Tunde tore through the fractured sky like a violet meteor, Ethra burning in his wake.

  His Paragon speed cut through the oppressive weight radiating from the massive sphere, an aberration of flesh and void, its heartbeat pulsing like a war drum, counting down to the birth of something worse than death.

  All around him, Adamath’s cultivators fought like cornered beasts, trading limbs and lives to hold back the tide of horror that spilled endlessly from the cracked, breathing sphere.

  Alana’s Fang danced in his grip, carving glowing arcs of raw authority, essence flame crackling as it sheared through the monsters. Each strike was a hymn of fury, a prayer of vengeance.

  His eyes never left the sphere.

  Near it, the regents fought, if one could call it that. Their techniques, grand and blinding, cracked reality like glass, but failed to do more than annoy the creature.

  Tunde’s gaze swept across them, and for a heartbeat, a fire kindled in his gut. He itched to strike them down. Kaius. Shuyin. Fehan. All of them.

  Cowards. Tyrants.

  Kaius, who had bartered Adamath’s future for a crown of ash. Shuyin, who weighed souls on golden scales like she hadn’t crushed thousands beneath her judgment.

  Yara, the architect of treason. And the others, who either followed or stayed silent.

  He passed them all, flashing through their dominions, through their relic-born defenses. They felt him. They saw him. A blur of void and fury, surging past like a phantom on the warpath.

  And not one dared to strike. Not even Kaius. But Tunde wanted them to. His teeth clenched; his heart thundered. Dare me. Just one of you. Try it. Let’s see if your greed and ambition are worth dying over.

  They didn’t. Not because they feared him, perhaps, but because deep down, in whatever remained of their tattered honor, they knew.

  They had brought this.

  The sphere, the thing that had once been Borus, loomed ever larger. Black veins rippled beneath its surface. Shrieks echoed from its many wounds, creatures spilling like blood, like pus, into the world.

  Tunde pressed forward.

  He remembered.

  He remembered the boy who’d once stood within inches of death in the wastelands, wondering who he truly was.

  He remembered the journey, the friends, the loss. The pain. The impossible climbs. Jade Peak. Black Rock. The Ashen Flame. The Wastes. The capital. Ifa’s death.

  He remembered the promise he made.

  And now, that promise walked behind him. Every cultivator who stood defiant. Every soul who still dared to breathe in a dying world. They followed him, not because of a title, but because they believed.

  He neared the sphere.

  Borus, what remained of him, wanted him close. He could feel it in the pull, the insidious allure that whispered through his bones. A trap. Of course it was.

  Good.

  Let it be one.

  Tunde surged forward, his aura exploding outward in a violent storm. He drew back his naginata, Alana’s Fang blazing with every drop of authority he had left, and then some. It thrummed with memory, with legacy, with wrath.

  He struck.

  The blow crashed against the sphere’s flesh—no, its shell, with enough power to crack the sky. The impact sent shockwaves tearing through what remained of the heavens, turning clouds into ribbons of vapor, the air itself rupturing with the violence.

  The sphere shuddered. Then it split.

  And the world screamed.

  A wave of raw, soul-shattering cold burst outward. Cultivators staggered. Some fell. Even Saints reeled.

  Tunde’s eyes widened as his most lethal technique, Empty Silence, manifested, a field of void-stained energy painting the skies purple as it slammed down like judgment itself. An explosion followed, a concussive blast that peeled back the very fabric of the world.

  Chunks of the sphere rained down like black meteors.

  And in the silence that followed…

  A hand settled on his shoulder.

  Tunde froze. Not from fear, but from something worse.

  The absence of everything.

  His eyes moved, slowly, as though dragged through mud, and there, hovering beside him, was a presence he hadn’t sensed so much as felt in his soul.

  An eye opened.

  Not his. Not Borus’s. The eye.

  It stretched across the void of the heavens, a pupil of oblivion itself, yawning wide across the sky. A terrible, devouring void that gazed at reality with nothing inside it but apathy.

  The figure beside him wasn’t Borus. Not anymore.

  The thing's form shifted with wet, gelatinous slowness. Flesh, steel, rune, script, rot. A smile curved lips that were not lips. A whispering voice echoed, not in the air, but in Tunde’s head.

  "So this is the heir."

  Tunde couldn’t move.

  This was not a creature. Not a rift beast or guardian. This was not power or even cultivation.

  This was death ascended.

  Taint incarnate.

  The world had paused. And something had stepped through.

  All around him, the pressure was absolute. It wasn't mere gravity or force. It was the weight of presence, of a truth too ancient and immense to be named.

  Paragons collapsed. Saints screamed as they were forced to their knees. Even the regents, pillars of the plane, so-called pinnacles of cultivation of their own design, shook and bowed to the ground like insects beneath a descending mountain.

  It didn’t matter what cultivation realm you had reached—here, nothing mattered.

  The being beside Tunde had erased the concept of resistance itself.

  Tunde felt it the moment it touched his soul; his aura vanished. Not dissipated. Not dispersed. Snuffed. Like a candle in a hurricane.

  His cultivation, once roaring and defiant, folded in on itself like ash in wind. The very earth beneath his boots buckled and groaned as if straining to hold together under this... thing.

  "You are wondering," it said.

  Tunde could not move. Could not think. Only tremble.

  The voice crawled into his ears, not through sound, but as an echo etched into his bones. He couldn’t turn his head, couldn’t breathe properly.

  His soul screamed. His heart pounded in rebellion, desperate to continue its rhythm in a body that no longer felt like his own.

  "How?" it mused, amused.

  "How did it come to this? From a war of ego and greed… to this."

  It didn’t speak loud—but its words rang across the world.

  "You wonder how your precious regents, your shining towers of strength, your so-called 'pinnacles'... have doomed you all."

  It laughed. And that sound, it wasn’t a sound. It was a fracture. A ripple across the fabric of reality that made the clouds split, made what mountains were left weep molten tears.

  Tunde swallowed hard, blood iron on his tongue. His limbs shook. His authority flickered, then died. His vision blurred until all that remained was dread.

  "They were fools," the being continued, hand still resting on Tunde’s shoulder like the kiss of a revenant’s plague.

  "Puppets. No, worse, willing puppets. Obsessed with advancement, with power, with control. And none of them, not one, remembered the truth.”

  It stepped in front of him then, and the world darkened.

  Tunde's breath caught. His eyes overflowed with tears—not from emotion, but from terror. Raw, unfiltered, animal fear. He couldn't comprehend what he was seeing.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  One moment it was a tangle of black tendrils, slithering in impossible directions; the next it was a towering figure of red flesh and fanged smiles, its oval head splitting open to reveal endless rows of teeth.

  Reality refused to define it. Even Tunde’s Ethra sight blinked, failed, and finally shut down entirely—as if it, too, was afraid.

  "You see," the being said, its voice now almost gentle, a whisper made of rot,

  "Your world, this prison you call a home, was never part of the tapestry. It tore itself from the wheel of existence."

  Tunde’s knees buckled in the air.

  "The current regents don’t remember. But their predecessors did. The princess... that fool Alana, sealed this world away to stop me. And in doing so, she sealed your fate as well.”

  It chuckled again, and the sound made the air tremble.

  “I am judgment made flesh. The wheel’s forgotten blade. I was meant to be the crucible of your world... to purify it. But instead, she left me adrift in the void-path, a fragment cast into the dark, waiting, struggling to manifest as rifts. And now?”

  It extended its arms to the blackened sky, to the cracked heavens. To the ruin that Adamath had become.

  “The wheel demands a reckoning.”

  And it laughed again.

  Tunde roared.

  It wasn’t a battle cry.

  It was fear. Madness. Defiance. His throat tore open as the sound burst from him, his soul trying to shake itself free from paralysis, to regain anything. Motion. Breath. Will.

  The being turned. Palm outstretched. A force—not Ethra, not aura, not concept, but something older, wrong—smashed into his chest.

  His world imploded.

  The sky vanished.

  Tunde’s imbuement shattered like thin glass, and his body snapped as if made of dry twigs. His heart stopped. His bones cracked inward. His lungs collapsed.

  He was flung from the heavens like a comet, crashing into the desecrated land below with such force the ground cratered and bled dust and brittle bones.

  Everything went black.

  Then pain.

  He woke, blood filling his mouth, choking on it. Gasping. Convulsing. His vision blurred, narrowed. The sky above him was a canvas of void. The laughter of the being echoed above him, joyous and full.

  “Oh! To see the last of her spawn broken, gasping, drowning in dirt!” it howled.

  “I must thank you, Kaius. Shuyin. All of you bastards. Your greed brought this day!”

  Tunde’s mind fractured. He clawed for consciousness, one hand limply dragging toward his void ring.

  Around him, desperate hands tried to help—familiar voices screamed his name. Elixirs were poured into his mouth. Pills forced between his teeth. Cultivators rallied to protect him, to revive him.

  But something else had entered him.

  Something foreign. It wormed through his torn flesh. It chewed through his Ethra lines, and it slithered into his veins. It ate into his soulspace—and with a jolt, Tunde felt it breach the final barrier.

  It was heading straight for the inheritance of Alana herself.

  Tunde’s body spasmed. His eyes rolled. His hands gripped the dirt until blood pooled in his fists.

  And above, in the broken heavens, death incarnate smiled.

  *****

  All across Adamath, a pressure descended so vast and alien it did not simply weigh on the cultivators; it invaded them.

  Lords cracked under its presence, turning on themselves in mad, shrieking bloodlust. Highlords wept rivers of red from their eyes as their Ethra lines ruptured.

  Masters screamed as their minds twisted, clawing at their own faces or tearing into the earth like animals. The plane itself warped beneath it, continents groaning and buckling like glass under fire.

  This wasn’t just an invasion; it was a redefinition of what power was.

  And at its center, near the cratered husk of Tunde’s body, paragons strained against the invisible hand pressing them down, their limbs trembling, their authority flickering like dying torches.

  Still, they moved. Inch by inch, bone by bone. Drawn not by logic but by something deeper, instinct. A voice in the marrow of their bones told them what the mind could not.

  Help him. If he dies, there is no tomorrow.

  Even the Saints, those touched by the fabric of the world’s laws, couldn’t move. Not because they lacked the will.

  But because something greater than law held them down. Their own strength bound them, like a cruel mockery of everything they had ever cultivated.

  And above them, the regents watched.

  They saw what was happening. Saw their proud legacies kneel in dust. Their paragons bent. Their saints powerless. Their precious factions fractured beyond repair. And then, the creature turned its gaze to them.

  To where two figures had risen—trembling, but standing.

  It tilted its grotesque head, voice thundering with false delight.

  “Oh?”

  One of the figures laughed—a deep, bitter laugh that rang hollow across the broken heavens. Flames, black as midnight and edged with crimson, coiled around his tall, lean frame like the hands of death.

  “To be bested by a mere child,” he mused, voice low, bitter, yet proud.

  “A fitting humiliation, I suppose.”

  His presence reeked of mortality—and refusal. He was not the Regent of the Envoys. But he was still death given shape.

  The being in the sky tilted its head, as if savoring a familiar taste.

  “Kaius Talahan,” it intoned.

  The patriarch of the Talahan clan gripped the hilt of his blade, one forged by his own hand, by his own essence flame and authority. The fire of his legacy flared to life. At first it sputtered, like a dying breath—but then it ignited, roaring into a cyclone of black flame and lightning that scorched the very air above him.

  Beside him floated Queen Yara of the Arcanists, her presence radiant and composed. Gold and blue flames danced behind her, runes glowing as her authority gathered around her in the shape of a radiant humanoid avatar. Her eyes held centuries of regret—and unshaken purpose.

  The creature clapped.

  “Oh, yes. Yes! This is it—the pinnacle of Adamath’s power. Laughable… but beautiful!”

  With an almost amused gesture, it flicked its fingers, and the pressure dropped. Like chains unfastened. The other regents, stunned and weakened, found their limbs free.

  They stood—each of them bloodied, betrayed by their own ambition, but alive.

  Kaius stepped forward, every footfall burning the ground beneath him into molten glass.

  “All my life,” he said, voice low but thundering,

  “I have chased the impossible. Wealth, prestige, authority, they were not the goal. They were the means.”

  His blade twitched, pulsing with fury.

  “I knew there was something beyond the heavens, beyond this small world where I had reached the peak. I was right, wasn’t I?” he asked, eyes locking onto the abomination.

  The creature tilted its head.

  “Your feeble minds cannot grasp the scale of the true cosmos. You do not yet understand what it means to be nothing.”

  “Good,” Kaius muttered, nodding.

  “Then let me show you what it means to become something.”

  “I sacrificed everything—my clan, my blood, my world—for power. And though I did not find what I sought; I did reach the veil beyond this reality. I’ve seen the truths your kind keeps hidden. I have touched the threshold.”

  From behind him, Bashu's body rumbled like a drumbeat.

  “I am Bashu of the Heralds,” he said, his form swelling with red and gold authority.

  Twin hammers spun at his sides, glowing with thunder and war.

  One by one, the regents stepped forward.

  Ayun. Yensu. Fehan. Arin. Shuyin. Shang.

  Each of them battered. Each of them broken. Each of them carrying the weight of failure.

  But for this moment, they stood. Their relics hummed with ancestral might. Their dominions flared to life. The air trembled, as if the world itself watched them with bated breath.

  “Perhaps we were meant to pay for our sins,” Yara said softly. Her voice carried a grave beauty.

  “I knew the seal’s weight. I knew. But I wanted more. I wanted freedom—truth.”

  Her hands extended as her aura swirled around her like a storm of living script.

  “I have doomed my people,” she said, voice breaking with sorrow,

  “but if this is judgment, then so be it. We are ready.”

  She clenched her fist.

  “You are not refining Adamath. You are not consuming us. You are the crucible. And this is the trial, to see whether our world is ready to ascend.”

  For the first time, the creature faltered.

  Its smile shrank. For a heartbeat, the void stilled.

  Then it roared—a deep, sick laughter that made the air scream.

  “If only your ancestors could see what you’ve become,” it said.

  “Arcanists? You call yourselves arcanists? Your clan’s eternal patriarch still lingers in a forgotten fragment of existence, in isolated training, unaware that a forgotten branch of his scions bicker over scraps and illusions of control on a worthless world.”

  Yara said nothing.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the creature said, voice colder now.

  “You will be refined. Your laws, your insights, your very souls—fuel for the next stage of my advancement.”

  It extended a hand—where a black orb coalesced, dense with corruption, the concentrated force of void. It sucked in all light, all color, and with a flick of its clawed finger, it hurled the orb toward them like the wrath of a dying universe.

  Kaius didn’t hesitate.

  He roared, a cry that cracked the earth itself, and surged forward in a cyclone of fire and lightning. His blade, burning with every sin and every sacrifice, met the orb—

  —and split it in half.

  Black shards of uncreation scattered into the air.

  And behind him, the last of Adamath’s pinnacles took their stances. Not as tyrants. Not as saviours. Not as rulers.

  But as the damned—who chose to fight anyway.

  It shuddered and became two spheres that shot in two different directions.

  ****

  Tunde felt the life bleeding from him, siphoned by the insidious corruption now burrowed deep within. It wasn’t just pain—it was unmaking.

  The foulness crept through his Ethra lines like acid, eating away at the very foundation of his existence and cultivation.

  Not even the countless trials he'd endured—the crucibles, the battles, the relentless march through blood and sweat—could stop this corrosion. His vitality, once a raging sea of lifeforce, now flickered like a dying ember.

  Within his soulspace, the inheritance of Alana, the last legacy of a forgotten regent, hummed with discordant force. A sound like the crackle of thunder mixed with the deep groan of breaking stone. It was resisting. Barely.

  The black stone gate of the inheritance pulsed—once, then twice—each pulse sending out waves of violet radiance as if drawing a breath of its own.

  Then, with a sound like a scream of splintering heavens, the golden chains sealing the gate burst open. Not with grace, but with violence, like a dam shattering under unbearable pressure.

  The chains shot toward the encroaching darkness like golden serpents, lashing at the void. But rather than attack it directly, they curled downward, arcing toward the dimly flickering figure of Tunde’s spiritual form, now translucent, a ghost of what it once was.

  Then—impact.

  They slammed into him.

  Violet and gold fire exploded across his soulspace, engulfing him in light. It wasn't warmth. It was judgment.

  His entire being lit up like a bonfire in a storm, every inch of him screaming with memory and flame as the gates of the inheritance swung open.

  From within them spewed a golden light so blinding, so pure, it made the darkness recoil. It pressed the foulness back—not eradicating it, but holding it. For now.

  And yet... nothing more.

  No miracle followed. No divine answer. Just a fragile silence.

  The darkness was held at bay—but it waited, coiling like a beast denied its prey. And what little remained of Tunde’s spirit hung there, caught between life and death, cradled by fire and shadow.

  Still... it was a lifeline.

  A single breath left in lungs that should have been still. A single beat of a shattered heart. The heavens—or whatever force now watched Adamath—had granted him one final mercy. But even he knew: this was the last.

  No more fate. No more luck. No more second chances.

  This was his final crucible.

  His spiritual self turned its mind away from his broken, bleeding physical body—now left to the protection of his allies. They would guard it, if only for a few more breaths. It would have to be enough.

  Because he had something to do—something so insane, so impossible, it could unmake him.

  He turned.

  To the gate.

  It loomed like a monolith before him, still glowing with ancient fire. And beyond it, coiled and watching, was the serpentine entity.

  Not silent. Not passive. It stared at him now, no longer amused. Its gaze bristled with something new: expectation. And rage.

  Tunde didn’t flinch.

  He had come this far.

  He stepped forward, toward the glowing carvings on the gate, etched into it like divine scripture burned into reality.

  The first of six.

  ‘Law of Emptiness’

  Tunde exhaled.

  Then he sat. Legs crossed. Spine straight.

  His existence teetered on the edge of oblivion, but he ignored the decay within. He drowned out the pain, the dying world, the screams in the distance.

  His final battle was not one of blade or blood.

  It was of understanding.

  And so, he closed his eyes…

  …and reached for the first law of the void.