Only when the Divine Bloom drifted over that land would the curse thin like morning fog, and only then would the Demon Eye vanish. It fed on that blight.

This was the “truth” Yuyun saw through her Eye of Truth, a cold shard of sight lodged in her heart.

The survivors held their breaths like stones under water. If the Divine Bloom fell, a god had to die. After the calamity, the Western Empire had only a handful of gods left standing.

Even Gods of Faith, not yet fused with the Law, still carried desire like wind in their chests. They had no duty to burn themselves for others.

Facing a species like gods, whose power was absolute like a mountain that blocked the sun, mortals didn’t dare ask for sacrifice. Even if the thought sparked, it died at the tongue.

The remaining gods traded looks across the silent air. As gods, they were supposed to stand with heaven and earth, survive cycles of continents and wars of millennia. And now, to volunteer for death?

Among the Gods of Faith, there had been saintly hearts; those had already fallen, spent saving ordinary lives, like candles consumed to the wick.

“Fall within the cursed land, and the curse will end?” The clear voice came chilled and tired. Death, a scythe in her right hand, her left pressed to her chest, wore a pale, peerless face. Ouyang’s casual point, given in his black-and-white twin-wing form, hadn’t been a joke.

Everyone knew she was Death. The scythe and sable garb were a banner under stormlight.

Yuyun nodded, the motion small as dew.

Death smiled with a bleak curve and walked toward the lightless ground. “My existence was denied long ago. Cough…”

Blood slicked from her chest and streaked her lips like red thread. She swayed, head tipped back, staring through layers of stone at a sky only she could see.

She’d known it the moment Ouyang’s distant finger touched her—her story had ended. A power that could resist chains cast by the Supreme Law wouldn’t fail to kill a god who hadn’t even reached Realm God strength.

Ouyang’s point had been too casual, a flick of disdain. To him, Death wasn’t worth being an opponent. That point was like spit—careless, falling. It didn’t crush the ant at once; to Ouyang, just a small wet stain. To the ant, a pond. The ant didn’t die when the “pond” fell. It drowned later, slow and sure.

Death was the ant. She’d clung to the edge of life long enough to reach a last choice. That power was beyond anything she understood. If dying was certain, then choose the place of burial with one’s own hand.

Monsters roamed, shadows like a tide. Death gripped her chest, lifted her scythe, and cut a path toward the Demon Eye.

When a god at her height moved with a will to die, the world heard it. Corpses turned to a rain of blood, scattering like petals, painting the sky crimson. Even the thick stormfront split under her blade, and long-lost sunlight spilled down her shoulders.

Her black hair caught the light like river ink. Bathed in the sun and drenched in blood, Death seemed, to all who watched, suddenly holy.

No one stopped her. They all wanted to live.

She drank enough sun to warm a winter soul. Her body rose into the void and turned with a gentle spin. Then she drove for the Demon Eye, a streak of madness and release. Death, the oldest god on the continent—no one knew which millennial war had birthed her. Old records carried her name like a watermark, yet even Gods of Faith didn’t know her era.

Now the oldest god smiled, a true peace uncoiling from within.

“Lord Nanyang, the meaning of my existence has found its answer…”

She closed her eyes and, with a last smile, struck the Demon Eye head-on.

Divine Bloom, a snow of petals, took flight.

“Hehe, Lord Nanyang, what kind of bridge is the Naihe Bridge? If all beings cross it, they’ll forget past and present lives…”

“Eh… I’m not sure either, brat. Quit poking everywhere. To me, those are myths. Very old myths. Untraceable.”

“Hey, Lord Nanyang, why are those black chains tangled into a ball? And those runes are so pretty. I really want to touch them.”

“Brat, stop. Don’t mess with that. Yimeng will chew me out!”

“Huh, Lord Nanyang, why do your feathers have strange runes? Can I pluck one to check?”

“Holy shit—you little menace! Why was I brain-dead enough to adopt you? Hands off!”

“Brat, I’m giving you a task. Watch this world for me. Don’t let it slip away from its set rules.”

“Eh, my lord, will you come back to see me?”

“Maybe I will… in a far, far future…”

Divine Bloom whirled. The storm thinned like torn cloth, and sunlight laid golden hands on the earth. The Demon Eye in the cloud sea cracked again and again, fading like ink in rain.

“How… how could this be?”

Yuyun went ash-grey. In the instant those cracks formed, her Eye of Truth saw it—Ouyang was dead. The Demon Eye seemed to be Ouyang. Its vanishing meant Ouyang’s death.

“No. Impossible.”

She clutched her head and muttered, her voice coming apart like frayed thread.

If the Demon Eye was Ouyang, hadn’t she killed him by proxy? Without her Eye of Truth, Death wouldn’t have moved like that, and the Eye wouldn’t have disappeared. It was her. She buried her own longing with her own hands.

“What… what have I done!?” The hate hit herself first, sharp as winter. The last thing worth hoping for, ended by her. The final dawn in her life, shoveled under by her.

“In the end, I ruined myself.”

She dug her fingers into rock. Even as jagged edges cut and blood ran, she felt nothing. Ice-blue pupils spilled two blue tears. Then her gaze went completely dim, like a lamp snuffed. It felt like falling back into that “dream,” a world gone black, stripped of color.

“Yun’er, what’s wrong?”

As the world tipped toward dawn, Switt felt his student’s silence like a cold draft. Something was very wrong.

Divine Bloom fell. The cursed land thinned and broke. Monsters scattered and winked out. The eye in the cloud sea dissolved into motes with one last unwilling stare. The continent seemed to meet a sunrise. The prophecy of “no dawn in the night” looked shattered—time to celebrate.

Yuyun didn’t hear Switt. Her dull eyes stared at the sky, vacant, lost.

Her emerald hair floated in a wind that wasn’t there. Green light motes spun around her like fireflies. Then the vision faded. A dagger formed in her right hand. She drove it into her heart.

“Yuyun!!!”

Switt never imagined she would choose death.

“Teacher… in the night, there really is no dawn. Despair hasn’t ended.”

She smiled a wrecked smile and slid to the ground. Her last curve of the lips—mockery of the world, or spite at life—no one knew.

“No dawn in the night?”

Switt knew his student. If she said it, there was a reason. Maybe nothing had ended after all. The thick clouds were breaking, the light was warm, hope felt like morning.

Her suicide, to Switt, wasn’t an absolute end. The Eastern Empire’s remaining tech, the Western Empire’s gods—both had ways to pull life back from the brink.

Yet something was wrong. Eastern tech failed. Western gods failed. Resurrection was tried again and again. Nothing took. People mourned—losing someone who held an Eye of Truth was a loss—but like foam on the sea, grief scattered quickly.

Switt chose a place of clear streams and green hills. He buried Yuyun with his own hands. Others planned to rebuild, but a cloud stayed in his heart, heavy and stubborn.

Yuyun, with an Eye of Truth, had spoken a warning. Had the cloud over the earth really cleared?

“It’s time. This world was born for the future, and it will end for the future.” Mapleleaf had come to this time to recover a world that had finished its task.

Because Ouyang went back to the past, he left a message inside a little boy’s mind. After Mapleleaf reached the Second Universe, and the Other Shore Era’s First Epoch opened, that boy learned of the future from Ouyang’s message. So this trial-world was built.

A world born for the future. And now Mapleleaf, also from the future, would reclaim it.

“I don’t get it. Why must you be the one to recover the world?”

The Moon Goddess’s voice rang like strings. She could do it. The Divine Sword could. Even Kanofia could. Mapleleaf traveled all this way from the future just to reclaim a world?

It felt… like using a blade of heaven to cut bread.

Mapleleaf shook his head and looked down on all things, like a true god watching ten thousand realms dim.

“That memory doesn’t belong to this age. It was born in the future, so the future must take it back.” No one present truly understood the “memory” he spoke of. The core of the continent was the memory Ouyang had stuffed into that boy—a shard from the future. Sent to the past by the future. Now, it had to be taken from the past back to the future. Only then would the cycle be whole. Only then could a beginning have an end.

“Rend, false sky.”

Cracks raced across the world, like veins in a breaking mirror.

The sky shattered by sheets. Blue and white fell away, revealing a roof riddled with fractures. Through the split seams, they saw a barren land behind the facade—no grass, no blue, no green mountains or clear water. It looked like the world after an ending.

In that instant, Eastern Empire and Western Empire, all clocks and pulses stalled. The world turned to fragments, and the mosaic that held it dropped piece by piece.

Circled by nine crescent moons, the Moon Goddess could only sigh. She and the Divine Sword had agreed—only if a power beneath gods pushed a world to annihilation would she stay out of it. Mapleleaf didn’t lift a hand. He spoke softly, and the world collapsed.

With the Moon Goddess’s power added, Mapleleaf’s breath broke everything.

“I wonder… in the far Eleventh Epoch, how strong your true body is. Looking through the river of time, I can see only a sliver, and it already exceeds what I know.”

The Divine Sword spoke in a low timbre, curious, hopeful for the future Mapleleaf hinted at.

Mapleleaf didn’t answer. He stretched out his hand. The broken world became a drift of light motes, and they gathered in his palm. With the false sky torn, they stood on barren ground.

This was the true First Continent. Through endless years it hadn’t regrown life. A Tiered Being had razed it, and its leftover power still raged like a storm. The earth was ash. The sky was in shards.

Everything still held the shape of the First Epoch’s curtain fall.

The light that the world became clustered in Mapleleaf’s hand. He cradled the globe with his left, right hand resting on the sword at his back. Not far away, a few people watched them with fear, eyes wide as lanterns in a wind.

They were, of course, traitors from the Other Shore, hustling Kanofia and trying to punch a tunnel through space to slip away.

By rotten luck, their corridor skimmed the First Continent, and Asathos—the turtle—opened both eyes. His gaze rang like a bell on glass and blew the passage apart.

Sensing Asathos’s off‑the‑chart presence, their main camp went cold like a well in winter; no one even thought of aid.

So the intercepted traitors had no way home, like fish flopping on dry shore.

Watching them with a half‑smile, Mapleleaf’s eyes held deep water, moonlight rippling under ice.

He lifted his gaze to the sky, and his fingers tightened on the hilt like roots gripping rock.

A weary calm settled, like dusk over a river.

“As a caretaker, this looks like a giant bullying children.

But years have washed my strength thin, and this isn’t even my true body.

So I’ll swing once. One sword, and I go back to the road of time, a traveler walking into tomorrow.”

A sword‑scar swept out; in that heartbeat, the brightest star in the night was that gleaming cut.

As the blade left, cracks bloomed on Mapleleaf like crazing on porcelain, then widened and swallowed him whole.

Deep in the star sea, a lone stroke flew toward an unknown place, a comet‑white line cutting into silence.

It ignored time and distance and locked onto the concept that existed there, like an arrow pinning a name to a door.

Explosion thundered; light spilled like noon over ice.

The surrounding sky went graveyard‑still—no twinkling stars, no circling planets, everything dusted to particles and blown into night.

Only that unknown place hung there, a black island in a dead sea of space.

“They all struck together and stopped the Withering Swordsman’s one cut, like catching lightning in a jar, but they paid for it.

Those Tiered Beings are hurt and won’t be hopping soon, like crabs with cracked shells.”

The Divine Sword hung in the air like a shard of dawn.

The White Cat stood on a stone, staring at where Mapleleaf vanished, her brown eyes deep as a shaded well.

When the dust finally settled, green light budded everywhere, and a rain the color of spring fell from the heavens.

Bathing in that emerald rain, the torn sky began to knit like silk, and barren earth sprouted tender grass you could almost see growing.

A long cry rang out, and an enormous emerald‑hued Azure Bird crossed the sky like a living comet.

“Azure Bird, congratulations on waking,” someone said, voice warm as sun on new leaves.