Over a barren wasteland, the sky lay cracked like shattered glass, the ground charred like a burnt crust.

A colossal turtle sprawled across a web of fissures like a mountain sleeping on a broken plate.

Magma ran like molten veins across the earth.

Storms scythed through the torn sky, yet every gust and ember bent away before reaching the turtle, like waves parting around a cliff.

The turtle lay atop a vast temple the size of a regulation soccer field, a stone sea under a ruined sky.

It filled the hall wall to wall, like a boulder wedged in a bowl.

Around the temple stretched broken walls and fallen pillars, ribs of a city gnawed by time.

Only the floor, etched with a frost of runes, still declared this place wasn’t ordinary.

The world itself was dead-still, a bell jar of silence without a pulse.

Aside from the turtle, a new spark stepped into that ash-gray stillness.

A young man in white sword-garb, twin blades on his back, walked toward the turtle like a pilgrim approaching a holy peak.

Beside him paced a horse-like creature, its hooves treading the air like stepping stones on water, never once touching the ground.

The man in white was Mapleleaf.

His sky-stepping companion was a Void Smuggler Beast, a steed stitched from emptiness like a shadow with weight.

As Mapleleaf drew near, the turtle opened both eyes like ancient galaxies unsealing.

In that instant, shoreless starlight welled up; for a breath, Mapleleaf felt cast into a stranger cosmos, a jeweled night without end.

So this is…the domain of an out-of-spec existence?

He bowed to the vast shell like a hill of night, not from fear, not from retreat, but from respect due an elder tree.

Oldest in the star-sea… Lord Azathoth.

This oldest of the star-sea had once shown itself when Ouyang first broke his seal, a blossom that flared and vanished.

It fulfilled an ancient pact and then sank back into the deep like a whale into black water.

So old it had forgotten its own name, it was called Azathoth by the gods of the Other Shore, a borrowed name from the first god of the Cthulhu tales.

Oldest among the constellations, the gods across the shore used that first name to hail this first shadow.

You carry…the scent of time and space.

The pearled starfield faded like dew; the wasteland returned, the sky cracked, the earth bleeding magma like opened wounds.

Azathoth regarded Mapleleaf, gaze heavy as stone on still water.

You are only a spirit-body; if your true body had crossed, the law of time wouldn’t go so easy on you.

As an out-of-spec existence, Azathoth read Mapleleaf’s state at a glance, like a sage reading ripples in tea.

To cross the long river of time is to step into a storm; the restrictions bite like iron.

A small change in the past draws punishment like thunder.

Weak ones, like Ouyang once was, return to the past as ghosts behind glass, watching a movie they can’t touch, helpless before others’ joy and grief.

Strong ones, like a Tiered Being who could rouse a hymn, can alter one thing in the past like a chisel tapping fate—yet the cost is annihilation like ash on the wind.

When you left this star-sea, you laid a backhand like a seed under snow.

Your spirit-body was hidden somewhere in this sky, I’d guess in one of your Other Shore’s three legendary lands.

You planted a spirit-body there, then in the distant future used supreme power to let your soul pluck time’s silken thread and work this puppet of a body.

Every move you make uses this body’s own strength, not the future’s, so the law of time doesn’t slam the door.

Besides, your soul still stands on the river’s far bank, not truly crossed, so the punishment barely nips your heels.

It’s clever—no, elegant—a fine idea.

As long as you don’t spill crucial secrets of the future, the law of time won’t trouble you.

Azathoth spoke the truth as if naming constellations, solving even what had long perplexed Ouyang, after only a few heartbeats of eye contact with Mapleleaf.

On that alone, the title stands—oldest life in the star-sea.

Lord Azathoth, worthy of the name oldest; our little sleight of hand was never going to fool you.

Mapleleaf showed no surprise; the trick looked heaven-defying, yet the one before him was the oldest shell beneath the sky.

Across all worlds the Other Shore had roamed, they had never found anything older than this turtle, a library of ages, a reef of knowledge.

Still, I didn’t expect you to stand guard on this First Continent.

The pact with the Supreme Sovereign of old was fulfilled, so why linger on this first land?

It’s true, my watch here has nothing to do with that so-called pact.

The giant turtle began to move, a continent drifting like a cloud; yet the ground didn’t quake, not even a dust mote rose.

I…just wanted to witness the era you spoke of.

Boy, in your age, did you fulfill that old vow?

He held back, a stone lodged in the throat of time; he searched for words that wouldn’t rouse the law like a hornet’s nest.

Rest easy.

Where I exist, the air around me becomes its own time-space, a pond cut off from the river; you needn’t worry.

Mapleleaf glanced around, feeling the rules bend like different currents around a rock.

Then he began, voice steady as a string drawn tight.

Let’s start with the Ninth Epoch.

In the Ninth, the First Imperial Princess sought a Third Universe beyond our First and this Second, testing the Void Sea like an explorer testing ice.

If a Third existed, then the First and Second weren’t born as twins.

In the Void Sea, they met enemies like no storm before, a race called the Chaos Demon Gods, born from the void like lightning without clouds.

The Ninth lost; the gods fell into long sleep like drowned suns, and only a few wandered reincarnation seeking the key to shatter fate’s shackles.

Before the fall, His Majesty the God Emperor carved a path into the deep of the Void Sea that the Chaos Demon Gods tried to dam.

In that depth lay another star-sea, and the Void Sea itself was a bulwark like a shell, with the Chaos Demon Gods as Wardens of the Way.

He stopped there, for before the oldest shell under heaven, the rest was obvious as daylight through mist.

Azathoth lifted his gaze to the broken sky like a fisherman reading weather, lost in thought.

I see it now.

Your First Universe and our Second formed a passage by accident, like roots finding a crack, so no Wardens blocked you.

But the Third you discovered, you forced your way into, so the Wardens stood against you.

It seems my watch over this land wasn’t wasted.

In the distant future, I’ll glimpse the ‘Pan-Universe Era’ you sketched like a map on the wind.

When Azathoth’s eyes lowered and sleep crept in like tide, Mapleleaf spoke in time, voice a bell in fog.

Lord Azathoth, in the far future, when the final war with the Chaos Demon Gods comes, please lend your hand.

The colossal turtle settled in the temple and slept, silent as a fossil, a mountain dreaming under black sky.

The cursed region had become, in truth, a march of monsters, a thorn-thicket between empires.

It lay on the border shared by the Eastern Empire and the Western Empire, a patch of earth turned eldritch like a wound that wouldn’t scab.

The Eastern Empire lost patience first; in recent days, squads of special forces slipped into that damned tract like knives into cloth.

At first they thought it was the Western Empire’s trick, and after years of shadow-sparring, Eastern soldiers knew the West’s methods like a hunter knows a rival’s tracks.

They weren’t worried.

But the moment their boots crossed that ominous soil, they knew they were wrong, like sailors who smell a storm too late.

They lost contact with the Empire at once; every signal was smothered in that ground like a flame under a jar.

They ran into mutant beasts early on, but with heavy fire, they dropped a rat the size of a house, its body thudding like a felled tree.

Their spirits surged like banners in wind—cowardly Westerners, too scared to face us head-on, playing at ghosts; did they think one big rat would spook us?

That night, a swarm of specters raged like winter squalls.

Creatures devoured by Gluttony turned to wraiths and clung to the soldiers like frost on steel, and the squad tore itself apart in a red haze.

The whole team—twenty-three—dead, candles snuffed in a gust.

Ouyang didn’t know that one of those men, before dying, wrote it all down like carving on bark, a diary of an end.

A three-headed eagle snatched that diary in its beak, wings cutting the cursed air like knives.

At the region’s heart, on a mountain forever burning with black fire like a coal that never cools, the eagle flew over that Flame Mountain.

It slammed into a sparrow crackling with black lightning, a storm stuffed into a small bird.

Lightning numbed the eagle like ice through bone; its beak opened, and the diary fell.

Whap—the notebook would’ve smacked Ouyang, but his superhuman reflexes snapped out like a whip, and he caught it clean.

Hm? A soldier’s death log?

Heh, interesting.

If I tweak a few lines and let this drift on the wind, the Western Empire’s the one who’ll shoulder the blame.

Flipping the pages, Ouyang’s smile tilted like a knife catching light.

But for a while, I need the Western Empire and the Eastern Empire unable to talk to each other.

That won’t be hard.

The Western Empire doesn’t have the Eastern Empire’s tech depth.