

He tapped another image. A figure appeared—not like the others. He came with a background: a sea of stars, a silver star-robe, a face blurred like a moon behind clouds.

“Kid, our glory doesn’t end here. Our myth doesn’t vanish in dust. From this moment, you’ll inherit that glory and that pride.”

The voice was male. That much he knew. Then shock struck like lightning. He knew who it was. The one said to have fallen. Alive.

Dijun. That was what everyone called him. A riddle of a man. Even his gender had been a rumor.

“That glory. That pride. I’ll inherit it…” Ouyang clenched his fist, heat surging like fire in winter. “Dijun, boss, rest easy. From now on, the glory of the Other Shore is mine to carry. Our pride won’t fade.”

He pressed another image, blood still hot.

Another figure arrived with his own backdrop: a withered forest under a sunset red as a wound.

“G—God Emperor, boss…”

“What I’ve got to say isn’t much different from his. Remember this. You alone stand for us. In splendor or in desolation, you are not alone. One day, we’ll return on the strength you forge.”