A stone room sealed to its last breath.
A streak of fire-red starlight flared, like a comet in a bottle.
CLANG—!
It rang like a black hammer hitting golden crystal, a thunder that split the skull.
The whole stone room shivered like a frightened beast.
A man was forging in his own arms—cradling a black iron pillar thicker than his thigh.
No tools, so his fists were hammers. No anvil, so his chest was the slab.
The man was iron himself. In his eyes slept a volcano. He raised his fists and slammed them, chest to pillar, again and again.
The pillar was thicker than his thigh; he could only hug it tight like a tree trunk in a storm.
Each blow burst into dazzling sparks that flowered across his body.
The pillar was seamless midnight, heavy as a fallen star; hugging it alone stole breath, yet he kept lifting his fists and driving them down.
Day or night meant nothing; he never stopped, like surf on stone.
His chest had caved deep under the endless blows; bone ridges showed like winter ridgelines, shifting and knitting into a white-bone anvil.
Was this punishment, a sentence to self-cruelty carved in flesh?
Look at his eyes—crimson twins hiding a volcano. Beneath the cold lay something bright: anticipation, and a grim kind of joy.
Arms tight to ribs, elbows drawn, five fingers knotted, he drove a straight punch and hammered the pillar.
Star-sparks flew. Boiling force poured in, packing the metal denser, tighter, like snow pressed into ice.
He didn't seem to tire. Like a machine under a mountain, his motion never changed.
Then a sound fell into his ear like a stray leaf.
It froze that eternal rhythm mid-swing.
Someone was speaking.
He stopped. He listened to a voice from two strata of the World away—the voice that had caged him here.
He went still, thinking, as if sifting ash for embers, then spoke at last.
"I will complete her." His long-unused throat rasped, awkward yet iron-steady.
"No." The answer displeased him. He shook his head. "I will complete her."
Under his mask, his mouth tilted, half-cry, half-smile, like rain in sunlight.
"I—will—complete—her."
...
...
"Do you know when a dream turns into an ideal?"
"Wh—?"
The talk drifted in cloud and mist, like lanterns over a lake.
After felling an unknown archer in one stroke, Ye Weibai grew playful. He sat cross-legged, robes flicking like crows' wings.
In the fog, he tossed words across like stones on water.
"When you think it's possible, a dream becomes an ideal." Ye Weibai answered himself with a smile.
"Then when does an ideal turn into obsession?" He didn't wait for a reply.
The Deity watched him, frowning, unsure what this black-clad Demon King was driving at.
These riddles drifted like smoke.
Ye Weibai never expected understanding. He was speaking to himself—or to someone who wasn't quite human.
He sighed, soft as falling ash. "When an ideal outweighs honor, outweighs life and death, it hardens into obsession."
As the Demon King said it, his gaze skimmed past the sky, across mountain after mountain.
There, a volcano was breaking open like a heart.
A vast, bladed power gathered like storm surf. Almost every strong soul in the World felt it: something immense, caged for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, battering a prison—a stone house set on the volcano.
Crack-crack-crack... the sound of a shell breaking filled every ear.
The more you press some things down, the wilder they surge—obsession most of all.
"What are you doing?" the Deity asked. "Can't you tell It's aimed at you? That sword was forged by the Blacksmith, single-minded, for three thousand seven hundred and five years. Their essence, spirit, and soul were poured into it. Even It found it alarming and sealed it."
"Of course I do." Ye Weibai lowered his lashes, smiling at the edge. "And what am I doing if not—running an experiment?"
"What experiment?" They asked, pages whispering.
The Demon King smiled. "A human experiment."
...
...
While Ye Weibai flicked his sleeve to kill and sat at the edge of the X-World, smiling with lowered eyes.
His posture was brushstroke-easy, free as wind over water.
He forced every gaze in the World—including Its—to fall on the present Demon King.
Meanwhile.
The current Hero King was in the Witchwood Forest, speaking with the rumored Witch.
Aerin and Lustrous, two girls in graceful bloom, were chatting about something—amusing, and truly not that important.
For instance... Ye Weibai.
"Yeah. Master Bai's strict. He taps my forehead."
Outside the circle, the blond girl pointed at her brow, fuming like a puffed-up sparrow.
At the circle's edge, the long-haired girl blinked, reached out, brushed that brow, then nodded as if confirming a seal.
Lustrous moved as if it were nothing, but Aerin froze.
The black-haired girl's face leaned in. Her fingers were long and pale, fingertips soft and cool, like moonlight—yet warmth bloomed between Aerin's brows.
Her heart kicked. A tingling sweetness rushed through her like spring rain.
It felt so good she almost gasped.
She bit her lip and held it down, pride like a knot.
So she missed the flush that rose on the other's eternally languid face.
Ripples moved in Lustrous's heart, and she sighed in silence. Her gaze slid to the black cross stabbed slantwise into the earth behind her, then back to Aerin. "Aerin. We're the same kind."
"The same... kind?" Blush lingering, Aerin blinked. "Aren't we—companions?"
Lustrous started, then nodded. "Yes... companions too."
"Oh! Little Li!"
"Li..." The black-haired girl's face tightened, then, seeing Aerin's hopeful eyes, she sighed and let it pass.
By now she'd grown used to this girl Hero King's love of pinning little names on people.
Lustrous thought: if the girl had a special skill, nicknaming might be it, like a sparrow pecking seeds.
"What?" Lustrous answered without much wind.
"That cross. We should smash it!" Aerin sprang up, ready to draw.
"Why destroy it?" Lustrous asked, cold blue eyes widening like deep water.
"Uh, aren't you sealed here by that thing, so if we—"
Aerin shut up. The black-haired girl stood, bare feet whispering, and walked out of the barren circle with ease.
"Aren't you—" Aerin stammered.
"I just didn't feel like moving." Lustrous yawned, turned, and slipped back into the circle to sit. "I'm a homebody."
"Too... lazy to move..." Aerin went blank. She'd stayed in this cold, sunless Witchwood Forest just for that?
But looking at Lustrous, loose as a cat in a sunbeam, the reason weirdly made sense.
"Then that cross is...?" Aerin couldn't help asking, then caught herself. "Sorry! If it's not for me to—"
"It's fine." Lustrous tilted her head; hair slid like silk; her blue eyes went deep. "She's... my mother, I guess."
