Dylan’s fist crashed into Ouyang, but it met a mirage. Ouyang burst into mirror shards, then stitched back together like flowing glass.

One punch. Two.

“Can’t kill him?”

After pounding for ages, Dylan felt the wrongness crawl under his skin.

“Your brain’s in a hurry. You think raw physics can kill me?”

Ouyang’s sneer cut like cold iron.

The jab lit a spark. Dylan floated, rubbing his hands, charging like a storm coiling tight.

“Kid, this time—die.”

He gathered endless black matter, energy so dense it nearly solidified. At godspeed beyond dodging, he slapped the black orb onto Ouyang’s head.

A thunderous roar; the void cracked like brittle glass.

“Hahaha… kid, you’re dead now!”

Confidence gleamed in the pitch-black breach. In that darkness, Ouyang’s headless body was dragged down by turbulence, a finger stabbing at Dylan—if he had a head, the threat would have thundered. Instead, he dissolved mid-fall into light-rain and was gone.

Dylan had erased a projection. He remembered Bai, spun—she was already weaving a door in midair, a hand reaching through…

“Looks like a hundred years sealed you stiff. You’re thrilled over killing a projection?”

Ouyang stepped from the door, Cursed Wings unfurling in black feather-fire. On his right hand lay a black glove, an omen gleaming from its seams.

Dylan turned slowly toward the voice. His eyes narrowed. Silence bit his tongue.

Ouyang was right; Dylan’s mind wasn’t whole. Without that century-old obsession, the new will forged by four artifact spirits would’ve devoured him.

“Don’t joke with me. I’m the man who’ll rule the world!”

He roared, and eerie black stripes crawled across his skin. Ouyang knew those marks by heart—the Night Clan’s curse-script. When the Night King fell, his tribe suffered a calamity. The God Emperor’s curse gnawed at them for millions of years.

A hundred years ago, Ouyang stormed the Demon World. With the Heaven Departing Divine Sword, he cut down the Night Clan outpost there.

But did the Night Clan only exist in that one nest?

Seeing Dylan’s curse-marks, Ouyang was certain: their remnants were not confined to the Demon World. Somewhere deep in the star sea, others hid.

Once he knew, Ouyang’s playful smile iced over.

“Remnants of the Night Clan.”

His words were winter-hard. The glove on his right hand bled black lightning and black flame.

Black crashed into black. Ebon fire ate the earth. The sky corroded under endless black thunder. Bai moved like a silent rhyme with Ouyang—slipping from his body, rising from his shadow—unshaken by the quaking space.

“Impossible. Space is broken. How can she blink to you?”

Bai’s presence needle-pricked Dylan’s patience; their rhythm of battle frayed his nerves.

Whenever he thought he found Ouyang’s flaw, a small angel-like girl popped up and ruined the plan. She stalled him; Ouyang bolted without shame.

Fine—one dead is one less. But when Dylan thought he had Bai pinned, she vanished, then a heartbeat later rose from Ouyang’s shadow a thousand miles away.

Black and white—these two were kiting him. Yes, kiting.

They could blink to each other, ignoring spatial turbulence and locks. Whenever Dylan swung for one, the other appeared to block, or the target reappeared far away by the partner.

Even if you could one-shot heaven, earth, and air, getting kited by an ADC with infinite mobility was pure misery.

Irritated, Dylan saw the black-and-white pair stop running. A perfect opening. He dumped everything, sprinting like a black hurricane toward them.

Far off, Ouyang watched him charge. Calm as winter water, he laced his fingers with Bai’s. At their joined palms, black and white light braided.

“Void Art—Primordial Chaos!”

In a blink, with their clasp as the seam, the world split into twin halves: black and white.

Primordial Chaos was a technique Ouyang alone couldn’t cast; only with Bai’s hand could it be born. A Guardian Angel is a companion angel, a being born when the world’s hymn is sung. As a companion angel, Bai can be read as part of Ouyang—no second self needed.

Within the chaos woven of black and white, all time and space lost meaning. Primordial Chaos rewound everything to its first shape. In a way, it was time turned back, but far more intricate—touching rules, fate, and the void.

Dylan was troublesome because four demonic artifacts inside him fed endless power. Strip them out, and he was just a washed-up nobody.

“Trace the root. Erase him in concept.”

Ouyang used the glove formed from Youwen to bear the braided chaos. In his hand, the original storm of creation gathered. He intended to erase Dylan at the conceptual level. And with Dylan’s blood as a medium, erase “Night Clan” from the star sea.

Above the black-and-white world, time-gears surfaced, clicking like frost-bit metal. From the Corridor of Fate, countless chains unspooled; each chain began at a Night Clan soul. Their births and endings, their rises and ruins—the corridor, like the river of time, housed all causes and all effects.

Concepts. The Corridor of Fate. The river of time.

This was a domain only a Primordial Deity could touch.

“No… don’t!”

Dylan felt the killing will inside the storm—power that could end him utterly.

What counts as truly dying?

On the Other Shore, the eccentrics of the First Cult once offered a thought: true death is when you vanish from every memory and from the world’s own concepts.

Erase a person from memory, and no one knows they existed. No one strives to change it, to bring them back. If the world itself forgets them as a concept, every trace is gone. Even time, rewound, is useless.

A person dies; as long as the living remember, they keep trying. If revival is impossible now, does it mean it’s impossible later? The future is a word of infinite miracles. If someone clings to a vow and keeps living, maybe someday they’ll find a way to resurrect the lost.

Thus, only when someone disappears from all memories and is erased at the level of concept does true death arrive.

Another thought says the dead aren’t truly gone if people still remember. He lives in everyone’s mind, in shared dreamlight. That brushes multiverses and layered spaces. For ordinary folk, living in memory does little. But if the subject is a Primordial Deity, a Tiered Being whose hymn once shook the world?

Living in everyone’s memory through long ages, they may crack the wall between the layer of memory and the layer of reality.

Of course, those are theories.

The black-and-white storm crossed and braided, rearing into an immense vortex. It spared Ouyang and Bai, but dragged Dylan in, along with the chains from the Corridor of Fate.

Iron links snapped as the vortex drew them, fragments vanishing into its depths. Dylan screamed and thrashed, tugged inch by inch into the dark. Even his voice was swallowed.

Just as Ouyang thought it was over, four clots of black light shot from the vortex.

“The Twelve Demonic Artifacts?!”

He knew that aura all too well. The four black lights pooled, fusing like water, soaking into each other. By the time he sensed the wrongness, the fusion was done.

A massive black sphere hung there, its skin burning with black flame. From it, astonishing energy thumped like a heart.