A terrible quiet remained outside as snow continued to fall down from the skies. With the death of the emperor, and the escape of the Azure Dragon, the heavens themselves felt weaker now. Qi felt weaker, starting to strain and wither out in the grasp of cold wintery hands. It was hard to imagine that a war was going on.But such was the nature of war. The frontlines of this battle were being fought across all borders of the empire. It was not the kind of war that I’d seen or heard of in history. It was closer to a disease. One that had spread across the lands, through the world at large and now it was coming for us.This wasn’t a war for land, treasure, ideological disputes or the gain of those in power. No, it was something much simpler and much worse. It was a battle for survival. Perhaps for all of humanity at large.The scales had shifted in the balance of the eternal war, and for the first time… the threat of humanity losing was starting to become real.I clenched my fists, feeli

Feng Sha laughed.He glanced towards Yan Yun and Liuxiang. “These two need to build their domains. They too need to seek their own truths. They’ve found some answers upon it already, but they need to seek what comes beyond them,” The divine beast turned back to face me again. “But you already have yours. You have had yours for quite some time.”“What? But… I… how?” I asked, confused.Feng Sha harrumphed. “Child, you reach out and bind the world to yourself and then make it a part of you. You are connected to the tree of rebirth, life and death itself join together within your soul, you represent the cycle of souls and contain the legacy of an old era.”“You’ve spent decades in the expanse of the in-between, at the edge of darkness and found genesis inside of it. It was you who stopped our rampage. Who convinced us that this world could yet be saved, when we had decided to begin anew and give it a rebirth. No matter how fleeting, how ephemeral it had been, it had been real, and it stil

I paused at that thought. Did that make me happy? It was weird how I did not have to think about it for even a second to answer.“No, I hate it,” I said, meaning every bit of it. “I don’t… I don’t want to do any of this. I don’t want to fight a war, I don’t want to… I want to take Flee and all my friends and run away. I want to abandon this whole thing. We could hide, stay safe somewhere out there. Apparently the rest of the world has fallen, but I don’t believe everyone outside has just died. People must be living there. We could live a quiet and peaceful life. Make a farm, grow spirit herbs, make alchemy pills, and I could experiment and grow my knowledge and library and help those around me and slowly create a town. Similar to the one I’d made here. A small haven for those close to me, cut off from the rest of this dark world,” I said, looking down as I felt exhaustion filling me.“You must be disappointed,” I asked, looking up at my younger self.He looked back at me, and then sho

I opened my eyes, finding myself standing in a different darkness. But this one wasn’t quite the same as the one I’d just been. This one was… darker, deeper, the nothingness of it more solid and concrete. The absence of everything more pervasive and ever present. I could feel the nothingness around me, almost feel space and reality itself, with the lack of all that was there in between me and the rest of it.It took me a moment, a really long and slow moment, before I had a realization.What I was feeling… was myself. The fluctuations in reality began to settle down a little at that thought. It was difficult to explain what exactly the realization was.The state of being that I was in right now… I could recognize it. Like waking up and becoming aware in a dream, and knowing it is a dream, and that the reality inhabited in this moment is different from the one present in the waking moment.It was a sensation akin to being half awake, being in between states. No one realized when they f

“This is the current state of the war front,” Qiao Ying said, unfurling a map onto the table in front of us. The seven celestial peaks were highlighted alongside the border to their north.“Currently there are incursions going on across every part of the empire from demonic beasts to minor demons, but that is nothing new, we’ve been fighting such incursions for centuries and have beaten back bigger and stronger ones. The problems are these areas,” Qiao Ying said, highlighting one section circled in red on the map. The demons are acting in an organized manner, something that has never happened before. This is true war and they’re using everything in their ability to try and break the barrier of the seven celestial peaks through this one section where there is a viable path for an army to march on and with their deathless being, well, deathless, they’re able to head up front and carve a way out for the lesser demons behind them, leading to a rapid march inwards right up to our border,”