Everything is Destined

Lin Qingzhou felt as if he were falling.

It was not a descent; a descent would have the sound of wind and the sensation of weightlessness.

It was more as if something had drained the air and gravity from around him, leaving his body drifting, his consciousness bobbing in the darkness.

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

It was not his body being torn, but space itself being ripped open, and he had been shoved inside.

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

The sky was a dark, bruised red, like rusted iron scorched by fire. Something lay stretched out in the distance... it was too massive; at first, he thought it was a mountain range, until he saw the protruding joints of a spine and realized it was the skeleton of a dragon.

It was not a Spirit Beast, but a true dragon; a single rib was longer than the tallest building in Proud Arrival City.

The skeleton stretched to the edge of his vision, the grayish-white bone covered in cracks, some parts weathered into powder that rose in clouds of ash whenever the wind blew.

Further off, there were even larger things. A humanoid skeleton was half-buried in the soil, its skull alone as large as a mountain, with a pool of stagnant, ghostly green water pooled in the hollow of its eye socket.

The ground was littered with these... the remains of giant beasts, broken weapons, and the ruins of collapsed palaces. There was no sound, no movement of any kind, save for the wind.

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

Only this time, he was not torn apart by the lingering ripples of destruction. The violent energies that used to pounce on him the moment they saw him were now circling around him, as if avoiding something.

Lin Qingzhou sat where he was, showing no reaction.

In the past, he would have at least been shocked.

He knew this hellish place too well, so well that he could describe the posture of every corpse with his eyes closed. But now, he simply sat on the ground, hands resting on his knees, his breathing shallow, his eyes half-lidded.

His brain refused to turn, or rather, he did not want to let it.

The moment it turned, he would recall the feeling of Na'er's hand slipping from his palm, and that final tear—salty, landing on the corner of his mouth—which he hadn't had the chance to taste.

He was still alive.

He had a Martial Soul, he had cultivation, and the bloodline of the Silver Dragon King flowed within him. But the moment he thought of this, he became even more unable to move... this power was something that girl had traded her life for.

He sat there like a machine with its power cut. His sense of time became blurred; it might have been minutes, or it might have been a long time. Until a pair of footsteps stopped before him.

They were not human footsteps. They were too light, as if metal were touching the ground, accompanied by a faint mechanical hum.

Lin Qingzhou slowly raised his head.

A woman... if she could be counted as human.

Silver-gray hair hung to her waist, embedded with faint blue light-filaments that looked like traces on a circuit board.

Her features were so exquisite they lacked a single flaw, her skin a soft, pale-blue translucent material through which one could faintly see light flowing beneath.

Her pupils were two rotating hexagonal rings of light, looking at him with that emotionless, scanner-like gaze.

Without a doubt, she was a quintessential beauty, even like a celestial being from the heavens. Even Lin Qingzhou could not find any words to describe her perfection. But he no longer cared about any of that.

She had been standing there for a while. Lin Qingzhou hadn't noticed, nor did he want to.

The two just looked at each other, neither speaking.

She did not move, like a statue. Lin Qingzhou did not move, like another statue. On the battlefield, there was only the sound of bone ash being stirred by the wind.

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

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

Her voice lacked any emotional fluctuation; even the boundary between a question and a statement was blurred. Yet every word was as clear as if it had been amplified, not transmitted through the air into his ears, but ringing directly inside his brain.

Lin Qingzhou did not reply.

"I am the core auxiliary personality of the End-of-All Divine Realm, designated Zero. You may understand me as the steward of this Divine Realm. The Divine Realm is dead, but the final management protocols remain, and that protocol now points to you."

She paused. "Do you have any questions?"

Lin Qingzhou lowered his eyes, and it was a long while before he spoke, his voice dry and hoarse as if it had been ground against stone: "Can I trade this life to bring Na'er back?"

Zero fell silent. The rotation speed of the hexagonal rings in her pupils accelerated slightly, as if calculating something, then slowed down.

"Negative. I am sorry, your priority level is the highest; you cannot die." She answered truthfully.

Lin Qingzhou didn't even show an expression of disappointment; he simply buried his face back down.

He did not ask why he could not die; he only knew one thing: Na'er seemed to have no hope of resurrection now.

Zero watched him, the rings in her pupils accelerating their rotation again.

She took half a step forward and crouched down, bringing their lines of sight to the same level.

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

"The things you have lost are defined here as 'important items.' The loss of important items leads to mental disorder. You are in a state of disorder, are you not?"

Lin Qingzhou did not answer.

Zero stood up, not pressing him further, but turned around to face the endless wasteland of corpses behind her. Then she began to speak...

Not to Lin Qingzhou, but as if she were accessing a dusty file, reading and relaying it as she went.

"The fact that you are forcibly dragged here every night is not a random event. It is because there is something within you that resonates with the core of the Divine Realm. Or rather, it is a resonance."

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

"In this universe, only a handful of Divine Realms dare to attempt such a feat, and the End-of-All Divine Realm was one of them. Our main god, the God of End, possessed power sufficient to touch that threshold. But something went wrong during the ascension... he was backlashed by the laws of the universe."

Lin Qingzhou showed no interest, but Zero continued regardless.

"To put it specifically, he went insane. Can you imagine how dangerous a guy is when he has lost his mind but possesses power approaching that of a God Star?"

"One person couldn't hold him down, and two couldn't restrain him. Later, all the God Kings—thirteen in total—joined forces and struck together... You have already seen the final result."

She raised her hand, gesturing to the surrounding corpses.

"Before the God of End died, he slaughtered every living soul in the entire Divine Realm. All the God Kings were annihilated, and countless gods fell. In the end, although he died as well, this is all that remains of the Divine Realm."

"I am merely a semi-intelligent management system; I lacked the authorization to intervene in that war and could only watch helplessly. After the war, I maintained the operation of the Divine Realm according to the final standing orders, but those orders were never completed... until your arrival activated the God Throne."

She lowered her head to look at Lin Qingzhou.

"In other words, you will inherit the God Throne of End in the future. You will become the new master of this place. This is non-negotiable; the binding is already complete."

When Lin Qingzhou heard the words "God Throne of End," seven words flashed through his mind—the ones written in that leather-bound notebook...

"I am the End, I am the Calamity."

So that was what it meant. The mystery was finally solved, yet he found that he didn't care at all. What did it matter if the riddle was solved? That girl was gone anyway.

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

Zero did not answer. She fell silent again, and this time, the silence lasted significantly longer than before.

Her hexagonal pupils rotated at high speed, emitting a faint buzzing sound.

She was utilizing massive computing power to analyze the human's current emotional state... grief, self-reproach, a sense of loss, the absence of meaning in life.

Every item had a corresponding explanation in her database, yet when combined, she could not provide a logical processing solution.

The calculation lasted a long time, so long that Lin Qingzhou thought she had crashed.

Then, she finally blinked, raised her right hand, and gently sliced 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 tore like a sheet of white paper being cut, the edges neat and the cross-section smooth.

On the other side of the rift lay a completely different space... gray-white marble floors, a dome so high it was invisible, and everything shrouded in a cold, faint shimmer, as if moonlight had frozen into ice.

"What you are looking for may not have completely vanished."

Zero walked in first without looking back. Her gait remained mechanical and precise, each step landing on the exact same straight line.

Lin Qingzhou stood frozen, watching her back for a few seconds. He didn't know what she was talking about, nor did he want to ask.

Yet, he stood up anyway... not out of curiosity, but because his legs had been still for too long and moved on their own, like an instinct.

As he passed through the rift, a chill washed over him—not a cold of temperature, but a silence that seeped into the marrow.

His footsteps echoed hollowly against the marble floor, each one dragging slowly.

Zero stopped in front of something.

It was an ice coffin, standing in the very center of the temple. Above the dais hovered a slowly rotating light source, casting pale blue rays onto the surface of the coffin and refracting soft, concentric halos.

The ice had not melted, nor did it have cracks; it looked as if it had just been frozen, or perhaps, frozen for a very, very long time.

Inside the ice coffin lay a humanoid silhouette.

The outline was blurred, details distorted by the refraction of the ice layers; he could neither see the face nor distinguish the figure.

Only a head of silver hair floated slightly beneath the ice, like moonlight submerged at the bottom of a lake.

Lin Qingzhou stopped dead. His pupils contracted violently, his heart hammered once, then again—the sensation of coming back to life felt like being splashed with ice water. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

Zero tilted her head, watching his face. Her halo rotated twice, and she spoke in a tone like a report of findings.

"No vital signs detected. However, residual energy of the same origin still exists."

She did not explain this sentence, nor did she intend to. Her database told her that humans would automatically fill in the blanks when hearing a vague hope, and the effect of that self-deception was often better than anything she could say.

Lin Qingzhou sat down on the floor beside the ice coffin. He simply sat there, saying nothing, not crying either.

But his eyes were no longer empty; that ring of silver-purple light was slowly rotating, as if waking from a long slumber.

He stared at the vaguely visible silhouette inside the ice coffin, his voice raspy as he spat out a single word.

"...Fool."