The regents had come to war.

  All eleven of them. Pillars of power that once shaped the balance of Adamath itself now stood side by side, surrounded by a crumbling plane.

  Eleven of the strongest cultivators the plane had ever known, whose presence defied even that scale, gathered in a last stand.

  Their concepts no longer hidden presences but manifest forces, woven into the very fabric of their being, roaring with raw power.

  Kaius Talahan led the charge.

  His blade screamed through the air, cutting a blinding arc of fire and lightning across the shattered heavens.

  He cleaved through rifts, tears in reality, that were in the final stages of fusing with Adamath itself. They bled other planely light, merging like a second skin being stitched to the plane’s already wounded surface.

  With them came horrors, twisted things long imprisoned behind the Seal of Alana, and now unleashed into a plane no longer protected.

  And those horrors… the regents had no choice but to abandon to the cultivators below.

  Paragons, Saints, even distant Masters and Highlords flung across the world itself, those still standing, were left to fight a sky blackened by monstrosities.

  Beasts shaped by madness and dripping with corrupted foreign power, beings of elements unrecognizable, from fire that devoured everything around it to water that burned the spirit of cultivators.

  Some were small and vicious. Others walked like giants, behemoths carrying the power of paragons in every breath.

  Darkness reigned.

  Not merely absence of light, but the erasure of reason, of order. The natural laws of Adamath, once so carefully upheld by the heavens, were now undone, eaten away by the presence that loomed above them all.

  Madness had rooted itself in the heart of the plane.

  The continents cracked like brittle bone, dragging themselves into alignment by an ancient compulsion.

  Volcanoes bled rivers of molten Ethra. Oceans boiled. The very plane groaned under the weight of its own unraveling. Reality strained like a cracked shell ready to burst.

  Still, the source of it all, the abomination that now wore who had once been Borus like a mockery, floated above.

  Vast. Silent. Triumphant. It was an existence that defied comprehension, a godlike blight that knew more than the regents had ever dared understand.

  Yet the regents forged on.

  For the first time in hundreds, if not more than a thousand years, they fought not for power, but for survival. This was the crucible not of ambition, but of judgment, and they had been found wanting. Still, they did not yield.

  Yara, Queen of the Arcanists, held the plane steady with sheer will, weaving colossal formations of stability powered by her own life.

  She burned her essence as fuel, anchoring fragments of the unraveling laws just long enough for her kin to stand.

  Shuyin, the regent of Astradriel’s cult, raised her golden scales high. Every attack of the abomination was forced to pass through her domain, its strength halved, but the cost was immense.

  Her near-limitless well of authority ran nearly dry with each counterforce. Blood dripped from her lips; her regent realm's imbued armor cracked.

  Zian, regent of the Veilweavers, summoned his most nightmarish techniques, unseen horrors bred from the deep wells of forbidden techniques known only to the Veilweavers.

  A twelve-headed worm with eyes that saw everywhere. Screaming scythe-spirits bound in bone cages.

  Cackling giants made of stitched-together concept-beasts. He unleashed them all, casting them at the thing that shouldn’t exist.

  Ayun spun illusions like stars, layers of phantom realms attempting to trap the being’s senses, to twist its perception, if only for a moment.

  But the creature laughed.

  “Oh, your techniques... quaint,” it said.

  “Disconnected from the source, cut off for so long. Even your Saints are but children, sniffing at scraps of meaning.”

  Then it raised a hand.

  Reality bent.

  And shattered.

  Ayun’s illusions exploded, leaving only afterimages. Zian’s conjured nightmares screamed and dissolved into ash.

  Shuyin coughed blood as her scales rang like broken bells. Only Yensu, the regent of the wild wardens, remained upright, pushing her life force into her healing arts, vines glowing and weaving desperately over her wounded comrades.

  The true martial regents—Kaius, Bashu, Daishi, Raijin, Fehan, Shang, Arin, stepped forward.

  Seven pinnacles of martial technique.

  On any other day, a clash between even two of them would have meant a near continent-ending war. Now, all seven fought for the right to see one more dawn.

  Kaius led with fire, columns of black flame wreathed in lightning, obliterating entire flocks of rift-beasts. They were erased. Disintegrated.

  Bashu’s hammer roared through the sky, colliding with the abomination’s arm. The impact cracked reality itself, folding space like cloth. For a moment, everything went silent.

  Then it fractured.

  The abomination split. Seven times.

  Each clone of it leapt into combat, pulling the regents into separate rift-zones, splinter realms torn from the folds of Adamath itself.

  In one realm, Fehan's Paragon realm human constructs clashed with a creature of a thousand mouths and burning logic.

  His dozens of Ethereon limbs met its chaos with brute, unrelenting precision, an artificer against entropy.

  Outside the fractured skies, Adamath continued to die.

  And still... the regents fought.

  Because this was no longer about their already tainted legacy.

  This was retribution.

  It was an unspoken truth, one every regent understood without saying a word: Adamath couldn’t withstand them. Not anymore.

  Every breath they took, every technique they released, every shred of authority they unleashed, tore the plane closer to annihilation. If they continued to fight within its crumbling shell, they would destroy the plane they sought to save.

  So, they carried the battle into the rifts.

  The second skin, the fragmented echoes of reality beginning to fuse with the physical plane—became the battleground.

  There, amidst twisted space and broken laws, they unleashed their truest selves. The strength they had cultivated over millennia, the raw essence they had hoarded, meant for their long-dreamed advancement to Hegemony, was released in full.

  And even that was not enough.

  Their strength had already been halved. Their advancement rituals, soaked in the blood and vitality of billions, had been hijacked by the very thing they now fought. They had paid the price in blood, but the creature had reaped the reward.

  They knew it. It knew it.

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  And now… they did what no regent had ever dared: they began to burn through their own lifeforce. Their final fuel. Their last offering.

  "So foolish," the abomination sneered.

  Its voice echoed from all eleven battlefields where it now simultaneously fought.

  "Hegemony? Blasphemy. You still believe in tiers—foundation, core, saint, paragon, regent, hegemon...?" It sounded almost amused.

  "How small your minds are. You think advancement is a staircase. You have no concept of true cultivation."

  The regents answered not with words, but with war.

  Their techniques thundered across the stitched rift-reality, crashing into the abomination’s many forms. They bit into it. They bled it. They even shattered pieces of it.

  But it endured. Laughing. Growing.

  Yensu’s living forest burned, black fire eating through her centuries-old relic. The same relic granted by the First Warden.

  She screamed as it shattered, the explosion carving a gash in the rift as she fell, her lungs full of ash and her spirit flickering.

  Shuyin’s golden scales shimmered, barely covering her retreat as Raijin, regent of the Asura, unleashed a thousand-blow technique, his burning body becoming a crimson sun, his swordplay so fast that space itself couldn’t keep up.

  Elsewhere, in a rift shaped like a screaming vortex of eyes and thunder, Kaius, Bashu, and Zian fought in tandem.

  Zian twisted reality, shaping it like clay. His Veilweaver concept created living mazes to disorient the abomination. But nothing stuck.

  The creature stole every technique, warped every construct, and hurled them back tenfold.

  Kaius burned them away. Over and over. Flames drawn from the very concept and soul themselves.

  Fehan, in another rift, screamed in frustration. His paragon realm constructs, meant to fight future wars, now turned against him. Corrupted.

  The product of his genius now his executioners. He fought them with blades, not authority, as illusions from Ayun tried to buy him time. But the constructs were built to defy illusions, Fehan had designed them that way.

  It was hell.

  Pure hell.

  Shang unleashed death. A thousand black crescents flying from his scythe with each swing. But metal did not die. Steel did not fear.

  Daishi and Arin fought in futility.

  Time bent. The undead howled. But the abomination defied decay. It reversed time. It rejected death. Concepts meant to unravel regents did not even scratch it.

  And then... Shuyin fell.

  Her scale, an ancient relic, blessed by the regent of balance itself, shattered. A death knell echoed across the rift as her concept collapsed with it. The creature's power doubled, pressing down like a second sky.

  Shuyin stood, gasping, and Raijin, burning like a comet, slashed through space itself to protect her.

  But he was too late.

  Yensu froze.

  Eyes wide.

  Blood spilled.

  A black claw ripped through her chest from behind.

  "NO!" Raijin roared, charging toward her.

  But the rift responded with rage. Shuyin, eyes full of horror, saw Yensu’s life leave her.

  One of their own. Gone.

  Raijin fled, tearing through the fabric of the rift with raw speed, leaving Shuyin behind.

  She did not scream. She did not plead. She simply activated everything.

  A final cascade of constructs burst from her void ring: traps, formations, techniques layered into secret formations, gifts of the Keepers from centuries past, loots from ancient battles not even recorded. Everything.

  Then the rift exploded.

  A tear in reality ripped open, swallowing Shuyin and the creature's presence inside. She burned herself with it, one final desperate sacrifice to weaken the enemy.

  And it worked.

  For a brief second, the briefest hope returned.

  Kaius seized the moment, his blade roaring as it bit into the creature's main form. Bashu followed, hammer-blows cracking reality like eggshells.

  Fehan reclaimed his constructs. Ayun twisted the rift's patterns to distort their escape. Shang's death scythe ripped into the wounded fragment.

  One of the creature’s bodies was left behind.

  And they destroyed it.

  The rift screamed. Light poured out. Blood—black, oily, and hissing—rained from the sky.

  But it was only a fragment.

  A finger.

  A shard of what loomed above, watching with a malicious smile.

  And the regents, what remained of them, knew:

  They had only just begun.

  ******

  Tunde stood again on the edge of life and death, a ledge he was growing far too accustomed to. His soulspace swirled around him like a forgotten void, silent but heavy.

  Nothing mattered anymore, not the war, not the shattered heavens, not the ruined earth. Not when death whispered softly at the nape of his neck, offering relief like a long-lost friend.

  Not when the world burned, and the sky bled above a people too broken to fight back.

  And for the briefest moment, he asked himself a question he had never dared to ask aloud:

  Why?

  Why did he keep going?

  Why did he bother to stand?

  Why did he fight?

  It was a quiet question, but it echoed loudly in the caverns of his weary heart. Every path he walked led to destruction.

  Every breath he took brought new calamity. Once upon a time, his greatest worry had been defeating a gifted child of a minor clan.

  That felt like lifetimes ago. Now, now he had been thrust into a fight against a cosmic horror, an entity the regents and saints themselves couldn’t kill.

  And it was exhausting.

  Cultivation, they said, was a path of transcendence. Of joy. Of harmony with the Dao. But all Tunde had found were graves. War after war, pain after pain.

  His cultivation had been dragged out of him, clawed from his bones by sheer necessity. Every advancement another scar. Every realm he stepped into was paid for with blood.

  He was tired of being a survivor. Tired of being the last hope.

  And here—now, within the hushed vacuum of his Soulspace, there was no one to see him falter. He let himself sit, if only for a moment, and stared up at the ancient monolith, the black stone gate etched with burning golden script.

  Law of Emptiness.

  It stared back at him, mute, uncaring, unreadable.

  It didn’t resonate with him. Not even slightly. It felt alien. Distant. Emptier than the void it described. Tunde reached out, fingers brushing the stone.

  He could still feel it. Cold, rough. Somehow, that was more grounding than the universe outside tearing itself apart.

  He closed his eyes.

  The pain surged forward. Not the pain in his body—no, something deeper. Buried. Ignored. Repressed. Rage. Bitterness. Hopelessness. The ache of a soul scraped raw.

  And then the vision returned.

  He was back there. Underground.

  A boy. Skin stretched thin over bone. Starved. Weak. His little sister’s scream echoed down the damp tunnels, those lightless caverns his people called home.

  One of the worms, white, mindless, a hunter of the dark, loomed over her. Its milky eyes glistened. Hunger radiated off it.

  He didn’t think.

  His legs moved.

  No Ethra. No authority. Just rage.

  A jagged shard of rock in hand, he sprinted, leapt, and drove it straight into the worm’s sac-like eyes. The creature screamed, a sound that shook the marrow in his bones, and flung him across the cavern. His back cracked against the stone. One, two ribs shattered. Blood filled his mouth like molten copper.

  Tunde coughed.

  His mind knew this was just a memory. His spirit knew the void was showing him something. Teaching him. But his gut—his gut, which had saved him more than once told him this wasn’t a lesson to be watched.

  It had to be survived.

  And so he rose.

  “Not again,” he hissed, voice cracking.

  “Not again, you bastard!”

  His fist drew back, calling on Joran’s Wrath, on Empty Silence, on anything, anything to strike back. Nothing answered.

  That was fine.

  He didn’t need them.

  Once, he had been a starving rat in the dark. Once, he had cowered in the face of death. But that boy had died long ago.

  What remained was a butcher of saints, of paragons, of all manner of things. His hands had broken monsters, and his blades had carved down those the world called invincible.

  He didn’t need a technique. He needed will.

  Tunde couldn’t remember exactly when he killed the worm.

  Maybe it was when his bloodied arm had plunged deep into its pulsing gut, ripping out its insides with blind fury, swing after savage swing.

  Maybe it was when he realized his own screams were drowning out the creature’s. All he knew was that when he came to, he was still standing, barely, covered in gore, chest heaving with exhaustion, arm torn and useless at his side.

  But she was alive.

  His sister.

  He saw her now with a clarity that broke his heart: dark brown eyes full of innocence, her cheeks smudged with soot, and that small, radiant smile she always reserved just for him. The kind of smile that made the hunger and pain of the underground bearable.

  He limped toward her, dragging his battered body across the stone. He’d done it. He’d saved her.

  Then, before he could even reach out, something dropped from above.

  A blur.

  A shriek.

  And her head was gone.

  Tunde’s scream ripped through the air as the scene shattered like glass—and reformed again, violently dragging him back to the moment just before it all began.

  The same place.

  Her in front of him.

  The worm slithering behind.

  He didn’t understand what the void wanted from him, but there was no time to wonder. This time, he lunged forward, snatching her into his arms and sprinting through the tunnels.

  The beast gave chase, howling behind him, but he didn’t stop, not even when his legs burned or when he heard the first rumble of a coming collapse.

  The path came back to him in pieces, a buried instinct, burned into his bones. A narrow tunnel leading to the heart of the cavern, where the heat crystals bloomed in jagged red along the walls. Ethra-rich, he knew now. And toxic to the worms.

  He burst into the clearing with a final push and dove straight into the pool at the center, curling himself around her just as the worm lunged behind them, teeth snapping shut an inch from his spine.

  He hit the water hard, knees cracking against the stone beneath. Pain tore through him. But she was safe, he had held her above the surface.

  And he laughed.

  He laughed through gritted teeth, through the agony screaming in every nerve, because for once, just once, he had won.

  Then her voice pierced the silence.

  “Why do you keep trying?”

  His smile froze.

  The water, it was boiling. It had never boiled before. His skin blistered, then peeled. He blinked up at her, but something was wrong.

  Her face, still his sister’s, but twisted. That smile now impossibly wide stretched to the edges of her cheeks.

  Pain lanced through him as the heat flayed him alive. Water filled his eyes, and his mind reeled, fracturing at the edges. His thoughts blurred. Her name, he couldn’t remember her name.

  Why can’t I remember her name?

  What did that make him?

  “Give it all up,” she whispered, voice lilting like wind through a graveyard.

  “The pain. The fight. Let it end.”

  His body convulsed. He could feel his bones turning to ash, his mind unraveling. The roof above collapsed in a roar of stone. A final mercy. Oblivion took him.

  And then—

  He was back.

  The same place. The same girl. The same moment, over and over again.

  But this time, he didn’t move.

  He simply stood and watched as the worm surged forward, and halted.

  The creature froze mid-lunge, hovering above her. She turned slowly to face him.

  That smile again.

  "What are you?" he asked, voice barely more than a breath.

  Her grin widened, inhuman now, splitting her face in ways that defied reality.

  “I bear no name,” she whispered.

  “Child of the Swimming Void.”

  Swimming Void.

  The phrase sent shivers down his spine. It meant nothing, and everything.

  She tilted her head, eyes gleaming with unnatural light.

  “I am what you are meant to personify.”

  Tunde took a long, trembling breath.

  “Emptiness,” he said.

  And this time, the void answered.