Ancient snow lay stacked upon the highland, a white mantle that hadn’t melted in ten thousand winters; the wind howled like knives through a vast, empty sky.

In that brutal cold, the group still stood bright-eyed, scanning horizons like sailors searching for a lighthouse in the storm.

“This place is called the Endless Plateau,” Jiangxue said, voice steady as a hearth flame in frost. “Legend says it holds a power that can sway evil gods, and beyond it lies the rebels’ largest stronghold.”

Morris, Belle, and Jiangxue had tried to take a shortcut, but they ran into Augustine’s team like deer meeting a marching troop at dusk. Strength in numbers felt like a wall against the gale, so the three merged into Augustine’s squad; with Jiangxue a native of this realm, they took her in the way travelers welcome a guide in wild snowfields.

“The Endless Plateau is… off,” Caro murmured, brows knit like storm clouds piling up. The place felt wrong to her bones, yet the shape of that wrongness slipped like fog through fingers.

“Relax,” Lain said, fearless grin bright as a torch in the wind. “We’ve got bodies like a small army. What’s to fear? Even if an evil god shows up, Augustine can summon his teacher’s projection.”

That landed like warm coals in cold hands; everyone nodded, heads lifting like reeds after a gust.

“I think… we should still be careful,” Jiangxue whispered, a sparrow’s worry in a hawk’s sky. “No one in history has crossed the Endless Plateau; those who chased limits vanished like footprints under fresh snow.”

She didn’t want this path, but her teammates were not ordinary villagers at a winter gate. Even if something monstrous waited in the drifts, she believed they could carve through it like fire through paper.

She wasn’t wrong.

They met beasts on the Endless Plateau, nightmares to Jiangxue’s eyes, shadows thick as firs in snowfall. Lain stayed calm as a frozen lake; one swing of his bone staff, and a white-furred brute sagged like felled timber.

“Lain, you really think you’re a melee mage now?” Durak huffed, outrage bristling like his goatee. He had forged that bone staff only hours ago, after they culled a forest beast and bound its soul within; watching Lain use it like a club, Durak rubbed his goatee as though smoothing ruffled fur.

“Glenza taught me this,” Lain said, voice crisp as winter stars. “A mage should beat a warrior up close, and kite at range.” He brought the staff down again, cracking the creature’s skull like ice under a boot. “These beasts don’t have full minds. Try to fish answers from their souls, and you’ll net muddy water.”

As Lain said, the beasts were dull-eyed in the deep, their consciousness a swamp of fog; digging for news there was like sifting snow for embers.

“So-called monsters… how disappointing,” Priss sighed, shouldering a flag like a lone mountain top. In this world, beyond the so-called gods, no other beings wielded true power; his tone made him look like a duelist strutting through a village square.

Everyone gave Priss a look as cold as sleet.

The Plateau’s mystery warped space like heat above dunes, and Augustine’s team couldn’t use spatial magic; they had to climb in flesh and bone, like ants crossing a white cliff.

Just when they wanted to crest this highland fast and go pound some rookies afterward, the Endless Plateau shuddered like a waking giant.

Ancient snow shook loose in sheets, and the ground split open like a dry riverbed cracking under sun.

“What’s happening? Did we luck into a quake?” Irina cried, clutching a rock as the earth heaved like a breathing beast.

“No. Something’s off,” Caro said, senses taut as a bowstring. “That aura isn’t mortal. Augustine, don’t hesitate—summon your teacher’s projection.”

Augustine wanted to challenge a divine gale head-on, fire in his chest like a forge. But some teammates were still below Sky Level; a god’s fingertip could snuff them like candles. He couldn’t stake their lives on his pride.

“I know.”

He bit his right index finger, blood bright as berries in snow, and sketched an ancient sigil in the air like smoke weaving patterns.

“Don’t!”

Two voices cracked across the wind, a man and a woman, coming from different directions like twin bells.

Augustine didn’t plan to stop; summoning his teacher’s projection felt like a rope across a chasm. The interruption pricked him like thorns, stirring a silent hostility toward strangers unseen.

From the south, two figures appeared through the flurries, silhouettes sharp as ink on rice paper.

“Lord Rex? Besha?” Priss blurted, the Land of Light’s prince jolted like a stag at a snap. Besha was the pampered little princess of the Land of Light, and Rex was the Demon King bound to her by contract.

Before the Demon King era arrived, the traitor demon kings had left the ‘Source World’; the Demon Kings of Miracle City had let old colleagues slip away like foxes into dusk. Priss had gone to Yaoguang City, the Land of Light’s former capital, to seek Besha, and learned Rex had already left the ‘Source World’.

He hadn’t expected Rex and Besha to appear here, like ravens crossing a white sky.

From the other side, they could also make out a woman, phantom golden wings beating like a dreambird’s flight. She couldn’t rise; her flowing blond hair veiled her face like sunlight through mist.

“Stop. You carry White Elf blood in your body. If you keep this up, the time power in that blood will—”

Her voice was music, windchimes in a winter alley; you could hear it a hundred times and never tire. Augustine flinched as if touched by ice, yanked his hand back in a snap.

In that instant, the Endless Plateau split wide, a seam tearing across the world like a smile in cracked porcelain. They tried to cast, but magic wouldn’t answer; their spells fell silent like gulls before a storm. They were as helpless as mortals, and nature’s force loomed like a tidal wave—no resistance, no escape.

Everyone fell into the rift, into a maw of color, red and orange and blue and green flowing like silk banners. The farther depths weren’t black; starlight pooled there, rainbow radiance unfurled like auroras.

They fell and fell, time stretching like taffy; no bottom, just drift. They wanted to act, to claw at fate, but the golden-winged woman’s words stilled them like a hand on a racing heart.

“Useless. We’re at the edge of the river of time, where a misstep means forever lost. Unless you hold the power of the God above gods, any rash move throws us into the wrong time, the wrong place.”

God above gods? They didn’t know that realm, and they were far from gods, like campfires under a sky of suns.

Silence wrapped them like snow. In a daze, Augustine seemed to glimpse Ouyang, straining with all his might like a swimmer against a riptide, trying to change this—failing in the end. After another drift of moments, a windchime’s ring threaded the strange space, and snowflakes blossomed midair like white plum petals. A white-haired girl in white appeared, a phantom figure cute as carved jade and porcelain. She meant to change something, you could feel it like warmth through gloves; yet she bowed toward the unknown and faded like breath in cold, vanishing at last.

The last hope shattered like ice under a heel.

—

Ouyang gazed toward the Endless Plateau, face dark as a storm over fields. The natural bulwark that had once divided nations had vanished, neat and clean, like a wall swallowed by tide.

Powerless—Ouyang felt it sink in, a stone in the gut.

“Too confident, weren’t we? Thought this world would be smooth sailing, just a one-sided slaughter.” If not for the Plateau, things would have followed the plan like ink along grain. The evil gods had been wiped out by the multi-realm alliance of gods, and mortals on the ground weren’t a match for those pseudo-gods, Demigods, and Sky Level titans; a single Sky Level could stand against armies like a cliff against waves.

Three days—only three days, and the evil-god world fell, like frost under sun. The stragglers were hunted by natives of this realm; after long oppression, their rebellion surged like a flash flood.

As for the final tally of the God-and-Demon Pilgrimage, Wutong would count it; Ouyang had no time to spare. He kept watch at the old site of the Endless Plateau, hunting for any thread, any ash.

Earlier, he’d invited a group of Tiered Beings, but no road opened; in the end, Litian brought out Flowing Light Wheel, the cute little loli best at the time arts, and she still couldn’t help. Ouyang felt she held something back, a secret like a seed under snow; when he tried to ask, she ran straight back to the Void Illusion Realm.

Then he felt it—the faint, flickering threads of time power vanished, gone like mist at noon. Everything dissolved, as if nothing had ever happened, like footprints covered by a fresh drift.

He slapped his forehead with a sharp smack, a spark of memory shooting like a firework. He dimly recalled a dream from the night Loyin turned into countless black butterflies beneath starry skies; that same night, he’d dreamed of something else.

He had dreamed of Augustine and the others. And then—

“And then what… what happened after?” Ouyang rubbed at his head, frustration snarling like a trapped wolf. The answer hovered like a moth at the lantern, but he couldn’t catch it.

Xi noticed the pattern on the back of Ouyang’s hand, a mark like frost etched on stone.

“You mean this mark only appears after you’ve killed a Tiered Being?”

Ouyang stared at his hand, baffled, like a traveler reading a map in a snowstorm. That dream—what had happened? The mark must’ve appeared after that night. Only after killing…

“I got it!”

Ouyang’s shout snapped Litian and the others’ attention to him like hawks turning to a whistle.

“That night, in the dream, I cut down someone—the one Li banished to Eternal Space-Time. Then… I saw Augustine and the others… wait… I think I stopped Flowing Light Wheel!”

“So the reason that little Flowing Light Wheel didn’t pull them out is that the you of that time crossed time and stopped the Flowing Light Wheel of now?” Xi’s thoughts aligned quick as falling snowflakes.

“In short, it’s on you.”

Dongze calmly flicked open a fan, fanning a cool breeze, tossing the line like a leaf on water.

“My bad, huh…”