"Blood answers blood."

Bones crushed.

"Flesh answers flesh."

Organs ruptured, divine blood boiling as resistance was peeled away.

"Soul answers soul."

Wang Xiao's severed head convulsed inside its orb, mouth opening soundlessly as soul-force was flayed layer by layer.

"Immortality?" Shi Tian sneered, finally letting contempt leak through. "That word is what children dream to when they don't understand."

Golden runes ignited!

"You thought endless life meant endless strength?" He clenched his fist. "You thought regeneration meant exemption?"

The orbs collapsed inward, reshaping, refining, stretching, until five glowing crimson lanterns formed, translucent and obscene, each containing a distorted silhouette writhing endlessly.

Shi Tian raised his hand.

The lanterns floated.

"By the Law of Slaughter," he declared, thunder and blood rain roaring behind him, "those who devour heirs shall not be granted death."

The lanterns screamed, forever.

"You will burn as my mourning lamps," Shi Tian said, his voice flat, almost exhausted, "to light the grief you created… to teach the next generation what immortality truly earns, when they dare defy."

His eyes were empty.

"Immortality does not save you."

Blood rain slid across his golden pupils like tears down a veteran's face, tracing scars worn smooth by countless eras.

In that instant, he seemed to age, years collapsing onto him all at once. His knees finally struck the shattered obsidian, the impact dull and heavy, as the five crimson lanterns drifted around him in slow, silent orbit.

The other Great Lords fell into an uncharacteristic silence.

They had come seeking control, intending to bind Wang Xiao, stabilize the collapsing universe bind with him, reduce him into a usable pawn, then divide the spoils at leisure.

None of them had expected him to go so far as to sever Shi Tian's bloodline outright. Nor had they expected the old slaughterer to descend personally, grief unsealed, authority bared.

Interfering now was unthinkable.

Shi Tian would turn on them without hesitation.

So they swallowed their intentions, sealed their calculations, and prayed that today would end here, that no further variables would emerge, that nothing else would go wrong.

Once more, they glanced at the kneeling Shi Tian.

Then, one by one, the three pairs of colossal eyes dimmed and faded from the sky.

They did not know.... Something far crueler had already begun to hover above their fate.

____

Outside the Prison Dimension lay the Void.

Not emptiness.

Not darkness.

But fuck-all.

The state before existence learned how to pretend it mattered.

It could not be measured, split, or crossed. No time, no distance, no direction. The Void wasn't something waiting to be explored, it was the place where even the idea of something hadn't crawled out yet. Calling it a place was already a lie.

Universes were not housed within it.

They were scraped against it.

Each universe was a sealed cage of spacetime, causality, matter, and law, bloated bubbles pressing endlessly against pre-existence. From that friction leaked what mortals later misnamed Dark Energy. To Earth, it was an invisible force pushing galaxies apart. In truth, it was the Void telling reality to fuck off, pre-existence bleeding through the cracks.

As the pressure built, universes swelled like corpses left in the sun, expanding until coherence snapped. Then reality folded inward, crushed itself into nothing, and burst outward again in violent rebirth. During that collapse, the invading null was beaten, broken, and refined, smashed into laws, energy states, matter.

What remained were universes.

Leftovers.

They shared the same bones, yet wore different skins, like shades of red split from a single beam of light and forced to pretend they were unique.

The Void had no space and no time, so movement meant jack shit. You could fall out of a universe, but you couldn't pick where you landed. Transition obeyed no distance, only resonance with the waves. Thus, when Wang Xiao's soul left his universe using the

cracks left by graveyard of gods, it didn't travel.

It tumbled.

Falling from one incompatible universe into another, smashing through spacetime states until something finally lined up.

Ancient beings once tried to understand this pre-existence pressure. Some traced its fluctuations, scratching patterns along the skin of reality. The Yin Faction rode those scratches, building portals atop unstable resonant waves, surfing the Void like thieves on borrowed luck.

None of them ever mastered it. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

Because pre-existence was never meant to be controlled.

It was meant to be endured.

Until...Something twitched.

In the eternal Void, where existence behaved like a dead sea meant only to be drifted across, something didn't ride the waves.

It moved through them.

Not sliding.

Not aligning.

But slicing, like a blade through a calm sea that was never supposed to part.

A phenomenon that should have been impossible.

Cracks in shattered spacetime of the universe leaked into the Void, dumping dark matter, laws, and broken energy like cosmic trash into a graveyard of null. Beings had long used such refuse as anchors, desperately trying to give direction to a place that spat on direction.

They all failed.

But the soul that slipped through one of those cracks did something obscene.

It didn't adapt to the waves of the Void.

It redefined it.

As if direction could exist where direction had never been allowed.

As if the Void itself had been forced to acknowledge a forward.

And in that place where "where" should not exist... the waves parted.

Not for a god.

Not for a law.

But because something finally had the courage to tell pre-existence where to stand.

_____

Far away....

Apophis had landed.

The colossal serpent lay coiled amid barren lands of the Netherworld, its massive body half-wrapped around the ancient pyramids, its slit pupils fixed on the endless night sky.

It knew its life had been threatened.

When the tiny Prison Dimension cracked, it had seized the only surviving path and been flung here, into the Netherworld, into the charred, miasma-choked territory of the Yin Faction.

It was land Wang Xiao had once ruined.

Blackened soil stretched endlessly beneath dead skies. Dark miasma drifted like fog, formed from souls that had died yet not been reincarnated.

To Apophis, this place was nothing, rotting spirits and stagnant gloom meant little. What mattered was deterrence. The stain left by Wang Xiao was strong enough that even Netherworld beings avoided this region.

Apophis had chosen it precisely because no one should come here.

It never expected to be found.

Its immense body froze, scales stiffening like ancient stone, as pressure descended, vast, sudden, and utterly wrong. Space tore open beside the pyramids, and something emerged.

A soul.

Moving at a speed existence itself could not process.

In the span of a breath, two trajectories converged, one descending from the sky, one bursting from within the pyramids, and they collided. The latter was briefly visible: Yin Yue. But the form did not hold. Upon impact, the soul shattered, fragments dispersing instantly, vanishing as if swallowed by nothing.

Gone.

Back in the Prison Dimension, Shi Tian still knelt in grief.

He did not notice the luminous fragments that appeared without warning, slipping from the Void into existence as if piercing a veil without tearing it. Tiny motes of light, like drifting fireflies, were drawn instinctively toward the five crimson lanterns.

"…W–Who?" Shi Tian murmured, lifting his head too late.

Something was wrong.

Far away, the three Great Lords who had already withdrawn were forcibly halted, dragged from the Netherworld's edge to stare into the Great Void itself. Where the Prison Dimension had once existed, there was now only a small, black dot.

No light.

No reflection.

A compression so absolute it felt obscene.

The dot pulsed faintly, pulling at everything nearby, void, spacetime, distant universes, devouring proximity itself like an endless mouth.

[Not good…]

The Obsidian Faction Great Lord spoke, his voice strained, as if recalling a nightmare he had once survived.

Then they heard it.

A scream.

It was Shi Tian.

The Yang Great Lord was being dragged toward the dot, his body stretched by irresistible pull. Both his arms were torn free, severed cleanly as he clawed uselessly at collapsing space.

"…"

"…"

"…"

The three Great Lords didn't even have time to react before the dot detonated.

BANG!

The explosion hurled them violently through the Void, scattering them like debris. Shi Tian's broken body was flung toward them, barely caught as they stabilized themselves, eyes snapping upward in instinctive terror.

Above them...

Something stood.

Vast beyond comprehension.

Its size dwarfed universes, overlooking them like grains of dust. Spacetime itself was inhaled and exhaled casually, swallowed with one breath and expelled with another. In the Void stood a cosmic entity with no fixed form, silver and blue glimmers weaving together into a vague humanoid silhouette. Its eyes alone radiated pressure beyond endurance, enough to crush will, soul, and law alike.

[Impossible...]

The Samsara Faction Great Lord's thought hadn't even finished before a palm descended.

Their expressions changed instantly.

The Netherworld, formed by the consolidation of countless universes, the largest existence known, was no larger than that palm.

And it was coming down.