Flowers bloomed and fell; the sun and moon revolved in endless cycles.
Birth, aging, sickness, and death were laws no living being could escape. The difference was that for lowly life-forms, these stages passed in but a fleeting instant, while for higher life-forms, they stretched across long eras. Yet there was no true eternity in the end. Even the so-called Eternal Soul was merely a unit of time measured against an era.
Compared to the slow river of history flowing through the Endless World, it was insignificant.
Who could say for certain how many strange and magnificent lives had been born within such an infinitely vast world, along that long river of time, only to ultimately be annihilated by the dimensional laws of the Endless World—or even higher dimensions?
In the Demon Stone World, or rather, on Demon Stone itself, Green and Milly had blended into the world of ordinary people, and several decades had passed without their noticing.
Sunlight spilled across the earth. On a high coastal slope, the two lay in white rocking chairs beneath coffee-colored blankets, listening to the sea breeze sweep through the grass and the birds sing. They forgot the passage of time, aware only of each other's heartbeats and breathing.
Several decades had passed, yet this pair of loving lovers, in the eyes of others, seemed never to have quarreled or argued. Every day, they found sweetness amid the ordinary, as though caught in a whirlpool within a jar of honey. Even having no children had never affected them in the slightest.
At this moment, Green and Milly's skin had not only grown loose, wrinkled, and inelastic, but also become spotted with age. They were both thin as sticks, little more than skin draped over bone, yet their smiles never faded. Their lips always