The Rest of the Story

In the Upper City of the New Royal Capital stood a five-story tower built of pure white marble.

Black Flame raged along the streets near the White Tower. The survivors, fresh from a life-or-death battle, had no time to catch their breath before plunging into a new fight to put out the fires and salvage supplies.

Strangely, every survivor seemed to overlook the magnificent White Tower. Even the rampaging Black Flame avoided the Red Rose Garden at its foot, as though it, too, had forgotten the place.

On the tower's top floor, a gaunt man with heavy bags under his eyes gripped a quill and wrote furiously in a red-bound notebook. The nib scratched across the page, leaving line after line of elegant script in black ink.

"And so the heroes defeated the tyrant, and the story reached its perfect ending."

His quill stopped. The man looked up toward the fallen Grand Cathedral.

The Black Flame near the Grand Cathedral had already been extinguished. Suddenly, the exhausted survivors erupted in cheers loud enough to reach the heavens. At their center lay a vast fissure plunging to the planet's core. Xia Lun, dressed in a dark gray coat, climbed out of it. The moment he reached the surface, he looked around, then embraced Renee tightly amid the crowd's heartfelt blessings and praise!

High above them in the White Tower, the man shook his head slightly. He turned his quill, flipped back several pages in his notebook, and found one marked with a golden bookmark.

"King Guewen's assessment ended in failure. Though he fulfilled the terms of our agreement, he himself died," the man wrote on the golden page.

With his conclusion written, he drew a slash through Guewen's name at the top of the page, lifting the Cognitive Filter on the