The secret art The Dead Live Again was etched in Ouyang’s mind like a blade carved into bone; Devila had once risen by it like frost from a grave. He’d wanted to ask who’d pulled that stunt, but Devila’s memory was a winter lake—flat, sealed, and empty.
The art itself stunned him like thunder rolling under the ribs, yet the one it brought back chilled him more, a figure black as pitch, like a night sorcerer walking out of soot.
“Kid, we meet again,” the man said, voice soft as dust on velvet, tipping a black mage’s hat to show sun-bright short gold hair. “My student, tell me—after all these years, did you grow, or did you stagnate like still water?”
“Headmaster Agas Francis…” Ouyang shook like a leaf in crosswind; in his map of the world, this mountain couldn’t be climbed. Agas was headmaster of Starry College, once chair of Dark Magic at that sky full of books, and Ouyang had been his student like a candle under a lantern.
He wore another face too—the vice president of the Dark Magic Association—second only to the legendary president Yimeng, a lone peak no other dark mage could scale, a star no other could reach.
Such a towering figure had fallen in a senseless upheaval, like a great tree cut at midnight. Ouyang knew little of that storm; the news had been walled off like a city under siege. He’d clung to the belief the headmaster still lived, like holding a coal in snow. Reality hit like a hammer to the temple: Agas was dead, and only the dead come back by The Dead Live Again.
“Relax. I’ll set my strength to match yours,” he said, voice calm as dusk.
Then Agas unfurled into a whirl of black crows, wings like ink slashing the corridor air. “Move!” Ouyang’s warning cracked like a whip, but in a blink three people were down like candles snuffed by night. Crows struck their bodies; an ashen vapor bled out like smoke from coals and got drunk by beaks, and when that gray breath was gone, so were their lungs’ tides.
With three lives blown out like lanterns in a gale, the rest finally panicked and ran, a tide of feet ribboning through the inn like ants in a broken hive.
“You two, with me!” Ouyang snapped to Nabelia and Eika, voice tight as a bowstring. He didn’t want to cross blades with Agas; the man might promise to hold back, and with his status he wouldn’t lie, but equal force means nothing when one side’s technique is an ocean worn by a million years, and the other’s a river in spring.
He saw no line of victory, no safe shore, and he wouldn’t toss his life like dice to fate just because heroes in stories pull miracles out of storm. As for catching the old fox off guard because he’d look down on a pupil—no. People don’t live a million years as air.
Still, there was a sliver of maybe, like a thin moon behind cloud—he was Agas’s student; a teacher has reason to ease his hand like rain thinning at dawn.
Ouyang seized Nabelia with his left, Eika with his right, and sprinted down a corridor that ran like a river with no sea, wind knifing their cheeks and breath burning like iron in their chests.
“Smart… Because my student’s running everywhere like loose fire, I can’t find him right away,” Agas’s voice drifted through the air like smoke trying to explain itself. Crows flooded the inn like a black storm, and in flight the crowd discovered an ugly truth: the inn was vast as a dream with no edges.
In their memory it had two floors, ten rooms each, neat as a chessboard. Now the floors climbed with no ceiling like vines into night, and every corridor stretched without horizon, an arrow that never lands.
Mid-sprint, Ouyang yanked open a door, dragged the siblings in like a fisherman pulling nets, and slammed it shut hard enough to thump their hearts.
“Lord Demon King, what was that?” Nabelia pressed her back to the wood like a leaf to bark, panting like a bellows. In this skewed inn, her body held no magic, a lake gone dry, and even Ouyang could only kindle a single fireball, a lone star for light.
“It’s complicated,” he said, voice flat as iron pulled from water. “We run first; meaning comes later.”
He hung his hope like windchimes on thin wire—on Divine Sword, on the stone man, on Moer, on Diary Bro, on those other big gods flickering beyond the clouds. He didn’t know why they wouldn’t just step in and smash him like a bug; he wouldn’t lie down and call it destiny. This was the cliff-edge of his life so far, toes over the drop.
Last time, a spacetime maelstrom tossed him into the Boundless Sea like driftwood; he didn’t know if another stray wave would lift him again.
Hee-hee.
An airy laugh rang around the room like bells in fog. Ouyang looked up and found a girl in a short black skirt standing on the ceiling like a cat on a branch. She stood—no mistake—on the ceiling, upside down to his eyes, yet her hair and dress ignored gravity like reeds in a windless pond.
It felt like her ceiling was the true ground and their floor the false sky, gravity flipping like a coin and landing wrong. That jolt passed, and her face froze him like a winter mask.
“Loyin?”
But the smile she wore, sly and wicked as a snake in tall grass, stripped the name from his mouth. “You’re Sin.” He tasted bitterness like ink. It made sense—Loyin was close to him, so if Sin wanted to cross her, she’d borrow the storm those people had gathered.
Whoosh—a black flame lanced from Sin’s mouth like a furnace exhaling. Ouyang tore the door open, grabbed the dazed siblings like kites in a gust, and bolted into the corridor’s cold wind.
“These bastards—how much trouble are they willing to brew just to kill me?” he cursed, cussing their ancestors eighteen generations back like tossing stones into a well. If they wanted him dead, do it clean—one Primordial Deity could snuff him like dew. Why the stage, the curtains, the painted masks? Maybe they couldn’t come themselves, so they set up this puppet play.
Whatever the reason, he ran with every muscle screaming like stretched rope, and the siblings bobbed behind him like balloons in a gale. Back with Agas, he’d known the old man would almost certainly go easy; the man always had. But that resentment-soaked little loli Sin? He wouldn’t bet air on her mercy.
He finally stopped, chest heaving like a bellows, and blinked—no little tyrant with smoke eyes, no second blaze. “She let up too? What are they on?”
Doubt gnawed like mice, but no pursuit was mercy enough. A black crow flapped close, shadow brushing his shoulder like ink, and Agas’s voice slid from it like cold tea. “Sigh, my student. I’m letting you off, but don’t make me stand still here. I need to show I chased, or the people upstairs will pluck my feathers.”
Fine. With a sigh like a stone dropping into a pond, Ouyang kept fleeing down that endless ribbon.
Behind him, Nabelia and Eika were tangled and lost, minds like kites in crosswinds. Enemy or friend—which face was the mask? If he was enemy, why warn them to run like a shepherd dog? If friend, why the hunt like a wolf in snow?
And really—they wanted to say it from the start—the target was Ouyang, the eye of the storm; why were they being dragged through the rain? Leave the vortex and wouldn’t the wind die?
After a while, Ouyang slumped against a wall like a swimmer to a pier, breath ragged as torn cloth. The siblings he’d hauled till they floated were pale as paper, half-dead fish on a dock. Mortal flesh isn’t a divine body; that speed chews bone like salt.
“L—Lord Demon King… we… really can’t… run…” Nabelia’s voice was a thread, her elegance gone like silk burned to ash. Eika could barely form words; he just lifted a hand and waved weakly like a reed in shallow water.
Seeing them carved down to shadow, Ouyang scanned the hall like a hunter in brush; no crows, no feral loli. He let out a breath like dropping a boulder from his chest.
Lying back to rest, he sorted the day’s chaos like stones on a board. Sin’s thinking was the splinter: with a setup like this, with Agas the headmaster of Starry College and vice president of the Dark Magic Association on the stage, escape should’ve been a story that never gets told. If they counted deeper, they’d predict Agas would go easy on a student, and they’d lay a second net. With Sin in the wings, Ouyang should be dead like a candle in rain.
But Sin didn’t press. Agas at least filled the inn with raven doubles, “searching” like a show in lantern-light. Sin? She popped out to spook him like a jump-scare in a mirror and then vanished like mist.
It wasn’t just Ouyang who couldn’t thread the needle; a Watcher failed to read the stars. A tidy plan had frayed like old rope—how do you report that to the higher sky? Do you lay it bare line by line, or do you paint clouds and hope?
He learned his stance fast. A black-haired girl stepped out of the void like a reflection leaving water; she was sharply there, yet wrong, a puzzle piece that didn’t belong in this world’s picture.
“My Lady…” the Watcher began, but the woman’s voice cut through like ice from the Abyss. “Do you know how to report this?”
“N-not exactly…” he said, standing on thin ice in a black lake, suspecting the outline but not daring to draw it. Guess right and you breathe; guess wrong and you sink.
