Ifa was a storm.

  Not just of Ethra or flame, but of centuries, of losses and betrayals so deep they had carved him hollow. Everything had led to this moment.

  Every plan, every hidden contingency, every breath taken during his long imprisonment within the relic, it all converged now.

  For so long, he had existed only as a will, a sentient echo buried in ancient memory, drifting in a sliver of Alana's power.

  He’d long since accepted that regaining his mortal form would cost something terrible, until the soul Saint, out of simple gratitude, had given him a new one freely.

  And for the first time in eons, Ifa had dared to hope.

  But like all things built on the whims of power, it shattered. The Talahan clan had done what they—and all those who held too much power—always did.

  They betrayed.

  Ifa should’ve seen it sooner.

  He was the elder among them, a remnant of the time before betrayal had become tradition. But even he hadn’t imagined this: that the Talahan clan would seek to unravel the very fabric of reality, to remake a sealed world in their image.

  His fury had once burned for the cults, the high factions who had fled from realms far greater than Adamath along with Alana, their histories hidden, buried in shame.

  Alana had told him just enough: they were exiles, refugees of a realm they were hunted, fleeing across the starbound sea, the planar tapestry, the planar sea, whatever it was called, to seal themselves here in safety, locking away the pathways to the true planar tapestry.

  But not everything had been told.

  Alana, even as regent, had secrets. The ancient elders who had fallen defending her never shared what they’d known.

  They’d died orphaned of truth, and their disciples had grown up refugees in their own world.

  Perhaps there were still descendants of the abyssal walkers out there, hidden, forgotten—but Ifa doubted they survived the wave of death the regents now unleashed.

  Not all had been as lucky as Tunde… to find the relic.

  And now… Jaito Talahan stood before him.

  A force of nature.

  Ifa saw it clearly: the man’s spirit burned with the fury of a Saint, his insights razor-sharp, honed through tragedy and conquest.

  He wasn’t merely a peak Paragon; he stood on the edge of regency. Reality rippled around him like a sheet under strain, threatening to split from the sheer force of his aura.

  Every step he took left craters in the wind, his presence devouring the battlefield.

  And Ifa answered in kind.

  His wind and earth techniques tore through space, shearing flesh, spirit, and mountain alike. Corpses littered the air, only to be consumed by flame or broken beneath pressure techniques so immense they bent gravity.

  Tunde was gone, Ifa could feel it. His heart stuttered, threatened to break—but no, there was still time.

  In the distance, he felt Zhu’s soul cry out in vengeance, the Ethralite clashing with a paragon in a storm of fury. Ifa couldn’t reach them. He had one enemy now.

  Jaito.

  The darkness of the world had begun to recede, funneled upward by the corrupted ritual being fueled above.

  The island of the Arcanists glowed with tainted light, a beacon of betrayal, and the scent of the regents’ imminent ascension tainted the air.

  Even the Arcanists, once sealed allies of the abyssal walkers, had fallen. Some still resisted, yes. But Ifa knew this: not many would live long enough to stop what was coming.

  He moved.

  His blade danced through the air, spinning with ancient formations. Golden Ethra, infused with earth authority, formed a mountain, not a projection, but a living monolith, a divine weapon hurled at Jaito like judgment itself.

  Behind the clan head rose a monstrous shape—a six-armed creature, forged of black fire and lightning.

  A manifestation of his soul, of his heritage, of something older than the clan itself. In one stroke, the creature split the mountain in two, rending the skies open as its howling echoed through reality.

  But Ifa had planned for that.

  He stepped through the fracture, eyes glinting.

  A second form shimmered over him, a cloak of regent-level authority from his void ring, bestowed by Alana herself, a shell of force made from light and stone, crackling with golden script.

  His blade met the surge of Asura flame, and from his void ring, he pulled a sealed scroll, one of the final gifts of Alana herself.

  He activated it.

  The rune that emerged turned the very air violet, every line glowing with authority stolen from the stars themselves. Even Jaito’s arrogance cracked.

  The Talahans’ eyes widened. His own weapon, one forged not by mortal hands, but inscribed with the authority of Kaius Talahan, patriarch and regent, lit up with crimson lightning.

  Ifa tasted it then.

  Death.

  Not the concept. The truth. Cold. Final. A silence so absolute it unmade spirit and steel alike.

  Kaius had hidden his imprint in the weapon of his son.

  Two regent-level techniques, one backed by authority refined through centuries of suffering, another by the divine madness of a patriarch, collided in a single instant.

  They both knew what it meant.

  One would die. The other would be changed forever.

  Ifa sent out a pulse of warning to the others—Zhu, Tiet, the wardens—anyone who could hear. His message was simple: get away.

  All across the ruined battlefield, cultivators—lords, Highlords, masters—fled in fear. Skyvessels turned.

  Paragons flinched as their own dominions were repelled by the sheer weight of what was coming.

  The ground was already scorched. The darkness, now stripped away, revealed a landscape of bones, white and bleached of life, stretching across a wasteland that had once been a capital.

  And above it all, two paragons prepared to fall upon one another.

  They swung.

  And the sky went white.

  Raw, blistering Ethra ripped through the heavens.

  It didn't explode; it consumed. Skyvessels, master-ranked cultivators, even space itself twisted into the vortex of annihilation that was birthed between two titans.

  The aftershock peeled through clouds, tore runes from formation arrays, and left behind nothing but silence.

  And when the world stilled—

  Two figures stood amidst ruin.

  Jaito Talahan, patriarch-in-all-but-name, bled freely.

  One side of his face had melted under the weight of Ethra fire, skin seared to bone, his left arm hanging uselessly from a shoulder barely held by shreds of sinew.

  Before him, impaled through the chest and still gripping the blade buried in Jaito’s side, was Ifa.

  The elder's chest was a hollow crater of scorched flesh and exposed ribs, and yet—he stood. Held on.

  By sheer will.

  By oath made a few days before.

  By the dying embers of a promise made centuries ago.

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  Jaito roared in fury, and the heavens answered.

  Thunder cracked like the voice of a furious regent. Bolts of lightning descended like judgment from the heavens themselves, searing Ifa’s ravaged frame.

  But before the final bolt landed, Zhu appeared in a blink, taking the brunt of the attack with a divine beast’s defiance.

  He was hurled away—a smoking mass—but he lived.

  Ifa staggered. His spirit flickered, yet he endured.

  His ring released a final piece.

  An item of silence. Of finality. Of wrath.

  The Will of Guyan.

  From it surged a presence ancient and baleful—Ethra that was wrong, corrosive, and destructive.

  Flames birthed in destruction Ethra took shape, a shadow of Guyan's terrible essence, given form by death and vengeance.

  Jaito paled.

  “Guyan?” he whispered, dread threading through his voice.

  The specter gave no answer, only a jagged smile. And then it lunged.

  Jaito had seconds.

  Blue talisman arrays roared to life around him, high-grade defensive formations that struggled to keep the wrath at bay.

  He was dragged backward, forcefully torn from Ifa’s grip by sheer survival instinct and ancestral protection.

  But Ifa... Ifa was not done.

  Even as his body withered, as blood poured freely, as pain filled every cell, he pushed. His will tore at the weakening formation, carving open a wound just wide enough.

  Guyan’s wrath surged in.

  The flames of destruction coiled around Jaito.

  The clan head screamed.

  “If I die...” Ifa rasped, his voice no louder than a whisper but carried by the winds of destiny itself,

  “...then I make certain you’ll never threaten Tunde again.”

  His words burned through the air like scripture.

  Jaito’s eyes widened as he felt it—saw them all in a frozen instant: Zhu, bloodied and limping, forcing himself forward.

  Zehra and Daiki, clashing against Talahan elites in a desperate attempt to reach them. Harumi, blade in hand, eyes burning with resolve.

  Skyvessels clashed overhead, Saints on both sides locking horns in destructive battles that lit up the sky with colorless light.

  Saints were actively holding back both enemy and ally alike, knowing what was coming.

  They could not risk interference.

  Because this was final.

  This was the blow that would scar the bloodline of Talahan forever.

  Jaito crushed Ifa’s shoulder in one brutal grip, shattering it to fragments, the sound sickening. But Ifa did not cry out.

  He lit up.

  Like a sun in collapse.

  Cracks webbed across his skin, not of pain, but of overwhelming spiritual density—runes from his soul leaking out. His core, the true foundation of all cultivation—was detonating.

  Sera, far off, screamed.

  Blood writhed around her in response, her madness triggered by the one man who had stood for them all.

  Rhyn and his Saint teacher Kael held off three Skyvessels with skill, authority, and blade, desperation in their stance.

  Every second was being bought—with blood, pain, and resolve.

  Ifa had earned them this.

  “You would die for this?!” Jaito bellowed, terror mixed with disbelief.

  Ifa smiled.

  It was not defiant. It was relieved.

  And then the skies broke open.

  A violet comet roared down, reality screaming in protest as it split the heavens—a streak of pure, pressure-drenched power that cut through space and cloud alike. Tunde.

  He was soaring from the shattered palace ruins, aura blazing like a fallen star. His presence alone warped the air, his floating blades reducing masters to pieces of falling flesh, his blade singing with authority that echoed through every cultivator's core.

  And Jaito, still burning, still roaring, saw him.

  So did Ifa.

  Their eyes locked.

  One last time.

  The old man’s smile turned bittersweet.

  Relief flooded his body. Tunde was alive, he was well, and he had advanced.

  “Tunde…”

  He saw what he needed to see; the boy had become a paragon. The heir of Alana was no longer hiding behind shadows, submission, and memories.

  He flew with his own power now.

  Ifa closed his eyes.

  The last of his strength surged upward.

  His core—his life—detonated, pulling all of Guyan’s essence with it, swallowing the sky in a maelstrom of violet flame, golden light, and raw destruction.

  And then—

  He was gone, nothing but memories and power unleashed left behind.

  *********

  Tunde tore through the skies like a falling star, a comet of wrath and desperation. He wasn’t thinking—not clearly.

  He didn’t void step, didn’t phase through space like he was capable of. No.

  He hurled himself forward, body blazing with authority and fury, force aspect wrapped around him like a cloak of vengeance.

  Skyvessels that tried to stop him were reduced to wreckage—torn apart by his floating blades or cleaved in half by the wrath of his relic.

  Ethra cannons, shield arrays, and defensive talismans all shattered in his wake like dry leaves before a storm.

  He didn't even know how he crossed the distance so fast.

  He just had to.

  And then he saw them.

  In the heart of devastation, Ifa and Jaito, locked together in a final embrace of hatred, both mortally wounded.

  Their bodies smoldering, spirits flaring violently against each other. The battlefield around them warped under the pressure of their duel, scorched lines of authority carved into the very sky, runes of pure destruction bleeding out into the land.

  Above them, the golden beam from the floating island of the arcanists split the sky in two—a divine omen.

  But Tunde didn’t care.

  Not about the regents.

  Not about their impending rise to the Hegemon Realm.

  Not about Adamath breaking apart beneath his feet.

  He didn’t even feel it as the land cracked, craters forming like wounds in the earth, skeletons of countless forgotten dead crumbling into the abyss below.

  All he saw was Ifa.

  And then, Ifa looked at him.

  Their eyes met, and everything froze.

  For a heartbeat, it was just them in the world.

  Tunde’s Ethra Sight caught it: golden lines of fragmentation spreading across Ifa’s soul and core. He saw the instability, the uncontainable rupture blooming inside the elder's body.

  A core moments from detonation.

  “No…”

  Ifa smiled.

  A tired, peaceful, almost fatherly smile.

  And then—

  The world went white, white-hot.

  Violent.

  Unstoppable.

  The explosion was more than light or heat; it was pure finality. Destructive power unrestrained by mercy or law.

  It tore through the firmament, devouring cloud, wind, and soil. Space screamed as it fractured under the pressure of a core's death willingly offered.

  Tunde screamed, but his voice was lost in the roar of a sun being born and destroyed all at once.

  He threw up shields of essence flame and raw authority, holding the others behind him—Sera, who clutched a battered Zhu, Elyria, barely upright, her blood trickling onto cracked stone.

  His companions were alive only because he stood between them and oblivion.

  And still, even with all his newfound power, he couldn’t stop it.

  When the brightness finally faded, it left a silence more deafening than thunder. Smoke clung to the ground like ghosts.

  The air reeked of ash and molten blood. The scent of something sacred—burned.

  Tunde void-stepped to the impact zone.

  What he found wasn’t a battlefield.

  It was an absence.

  A crater miles wide, gouged into the earth like a scar of grief itself.

  At the very center—

  One bone.

  Bleached white. Still smoldering.

  Tunde stared, his body frozen, floating just above the ground as wind whipped around him.

  He dropped to his knees.

  His fingers dug into ash and sand, clenched until they bled, but he didn’t notice. His mouth opened, and a howl tore loose—ragged, wounded, primordial.

  A sound of loss.

  A son’s cry for a father.

  Sera tried to speak, words choked in her throat. Elyria’s hand reached for him, trembling. Zhu, wounded but awake, could only bow his head.

  But Tunde heard nothing.

  Just the dull hum of static in his mind. A void echoing within him louder than the battlefield’s rage.

  No matter what they said, no matter who touched him, it was just silence.

  Because Ifa was gone.

  And Tunde had been too late.

  All around them, the land trembled. The skies grew dark. Clouds spiraled unnaturally, and a quake rolled across the continent like a wave of divine fury.

  Adamath shuddered, as if mourning its loss alongside him.

  And high above, the regents advanced.

  Reality twisted, fissures cracked the sky.

  And through it all, Tunde knelt, unblinking, unmoving, alone inside the quiet, while the world burned.

  ************

  The regents had felt it, each of their paragons perishing one after the other like candles snuffed in a storm.

  Their armies lay in ruin, scattered remnants of once-glorious sects and cults.

  The battlefield below was soaked in the blood of saints and masters alike, their deaths part of a senseless, brutal tide that fractured what remained of the cultivators of Adamath.

  And yet, the regents did not care; they had transcended concern.

  Perched on the edge of the impossible, they floated at the heart of the vast rift realm just beneath the floating island of the arcanists, surrounded by threads of raw Ethra and streams of stolen vitality.

  The deaths of billions, both cultivators and mortals, fueled their ascent. Cities, sects, empires… entire bloodlines erased in the name of their advancement.

  The sacrifices had not been offered willingly, but that too, was irrelevant.

  Centuries of planning, manipulation, and ruthless cultivation had led them here.

  Even the sudden emergence of Alana’s heir, a paragon forged in war and shadow, meant little to them. What was a single paragon, no matter how gifted, compared to a hegemon?

  Nothing.

  Queen Yara stood at the epicenter of it all, the architect of the formation inscribed into the bones of the floating island.

  She was radiant, crowned not in gold but in unyielding authority, her fingers weaving ancient scripts drawn from the First Runes, secrets only the arcanists had preserved.

  Behind her, kneeling like a penitent dog, was Borus. The artificer, though master-ranked and once arrogant beyond sense, now shook violently under the cascading waves of condensed Ethra flooding the ritual.

  He dared not move.

  Kaius Talahan’s eye twitched the moment he felt Jaito’s light extinguished, snuffed by none other than the child he had dismissed again and again.

  The other regents felt it too, that flicker of annihilation, the silence that follows when a weapon honed for centuries is shattered.

  But Kaius had not clawed his way to regency by mourning losses. His gaze remained forward. He simply clenched his jaw and breathed the insight deeper into his core, pressing onward.

  Yara’s voice rang out like a divine command.

  “Now.”

  At her word, the regents poured the full weight of their authority into the formation.

  The ritual reached completion, not in one instant, but in a crescendo, a divine cacophony of a thousand voices, thousands of wills, sacrificed for one cause.

  The entire floating island of the arcanists ignited with light and script, formations blooming like sunflowers under the heavens.

  And then, like a heaven’s tribulation made manifest, it was launched.

  The entire island hurled skyward like a divine missile, aimed not at the stars, but beyond them. Toward the prison.

  Toward the seal.

  The skies, already strained from the surge of unbalanced Ethra and death, gave way.

  The ancient bindings that Alana herself had cast over the world, bindings that had endured countless generations, held together by the will of a regent who had dared to protect an entire plane, began to snap like overstrained thread.

  And it happened.

  Not all at once.

  Not with fanfare.

  The sky peeled.

  Slowly. Silently. As if the heavens themselves were opening an old wound.

  It did not thunder; it unfolded.

  A seam tore through the firmament above them, not jagged, not violent, but surgical, deliberate. As if reality had always known this moment would come.

  Beyond it was not heaven. Not stars. Not realms of enlightenment.

  There was nothing, not blackness, not light, not even the void in the way Tunde had come to know it.

  This was absence, true and absolute, a place where even concepts failed to exist. No time. No direction. No Qi. No purpose.

  The cultivators who dared glance upon it found their senses betrayed, their thoughts tangled, as if even their minds were being forgotten.

  And something looked back.

  Not with hate, not with hunger, but with indifference so absolute it became terror.

  They, who had styled themselves the architects of a new Adamath, were beneath it. Less than sparks in the wind. Less than motes of dust floating in a dying world.

  A silent realization gripped each regent, even as their auras flared to keep their minds from fracturing.

  This was not the top; this was never the top. The sky had not been a gate; it had been a ceiling.

  And they had just torn it open.