The world had ceased to make sense. There was no up or down. No air. No ground. No light. Only the feeling of endless falling—a descent with neither end nor beginning.
Dao Wei was still falling.
Through layers of reality, through the shattered skeins of time, through veils of lightless memory. His body twisted, suspended in a medium that felt like water, but colder than death. The void around him churned as if alive, the air a miasma of shadow and silent screams.
"Am I... dreaming?" he pondered.
But pain clung to him, raw and deep. His skin, cracked and scorched from battle, still bore the marks of his last stand at Death Valley. His silver halo flickered above his brow, dimming, fading. The six elemental orbs encircling his Chaos Body spun wildly, destabilized by the foreign energies of this impossible place.
His chest burned. His breath came in shallow, pitiful gasps. But he was still alive.
Barely.
Then the whispers began.
A ripple in the abyss.
A voice, soft, playful: "Wei-ge, race me to the lake! Loser has to carry the other back!"
Mingxia. Her voice danced like sunlight on still water, unbothered and pure.
Another whisper, this one gentler, more innocent: "Big Brother, will you tell me another story? Please?"
'Xuner...' Dao Wei's fingers twitched. A tear, lost in the void, drifted from his eye and dissolved into stardust. He wasn't sure if he was weeping for them or for himself.
Suddenly, his Chaos Body jerked violently. The silver halo that crowned him blazed with renewed, chaotic intensity. Orbs flared—metal, water, thunder, space, light, and dark—twisting around him like a living storm.
His bones screamed. His veins flooded with power he couldn't control. The Abyss had no mercy.
More whispers. But these were older. Deeper. No language. Just force. Raw, primal forces speaking in tones of eternity.
"Neither Light nor Dark..."
"...child of what came before."
Visions ignited in his mind. His senses were seized by memory not his own.
A battlefield. Towering beings locked in combat. One clad in luminous gold, wings wide enough to shatter skies. The other was identical but a mass of moving shadows, pitch-black eyes burning like coals.
Dao Wei screamed.
Not in pain.
But because he felt himself there.
Not just watching.
Part of it.
He could feel the blow when the Golden One shattered a continent with a single punch. He could taste the blood as the Dark One consumed galaxies to keep fighting. His body rippled, his soul unraveling at the seams.
"ENOUGH!" he cried, his voice warping through the void, both sound and silence. "This isn't mine! These aren't my memories!"
Yet the abyss did not stop.
It only deepened.
His thoughts—his identity—began slipping.
He tried to summon his strength. To form even a single strand of spiritual essence. Nothing answered. His body remained limp, drifting like a broken feather in a hurricane.
Time bent.
Dao Wei saw himself.
Younger. Laughing. Training under the Old Man. A child with fire in his eyes.
Then another image.
He was alone. Covered in blood. Eyes red. Holding a blade made of screams.
Dao Wei shuddered.
'Was this what awaited him? Was this what it meant to defy Heaven?'
Suddenly—a pulse. Not his.
Beneath him, or perhaps above, a glow emerged. Ancient. Shimmering. A gate? A seal?
It pulsed again, a beat in sync with his dying heartbeat. His elemental orbs answered it. Silver strands of Chaos energy slithered from his core, reaching toward it.
"You do not belong here..."
The voice returned.
"Descend. Become what you must."
Dao Wei fluttered his eyes.
Meanwhile, in the heart of Qingling's Capital—where golden spires reached for the heavens and the rivers coiled like silver serpents beneath cloud-kissed bridges—stood the Imperial Citadel.
It was said that the sun itself hesitated before rising above the vermillion walls, as though paying homage to the oldest bloodline left unbroken since the era of the Primordial Courts. Within these sanctified halls, where the air tasted faintly of sandalwood and timeless decree, the Imperial Royal Family ruled—not through brutality, nor merely power—but by presence alone. They were the stillness in the storm, the eye of every unseen conflict, the echo that remained long after the drums of war had silenced.
Yet today, a strange hush hung over the capital.
Even the wind, which often rustled through the Capital's high pines and tower flags like a bard in motion, now seemed to pause—as if the world itself awaited a message it dared not predict.
In the deepest inner sanctum of the Citadel—a place untouched by time or intruding eyes—the eldest of the Emperor's children stood before a jade-scrying mirror, its surface swirling with the latest whisper of fate.
"The Sword Childe fell," murmured the Second Prince, barely more than a breath.
"The Demon Childe perished as well. But the world only fears one name," came the response, this time from the First Princess, a woman draped in silks so dark they shimmered blue in the lantern light.
"And what of her?" the Emperor himself asked, voice deep, as though carved from stone long buried beneath mountain roots.
No one answered.
For some things, even the Imperial Throne dared not presume to understand.
Far beyond the city's luminous walls, beyond the watchful eyes of men and ghosts alike… beneath no known sky… She sat.
Where no court could reach. Where no storm could touch. Where no man had ever walked and remembered how.
The Holy Lady.
Her name was not spoken. Only felt.
She sat beneath a moon no one could see—one that drifted above a horizon unreachable by ordinary minds. Her presence was faint, like ink dissolving into water. Her robes, fashioned of dream-smoke and woven silence, shimmered without light. A silver veil cloaked her face, not to hide her beauty—though many claimed such beauty would melt the will of kings—but because the truth of her gaze was not meant for mortals to bear.
Before her lay a blank scroll, untouched by time, unbound by rules of earth or heavens.
In her hand, a slender inkbrush hovered, trembling with reverence, not fear. Her fingers moved not with haste, but with time.
The quill met paper.
One stroke.
One word.
Then another.
'Status: Unknown.'
Followed by a pause, as though the world itself waited for what was to come next.
Her hand moved again. This time slower. More deliberate.
'Death is not the end.'
The final dot of ink bled into the parchment like a drop of the soul itself.
She did not speak aloud. There was no need. Her message would be known. It would be felt in the marrow of the world. In the eyes of cultivators who woke from strange dreams. In the silence between sword strikes. In the gasp of a dying enemy who thought fate already sealed.
A messenger crane stirred beside her, a paper-born creature folded with spells older than flame, and with wings that shimmered like starlight refracted in dew. She touched it once, and it vanished—off to deliver the words she had written.
Somewhere, a bell tolled. Not in the cities. Not in the forests. But in the realm between moments—where future and past meet to whisper.
She set the brush down.
And gazed out, into the space where no eyes could follow.
Behind her, the shadows bent slightly. Not from fear. But reverence.
Meanwhile… Across the Mortal World… The capital buzzed.
Not from trade. Not from gossip.
But from something deeper. Older. Every cultivator felt it—that echo of a deeper shift. Even those who had never seen the Sword Childe knew his name. Now they heard the whisper.
"Status unknown."
"Fell into the Abyss."
"Not dead… not alive."
In taverns, temples, and courts alike, people whispered the Holy Lady's new decree. Some scoffed. Some wept. While some fell to their knees, unsure why.
In the Northern Wastes… Snow fell like silence itself. A young sect master sat before a thousand-year pine, breathing in the cold. His eyes opened as the crane arrived. He read the words. Then stared into the white sky.
"Then… it's not over," he murmured.
Right then, within the Depths of the Earth… A prisoner chained in black fire stirred.
Eyes like molten obsidian blinked.
"The God Killer… still breathes?"
He laughed. "Hahaha! He Lives?!"
The flames shuddered.
And in a ruined courtyard, long forgotten…
A girl in mourning robes, her eyes dry not from strength but because the tears had run out long ago, knelt before a shattered sword planted in the earth.
The paper crane fluttered down beside her.
She read the scroll, and smiled... A broken smile.
But a smile all the same.
The world shifted. And fate twisted. When in a quiet place, where ink met paper, the Holy Lady moved her brush once more. This time, she did not write for the world.
She wrote for herself.
'He is still falling…Let him reach the bottom.
Then we shall see what climbs back out.'