Yue's POV All I felt, for the last five or six days, was nothing but pain. My whole life, I'd never experienced so much of it and I'd lived so fucking long.I started feeling like it had been a mistake to even harbor the thought of begging the Emperor to give more time. I was such a fool. Pain and failure were things I never got used to since I was a child. Now here I am, embarrassed for not being able to keep my word, and dying slowly because I thought I could do something that couldn't be done. A bead of tear rolled down my cheeks but I wiped it off immediately with the back of my palm. The silver glyph embedded in the meat of my left palm exploded with a blinding, lethal white light that turned the dark stone walls of the corridor into a landscape of stark, bleached bone. The countdown digits had finally shifted, locking into a threshold that felt like an executioner's blade resting against the base of my neck: 2 Days, 00 Hours, 00 Minutes, 00 Seconds.A fucking fresh day. The

Yun Qian's POV The smooth, un-enchanted marble of the Upper Spires did not resist the slow glide of my leather shoes, it simply accepted the cold, structural weight of my long awaited return. Did y'all really think I wasn't going to come back? I was moving effortlessly through the equalized corridors of the Upper Spires, and I kept leaving a trail of salt-crystals along the marble floors, my bone-flutes playing a soft, enticing melody. The universal [Equalization Protocol] that Lin Feng had hammered into the foundations of this mountain was supposed to be a law of silence, a flat field where no high-frequency talent could breathe.Yet, my music did not require his gold-tinted server allocation to function. It ran on the basic physics of materials, the raw harmonic resonance of stone and bone. With every step I took, a soft, geometric frost of salt-crystals bloomed behind my heels, snapping against the gray polished floors like breaking ice. The mid-sized bone-flute felt comfortab

Yue's POV I'd never felt this much of a failure in my entire life, and I'd lived so damn long, too damn long for this shit. I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole, or at least wake up from this horrible dream I was currently encountering. But none of that happened. I was anxious, and that led to a panic, and I don't do too well with situations when I'm in a panic. The transformation of my physical matrix had finally reached its terminal velocity, I was no longer a living officer of the law, but a dissolving ledger of pending deletions.The silver glyph on my palm burned down to 24 Hours, 00 Minutes, 00 Seconds, the intense heat now causing my skin to peel away in long, silver ribbons that turned to ash before they hit the floor. Every movement of my fingers caused the skin along my forearm to separate into thin, shimmering strands of administrative text that frayed and unraveled in the cold air, each ribbon incinerating into a silent, grey residue that blanketed the l

Lin Feng's POV I'd seen and had been involved in so many weird things since the very moment I led my hands on the gacha tablet. But the sky today had to be the weirdest, it just looked off, and I'd literally seen the sky bleed purple at some point in my life. This world really never ceases to amaze me. The northern sky was bleeding a pure, blinding lumen that turned the gray sleet into needles of white fire.The sky took all of my attention, before I finally remembered the reason I was standing where I was standing at this very moment.I ignored the clash between the two women in my throne room, moved to stand on the high balcony, my single violet eye tracking the thousands of golden torches descending the northern ridge. The shattered shards of bronze glass behind my heels were still vibrating with the silent, non-mana-based vacuum generated by Imoabasi’s silver forks and the siren’s bone-flute, but my focus had already broken past the borders of the council chamber.The massive,

Yun Qian's POV The smooth marble beneath my leather shoes was already losing its physical density, the molecular structure of the Upper Spires softening into the sterile, white texture of a blank ledger sheet. As the outer walls began to dissolve into white paper, I stepped out onto the high roof of the central pavilion, my white ash-wood conductor’s baton pointing directly at Lin Feng’s chest. The universal [Equalization Protocol] that the blacksmith had spent months hammering into the mountain’s roots was tearing apart at the seams, its low-frequency boundaries completely overrun by the supreme administrative law of the approaching golden vanguard. Below us, the vast fields of ink-black data that once formed the Weeping Domain were drying into rigid, static sheets of imperial vellum, erasing his revolution foot by foot. I didn't reach for a mid-sized bone-flute this time. I stood at the very edge of the clay tiles, my immaculate white silk robes whipping violently against the w