Only Ouyang knew what he had seen beyond the Gate of Truth, like a lone traveler peering past the mist.

Bai was still Bai, a carefree bird chasing sunbeams through clouds.

To her, whatever lay inside that Gate was just curiosities, like fireflies trapped in a glass jar.

Their complicated threads made no sense to her, like constellations strung beyond reach.

Following Ouyang felt like the only road that meant anything, a river pulling her toward the sea.

Even when Ouyang said she was the one-and-only Starlight Angel, titles fell from her like petals.

As long as Ouyang smiled, she shone, like a mirror catching dawn.

Perhaps, for her, that was her whole world, a small lamp lit by one pair of eyes.

Sky broken, earth cracked; the world dimmed like a room with curtains drawn.

No sun or moon, and the stars were dulled like bloodless gems.

This was the “Source” World, once bustling, now a wasteland of bones and ash.

Ouyang stood atop Miracle City’s Sky Tower, gaze hawk-sharp on the far horizon.

Back in the Aurela World, dread had sprouted in him like frost under leaves.

As an Ancient God then, his omen wasn’t baseless, a bell tolling behind his ribs.

Now he finally understood what that warning meant, like ink settling after a storm.

The battle of Tiered Beings in Hell drew the Law’s attention, a beacon flaring in dark.

Burned once, the rules exiled every fighter like leaves cast into crosswinds, to stop another Eighth Epoch riot.

Though the Other Shore slipped away, outsiders thought they were banished, like rumors hardening into stone.

Ambitious hearts grew loud, drumbeats thudding through fog.

Clafias said the Divine Realm allied with the Demon World and the Underworld to make a move, like wolves circling.

With people sure the Other Shore was gone, their armies rolled out like tides under a black moon.

The clash roused the Law again, and every Tiered Being who fought was banished into unknown spacetime like stones into bottomless wells.

Without its Tiered Beings, the “Source” World couldn’t withstand the three higher civilizations, like a wall without pillars.

“Ouyang… a volcano’s about to erupt; there’s a village that survived the war near it.”

A girl dashed up the Sky Tower, breath ragged like bellows, her orange-red hair streaming like sunset wind.

By the time she reached him, fine sweat beaded her brow like dew on stone.

Ouyang turned and sighed, helpless as a wave hitting rock.

“Lady wife, why’d you come? If you’re unwell, go rest, like a bird returning to a twig.”

“Don’t—how many times—don’t call me lady wife!”

Pale with a faint blush, Xi’s eyes skittered like minnows, because she no longer remembered Ouyang.

Or rather, she remembered nothing of their past; her memories lived only in this collapsing world, like leaves on a winter tree.

Every Tiered Being in that war was exiled by the Supreme Law, even Aurora, like stars swept from a map.

Aurora felt too much unwillingness, a thread tugging at her heart like wind on a kite.

She knew the “Source” World was built by Ouyang’s long labor, like terraces carved into mountains.

If it died outright, Ouyang would grieve like a river choking on silt.

Most of all, she wanted to stay at Ouyang’s side, like a lamp by a bedside.

The Supreme Law locked onto souls, onto roots, like nails into timber.

To remain in the “Source” World, Aurora split the “self” from her soul, like peeling skin from fruit.

The “self” was exiled to unknown spacetime, and what remained was a person with blank memory like fresh snow.

Jue told Ouyang all of this, his words steady like stones lined along a path.

“Yes, Lady Wife.” Ouyang smiled, hiding the bad weather in his gaze like clouds behind glass.

Since Aurora split her “self,” Xi was utterly ordinary now, a mortal body with no thread of power.

No method could grant her force, and that’s why she panted after the climb like a runner at dusk.

Her blankness was selective; faces and stories were gone, but language and habit remained like footprints in sand.

In this world that felt strange as snowfall indoors, Ouyang alone felt familiar, like a hearth in winter.

“Stop calling me that; I don’t know you…” her voice faded like mist along water.

From nearby mouths, she’d learned they had been lovers, like two names carved on one tree.

Thinking of Ouyang’s feelings, she swallowed the last words, but her lips still shaped them like silent petals.

“Alright, Ouyang, stop spacing out and go save that village.”

Xi knew only this much: Ouyang was the lone dawn in a breaking world, a pale blaze on a black ridge.

That self-styled lord of the world had dragged it back from the cliff, like hands hauling a rope.

The sky still wore cracks, the earth still split, and volcanoes woke like drums.

But every living thing felt the world inching back, like sap rising through bark.

If it had been a patient with half a breath, it had passed danger and was healing in quiet light.

Seeing Ouyang unmoved, with no plan to rush out, Xi grew anxious like a bird pecking at windowpane.

“Hey, Ouyang, aren’t you the world’s lord? A small village faces a volcano, and you won’t budge?”

She fumed but had no way forward, like rain trapped under a roof.

If he refused to go, she couldn’t force him, like hands trying to push a mountain.

“I already saved them,” Ouyang said, calm as a pond at dawn.

“Ah? Saved?” her surprise popped like a spark.

“Mm. I pressed the volcano down; it won’t erupt,” he said, voice light as wind through reeds.

Seeing her disbelief, he drew a circle in the air with one finger, and inside it an image pooled like water.

Villagers were rebuilding homes, and the volcano stood cold, as if its magma had vanished like smoke.

Just as Xi thought he was fooling her with a mirage, footsteps climbed the Sky Tower like drumbeats.

Jue arrived, a dark blade of presence on the stair.

“Your Highness Aurora, His Majesty Ouyang handled that village; the danger is gone,” he said, voice official as a seal.

Xi knew Jue well; during the disaster, he held order like an iron spine through chaos.

Without Jue, humanity might have perished before the world, swallowed by its own heart like a snake eating its tail.

If Ouyang felt familiar and safe, Jue embodied authority, the official hand, like a banner in wind.

Since Jue said so, it had to be true; still, shock held Xi, like frost on a leaf.

Ouyang hadn’t left her sight or the Tower, yet he snuffed a distant volcano like pinching a candle.

Wearing that wonder, Xi sensed Jue had business with the “lord of the world” and stepped away like a shadow.

As she left, Ouyang’s face darkened like thunder under a lid.

Jue’s face stayed taut, like a stretched string.

“Not optimistic,” he said, words like cold rain.

“Even with Demon Lord Safix’s support, those three high civilizations will return once they catch breath.”

The Tiered Beings who fought were exiled, but they weren’t all those civilizations held, like roots under ground.

In their lands slept ancient beings.

From the Gate of Truth, Ouyang knew there were out-of-spec existences in those old civilizations, like storms outside charts.

Even half-crippled, they were terrifying, mountains with knives for bones.

After that war, the rules were scarred, and besides banishing the culprits, sleeping third-tier beings were flung away too, like seeds into void.

Our side losing Tiered Beings hurt.

But those three civilizations bled worse, like ships with hulls ripped.

During the Eighth Epoch, the Other Shore shone bright enough to erase them, like noon over shadow.

They didn’t, because their timetable was tight; a full war then meant a long convalescence, like winter seizing fields.

Now those worlds’ terrifying sleepers are gone.

A snarl tugged at Ouyang’s shadowed face, like a crack opening in stone.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, like a door slamming shut.

They have only a handful of Tiered Beings left, and their ancients were banished with them.

“Next…” Ouyang looked at the dim sky, hatred steady as frost on iron.

“This debt will be paid.”

The world stands near ruin, and several Demon Kings have fallen, like stars dropping from a black vault.

That alone fixed his resolve to fight to the end, iron meeting iron in a cold forge.

“Saya, move the Other Shore’s databank.”

“Shift the important artifacts, and anything with memories tied to it, like threads kept in a chest.”

“Understood.” Saya’s voice rippled through space like a bell, though she didn’t appear.

“Jue, about your curse.”

“I can lift it now; one more Tiered Being tips our side, like another pillar under a bridge.”

Before, Ouyang could loosen it but lacked certainty, like a lock half-picked.

Now his grown power and the truth he gleaned beyond the Gate give him confidence, a lamp under the ribs.

Jue’s origins are ancient, but still within the frame of Truth, like roots held by soil.

Truth of all things, root of all causes.

He isn’t omnipotent yet, but he brushes the edge of omniscience, like fingers skimming silk.

Having reached the Gate of Truth, he knows most of what star-space holds, like maps spread on a table.

He knows Jue’s past, the Ancient Turtle’s yesterday, and those sleepers in the Divine Realm, Demon World, and Underworld.

“A bunch of gasping survivors,” Ouyang said.

“When they crawl back from exile, I’ll already be able to fight them.”

“Besides, our people will find the way home sooner, because Xi’s body stayed like a lighthouse in black water.”

“Through her, I can guide those lost in the vast spacetime sea, though the return will be long, like winter on foot.”

“Come, let’s pay our respects to those friends,” he said, voice heavy as wet stone.

Ouyang and Jue walked to a graveyard, a new field of stone cut at Miracle City’s edge like stitches on a hem.

There, a dark-skinned, sharp-eared girl sat before a tomb, a figure poured from night.

The stone bore the name Tangela, the Titan who trailed the dark elf like a shadow.

The big lug fell protecting believers in his domain, took a Primordial Deity’s blow, and dispersed with his land like dust.

Sitting before the stone was Feges, the dark elf, eyes veined with blood like cracks in ice.

A dagger lay clenched in her hand, a frozen thorn she wouldn’t drop.

Ouyang didn’t know exactly what bound Feges and Tangela.

When he met them, they were already like this, two trees grown entwined by weather.

To Feges, Tangela mattered like breath, maybe a friend, maybe an elder brother.

“Boss Ouyang, will you avenge the big lug?” she asked, voice thin as paper.

She herself hadn’t recovered from that war, a wound that wouldn’t seal.

After the Tiered Beings were banished, if not for Agas, Ouyang’s former teacher, bracing the line, casualties would have spiked.

Thankfully, Agas held until Demon Lord Safix arrived, like a beam holding until other beams slot in.

Ouyang brushed the tombstone with one hand, dust rising like old bark.

It was an empty grave, like a mouth with no echo.

Tangela had been struck by a Primordial Deity and dispersed completely, no fragment left, like a candle blown out in a tunnel.

“I will.”

“Soon, I’ll wager everything and utterly destroy those three worlds, like grinding stone into sand.”

Farther ahead lay the graves of Valiant and Bartley, stone mounds under a cold wind.

Whether the orcs’ god Valiant or the dwarves’ god Bartley, both were mule-stubborn, like mountains refusing rain.

In that calamity, they went in ready to burn with their enemies, a wildfire vow to go down together.

In the end, laughing like storm-madmen, the two stubborn fools self-detonated and dragged a swarm of foes into the abyss.

As for Kooson, Ouyang’s most loyal follower, he stood like a shield before Irina, and the two fell together like twin candles.

At the instant before he dissolved like mist, that fool still confessed to Irina.

Watching it all, Jue let out a wry smile, a cracked moon over dark water.

Besides Ouyang, the only one Kooson would heed was Irina, a soft bell in his storm.

In Kooson’s palace of stone and torchlight, Irina and Kooson signed a pact with the Goddess of Light, Clafias.

She became a Demon King’s Pact-Bearer, a silver thread tied to a thunderhead.

Because Kooson looked guileless and easy to bully, others would pile errands on him like snow on a cart.

Each time, Irina stood in the doorway like a mistress with a fan, and she waved those burdens away.

Kooson’s grave was a twin tomb, left for Kooson and right for Irina, two stones sharing one shadow.

It too was a cenotaph, an empty shell under drifting dust.

Then Ouyang reached the grave of the last Demon King to fall, a lonely stele in the wind.

[Second Sword of the Nine Hells]

Ouyang carved it himself, strokes like knife marks on bark.

Amelie, the girl who walked out of the Nine Hells, burned to surpass the old names like a rising flame.

Stubborn as granite, and self-forging as iron in a forge.

She never eclipsed the former First Sword of the Nine Hells, that high star over a dark sea.

But in that pit called the Nine Hells, she earned the right to be called the Second Sword.

He sighed, and there were no tears, only dry salt on the wind.

He lifted his head to the broken sky, where a flock of “suns” had been the first to fall like meteors.

Ouyang remembered promising a fire phoenix paid leave, a laugh in the rain.

That first one Kanofia dragged from the Divine Realm to hang as a sun, a burning lantern over night.

On ordinary days the Demon Kings joked and called it a barnyard chicken, a red feather in the mud.

Now, before it could taste that paid time off, the “chicken” had vanished like ash on the wind.

“Bat, go to that death-still starfield and invite the First Emperor,” Ouyang said, his voice low as distant thunder.

“Tell him he’s been wiped from the Supreme Law’s blacklist, a name brushed clean from cold stone.”

“Understood.”

Normally Devila would spar with Ouyang like two blades ringing, but now he gave only that word, heavy as iron.

“This grudge… it will be repaid, a tide returning to drown the shore.”

“Like Yi Ye’s creed, the eternal banner will rise again, cloth snapping like lightning over a stormed plain.”

“And my Void Banner will rise again, the color of deep night over a sea of bones.”

“Be ready—I’ve wagered everything, chips and blood thrown into one blazing pot.”