The light of the collapsing Citadel still burned behind their eyes.
Ash drifted across a sky that no longer knew how to hold dawn. The horizon bled silver where the veil between worlds had cracked, and silence spread across the ruined landscape like a funeral shroud. Somewhere far behind them, the Citadel of Echoes had died — taking with it Severin the Hollow Mouth and the last of the Inner Circle.
But the Hollow King still lived.
And the final Crown awaited at World's End.
They stood upon a cliff of molten glass where the world had folded inward during the battle. Rin leaned against a shattered arch, bloodied but breathing, her eyes fixed to the west where thunder coiled like a chained beast. Baelin sat cross-legged, breath wheezing, his chi lines visibly fractured beneath scorched skin.
Li Shen stood at the edge of the precipice, watching the wind scream over broken peaks. The Nameless Edge hummed low in its sheath — not with power, but with pressure, as though it knew that something vast and ancient stirred ahead.
They had seen victory.
But they had not won.
"There are no more walls to breach," Baelin said quietly, "only the mouth of the world left to enter."
Li Shen turned, his jaw set. "Then we enter it."
In the shattered library of the wandering sage Sorei, they unearthed what little remained of knowledge untouched by the Hollow King's reach.
World's End was not on any map.
But it was in song.
"Where sea falls into star and sky drowns in memory,
There stands the blade that waits for no master.
There lies the door that the world forgot."
The verses were whispered by the last of the Mapweavers, hermits who stitched reality through sung cartography. One remained — Kira of the Winded Loom, who lived at the edge of the Sky-Bone Steppes.
Their journey to her took nine days and cost them two allies — one consumed by echofire when a rift tore open mid-path, the other lost to the Curse of Withering Time that still clung to remnants of the Citadel's decay.
Kira was blind. And yet, she saw more than any of them.
"World's End is not a place," she rasped. "It is the place before the place. The place the Hollow King cannot reach — not because he is weak, but because it is where he was born."
She sang the path into being.
And the land bent to let them through.
The sky bled into sea. The stars shivered like they were drowning. The wind forgot how to blow.
Li Shen, Rin, and Baelin crossed the Horizon of Ghosts, where each step was a memory stripped bare. They walked across bridges made of names they'd tried to forget — old friends, fallen masters, lost siblings. And the horizon spoke.
At times, Rin stopped walking, trembling.
At times, Baelin wept without knowing why.
At times, Li Shen saw her — the girl from the Phoenix Monastery, the one who had first shown him how to hold a blade not to kill, but to protect.
And at the final bridge, he saw himself.
But it was not the boy he had been. Nor the warrior he had become.
It was a shadow — clad in hollow fire.
Wielding a sword of mirrors.
"I am the you that breaks," it said. "I am the sword you will become."
Li Shen said nothing.
He walked forward and passed through it.
Beyond the Ghost Horizon lay the Shattered Gate — a circle of monoliths suspended in skyless air, held aloft by memory and song. The stars had fallen here long ago, leaving only fractures of light that shimmered when spoken to.
Baelin collapsed. His body had burned too many times. His soul could no longer hold chi without bleeding.
"Go," he whispered. "I taught you to survive. Not to turn back."
Rin took his hand. "We'll return."
"No," Baelin smiled. "You'll win. And that will be return enough."
He stayed behind, meditating beneath the falling stars, one final monk at the gate between worlds.
Li Shen and Rin passed into World's End.
There was no ground. Only the curve of forgotten wind.
They walked upon a road made of sword hilts, each one belonging to a warrior who had once reached this place and failed.
Above them spun the Crown of Endings — not worn, but orbiting a spire of unmade time. Within that spire stood the Hollow King, alone, holding a blade unlike any other.
It had no edge.
No shape.
Only purpose.
"You brought names here," the Hollow King said. "They do not belong."
Li Shen stepped forward, the Nameless Edge now a torch of memory. "You wore crowns not to rule, but to erase. You called silence peace. I call it surrender."
The Hollow King raised his blade.
And the world wept.
The battle did not begin with a clash.
It began with a breath.
Li Shen launched forward, bladesinging through the Thousand Echo Steps, but the Hollow King met him with Formless Cut — a style that left no path, only end. Each stroke Li Shen unleashed was devoured by voidlight.
Rin hurled herself into the fray, drawing blood with Mirror Veil Bloom, slicing illusion through the Hollow King's shadow clones. But his wounds did not bleed. They simply vanished.
Li Shen shifted forms.
He used Ocean Soul Spiral to trap the Hollow King in a riptide of mirrored gravity.
He followed with Eidolon Lure, drawing on the ghosts of every blade master he had ever defeated.
He ended with Remembrance Form: Final Petal, not as a killing strike — but as a prayer.
The Hollow King faltered.
"Why… why does this name still burn?"
Because it was never erased.
Because it was remembered.
Li Shen's final cut — not from the Nameless Edge, but from within — severed the Hollow King's link to the Crown.
And the Crown of Endings fell.
Not to be worn.
But to be buried.
The final blade — the true sword of World's End — hovered above the ruins of time.
Li Shen stepped forward.
He did not reach for it.
He bowed.
And it came to him — not as a weapon, but as a memory long denied.
He sheathed it beside the Nameless Edge.
And the world breathed again.