A flower blooms for a thousand years, withers for a thousand; petal and leaf pass like boats in fog, life after life, never to meet.

Under the Void Technique: Other Shore in Bloom, the measured distance between Ouyang and Bango stayed the same, yet a thousand panes of space slid between them like ice floes. Lifetime after lifetime, they’d never meet. It felt like a curse in its chill, but curses broke on foes stronger than Ouyang. Only the void could split them clean.

Next came the hard part, fusing two legend-tier Ultimate Arts. Even if space stacked between them like layered glass, even a half-finished legend would do. At release, it would ignore every wall of distance and blow this void bare.

Black wings folded forward like shutters. Between them, a black bead of power trembled like a caged heart. Ouyang cupped the bead in both hands and closed his eyes. Memory rose like mist, every shard of knowledge about those two legends drifting into place.

Time, space, law—knowledge like a night sky full of constellations. You don’t cross that sky in one breath.

Dawn-Dusk, at its core, is ruin and destruction. You hold the sword in your heart and cut down what stands before your eyes. You cut every law like reeds in flood. Whispering, Ouyang traced the blade’s light in his mind. He saw a peerless swordsman whose blade severed time and space like silk. So he drew out the parts that belonged to ruin and annihilation.

The Eye of Chaos works on law itself. Chaos and order. From the first chaos you raise new order, new law. Wherever the Eye falls, rules return to rainstorm and mud, then order rebuilds them like a careful mason. That’s why they say it rewrites law. I’ll borrow its reset, then stitch it to the blade of destruction.

A single legend-tier Ultimate Art takes common gods a million years to fathom. Ouyang’s void didn’t recreate either. It jammed them together, shaved off the splinters, and forced a fit. Like stacking blocks. He didn’t carve the blocks; he just locked them tight.

Power to break mountains. Power to revise the script of the world.

The black bead kept shifting, iris-like. Its rim stayed dark as ink; its inner pupil turned white as bone. In that white iris, a tiny sword emblem branded the sclera like frost.

When he finished, he looked ten years older. His breath thinned like winter smoke.

It’s only half-finished, but it’s enough to end you. Bango, host of Legacy’s Grudge, take this as I said—our last meeting. The tips of Ouyang’s bangs had gone white, a tired frost along his brow. He pressed his palms together and trapped the eye between them.

Void Ultimate Art: The Destroyer’s Eye.

His hands opened like dawn splitting cloud. A black-on-white eye rose between his palms and hovered. In the white core, a tiny gold-hilted sword spun, jittering like a bird before flight, thrilled and bright.

Around that eye, a phantom eye bloomed, vast as a storm front. It swelled to fill the void like a rising moon. At its endless center floated the normal-sized eye, cold and still.

Inside, the golden sword stopped spinning.

Where the gaze falls, every rule breaks like rotten ice.

In an instant, the void rang with mirror-crack sound, hard and clean. Bango, there’ll be no next time. Ouyang smiled, a rain-on-stone smile. In the empty air, only a broken black crown drifted like a dead moth.

He caught the crown. It was all cracks, a dry riverbed of fractures.

No surprise a Ladder-tier being had a hand in crafting this. Even under my void, it left a husk. He only murmured it. The spirit of Legacy’s Grudge had faded with Bango under the eye’s light, leaving an empty shell. Whatever. I’ll bring it back for the brats to play with.

He stepped once. Azure sky unfolded like cloth. The black fog was gone. The sliced sky patched itself, tiles sliding back to their places.

A cool dawn wind brushed past. The white at Ouyang’s fringe lifted like frost-lit grass.

Cough. Weariness weighed like wet armor. Fusion wasn’t simple, not even for a half-legend. Now he knew why no one but a creator could use a legend-tier Ultimate Art.

Every legend carries a thread of its maker’s soul. When Ouyang forced two legends to mesh and birthed that half-made thing, he felt it—his soul snagging on the new art under some unseen law. That tether drained him dry. He’d dreamed of mixing all sorts of legend-tier arts, forging new ones like a smith at a midnight forge.

Then crushing foes with a storm of legends. Now it sounded foolish. The more legends he held, the more his soul would wither like a winter tree. He felt it clear as chill water—around five fusions, his soul would die, aging to ash.

Maybe... only when I strike the world’s own hymn will I slip this leash.

When he stepped back into the Void Church, faces lifted like flowers to sun, all worried. Something warm stirred in him. Devila, and even White Cat, who barely knew him, wore shadowed brows.

Mrrrow. Lucky you’re still breathing, kid. If you’d died, Lord Cat wouldn’t have a proper hitter for those Twelve Divine Demon Artifacts... The first sentence warmed Ouyang like soup. The second made him want to stew the cat.

Teacher, your hair—why are your tips white? Augustine had noticed. That, of all things, pleased Ouyang. This half-accidental student had eyes.

Bai noticed too. She glanced at her own long silver hair, twined it around a finger, then patted Ouyang’s head, as if matching silver to frost.

Mine… looks better. She wrestled the words out at last, calm as a child staking a claim.

Looks better? Who’s competing on looks? This is overwork bleaching me, not a fashion show. Ouyang held the black crown and felt weirdly adrift.

Just then, Jade Rabbit hopped out from behind the door like a spring hare.

Lord Ouyang, I missed you so much— She lunged and latched onto his leg like ivy. Huh? When did you dye your hair? Kinda cool!

Dye it? Who dyed it? I’m exhausted, not posing.

He conceded defeat to this flock of oddbirds. He needed sleep, or their chatter would grind his nerves to dust.

Kitty, a toy for you. I’m sleeping first. Too tired. He tossed the cracked black crown to White Cat, then drifted toward the stairs. His steps wavered like a drunk’s on a narrow bridge. Anyone could see he might fall.

At first White Cat blinked, puzzled. Then it saw the crown and the pieces fell like stones. A black crown, webbed with cracks. Legacy’s Grudge.

It swallowed. Hard to believe. Ouyang hadn’t just erased the host. He’d hammered Legacy’s Grudge to this state. What kind of force could score a crown like stone under lightning?

He’s wiped out. Don’t crowd him. Let him sleep. White Cat kept turning the crown, eyes bright. When Augustine started toward the stairs, it flicked a warning, sharp as a paw-swat.

Devila, a god among gods, had already sensed the crown’s wrongness. After White Cat’s whisper, his lip twitched. So Ouyang did have that kind of card up his sleeve.

Collin, about the sky earlier—you know how to spin that, right? Devila’s gaze cut sharp. The black fog had almost blanketed Canopy City. If it had, hatred would’ve sprouted like weeds in every chest. The city would’ve become a killing ground, mindless beasts and people tearing each other until one thing stood on a hill of bodies.

I understand. Collin knew the game. A Void Messenger had stopped this calamity. Time to widen the Church’s voice. A preacher should smell a chance like rain.

Bai wore the white robe Ouyang had given her. Her eyes stuck to the stairwell like a moth to lamp, worry soft and steady. She didn’t know what the white at his fringe meant, but she felt his fatigue like cold through cloth.

She tugged her hem with small hands. Barefoot, she paced the nave like a white fox, restless as wind. No one fussed about her dislike of shoes, but her pacing tugged at them all the same. At last, Eunice sighed, long as autumn. Whatever she mourned, she kept it quiet. She took Bai’s hand and led her toward the stairs.

Come on. If you’re that worried, we’ll check. But if he’s asleep, we don’t wake him.

For once, the eternal loli shed the child’s mask. For a heartbeat, she looked like the elder under a winter pine. She held Bai’s hand; though shorter, she felt like the older sister, and Bai, the younger, followed.