The technique echoed like divine thunder, a sound that rolled across the fractured heavens and rippled through the broken land below.

  The abomination reeled, jerking violently to the side just before the technique could strike its core, its clawed limb sweeping upward and rending open the sky itself. Black lightning and raw void energy burst forth from the tear as it spun, its monstrous hand aimed at tearing Tunde in half.

  But Tunde was no longer there.

  In the space between instants, he reappeared behind the creature, another Void Devouring Palm already primed. It slammed square into its back, and the resulting blast forced a howl from the abomination, a scream that tore through the atmosphere, warping it.

  The strike had bitten deep.

  For the first time, its outer shell unravelled in strips of sickly flesh and viscous shadow, revealing something that churned Tunde’s stomach.

  Beneath the twisted layers of madness, he saw the original, what little remained of Borus.

  The artificer’s decayed body was fused grotesquely into the spine of the beast, his features caught in an expression of torment that bordered on ecstasy.

  His eyes, sunken and unfocused, flickered briefly as though seeing Tunde—begging, laughing, perhaps both.

  Disgust flared across Tunde’s face.

  That hesitation cost him.

  With a bone-splitting roar, the creature twisted, one massive arm catching him cleanly in the chest and slamming him into the ground like a meteor. The earth detonated beneath the impact, gouging a crater wide enough to swallow a city square.

  But Tunde rose.

  Dust rolled off him like mist. His robes were torn, his hair wild, but his stance was steady.

  The creature landed opposite him with a sound like tectonic plates grinding together.

  “I should have known,” it spat, its tone venomous, its many eyes blazing, “your bloodline doesn’t die easily.”

  It stepped forward, talons dragging through the air like blades.

  “So now you’ve tasted the law and scratched the surface of a Dao. And what? You think that changes anything?”

  It snarled, leaping forward.

  “Your hold is brittle! Fickle! You haven’t even formed a Dao seed yet!”

  Tunde didn’t answer.

  They met in the sky with a thunderclap, fists and claws colliding in an exchange that warped the very fabric of space. Tunde spun, ducked, weaved.

  His control of Qi was unrefined but instinctive, shaping into strikes, shields, and surging force just as easily as his Ethra-based techniques once had.

  He twisted beneath a blade-arm sweeping for his head—an attack strong enough to decapitate a Paragon—and drew his Qi into a single palm. He tried for Empty Silence, the old technique, but something new answered.

  A pulse of violet Qi, pure and sharp, erupted from his hand like a thunderbolt, striking the creature square in the face. It recoiled with a screech, stumbling backwards.

  Then it divided.

  Dozens of forms split from its body like shattered glass flying upward—copies, illusions, fragments—it didn’t matter. They filled the sky, blotting out the heavens with a swarm of writhing horrors, all converging on Tunde at once.

  “This plane is already forfeit!” it shrieked, its voice echoing from every form.

  “You’re too late! The Great Alignment will tear Adamath from the wheel! Your kind are not worthy to ascend to a true bound realm!”

  Tunde didn’t move.

  His hand outstretched behind him, and from the dust where his old body had fallen, Alana’s Fang trembled, then roared to life.

  It shot into his palm like a comet, slamming into his grasp with a satisfying crack.

  Violet scripts—ancient, otherworldly—flared across the blade’s surface. They shimmered like lightning dancing across metal, pulsing in tune with the hum of his Qi-infused core.

  The weapon inhaled the surrounding energy in a furious rush, drinking deeply of the power now flooding this broken world.

  The creature paused.

  Its many eyes widened in unison as, just behind Tunde, the void dragon took form—a vast, coiling shadow of violet flame and starless hunger. A beast made not of flesh or scale, but of presence of Dao of the void. It opened its eyes and the world dimmed.

  Tunde raised the blade.

  “Your words mean nothing to me,” he said—calm, cold, final.

  The forms lunged, a tide of blackened limbs and screaming maws closing in on him from every direction. But Tunde’s feet didn’t move.

  He stepped—and the world broke.

  Void Step.

  Not a technique anymore, but a part of him.

  One instant he was grounded. The next, he was in the air above them all, blade already descending. It sang as it fell, the ancient scripts glowing white-hot now, howling with the law of emptiness, of the void, of purification.

  The Fang struck true.

  It cut through the abomination’s core form, slicing through Qi, flesh, and corrupted essence alike. The blade didn’t cleave—it erased, removing the corrupted reality around it and replacing it with absence.

  The creature twisted violently out of the arc of the blade, but not fast enough. It lost one of its arms in the process, the limb vanishing in a swirl of violet flame and formless void.

  Its remaining arm snapped toward Tunde like a spear, a black blur of shrieking hatred, but it met the wall of his floating blades, the force of impact splintering them one by one.

  They shattered like glass, yet they had done enough. The momentum of the strike was dulled, the sheer force diffused just enough for Tunde to right himself mid-air, sliding back across fractured space.

  He hovered in the sky, chest heaving slightly, hands steady. His eyes, burning with insight, flicked upward.

  Above, the sky screamed.

  Lightning tore jagged scars across the heavens. Thunder cracked not just the air but the very fabric of Adamath. The land that had once begun to converge, continents being pulled together by whatever force had awakened, began to tear again.

  Not gently. Not with resistance. They fractured, cleaving in massive, violent ruptures that turned mountains into rubble and oceans into steam.

  From the rents in the world, Qi poured forth. Not like mist or smoke, but like a tide—pure, overwhelming, and foreign. The Ethra was gone, burned away, and in its place the true energy of existence began to flood in.

  Tunde nodded slowly, not to himself, but to the understanding that took hold in him.

  “Lies,” he said, his voice steady and clear.

  “Everything you’ve said… all of it. Lies.”

  The abomination froze mid-expansion, its attention snapping to him.

  “You’re not stronger than us. You’re not some judgment from the Wheel. You’re not a test. You simply took advantage. A parasite.”

  It snarled, guttural and low.

  “True,” Tunde continued, his tone sharpening into fury, “we may be suffering punishment from the heavens, from the Wheel—if such a thing still watches us, but it was never meant to be our extinction.”

  He took a slow breath, watching as the sky trembled above them, violet cracks growing deeper by the second.

  “It meant trial. It meant a breaking. The remaking of a world. The Alignment wasn’t the end—it was the pivot.”

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  He narrowed his eyes, voice dropping low and bitter.

  “And you… You’re just a scavenger feeding on the collapse.”

  The creature said nothing. But its rage was palpable.

  A hiss of pressure released from its grotesque form as it began to expand again, massive, uncontrollable.

  It swelled like a stormcloud about to devour the sun, its limbs fracturing into an impossible tangle of limbs, tendrils, and mouths.

  Tunde saw it.

  Not just with his Ethra Sight, though it was far more than that now. No, this was instinct. Bloodline ability. Something ancient in his bones pulsed, recognizing the abomination’s intent.

  It wasn’t trying to win through battle.

  It was trying to absorb Adamath entirely—every piece of land, every drop of life, every thread of Qi flooding through the shattered world. The great Alignment had rendered the plane vulnerable. And in that vulnerability, the creature would consume it whole, birth itself anew, and ascend into something far worse than a regent or hegemon.

  And it would have succeeded.

  It would have succeeded if not for him—the flaw in its design, the chink in the veil. The aberration it hadn’t anticipated. Tunde.

  He didn’t yet understand what his bloodline truly was. What it meant. But he knew, with every fiber of his being, that it mattered.

  And it was enough.

  Tunde looked down at the Fang in his hand.

  It trembled, responding not just to the weight of Qi or the presence of emptiness, but to the full, burning resonance of his Dao. Of the Void.

  He let it in.

  He poured himself into the weapon—his understanding, his insight, his surrender. The Dao of the Void was not stillness or numbness.

  It was acceptance and unmaking. A great, cosmic silence that followed only after truth had been spoken.

  The blade lit up.

  Violet light surged through its runes, igniting across its length like a wildfire, each symbol howling with ancient power. The color climbed into the sky, painting the heavens in a radiant, otherworldly hue. It was no longer just a blade. It was a key. A conduit.

  And behind it came a pressure—terrible, divine, infinite.

  Something responded.

  Tunde's hand tightened on the Fang, and with a voice that echoed not from his lips but from the very space around him, he spoke, quiet and cold:

  “You fed on our weakness. You misread our fall as death.”

  The void dragon behind him stirred—coiling, vast, watching.

  “But now you face the emptiness. And I am the vessel.”

  The abomination’s form surged forward in panic, a tidal wave of limbs crashing down.

  Tunde raised the Fang.

  And the sky began to scream.

  The dragon behind Tunde uncoiled from the sky like a living nebula of night—serpentine, coiling, its vastness dwarfing even the heavens that dared contain it. Stars blinked and vanished within its silhouette as it stretched open its limbs across the fabric of the firmament.

  It was a creature of concept, of ancient legacy, of Dao—an echo of what Tunde was becoming.

  Tunde surged forward, blade drawn back, his figure a streak of violet against the crackling sky.

  The creature met him with its horrors. Hundreds of limbs, grotesque and fleshy, reminiscent of the twisted monstrosity once birthed by Bai’s corrupted clone, a nightmare now made flesh and multiplied. They descended in waves, whipping and rending through the air, seeking to consume him in their tide.

  But Tunde moved through them like the void itself. Untouchable. Ethereal. The flow of Qi coursed around him, not resisting, but singing—guiding him, lifting him, empowering every step, every motion.

  As long as the heavens remained torn open, as long as the void above stayed exposed and the Dao of Emptiness hummed within him, he was not just a Saint.

  He was near invincible.

  The core. That was his aim.

  It pulsed deep in the abomination’s form like a second sun, glowing sickly and red-gold. From it, thousands of lesser forms ripped themselves free—screeching, winged aberrations, spiraling limbs, crawling, slithering mockeries of life—all heading straight for him like a tidal flood.

  Tunde’s brow furrowed, they never did seem to end.

  And then, like sparks in the dark, power flickered around him.

  Authority-laced techniques lit up the air. Lines of golden flame. Arcane wheels. Ribbons of concept and color and willpower, flaring like dying stars. Saints. Paragons. Even the remnants of the regents. They had not abandoned him.

  They held the line.

  Their efforts were flickers beside the blaze of his own Dao, but they were enough. They knew. Every one of them knew: Tunde was their only hope now. The rest were just buying him seconds.

  He gave a silent nod of acknowledgment, then pressed forward.

  The Law of Emptiness sang in his bones. The Law of Force, dim and inconsistent as it was, flowed with it now, like a river within a chasm.

  It surged through his limbs—not a torrent, but a concentrated pulse of power that exploded with every strike, every step.

  He shattered the wall of will that guarded the creature’s heart, punching through it like a blade through silk, and drove toward the writhing core where the grotesque shape of Borus hung—half-fused, his face a mask of agony and twisted bliss, caught in the torment of his own ambition.

  Tunde paused for only a heartbeat, staring into the bloodshot eyes of the dying artificer.

  How many tragedies had started with this man? Jade Peak. The schemes. The betrayals. The turning of the regents. The release of this thing now threatening the entire world.

  The Fang of Alana, awakened once again with his Dao and humming with Qi, tore clean through the protective shell encasing the artificer. It punched into his chest, through bone and heart and memory.

  Borus gasped. Mouth opening in pain. No words came.

  “Joran sends his greetings,” Tunde said, voice like polished iron, stripped of malice.

  The Law of Emptiness would not allow it. It dulled grief, denied vengeance. It simply was.

  The scream that followed did not come from Borus. It came from everywhere.

  Around him, the lesser creatures shrieked as they crumbled—some like ash, some like sand, others imploding into motes of Qi and light. All of them unraveling as if the very thread of their existence had been pulled loose.

  The world trembled again, far worse than before. Lightning cracked across the sky in rivers, not bolts. Veins of fire ran from horizon to horizon. The very plane of Adamath heaved, its crust groaning like a dying beast.

  Then—rupture.

  A sound like the shattering of a divine bell rang out. The great scream that followed tore the air apart as something snapped across the heavens. The opening above—the torn seal of the void—began to close, its jagged edges knitting back together with pulses of unfathomable force.

  Still, the lightning persisted. It wasn’t ending. It was aligning. Reality rippled in waves—shock after shock as Qi flooded the world like it had never known. The very nature of existence was changing.

  Tunde stood amidst it, hovering in the sky, his robes fluttering like they answered only to gravity’s memory. The body of the abomination was gone, turned to nothing—emptiness returned to emptiness—and only the half-destroyed husk of Borus remained, falling like a stone.

  Tunde inhaled, deeply.

  And then he roared.

  It was not a roar of victory. It was not triumph. It was release—a sound that resonated with every soul left alive across Adamath. It shook the bones of dying Saints. It rattled the hearts of hiding Masters. It rippled out through the torn lands and broken sky and scarred cities.

  It was the sound of a world remade.

  His presence surged outward, a beacon of violet light in a world still trembling, his very soul harmonizing with the new foundation of this changed realm.

  And below him—above him—around him, across the dying and surviving faces alike, there was only awe.

  For in the moment that followed, Tunde—Saint of the Emptiness, Heir of Path of the Void—stood alone against the skyline.

  And Adamath breathed again in delicate rasps.

  ******

  Broken ruins were all that remained of the capital.

  Where once had stood towers of white jade and marble, broad avenues etched with formation arrays, and spires that pierced the skies in testament to Adamath’s grandeur—there was now only ash. Dust. A barren, scorched desert.

  Wind blew across the flattened skeleton of what had once been a city of legacy, of lineage and power. It whispered the last prayers of the dead, carrying the bones of dreams now extinguished.

  The empire was gone.

  What future generations would one day call the shattered sands of Bloodfire had once been the nexus of the unified continent. Now? Merely another ruin. One more grave among many.

  The sun of Adamath burned high above once again, but the sky no longer looked the same. Everything had changed. The plane itself pulsed, alive with something new. A transformation both violent and irreversible.

  But all that would come later.

  Tunde landed.

  Silent. Effortless.

  The scorched winds died down around him as the pressure of his presence washed outward. Saints. Paragons. The fractured remnants of great clans. They all watched. Eyes wide. Breaths held.

  The regents, those who had survived, did not meet his gaze.

  No one needed to tell them what they already knew.

  Tunde was no longer just a Saint. He was something else. Something born from the void, forged by pain, crowned by emptiness.

  The foes among them turned to flee.

  Tunde almost laughed. These were the proud few who had once lorded over Adamath, who had torn open the heavens for hegemony.

  Now, stripped of Ethra, their bodies incapable of harmonizing with Qi, they were barely cultivators. Weak, spent, broken.

  They were ants scurrying from a coming storm.

  He crossed the distance between them in less than a breath.

  The first: Ayun of the Mistwalkers.

  His eyes, once smug and veiled, were wide now with pure terror. Tunde said nothing. He tore open his void space with a twist of his fingers and hurled Ayun inside like refuse. Whatever came of him, it would not be quick.

  The second: Arin of the Chronomancers.

  He tried to loop time, his signature technique. But his authority was a dying candle against a storm. Tunde raised his hand. Void Devouring Palm exploded from his palm in absolute silence.

  There was no scream. No trace. Arin was erased.

  The third: Bashu of the Heralds.

  Collapsed in the sand. Bloody, torn, barely clinging to life. Tunde paused over him for only a second. He looked down on the man who once called himself unbreakable. There was no hatred left. Just... pity.

  He turned away.

  The fourth: Zian of the Veilweavers.

  The man tried to speak. Tunde didn’t let him.

  A flicker of violet light and Zian’s head hit the sand.

  Then, the last.

  Kaius Talahan.

  The once-mighty patriarch knelt in the ruins of his palace, surrounded by heat and dust, one arm gone, a broken blade in the other. He didn’t raise it. He didn’t flinch. He only looked up, met Tunde’s gaze—and laughed, softly, bitterly.

  “I always expected it,” he said.

  “That the laws of existence would find a way to repay us for what we did. The price... was always coming.”

  Tunde stood still. Silent.

  Behind him, more arrived. Kael, whose blade sang low and grim as he ended Bashu. Mei, her robes torn, her power pulsing like a dying sun. Shen, grim-faced, torn between sorrow and judgment. Rhaelar. Varis.

  The survivors. The witnesses.

  They said nothing. They all knew what this moment was.

  “I thought we could cheat fate,” Kaius went on, voice hoarse.

  “The cults, we thought we were guarding Adamath. But we were just delaying its reckoning. That thing… maybe it was right. Maybe this is the judgment of the wheel.”

  He looked up at Tunde, not as a warrior, not even as a patriarch, but as a man at the end of the world.

  “Or maybe you are,” he whispered.

  “You, Tunde. The judgment itself.”

  Tunde turned.

  He looked at Mei, at Shen. At Rhaelar and Varis, whose faces held no sympathy, only cold resolve.

  “He cannot live,” he said.

  “We don’t expect him to,” Mei replied, her voice like ice drawn across steel.

  “There are fewer than a million of us left,” Shen added, quietly.

  “Our world... is bleeding.”

  They had lost more than cities. They had lost history. Generations. Everything that once gave Adamath its place among the stars.

  Tunde turned back to Kaius.

  He looked at the man. Really looked.

  And then, with a long breath, he turned his back and walked away.

  “Do with him what you will,” he said.

  “I’m going to find the people I care about.”

  His voice rose, then, loud enough for all to hear:

  “To those who supported the cults, if you still draw breath, know this. I will find you. And I will end you.”

  With that promise, the Void Devourer vanished, the wind swallowing the place he had stood.

  Only silence remained.