“Meow~”

“Meow-meow~”

“Meow~”

This is a world overrun by catkind; wherever you look rolls a tide of cats, white as snowdrifts, black as ink pools, gray as rain clouds. A black cat paced like a shadow on a sill, a pitch-dark halo hovering over his head like an eclipsed moon.

“Ouyang, you idiot,” came a growl like a kicked wasp nest. “If it weren’t for you, would we have ended up like this?”

A fat gray tom pounced like a boulder rolling downhill, but the black cat slipped aside like wind through reeds, and the sneak attack swished past.

The mess began back in Hell, where that miserable demon monarch still counted as a Tiered Being, a mountain among peaks. He devoured souls like a storm swallowing sparks, and climbed back to that height like frost returning to the branch.

That fight wasn’t one Ouyang could join; Xi held the line like dusk holding back the sea, while Ouyang sprinted for reinforcements like a runner with fire in his hands.

Then came the crowd beatdown everyone loves to see, a drumroll of fists under thunderclouds. Their side’s Tiered Beings were wounded like cracked shields, not fully recovered, but numbers rolled like a flood.

Especially Litian—when the demon monarch saw Litian, he froze like a stag in torchlight. Back then, when the God Emperor took him alive, the Heaven Departing Divine Sword was the blade at his throat.

Aurora the Goddess of Aurora, the Heaven Departing Divine Sword, Litian; Dongze; the Ancestor of Blood Night, Kanofia; the Moon Goddess—five like storm gods against one like a lone tree. Hell got beaten until it was all splinters and smoke.

Seeing the tide turn, the demon monarch clung to spite like a drowning man to driftwood—if he was dying, he’d make sure they choked. He went for the weak ones in the crowd, and Ouyang’s heart flared like a pricked lantern; he’d just come to watch the show, how could a perfect brawl not include him?

And that’s when it blew up.

In that split-second panic, Ouyang yanked out the Dark Trinity Artifacts, hands shaking like leaves in a gale. Everyone knew the Calamity Cloak was a spiteful thing, a wildfire you couldn’t steer; once drawn, it burned everyone but its holder.

The bystanders tried to bolt, but the Cloak turned the air to tar, trapping them like flies in amber. As the demon monarch’s strike came roaring in, Ouyang hurled the Cursed Ring like a stone into a flood; it flashed and stopped the blow like a shield of midnight.

He never expected the rebound; after blocking that strike, the Cursed Ring sputtered like a dying star, then turned and cursed Ouyang’s side like a snake biting its handler.

Right then, the demon monarch self-destructed, a sun blooming under their feet. Ouyang wrapped everyone in the Calamity Cloak like a storm blanket, took the blast like a cliff takes a wave, and when the light faded, they were in a strange world—and they were all cats.

The blast had torn the Calamity Cloak like a sail ripped by squalls; like the Cursed Ring, it lost all power and lay silent as a cold forge. Those two artifacts spent their last breath to keep them alive, and that was the final ember of their use.

Two of the Dark Trinity were scrap for now, no spark left to kindle. The last piece, the Godforsaken Halo, perched over Ouyang’s head like a black coronet and hummed like a storm halo.

Amid the sea of catkind stood a single little girl, a lantern in a field of eyes. She alone hadn’t turned into a cat—she was Saya.

As the Azure Bird, her archive held ways to resist the Dark Trinity Artifacts and keys to unbind curses, a library like a star-map. But in this strange world, her link to her body in the Other Shore snapped like a severed kite string; without that vast database, she couldn’t undo Ouyang’s curse.

Dufei—the fat gray tom—kept chasing Ouyang like thunder chasing a flash. Saya grabbed Dufei by the scruff like lifting a cub, tossed him aside like a sack, then scooped the black-cat Ouyang into her arms, warm as a brazier.

Ouyang squirmed, prickly as a hedgehog, but when he thought of Saya’s life, his heart softened like snow in sun, and he let her hold him.

In the age when the Twelve Divine Demon Artifacts ran rampant like locust swarms, Saya couldn’t escape the fate called “Song of Saya,” a name like a bell toll. On that illusory First Continent, Ouyang saw Youyun, who wore Saya’s face like a mirrored moon, and something clicked like flint.

Youyun had said she’d seen Ouyang, in a dream hazy as mist on a lake. While Ouyang’s main persona slept like a sealed cave, she spoke to his second persona; from those words, Ouyang could tell Youyun was Saya, two petals on the same branch.

Time on that illusory First Continent didn’t flow like the Source World’s river; perhaps Youyun only slept a night like one sip of tea, while her soul crossed into the Source World as Saya and lived ten-some years like a lantern burning down. When Saya died, Youyun woke as if from rain, the dream dripping away.

As Saya, she died with regret clinging like frost on grass; as Youyun, she killed herself with regret and remorse knotted like twin vines.

“At the time, you told me people were so cold because of the Light Church,” Ouyang remembered, the words etched like knife-marks. “They opposed heterosexual love, and sent every boy-and-girl pair to the stake like dry wood… and we made a deal—if I wiped out the Light Church, you’d date me.”

He hadn’t promised anything, or so he told himself; it had all been what Saya believed. Still, guilt pooled in him like ink in water; he felt he owed that girl.

“Meow~” Ouyang stretched in her arms like a lazy panther, then flopped on her forearm like spilled silk and rubbed his head against her sleeve like a brushstroke.

“Meow, look at that kid Ouyang getting all docile,” a voice drawled like a cat on a warm wall. “Looks like his loli-con soul just woke up.”

Five cats were on scene, plus one tiny loli like a plum blossom. The heckler was a White Cat, fur pure as new snow, a cat who swore he’d flip his fate like a table.

Yeah, that was the long-absent White Cat, who’d once roamed the world with the Little Overlord like a pennant in the wind. When Ouyang called in the brothers, the White Cat popped out of nowhere like a jack-in-the-box, said he wanted in on the fun, and got dragged into this strange world like a fish caught in a backwash.

There was the black cat with the pitch halo—Ouyang; the fat gray Dufei like a rolling stormcloud; and the adorable White Cat like a sugar puff. Of the other two, one wore tangled red-and-gray stripes like fire in ash—Devila, the vampire cat. The last was a calico…

“Meow… this humble self still doesn’t understand… meow, how things turned into this mess, meow…” she murmured, voice like incense smoke.

Right—our final calico was the awe-drenched Lord of Hell, now all whiskers and whisk.

So yes, this was a world occupied by catkind, a tea-garden taken by tigers in kitten skins.

Ouyang flicked his tail at the White Cat like a whip of grass, then pointed his plush little paw like a magistrate’s baton. “Dead cat, wanna taste the Godforsaken Halo?”

The halo above him wasn’t just for show; under Ouyang’s will, it could morph like a trick mirror into all sorts of cursed rings—Green Hat Aura, the cuckold’s cap; Epilepsy Aura, a strobe of doom; Idiot Aura, fog for the mind.

White Cat heard that and shrank back like a turtle into shell; looked like Ouyang had already given him the Dark Trinity lecture, chalk and all.

“First thing,” Ouyang said, voice steady as a hand on a tiller, “don’t fixate on me dragging you here. We need to figure out what kind of world this is.” Safety first—that was the creed he wore like armor.

“An independent world, cut off from the outside,” Saya said, conclusion clear as a bell in winter air.

At the words “independent world,” Ouyang lit up like dawn breaking the ridge. Such a world sits outside the starry sea, beyond the Supreme Law’s net, with time flowing apart from the great river like a hidden spring.

The river of time is stubborn as bedrock; even if you go back, you can’t return without paying a price carved like tithe. Remember Augustine and the others—if not for Sin shouldering every punishment like Atlas, they’d have been wiped out like candles in wind.

An independent world is a sealed bubble, and its time isn’t in the river at all; you can step upstream here like walking a garden path. Even if Ouyang rewrote timelines like chalk on slate, it wouldn’t ripple the main current with a butterfly’s storm.

Picture the ocean, and this bubble as a glass bead bobbing; time travelers spill “poison” into the past, and it spreads in open water like ink. But the bubble’s skin blocks it; the toxin swirls inside like smoke in a jar, never touching the sea.

Ouyang looked up at the sky; there was a sun like a lantern hung at noon, but it wasn’t a true sun, and the far vault wasn’t bright with stars but veiled in chaos like fogged glass. This world wasn’t a planet hanging in a starry field; it was a crafted dome, an egg under painted clouds.

Ordinary folks couldn’t pierce that blue to the chaos at the rim; in their eyes, the sun still rose in the east and set in the west like a faithful clock, and night still wore a cloak of stars like scattered rice. To Ouyang, that sun was just a big light-orb, not a star, and those “stars” were painted sparks on a curtain, with only chaos behind.

In other worlds, when errors appear like cracks in ice, the Supreme Law mends them like a smith with a hammer, forcing things back into rule. Here in an independent world, there is no rule-chain; the edges fray like free canvas in wind.

“So this is an independent world?” Devila, the vampire cat, narrowed his eyes at the sky like a hunter seeing tracks in frost. “I can see this world’s timeline, from birth to ash, clear as a riverbed.” As a Realm God—indeed, a Creator God—in the Source World’s star sea, peering across the river of time was like staring into a whirlpool; one misstep, and you’re lost in rapids, no shore to find.

Here, he read the time-axis like rings in a tree—wars at birth like storms at spring, peace now like a summer lake, and the final ruin like leaves in fall.

“And for us gods, on this worldline we’re unique,” Ouyang said, voice level as a blade on stone. “Our ‘now’ is the only ‘now.’ Even if someone goes back one second, there’s no second copy of us; we only live in this heartbeat.”