Looking at the city before him, surrounded by a sea of bones, Yixing felt a headache coming on...

Glory City was a great city at the heart of the Human Empire. It was the empire’s largest city and busiest port, its center of culture and commerce—a testament to human wisdom and strength.

But the city now stood empty and alone. All the civilians had been evacuated, and a horrifying war had erupted outside its walls.

This was a battle for the survival of the living. Every race—elves, dwarves, even the half-orcs, ancient enemies of humanity—stood shoulder to shoulder here. Every fighting force in the world had gathered on this battlefield.

Soros, the Lord of the Dead, had sent his sea of bones surging all the way here. If the city fell, nothing would stand in his way. All the living would be wiped out, and the entire world would fall beneath Soros’s shadow.

Mages and archers stood on either side, desperately unleashing a storm of attacks against the advancing skeletons. Crackling fireballs and bone-chilling icicles streaked toward the enemy alongside a rain of arrows. Every attack was aimed to kill. Trained beasts and demonic minions from the Void charged the enemy one after another. Even demon warlocks fought side by side with the paladins they’d once hated with all their hearts. Even the proudest dragons had to bow their heads and fight alongside mortals, facing the deepest fear before them.

Light flashed throughout the crowd. Priests and shamans didn’t dare hold back; holy light and elemental power each had their part to play. Calling on the names of saints, ancestors, or demigods—who knew which—they poured the power of life into the wounded, sending them back into battle.

The skeleton army couldn’t advance against such resistance, and the battle settled into a stalemate.

Not far away, inside a hastily built fortress, Lord Soros tapped the table and said, “...Fools.”

His voice was hoarse and cold, mocking the mortals’ feeble resistance.

No one knew where Soros had come from, or how he’d gained his boundless power and ability to control the dead.

Soros, the Eternal Night Lord, possessed power that made him all but invincible to mortals. From the moment he appeared, he’d plunged into a campaign of slaughter and conquest.

Everything had gone so smoothly. In just over a year, he’d already flattened the entire world. To him, the resistance before his eyes was nothing but ants struggling in vain. The world was about to fall into his hands.

And yet Soros felt nothing but endless emptiness inside. Everything he wanted had come far too easily... He felt as if he’d grown completely cold.

But the emptiness in his heart couldn’t hold back his power. Soros waved a hand, and within a second, the sky above the battlefield froze. The clouds turned to snowflakes and drifted down, while the icy power of death flooded into the skeletons attacking the city.

This cold power had granted him invincible might, but it also seemed to have sealed away his feelings. No matter what he did, he felt no stir of emotion—only an endless emptiness. All he wanted was for the world to sink into that eternal loneliness with him.

Empowered by this force, the undead launched an all-out assault. The long-restless frost dragons took to the sky and tore their own kind to pieces. Soldiers clashed across the battlefield, flesh and steel grinding against each other. The chill from the warriors’ axes was colder than the snowflakes overhead, and each swing sent a dreadful wind howling in every direction. The runeblades in the death knights’ hands glimmered with an eerie black light as they drove their rotting servants forward. Even the holy light had become a killing machine: without a trace of mercy, the paladins smashed the heads of their former companions as if cracking open ripe melons.

After one round of fighting, the undead began to gain the upper hand, and the living were the first to suffer losses. Once the numbers tipped too far, the living who fell in battle would rise again as undead and join the fight. The undead had outnumbered the living ten to one from the very start. The living had no way out—and no hope.

But through sheer strength of will, the living drove back wave after wave of attacks.

But the undead soon returned, charging again and again. Their shadowy agents were sabotaging the rear as well, ambushing reinforcements who’d strayed from the road and plunging their daggers into their backs without mercy. They burned the living’s strongholds to the ground. By the time the blood-crazed survivors realized what had happened, they’d already lost two towers.

But no one gave up.

Everyone knew this was the final battle.

The slaughter began anew. The wind howled, the horns blared, arrows rang through the air, and frostfire blazed in every direction. Someone died every second, and reinforcements from inside the city rushed in to take their place. Corpses piled up on both sides of the snow-covered road, and the blood ran so deep it could float a log. The snow stopped falling. Only the battle cries echoed across the plain.

The scales of victory began to tip toward the undead. It seemed nothing could change the outcome.

Just then, a slanting ray of sunlight pierced the gloomy sky. Warm light spilled over the ground, bringing a moment of calm and peace to the brutal battlefield.

“Sunlight...?” General Rugwa, commander of the allied forces, stared as the light broke through the gloom. His expression suddenly changed.

This veteran of countless battles was now fighting on the front lines, though his armor was shattered and his sword chipped. He should have been commanding from the rear, but every reserve had already been thrown into battle. Every living fighter in the entire world had been committed to this field. Everything would be decided here!

As he stood stunned by the sunlight, a cold blade of the dead was already closing in on his throat.

“Get back! Undying Radiant Flame!” a woman shouted. A female knight in heavy armor pulled Rugwa out of danger. At the same time, brilliant light burst from her. Golden flames, bright as tiny suns, clung to her sword. With a single sweeping strike, she turned more than a dozen skeletons around her to ash.

“This is a battlefield! What are you standing there gawking at?” She grabbed Rugwa as he lay on the ground. The female knight’s once-bright blue eyes and golden hair were caked with dust. She’d clearly been fighting for a long time and was utterly exhausted.

“Sophia, look... The sun!” Rugwa pointed excitedly at the sky.

“You have time to look at the sun right now?” Sophia snapped. Even so, she kept her sword moving with undiminished ferocity, cutting her way through the enemy ranks without fear. But the sea of bones surged like waves, endless and relentless. After fighting for so long, she was running out of strength. And now, after saving Rugwa, she was surrounded. It looked like she’d have to perish in that sea of bones alongside the old man...

With all seeming lost and the city on the brink of collapse, Rugwa looked up at the sky with a strange expression. “Ever since the Eternal Night Lord attacked, the sun hasn’t appeared in the sky once! But now the sunlight’s breaking through! Could someone have defeated Soros?!”

“It... really does look that way.” After Rugwa pointed it out, Sophia noticed it too. The sunlight was so ordinary, yet now it seemed strangely out of place. But even Sophia, a first-rate fighter, couldn’t help shaking her head at his next words. She casually hacked a nearby zombie in half and sighed. “But no one can defeat Soros... The Dragon King, the orcs’ War Lord, the elves’ Grand Sage, all those Legendary Mages, and even my teacher, the Church’s guardian knight—we failed, even fighting together...”

Hearing Sophia’s words of despair, Rugwa—whose spirits had only just risen—didn’t want to admit it, but there was nothing else to say. They’d tried everything. No one could defeat the Eternal Night Lord. The living might seem to be fighting back fiercely, but everyone knew this was just a cornered beast’s last stand, their pride the only thing left to wager. The living had already lost.

The sudden sunlight caught the attention of many on the battlefield, not just them. Countless people looked up at the brilliance in the sky.

Everyone was astonished by the sudden change in the weather. But no one noticed that the real battle was taking place beyond the battlefield.

“Such power... I never imagined anyone in this world could be your equal. Who are you?” Soros, king of the undead, stared at the man before him in astonishment.

“Call me the Ultimate Manly Man!” The man took a step forward. There wasn’t the slightest trace of energy around him. He looked utterly ordinary.

He moved lightly, walking forward at an unhurried pace... And yet—the earth could barely bear his might! The ground shattered with a roar wherever he went. A blast of force surged skyward, breaking through layer after layer and tearing through the clouds! It ripped the sky open, letting sunlight spill across the battlefield!

“Uh... No, that sounds kind of stupid. Just call me by my name. I’m Yixing.” The man, who’d just been radiating an overwhelming aura, scratched his head and gave an awkward laugh, showing none of the self-assurance of a mighty fighter.

“If you succeed, the world will be over, and things will get boring. So I can’t let you succeed.” Yixing took up a fighting stance and smiled at the undead before him.

“Then... Yixing, you intend to stop me?” The dried flesh and bones on Soros’s body began to creak and clatter, a truly horrifying sound.

“Or kill you and stop this disaster at its source.” Yixing grew serious, his smile fading.

Soros spread his hands. “You’re strong. So... after you die, I’ll grant you a reward beyond measure.”

That was all that needed to be said. There was nothing more to discuss!

No one knew what happened after that.

Only one thing was clear: for some unknown reason, Soros had vanished.

The dead lost their source of power, and the sea of bones became completely motionless. The zombies turned into nothing more than corpses. The death knights and liches serving the Eternal Night Lord also lost the source of their power and grew weak. The living seized the chance to counterattack and... actually defeated the undead.

The battlefield erupted in celebration. No one knew why this had happened, but that didn’t stop them from rejoicing in their victory and the exhilaration of having survived.

Then they discovered some of Soros’s bones beyond the battlefield, along with bloodstains left by another person. And around the two of them lay a ravine, over a thousand meters deep and ten li across, carved out by their battle.

Based on the traces left at the scene, the Grand Sages concluded that Soros might have perished alongside some powerful warrior. But they couldn’t determine who it was.

No one knew who had done all this, but there was no doubt that someone had saved the world. People held their awe in their hearts and gave thanks to this unknown hero. Whoever he was, though he’d left no name behind, he’d given his life to leave the living a hope of survival.

The End (just kidding).