Night thinned like ink in water, a white seam opening along the horizon. They’d been wandering under the cold stars almost all night.

Just as everyone was ready to head back, Augustine felt something wrong with the White Cat. Memory said that aloof creature gazed down like a moonlit statue—yet now it trembled like grass in a storm.

“Cat Lord, what’s wrong?” Augustine’s voice cut the hush like a bell. All eyes swung to the White Cat. Its fur stood on end like frost-needles, as if it had scented something that walked out of a nightmare.

Ouyang met the White Cat’s gaze. The feline’s mouth shaped a few hoarse words, cold as snow on stone. “Legacy of Hatred.”

“Legacy of Hatred?” Augustine blinked in confusion, and even Devila, a being like a mountain in the mist, looked lost. Then the answer arrived with the sky. The white rim at the edge of dawn winked out like a snuffed candle, and the heavens grew darker, as if something was eating the stars one by one.

Before their eyes, an eternal night drank that slice of sky dry. Dawn did not come. A pitch-black bowl covered the world.

“Twelve Divine Demon Artifacts. Legacy of Hatred,” Ouyang murmured, voice flat as a blade laid on ice. “Vice-captain, take them somewhere safe. I’ll see what we’re dealing with.” Before Augustine could respond, Ouyang slipped into the jungle like a shadow leaving the firelight.

Among the Twelve Divine Demon Artifacts, Legacy of Hatred isn’t the cruelest knife, but it casts the widest shadow. By design, its host is a lunatic who hates heaven, earth, and even the air like sand in his teeth. This world was Ouyang’s back garden, a quiet pond; the Twelve surfacing here was a stone thrown in on purpose.

The Black Wings unfurled behind him with a dim, abyssal sheen, like oil on midnight water. In the endless black fog, Ouyang didn’t need to search. The man who hated sky, land, and breath itself drifted forward as if the darkness had carried him in its tide.

Scarlet pupils brimmed like bleeding wells. Red, hedgehog-stiff hair. Two slashes of old blood on his cheeks. The host was a man in his twenties, smiling like a paper mask, wrong and bright.

Above his head, a jet-black crown leaked a chill aura like winter smoke.

“The host of the Legacy of Hatred?”

“That’s right… heh, heh…” His laugh rasped like a saw through bone. “Heh… heh… I’ll smash you all. I’ll smash everything. I, Bango, will shatter this world steeped in hate like glass on stone!”

“Heh… heh…”

Bango kept giggling, a cracked music-box in the dark. Ouyang shook his head. The man was gone past saving; this wasn’t a poison you could purge.

“In that case… Void Art: Void Prison.”

Since taking the Black Wings and ascending to Realm God, Ouyang had forged void arts that belonged only to a Void Messenger. Once the Void Prison drops, everything near the caster gets sealed into the void like bugs in amber. It draws no lines between friend and foe; it’s a tide that drowns all.

Bango could blink through space, but he couldn’t cross the true void. Inside this prison, unless Ouyang died—or unless the opponent was a Primordial Deity—even an Ancient God could only claw at the walls like a trapped beast.

The moment the Void Prison settled, space within several kilometers cut clean like sliced jade. Black mist, people, sky—gone like breath on glass. Only a blank void remained, cold and lightless.

“Heh-heh-heh-heh… useless,” Bango crooned, voice like gravel. “In my hands, everything shatters. People. Things. Time and space. All of it breaks like brittle ice.” From the black crown, countless midnight vines snaked down like roots, piercing into his skull with a wet hiss.

“Explode. Shatter.”

He punched at Ouyang, his fist braided in endless black fog like storm ropes. Bam—the Black Wings folded into a shield and caught it. The fog tore apart, and black feathers drifted in the void like ash in snowfall.

“Heh… not done yet.”

Bango’s face twisted, a sorrow-smile like a cracked mask. He reached up to the crown and wrenched out a greatsword black as a thunderhead. He swung once, and a gust of black currents rushed Ouyang like a flood escaping a dam.

“Hate! Hate the sky, hate the earth, hate yourself!” His howl clawed at Ouyang’s eardrums like iron nails. Ouyang watched that mad stroke fall, then tipped the Black Wings and slid aside, thin as a knife-edge.

Fog rolled like ink in water, yet within a one-meter ring around Ouyang the fog could not enter, like rain sliding off lacquer.

“Clever idea,” Ouyang said, voice steady as a still pond. “When hate hits its peak, a man loses reason and turns the blade inward. When he kills all he sees, he kills himself next. Too bad. My Black Wings are immune to that mire.”

Bango’s scarlet eyes went wide, pupils like coals. He saw the Black Wings steadily drinking the fog, sip by sip.

“Heh…” His head dipped, laugh seething like steam. “You’re strong. So far, you’ve danced through this like it’s a game… and I hate people like you. That look in your eyes, that calm—go die. All of you, go die!”

He moved like a guillotine. He drove that pitch-black greatsword into his own heart. The blade drank his blood, broke into black mist, and vanished like smoke in wind. His chest wound fumed black, then sealed shut like ice knitting. A black cross-star bloomed in each scarlet eye, cold as a brand.

“Die.”

Ouyang tensed to guard, but Bango’s fist smashed into his gut first, a comet through the dark. Ouyang flew through the void for an unknowable distance like a leaf in gale. He twisted to recover, and Bango was already above him—another punch cracked down on his skull like a falling bell.

“Damn…” The boost from the Legacy of Hatred was the fiercest of the twelve. With enough hate, a creature’s strength could, in theory, rise to Primordial Deity levels like a tide swallowing a cliff.

“Ah-ha-ha-ha!” Bango stood in the void like a black sun and howled, drunk on victory.

Ouyang wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth, a calm mask settling like frost. He knew the man’s power had climbed near the Primordial Deity’s peak under that artifact’s surge.

The Black Wings drew in, tight as clasped hands. Ouyang cupped his palms like sheltering a spark.

“Void Art: Edict Creation.”

To kill a foe standing at the peak of an Ancient God with only a Realm God’s strength, he needed a Legendary Edict. There are lower edicts, upper edicts, final edicts, and the legendary—each a mountain of law.

Below legendary, others might borrow a sliver. But for a Legendary Edict, only its creator can call even a drop—no second hand on that sword. Ouyang’s Edict: Void let him cheat the lattice. In emptiness, he could fuse multiple edicts and birth a new one, a blade he himself could wield.

“In the Other Shore, the fiercest strike is ‘Dawn and Dusk,’” he thought, resolve settling like iron. “Each Legendary Edict holds knots of knowledge like constellations. Fusing two on short notice is the limit, and even that yields a half-finished thing… but there’s no choice. Only a legendary blade can cut this knot, even as a half-forged edge.”

Legendary Edict: Dawn and Dusk belonged to the God Emperor of the Other Shore, a third-rung sovereign in that sea of beings. In the Second Era, one sword-call brought the Twilight of the Gods like winter falling on orchards. In the Third, one stroke split the night and ushered dawn like a sunrise cleaving fog.

In that myth-drenched Second Era, gods fell like meteor showers. That alone spoke to its power. It razed the Ancient God Realm like fire through dry pines; the current Divine Realm stands on those ruins, a corner-town where a capital once blazed.

Ancient beasts slept deep, so total ruin never came—but the edge told its tale. In the Third Era, with darkness born of Original Sin stalking like wolves, that same sword cut the night and lit the horizon.

Such is the Legendary Edict, Dawn and Dusk—said to be the most destructive art in the Other Shore, a thunderbolt cast as a rule.

“In that case, fuse Dawn and Dusk with the Eye of Chaos.”

Legendary Edict: Eye of Chaos didn’t bite as hard, but its creator stood level with the God Emperor: the First Imperial Princess, Cynthia, Warden of Order and Chaos. They say, in any world the Eye of Chaos could see, she could rewrite order and rules like an author mending a page.

Within that eye, all things—birth and death, tides and seasons—yield their lines to her pen.

“Before that…” Ouyang glanced at distant Bango, a flint of resolve catching. “Void Art: Other-Shore Bloom.”

The Other-Shore flower blooms for a thousand years, then falls for a thousand more; leaf and petal pass each other by like strangers, life after life. Ouyang’s void art worked like that legend—the two would be parted, two shores, never to meet.

“Go to hell,” Bango roared, cracks crawling over him like dry riverbeds. Black mist steamed from the fissures. He threw a fist that could grind worlds to powder, a victor’s smile lifting his lips like a trophy raised high.

“Then farewell, hedgehog-head,” Ouyang said, voice soft as dusk. “This is the last time we’ll meet.”

Void Art: Other-Shore Bloom.

For a heartbeat, a flower bloomed in the void, so beautiful the sun and moon would pale like lanterns at noon. It opened. It withered. Lifetimes turned like pages. Two shores. No meeting.

In Bango’s eyes, Ouyang vanished like a stone slipping into deep water. The void was still the void, a silent field—but he couldn’t find Ouyang’s shadow, couldn’t taste his breath on the air.

In Ouyang’s sight, the void remained, glass-still; Bango was gone, and the black fog went with him like night at sunrise.

Just like the old legend: two shores, never to see each other.