A Kind of Future

"Of course, Mr. Zhao Cheng, you are the exception. You are an anomaly—a celestial being from Eastern legend, a pure-blooded son of the gods from Western myth. Like Zeus in the old tales, though raised by mortals, your divine power was not diminished in the slightest. Once you came of age, you possessed the ability to slay the previous generation's god-king."

Lord sighed with emotion, his gaze turning toward the sky.

Though it was already afternoon, summer had arrived, and night fell late. The sky was still bright at this hour.

"The West has fatalism, the East has causality. Every calamity, every turn of fortune... For someone like you to be born so suddenly, even I find it difficult to fathom just how terrifying the calamities ahead may be!"

"Some time ago, I had a dream. In it, all things perished. At the end, I seemed to see someone—a man who, unwilling to accept it, swung his sword at the heavens. The vault of heaven itself was torn apart by that single stroke, yet the ending of the great annihilation could not be changed."

"Before this, I never knew who that person was—the one I saw at the very end of my dream. Not until I saw you."

Lord's tone shifted, abruptly turning incomparably grave.

Unlike ordinary people, who had countless dreams and could easily have several in a single night—

Someone like him generally did not dream at all. But once he did, there was surely some confirmation lurking in the unseen.

And such an ending was undoubtedly terrifying.

Before meeting Zhao Cheng, Lord had thought that perhaps the invisible undercurrents surging through the human world had stirred a few of his worries into a dream.

But after meeting Zhao Cheng, he suspected that he had dreamed of a