The war between the two great empires didn’t start with the sky cracking; whether by plan or by drift, they first pushed the fire into smaller nations, and those states crumbled like sandcastles under waves.

Yet the heart of the battlefield stayed the Cursed Land, a thorn lodged deep in the continent’s flesh.

The other fronts were small, but they chewed the mainland like moths through silk; civilizations faded like old ink, and borders peeled away like bark.

“Interesting...” Mapleleaf stood veined with black fissures, a statue about to split like dry clay; beside him, Kanofia floated above the cloud sea, a phantom blood‑moon blooming behind her like a wound.

They weren’t alone above the billows; a cracked Divine Sword hung like a storm‑scarred mast, and a woman circled by nine crescent moons drifted like a swan in frostlight.

“Do you know why this world exists?” Her voice was clear as wind through jade chimes, a spring over stone.

Mapleleaf’s space warped like heat‑haze; gray substance leaked from his dark cracks like ash on snow. An unseen pressure ringed Kanofia, the Divine Sword, and the moonlit woman, turning the gray back like a tide against a seawall.

The Divine Sword swayed like a reed in a river. “An attempt... I know that much,” it murmured, “but what they’re trying to attempt, I can’t see through the fog.”

“As the Moon Goddess says, no one but Xuan and Luo knows,” the woman within the crescents spoke, her glow like frost on night water.

“Exactly,” Mapleleaf said, voice heavy as rain on slate. “No answer came until the Tenth Epoch. This continent kept cycling like a wheel rutted in mud. That was the first attempt. From that first turn came the Tenth Epoch, an age where all beings struggled in endless reincarnation like fish trapped in a drying pond.”

“In reincarnation, they struggle?” Even Kanofia’s icy calm cracked, surprise flashing like lightning behind cloud; she couldn’t picture that winter of an age.

“Yes. The gods fell asleep like mountains under snow; their souls wandered the wheel like leaves caught in an eddy, waiting for dawn...” Mapleleaf paused, caution folding over his words like a shutter. “It was darker than the Third Epoch’s Dark Age, a night where everything despaired inside the wheel like candles drowning in wax.”

At the edge of the stars, countless golden chains whipped forward like sunlit serpents, yet they shattered a few dozen meters from Mapleleaf, breaking like surf on a cliff.

“How impatient,” he said, smiling as lightly as wind on grass. “Relax. I’ll leave when the hour ripens. Don’t prod me. Let a traveler through time watch this last feast like a lantern festival before snow.”

In a single month, war flared across the Eastern Empire and the Western Empire like prairie fire; other civilizations burned out like dry reeds. They knew they were netting the river dry, yet the Curse of the Millennium War hung above them like a sword over a neck.

Smoke wolfed across the land like storm‑shadows. Mountains and rivers vanished like paint washed by rain. The earth split in great slabs like cracked ice; green forests withered into deserts like fields under a killing wind; rivers went bone‑dry like veins in drought.

Even within both empires, restraint was a thin dam; many regions still turned to sand like orchards swallowed by dust.

When the two empires reached mutual ruin, black clouds clenched above the Cursed Land like a clenched fist; a cold voice fell from the eye of the storm like a judge’s gavel.

“Void Arcana: the Destroyer’s Eye!”

Within the cloud‑vortex, a colossal eye formed like frost spreading on glass—black rim, white heart—and in its pupil hovered a golden little sword like a sun‑sliver. Look closely and you’d see it mirrored the Divine Sword above the clouds; if those cracks healed, they’d be twins like reflections in still water.

“Where the gaze lands, all rules will shatter!”

Rules collapsed in a breath like ice under a boot. Inside the Cursed Land, every law broke like snapped strings; every force lost its balance like scales tilting.

Water flows downhill, white clouds float on high, life and death trade places in the wheel—those are rules like bones under skin. Now, a dead volcano belched fire like a waking dragon; its law changed, its ash painting the sky like night blossoms. Above, a nine‑headed bird swam through black water hanging in the air like a lake of ink; water left the earth like rain falling upward, and birds roamed it like fish in a midnight pond.

Vines no longer rooted in soil but in the void like green threads sewn into darkness, clutching at unseen loam.

Everything slid into chaos like a compass gone wild.

Western Empire and Eastern Empire both felt it, a chill like cold iron at the spine. Records said that by this stage, other civilizations were ash and both empires thinned like a winter herd; then they would sheath blades and coax the continent back to spring together.

But the Cursed Land twisted that script like a page scorched at the edges.

Endless monsters poured from the Cursed Land like ants from a cracked hill; common rules washed off them like rain on oil. The law of life and death shifted like sand, and no one knew how to kill what wouldn’t accept dying.

In trench and street, people learned despair like frostbite; even powdered to dust, those monsters revived like seeds after rain.

By accident, hope flickered like a match in wind. A monster broke into the Eastern Empire’s salt vault; the moment it touched salt, its body melted in minutes like snow on a hearthstone.

They tallied and learned by firelight and fear. Some monsters died only to pollen, fading like moths in flower smoke. Some could be hurt only by weapons made of paper, sliced like clouds by a reed. Others required no hand at all; a certain sound unspooled them like silk, and they perished by their own thread.

The hard war dragged on like winter without end. The Eastern Empire fired missiles at the demon eye over the Cursed Land like arrows at a moon, but they went dead the instant they crossed that border, dropping like stones.

Darkness spread like ink in water. The black clouds above the Cursed Land kept blooming like mold; the continent lay under a damp lid of night. Corpses rose and turned like grain sprouting wrong; wraiths drifted like cold wind through ruined doors.

The last people of Eastern Empire and Western Empire gathered like embers cupped in hands; old grudges fell like rust from chains, and together they searched for a sliver of dawn in a night that stretched like a sea.

“It’s useless. An astrologer glimpsed a shard of the future like a star through fog. He spent his life to say one line: In the night, there’s no dawn.” The speaker was Ovisen, chief of the Blackwater Bandits, his voice rough as rope. After Ouyang fell and Mapleleaf vanished, the Reaper hid in Qiuya City to heal like a wolf in a cave, and he took the city like a shadow taking a room. He restored Ovisen and the others’ souls like rain on fevered earth; they were no longer mindless millennium wraiths.

The Eastern Empire’s Sky Warriors and the Western Empire’s gods spent themselves like torches in wind to shield the common folk; against monsters that refused death, even gods met defeat like bells struck dumb. By the time the East charted weaknesses like hunters mapping trails, many Sky Warriors and gods had fallen like stars.

“Yun, can you use those eyes and see how we survive this storm?” In an underground cavern camp that held the last breathing spark, Switt, an Earth Warrior of the Eastern Empire, asked his student Youyun, his voice low as distant thunder.

Fear came first, heavy as wet cloth, and Youyun curled in a corner like a sparrow in rain. She kept her head down, her clothes ragged like torn banners. Since childhood she bore strange gifts, the brightest being the Eye of Truth, a mirror clear as still water.

After her parents died, her teacher Switt took her in like a tree sheltering a sapling, while her brother Youwen vanished like a boat into fog. Back then her power was weak, her Eye unsteady like a candle flame. Her family’s ruin drove her to train like steel in fire; at last she used the Eye to see her parents’ deaths, and saw her brother stuffed into a sack and carried off like a stolen kite...

Her sky collapsed like cracked porcelain. Behind the torn blue was only darkness like a well with no bottom. Through the Eye she saw the hand behind it—Qianye—moving like a spider in a web. As for Youwen, she saw only the sack; beyond that, a force blocked her gaze like iron shutters. To her, it meant the blade had already fallen; in the Eye’s world, she “saw” Youwen’s essence—void, a blank like snow without footprints, which meant death.

The culprit was Qianye, or rather the Qianye clan, a frost that crept into the bones. Her mother belonged to that house, yet their ruthlessness bit like salt in a wound. It wasn’t a whim of Qianye Jing; it was a plot laid like a snare.

Family—she had none left, only echoes like wind in an empty hall.

What kept her walking were two pillars like stakes in flood. First, Master Switt. With an Earth Warrior standing like a mountain, no one dared bully her; in the catastrophe he shattered his fetters and rose as a Sky Warrior, carrying godlike destruction like thunder in his palms.

Second, Ouyang. She once looked at him with the Eye and saw he still lived, and relief spread through her like warm tea. Her feelings for him tangled like vines. They were strangers, yet in the season she used the Eye, that “dream” he wove became clear as moonlight; no longer a blur.

She didn’t know why worry clung like burrs. Maybe his self‑spun past in the dream was too pitiful, a fledgling fallen from the nest. Maybe their meeting in this world was a chance blossom. She kept fretting over the guy who had once slept in her bed like a cat in sun; since she was little, no other man had even sat there, let alone slept.

That encounter brought anger like sparks and fear like shadow, yet if only that life could have kept ambling like a brook—bickering, laughing, mending.

Qianye Jing shattered that fragile warmth like glass; the farce full of sighs had a gentle ember at its core. She still wanted to see Ouyang and the White Cat tussling on the couch like cubs. She still wanted to see Ouyang and the White Cat pranking Youwen, chaos like confetti. She still wanted to hear Ouyang say good night before sleep, a whisper like a candle’s last glow.

Some people and some moments pass you by like petals on a river.

“I... understand...” Her voice was small as rain. She raised her head like a flower finding light. For two years she hunted Ouyang’s tracks across a tide of faces like stars in a night sky, never finding the one she sought.

Every time she used the Eye to seek him, she saw only a void like fog. Yet the Eye’s whisper said he lived, a heartbeat like a drum behind a wall—alive, and still a void.

Emerald light flared in her pupils like dew on jade; the Eye that pierced truth opened like dawn, parsing the world like a weaver sorting threads.

“I... see it. Gods fall in that cursed place like trees in a storm, and everything else will fade like frost at noon.”

Ouyang once cursed that region like ink spilled on a map; only when the Divine Bloom drifted there like white petals in wind would the curse lift. Now, through the Eye of Truth, Youyun caught the message like a bell tone in silence.