The Doomed Monarch

The true enemy

The copper incense burner on the low table had long gone cold, leaving a bitter residue of pine gum in the air. Lin Feng sat motionless on a pallet of coarse wool, his hands resting palms up on his knees. His chest was wrapped in tight linen bandages, dark green grease from Xiao Chen’s medicinal poultices seeping through the cloth. He was not breathing. To the casual eye, he was a corpse left out to dry.

Deep within his perception, he was falling through a well of cold ink. The fractured edges of his core were still raw, vibrating like cracked bells every time his consciousness brushed against them.

"You are going too deep," a voice echoed from above him, distant and filtered through layers of reality. It was Xiao Chen, his voice tinny and nervous. "If your spirit detaches completely from the marrow, the body will think it is dead. It will start to rot, Lin Feng."

"Let it rot a little," Lin Feng answered within his own mind. "The damage from the elemental rebound is fused into the lower channels. If I don't trace the roots of the star map now, the violet ring will choke me before the remaining four years are up."

The ink around him dissolved. The sensation of gravity vanished, replaced by an absolute, weightless vacuum. The stars above him were not the familiar lanterns of the mortal realm; they were large, unblinking eyes of pale yellow light, arranged in geometric clusters that made his temples throb with a dull, wet ache.

"He is entering the threshold," a different voice remarked. This one did not come from the palace or the world below. It was vast, multi-layered, and carried the specific chemical tang of old iron and dead oceans.

Lin Feng opened his spirit eyes. He was standing on a shelf of translucent black glass that seemed to float in the deep void. Ahead of him, the darkness gathered itself into a shape. It was not a monster with tentacles or a giant beast; it was a towering humanoid figure made of interlocking plates of dull gray metal, its face an empty, reflective mirror that showed Lin Feng his own pale, scarred visage.

"The little king of the mud patch," the entity said, its mirror face shifting slightly to show a distorted version of Lin Feng’s broken grin from the volcano. "We watched your little fire trick. We watched you swallow the old man from the western flats. You think you are a wolf among sheep, Lin Feng."

"I am the man who is going to break your harvest," Lin Feng said. He tried to summon the white fire core, but here, in the vacuum, his cultivation felt like a guttering candle flame.

The metal entity did not strike him. It simply leaned forward, the sound of its movement like two iron shields grinding together. "A harvest implies labor. You are not labor, little king. You are a fruit that has grown precisely to the size of the basket."

"I know about the prophecy," Lin Feng said, his teeth locking as he forced his spirit self to stand straight. "I know you need my death to drop the world-shield. I am building an army to burn your vanguard before your boots touch our soil."

The entity's mirror face rippled, the image of Lin Feng dissolving into a massive, spinning vortex of violet light. "An army of what? The frozen girls from the north? The old politicians who shake their wooden tablets at you? You have spent three years running across your tiny continent, spilling blood and calling it an empire."

"It is enough to kill your scouts," Lin Feng said.

"They are not scouts," the entity replied, its voice vibrating with a dry, metallic amusement. "They are the buyers. They are checking the fat content of the herd."

A sharp pain exploded around Lin Feng’s neck. The violet ring, invisible in his normal spirit state, manifested as a heavy collar of spiked iron, its chain extending upward into the dark canopy of yellow stars. He could feel the physical weight of it pulling his head down toward the black glass floor.

"You think you are the first to find the shortcut?" the entity asked, stepping closer until the smell of ozone was thick enough to choke Lin Feng’s spiritual lungs. "You think the frantic prince who kills his uncle is a new story in the cosmos?"

"We are different," Lin Feng gasped, his hands clawing at the iron collar around his throat. "Xiao Chen has the calculations. We know the frequency."

"The scholar is a clever ant," the entity said. "But he is still an ant counting the grains of sand on a boot that is about to step on him. Let me show you your original design."

The black glass beneath Lin Feng’s feet cleared, becoming perfectly transparent. Below him, stretching into the bottomless depths of the void, were thousands of small, glowing spheres. Each sphere was a world, surrounded by a thin, crystalline dome of blue energy. And atop each dome sat a massive, obsidian altar, identical to the one Lin Feng had ordered his ministers to build in the imperial courtyard.

Beside each altar lay the corpse of a king, his chest pierced by a ceremonial blade, his body erupting into the exact violet light that Lin Feng had seen in his own star map.

"The Cycle of the Crowned Sacrifice," the entity whispered, its hand descending to touch the iron chain on Lin Feng's neck. "We have consumed seventy-four thousand worlds using this exact same prophecy loop, little king. We give you the countdown so you will run. We give you the power so you will conquer. We make you a god so you taste sweeter when we finally make you die like a dog."