The thread of Yue Miryu's life is about to be severed, one of the greatest sorcerers the world had ever known.
And the one to end him?
Mei Asahrah.
The one who ended the strongest…
Took his place…
Broke his curse… only to become the revered.
"You said we were brothers, and we will stand by each other's side no matter what. But you used me and my people like a weapon... like your little toys which you threw away when you had no use for our power …. I hope it hurts, Yue. I hope these ending eats at you for every year you made me hate myself."
"You told me I was special to you ... I thought I was yours .... but I was just a pawn for you that you could use to move across this little gameboard of yours .... I gave you everything .... my body, my loyalty, my devotion, my soul... my empire ... I gave it all to you. and you??... you turned and pretended like I never existed when you were done ..."
"How poetic. Slain by the only person who ever truly saw the good in you, the only one who looked at the monster and offered a hand to help the boy beneath. And you? You burned it. You burned her faith, and every chance you ever had at salvation, just so you could chase power that you never deserved."
Some bore nothing but pure, raging hatred… scorched by the ruin Yue left behind. Others were simply survivors, ghosts walking through centuries of pain he carved into the world. And now, as he stands moments away from death, they offer him their final truths…bitter, broken, unfiltered…. while the blade of the only one he ever adored hovers above his heart.
There were neither tears nor mercy in her eyes… Eyes dried from exhaustion and filled with nothing, but fury caged her eyes. She stared into his eyes for a while which is quite a long time for someone who holds fury in her eyes ... "I wish you peace..." she whispered with the tip of her sword at his chest, "and may this realm never know your presence again."
He has lost everything.
The war, his name, and the divine sun shard which made him the strongest of all time… He sighed hoping for a chance to escape this reality.
But one can only flee from fears and dreams, never from reality itself.
Because the more you try to outrun reality, the crueller it becomes.
Yet… those thoughts vanished in an instant, as her blade glided through his chest…
Gently... So gently, as if a swift breeze had kissed his chest ...the gentleness so soft even a newborn would not weep ... but beneath that delicacy, the sword pierced through his chest, shattering his spiritual core, the soul seedbed for one's powers. He fell before he could process his thoughts or speak another curse spell.
She pulled out her sword and raised it towards the sky as the blood slid down the blade…to the hilt, to her hand, spilling into her robes… staining them ... not as a blemish but as a proof of her victory.
Her sword, forged of silver, delicate, easily bent but never broken, rose high towards the heavens as if daring them to challenge her and Rever her. Her feet, rooted firmly in the earth, commanded the Hell beneath to rise and scream her name in reverence...
She stood alone now…. The one and only, revered across the three realms, a beacon of silent strength and eternal grace.
What the seven great empires, even in unity, could not accomplish, she had done with her own hands.
Among emperors and generals, and sages, only she had kept pace with him. Only she had deflected his grace, matched his strength … stood not just as his equal, but above him, by doing what no one else could… killing him. Only she had struck him hard enough to draw blood… the blood no one believed could be spilled.
And now, the King of Curses lay dead at her feet.
---------
In the silence of Crownfall, when the snow devours all color, the cherry-apple blooms like rubies crowns on old forgotten graves.
When everything else withers in the silence of frost, like the last breath of a dying age…
the cherry-apple blooms in defiance, red as life, bold as prophecy.
Birds flick to it, drink its nectar…
They feed as though drinking elixirs of warmth in this grey winter. like a promise of tomorrow in a dying world.
And in this ruthless winter of Solseosgar, where silence pierces deeper than swords…
the wind in the guest wing of the Solhareal Palace grew warmer.
A warmth not born from heat of a bonfire…
But from something old, waking in remembrance.
In the stillness of time,
the wheel had rewound too far back.
His eyes jolted open.
A sharp gasp tore from his lungs, as if he had been drowning in centuries of silence.
His breathe… shallow, seizing…
Not from exhaustion, but from memories.
A thousand moments tore his mind all at once.
"Aahhh!!"
A loud Gasp.
Yue jolted upright in his bed, drenched in sweat, his breath sounds ragged as if he'd been yanked from the bottom of a freezing lake.
The room was dark,
Except from the dying candles which were flickering, on the verge to go out…
Bright enough to assure him he was not inside a void.
But inside his head, everything was chaos.
"Damn… what is going on…?"
His voice was raspy… and broken.
He gripped his temples with both hands and slid them up into his hairs as if trying to escape from this reality....
"This never happened… in any of my incarnations…"
Every time he came back, the memories returned slowly… one by one, the fragments of past lives, pouring over him like a rising tide.
But this…
This was a storm. Thousand lives he has lived, screaming in his skull.
Blurred faces… of lovers, enemies, worshipers, victories and falls… empires he built and burned, people he protected and killed… all flashing too fast, sudden for him to hold on to.
"Haaah… my head hurts like crazy…"
He slouched forward, hands on his knees, shoulders trembling like a dam moments before it breaks.
The veins reaching his eyes throbbed violently, each pulse sharper and more intense than the last. His heartbeat was erratic and loud, like war trumpets.
Even after nineteen lives, seven thousand years, he had never experienced this kind of backlash.
And beneath all this chaos,
A new kind of silence arose.
Not peace.
But warning.
Something had shifted in the wheel of fate.
It never changed before.
But this time…
The past was not coming back to guide him.
It was coming to crush him.
Three hundred and sixteen years.
That is how far he had come back.
Back to when he was just thirteen.
It was not the farthest he had ever lived. That honor belonged to his Sixteenth incarnation, when he lived 798 years in the past.
But this moment... this life... felt heavier.
He lay there still on bed… in the body of a boy, but bearing the soul of someone far, far older.
Nineteen lifetimes.
Seven thousand eight hundred ninety-one years.
Etched into a single mind.
A tapestry of blood, betrayal, kingdoms, and crowns — woven from death after death.
And through all those lives, one goal remained unchanged:
To achieve immortality.
And through all those lives, one goal remained unchanged:
To achieve immortality.
To shatter and rebuild this rotting system… ruled by laws that favoured the few and punished the many innocents.
But bear with me, reader…
Do we, as mortals, truly possess the right to deliver justice?
Justice is not a fixed thing. because justice is subjective.
One man's crime may be another's salvation.
...One crime of mine might bring you glee but anguish to the other.
What you see as righteousness, another may call it wicked.
So, tell me…what is justice, really?
It is not correction or making amends.
It is not balance.
Justice is a cloth; it wraps around you differently depending on the shape of your perspective.
And if justice must be dealt,
shouldn't it be done by someone who sees everything?
Every face.
Every motive.
Every tear and every smirk.
Only one who knows every heart without bias could wield such power rightly.
That one would have to be God.
But do gods even exist?
To me… they never have.
To you… perhaps they do.
To some… they must.
But when no gods answer, when the heavens remain silent,
we begin to carve out justice with our own hands.
We become the judge, jury, and the executioner.
We become the gods we once prayed to.
And that…
That is when the world begins to fall apart.
Not from evil,
but from the arrogance of mortals trying to play supreme.
He had died nineteen times, each time meeting a different end.
But the world?
The world NEVER changed.
Still blind. Still bound. Still broken.
'Not this time"
Yue tossed aside the blanket and stepped barefoot onto the terrace.
The cold bit into his skin, but it was not the chill that made his hands tremble… it was the weight of seven thousand years pressing down on him like ghosts of every life he had ever lived and taken.
His long black hair danced in the icy wind…
like a banner of conquest,
singing the anthem of battles never won.
Each strand hummed a forgotten song:
of longing he no longer remembered,
of love he long lost,
of freedom he still soared for every time.
Betrayal he always gave,
trust he never offered.
Words unsaid,
actions undone.
Endings that could have been,
lives unlived,
paths never walked,
souls he could have saved.
And yet, those glossy black strands, for all their motion,
held no brilliance.
They shimmered faintly, not with light, but with rusted memory of
melodies dulled by time, emotions reduced to echoes.
Remnants of a man who had lived too many lives,
and never truly lived one.
His eyes, green like spring breaking through the cold grave he made for his soul,
shimmered with youth,
as if the light had returned to a gaze that had long forgotten hope.
There was still grace in his walk,
and the face…
The same face.
Beautiful.
Timeless.
Enchanting.
A face untouched by the chaos, as if time itself dared not scar this beauty.
It was the beauty that earned him the name the world would never forget:
Crimson Temple.
Not just for the blood he spilled,
but for the way the blood ran like sacred scriptures across his skin.
A god in human form.
The slaughterer.
The saviour.
They revered him like he was holy,
even when his hands were stained from the blood of their own people.
He was something else.
…But now?
Now he was just sixteen again.
In a boy's body.
Breathing in frost and remembrance,
He closed his eyes.
Raised his hands.
forming the Prana hand sign, breath steady, total concentration.
His voice dropped to a whisper. A command. A calling.
"Rise...wix"
A sharp pulse of spiritual energy flowed through his body.
His breath faltered…bit.
His spine crouched…
"It worked…" he gasped, a smirk at the corners of his lips.
"I can feel it... the energy… surging through me—aaahh—pleasant…"
Before him, swirling mist began to take shape into something soft and mystic, coiling like order and chaos intertwining to form balance.
A divine presence.
Fur as white as untouched fallen snow,
Seven flowing tails drifted behind it, weightless as a plume,
It growled… its fangs gleaming beneath a scrunched, snarling snout.
The eyes... like twin crimson moons watching from behind the clouds…
A fox.
A celestial, divine beast.
Majestic. Godlike. Beautiful.
Too beautiful.
It looked nothing like the monster the world knew about.
Nothing like the beast that had killed millions, split mountains, and burned empires to ashes.
Nothing like the creature that had, in all nineteen timelines, killed millions in Yue's name.
And yet… it was.
The godlike divine fox had obeyed only two people in all of time.
Yue... and
Nevermind.
It stood there… weak, this time… but its presence twisted everything around itself.
And Yue, for a fleeting second, reached out to it with something close to awe.
A bond… they shared… and carried through ages, births and timelines …
The world is a beautiful place…
Or maybe that is the illusion,
It painted to hide its horrors.
And then….
it vanished.
The mist evaporated. The beast dissolved into the surrounding like dust.
The light in the beast's eyes faded like dying stars…
"AARGHHH—!"
The force recoiled.
Like thunder tearing through his veins.
He collapsed to his knees.
Blood burst from his mouth, splattering on the ground.
Cough. Cough. Cough.
"Haaaah…. damn itt!"
The pain was beyond normal
It felt like his organs were melting from inside.
"If I cough any more… I'll vomit my intestines out—"
He dug his nails into the marble floor, gasping, for air.
The night blurred around him… the air suddenly turned cold, but his heartbeat was louder.
This…
This was the cost.
The technique was perfect.
His memory was perfect.
But his body…. only sixteen… was not.
"I knew I wasn't ready…" he spat blood again.
"Still tried anyway…"
A hollow sigh escaped his lips.
"Just wanted to see… if that beast still remembered me."
"But what a pity…" Yue sighed
"It didn't."
Not yet.
He had known that. But still…some part of him always wanted to try, just in case this life would be different. Just in case, this time, he would be strong enough from the start to command the beast no one could tame in this whole world …The beast who only bowed to Him and …. Nevermind.
"I need to ascend faster," he muttered under his breathe, "No time for mistakes. No room for failure. Not this time."
He returned to his pavilion in silence, the cold winter-night air still clinging to his skin.
"It's 2 a.m.… I should get some rest. I will think more clearly in the morning."
A tense Sigh escaped his lips as he lays back …eyes closed, pretending to sleep long before sleep truly found him.
"Yue… you're awake?"
Her voice drifted to him like a breeze…soft, weightless, impossibly gentle.
She was there beside him, sitting. Smiling, that same beautiful smile. Her honey-glazed, golden-brown eyes locked onto his spring olive ones with a look so warm, so unshakably kind, it reached places in him he did not know could still feel.
The kind of gaze that melted every wall of isolation he had built to contain the monster within.
But in that moment… he was not the monster.
He was just Yue.
Without thinking, he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close to his chest.
"I missed you," he whispered against her ear.
And then, he laughed… just a little, a proud laugh. Because for once, he was just Yue. Nothing more. Nothing cursed. Not restrained.
"I'm really in love with you, you know."
He pulled back slightly, just enough to meet her eyes again. Eyes full of quiet light.
But just as the warmth settled in, the dream began to shatter.
She was still in front of him… only now, he was not holding her.
He was holding the hilt of the sword.
The sword that was buried in her chest.
Her lips trembled. Blood streamed from her eyes, nose, mouth, ears…. the color of death painting over her existence. Yet even now, her hands rose gently to cup his cheeks. Just like before. Just like always.
Her white robes, once symbols of purity, were slick with blood…soaked in crimson.
"No..." His voice cracked. "No, no, no, no—"
Tears welled in his eyes, flooding over.
And still, her touch did not falter.
"I'm glad it was you, Yue."
Her voice was no louder than a whisper, but it cut through him deeper than any blade ever had.
He lives his past lives in dreams.
But dreams cannot change what has already been done.
She has killed him.
And he has killed her.
Again. And again. And again.
And every time one of them dies, the wheel of life rewinds, dragging Yue back through the corridors of time, into a life he has long tried, and failed, to forget.
A curse made not of magic…but of memory and greed.
He jolted awake, eyes wide open... heart pounding like a man pulled back from drowining
"these memories again…" he his arms crouched back to this head ...
The servants stepped in quietly, drawing back the curtains to let in the pale morning light.
"Your Highness, your bath is ready. Would you prefer tea before you enter?" one of them asked, bowing.
Sometimes Yue accepted the offer. Sometimes he did not. But today, he said nothing …. Before he could react, the doors creaked open slowly.
"I can't believe you're still in bed on a day like this… What should I do with you?"
It was Yuze Miryu.
The Crown Prince of the Dravilorian Empire.
His voice was light, but the weight of the day clung to his words. At seventeen, Yuze already bore the presence of someone shaped by discipline and destiny. He stepped into the room arms crossed, and a playful smirk at the edge of his lips.
Yue blinked up at him. "…Brother."
A flicker of realization passed through his mind.
"Ah, the annual evaluation day…cool…ugh…Just what I needed…. people flaunting power, fake smiles with fake alliances, and blood in their every intentions…. I wanted time to think, but it seems the universe prefers chaos over clarity.
"Mmm… what should I do? I already know how it's going to go. If I overthink it, it'll only look like my decisions are rehearsed. But if I try something new just for the sake of change, I might ruin everything."
"Argh..." Yue groaned, burying his head in his hands, fingers tightening in his hair.
Yuze laughed gently and walked closer. "You know… maybe you should give the event a little less thought and focus more on getting out of that bed first."
"Yeah, yeah. Get out," Yue muttered, still hiding his thoughts.