Everything Had Been Fated (3K)

Lin Qingzhou felt like he was falling.

Not plummeting—plummeting came with the rush of wind and the sensation of weightlessness.

It was more like something had sucked away the air and gravity around him. His body drifted weightlessly, his consciousness bobbing in the darkness.

He vaguely remembered a flash of blue light, Di Tian's dragon claw, and then a tearing sensation...

It wasn't his body being torn apart. Space itself had split open, and he had been shoved inside.

When he opened his eyes again, he was lying on a stretch of scorched earth.

The sky was dark red, like rusted iron scorched by fire. Something lay stretched out in the distance... It was so enormous that at first he thought it was a mountain range. Only when he saw the vertebrae jutting from its spine did he realize it was a dragon's skeleton.

It wasn't a Soul Beast, but a true dragon. A single rib was longer than the tallest building in Aolai City.

The skeleton stretched to the edge of his vision. Its gray-white bones were covered in cracks, and some had weathered into powder. When the wind blew, it sent up clouds of bone ash.

Something even larger lay farther away. A humanoid skeleton was half buried in the earth. Just the skull protruding aboveground was as big as a mountain, and a pool of stagnant water in its empty eye sockets glimmered with a ghostly green light.

The land was littered with these... the remains of colossal beasts, shattered weapons, and the ruins of collapsed palaces. There was no sound, nothing stirring except the wind.

This was that battlefield. The Ruins of the Divine War he was dragged into every night.

Only this time, the lingering shockwaves of destruction didn't tear him apart. The violent energies that used to lunge at him the moment they saw him now steered clear, as if making way for something.

Lin Qingzhou sat where he was, unresponsive.

Before, he would at least have been shocked.

He knew this wretched place too well, well enough to describe the pose of every corpse with his eyes closed. But now, he just sat on the ground, his hands resting on his knees, his breathing shallow, his eyes half open.

His mind refused to work. Or maybe he simply didn't want it to.

If he let it, he would remember the feeling of Na'er's hand slipping from his palm, that last tear, salty, falling onto the corner of his mouth before he could taste it.

He was still alive.

He had a Martial Soul now, cultivation, the bloodline of the Silver Dragon King flowing through his body. But thinking about it only made him feel even more incapable of moving... That girl had traded her life for this power.

He sat there like a machine with its power cut. Time grew hazy. Maybe a few minutes passed, maybe much longer. Then footsteps stopped in front of him.

They weren't human footsteps. They were too light, like metal touching the ground, accompanied by a faint mechanical hum.

Lin Qingzhou slowly raised his head.

A woman... if she could be called human.

Silver-gray hair fell to her waist, and faint blue strands of light ran through it like traces on a circuit board.

Her features were flawless, her skin a soft, translucent pale blue, with light faintly flowing beneath the surface.

Two rotating hexagonal rings of light filled her pupils. They regarded him with a gaze devoid of emotion, like a scanner's.

There was no doubt she was a stunning beauty, like a celestial maiden descended from the heavens. Even Lin Qingzhou couldn't find words to describe her beauty. But he no longer cared about any of that.

She had been standing there for some time. Lin Qingzhou hadn't noticed, and hadn't wanted to.

They stared at each other without a word.

She didn't move, like a statue. Lin Qingzhou didn't move either, like another statue. The only sound on the battlefield was the wind lifting bone ash in the distance.

After an unknown amount of time, she was the first to speak.

"Welcome to the End-of-All Divine Realm."

Her voice had no emotional inflection, and even the line between a question and a statement was blurred. Yet every word rang out with amplified clarity. It didn't travel through the air to his ears; it sounded directly inside his mind.

Lin Qingzhou didn't reply.

"I am the auxiliary personality of the End-of-All Divine Realm core, designation Zero. You can think of me as the caretaker of this Divine Realm. The Divine Realm is dead, but its final management protocol remains. That protocol now points to you."

She paused. "Is there anything you would like to ask?"

Lin Qingzhou lowered his eyes. Only after a long while did he speak, his throat so dry and hoarse it sounded as though it had been ground against stone. "Can I trade my life to bring Na'er back?"

Zero fell silent. The hexagonal rings in her pupils spun a little faster, as if calculating something, then slowed.

"No. I'm sorry, but your priority level is the highest. You cannot die," she answered truthfully.

Lin Qingzhou didn't even look disappointed. He simply lowered his head again.

He didn't ask why he couldn't die. He only knew one thing: it seemed there was no hope of bringing Na'er back.

Zero watched him, the rings of light in her pupils speeding up again.

She took half a step forward and crouched, bringing their eyes to the same level.

The movement was a little stiff, as if she had just retrieved the entry "how to comfort humans" from a database, but only loaded half of it.

"What you have lost is defined here as something important. Losing something important causes mental disarray. You are in a state of disarray, correct?"

Lin Qingzhou didn't answer.

Zero stood and didn't press him further. Instead, she turned toward the endless wasteland of corpses behind her. Then she began to speak...

Not to Lin Qingzhou, but more as if retrieving a long-sealed record and reading it aloud.

"You are forcibly pulled in here every night. It isn't a random occurrence. Something within you has resonated with the core of the Divine Realm. Or, more precisely, it has created a sympathetic vibration."

"This Divine Realm was once preparing to ascend into a God Star... Can you understand the concept of a God Star? It means raising an entire plane by one dimension, allowing every living being here to attain eternal life."

"Only a very small number of Divine Realms in the universe dare attempt such a thing. The End-of-All Divine Realm was one of them. Our Supreme God, God of End, had grown strong enough to touch that threshold. But something went wrong during the ascension... The universe's laws turned against him."

Lin Qingzhou showed no interest, but Zero continued.

"To be precise, he went mad. Can you imagine how dangerous someone with a muddled mind and strength close to that of a God Star would be?"

"One person couldn't hold him down. Two couldn't restrain him either. In the end, all the God Kings joined forces—thirteen of them, fighting together... You can see the result for yourself."

She raised a hand and gestured at the corpses around them.

"Before God of End died, he slaughtered every living being in the entire Divine Realm. The God Kings were wiped out, and countless gods fell. He died in the end too, but all that remained of the Divine Realm were these."

"I'm only a semi-intelligent management system. I had no authorization to interfere in that war, so I could only watch helplessly. After the war, I maintained the Divine Realm's operations in accordance with the final surviving command. But that command remained incomplete... until your arrival activated the God Throne."

She lowered her head and glanced at Lin Qingzhou.

"In other words, you will inherit the God Throne of End in the future. You will become the new master here. There is no room for negotiation. The bond has already been formed."

When Lin Qingzhou heard the words "God Throne of End," seven characters flashed through his mind, from that leather notebook...

"I am the end, I am the calamity."

So that was what it meant. He had finally solved the mystery, but realized he didn't care at all. So what if the answer had been revealed? That girl was gone.

"Are you telling me this to make me happy?" Lin Qingzhou's voice was flat, like a pool of dead water.

Zero didn't answer. She fell silent again, this time for much longer than before.

The hexagonal pupils spun rapidly, emitting a faint whirring sound.

She was using a great deal of processing power to calculate the human's emotional state... grief, guilt, sense of loss, loss of purpose in life.

Her database had an explanation for each of them, but taken together, she couldn't provide a reasonable solution.

The calculations went on for a long time, long enough that Lin Qingzhou thought she had crashed.

Then, at last, she blinked and raised her right hand, making a gentle swipe through the air.

The world split open.

It wasn't the light effect of a teleportation array, nor did it resemble a Soul Skill. Space was like a sheet of white paper cut open, the edges neat and the cross-section smooth.

Beyond the rift lay a completely different space... gray-white marble flooring, a ceiling too high to see, and everything bathed in a cold, faint glow, as if moonlight had frozen into ice.

"What you're looking for may not have completely disappeared."

Zero stepped through first without looking back. Her footsteps remained as mechanical and precise as ever, each one falling along the same straight line.

Lin Qingzhou stared at her back for a few seconds. He didn't know what she meant, and he didn't want to ask.

But he still got to his feet... not because he was curious, but because his legs had been still too long and moved on their own, like instinct.

As he passed through the rift, a chill swept over him. It wasn't the cold of low temperature, but a silence that reached to the marrow.

His footsteps echoed hollowly across the marble floor, each step slow and dragging.

Zero stopped in front of something.

It was an ice coffin, set in the very center of the temple. Above the raised platform, a slowly rotating light source hovered in the air, casting pale blue light over the coffin's surface and refracting it into soft, concentric halos.

The ice hadn't melted or cracked. It looked as though it had just frozen, yet also as though it had been frozen for a very, very long time.

Inside the coffin lay a humanoid shadow.

Its outline was blurry, its details distorted by the ice. Its face was impossible to make out, and even its shape was indistinct.

Only a head of silver hair drifted faintly beneath the ice, like moonlight submerged underwater.

Lin Qingzhou stopped. His pupils abruptly contracted, and his heart pounded once, then again. It was as if a splash of cold water had jolted him back to life. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

Zero tilted her head and watched his face. The rings of light rotated twice, and she spoke in the tone of someone reporting a result.

"No signs of life detected. But residual energy of the same origin remains."

She didn't explain what that meant, and had no intention of doing so. Her database told her that when humans heard vague hints of hope, they filled in the blanks themselves, and that often worked better than anything she could say.

Lin Qingzhou dropped onto the ground beside the ice coffin and simply sat there. He didn't speak or cry.

But his eyes were no longer empty. A ring of silver-violet light was turning slowly within them, as though waking from a long slumber.

He stared at the faint outline inside the ice coffin and rasped out a single word.

"...Idiot."