So help me live. Live until—until I reach that Deity who can unwind death’s cause and effect!

When you zoom out to the boundless Void Tunnel, both Ye Weibai, a human, and Lina, a Deity, shrink to motes of dust in a sunbeam.

So small, their vanishing would pass like a breath lost in wind—no one would know.

But when that black-haired, black-eyed boy, blood-soaked, spoke those words, the air itself held its breath.

An invisible wave, subtle yet immense, surged from Ye Weibai as its center, like wind across reeds, like ripples on a mirror-lake, racing to the four corners of the cosmos.

In a single breath, it swept through countless Worlds and the Deities who wander between Worlds, like a tide washing lanterns in the night.

That wave was breeze and ripple, light as silk, yet the keen could feel it brush their skin like rain.

No—accurately speaking, not humans, but Deities felt it, like distant thunder sliding under the skin.

Those not asleep, not sealed, not broken by wounds sensed threads named Causality and Fate settle on their shoulders, spider-silk fine, a frost of meaning.

That faint gleam cut their long, unruffled days like a blade of dawn through fog.

Not black, not white—gray, smoke-gray, ash over snow.

“This scent.”

Among ragged boulders and barren hills, the short-haired girl with cherry-red locks, the [War Deity], stared at the fine thread on her shoulder—eyes like empty sky.

“Boy.”

“You?”

Under a blazing sea of stars, the scythe-bearing girl called [Dark], black hair and eyes like ink, raised a brow and bared a single fang.

“You’re not dead yet?!”

“Brother? Why is your scent here?!”

In an abandoned shack, a girl’s face blurred like mist; joy flared—then shattered into grief and fury.

“[Seer], you lied to me!”

“Little brother?”

In the Void Tunnel, a tall woman with blue hair, the [Void], lit with delight like dawn on ice; she turned toward Ye Weibai.

“I’m coming!”

“Linked to me?”

In a drifting temple, the Deity of absolute justice, [Trade], frowned; between two fingers she pinched the thread on her shoulder—causality ground to powder like chalk.

“That’s better,” she said, voice level as scales. “Absolute neutrality is who I am.”

“Huh?”

In Little Ash’s room, Wei’s eyes snapped open like shutters in a storm, disbelief flooding them.

“Bai?!”

...

Then.

Time shattered like glass; the long line of fate snarled into a knot.

When Ye Weibai awoke, he had wholly become Yexiaobai.

...