Prologue: The Apocalypse Is Still Unfolding

City-State Calendar, Year 434. Outer Flame Frontier.

The boy crushed a dried skeleton underfoot and leaned against a rock wall, looking into the distance.

A mirage-like white glow shimmered on the far horizon.

According to his teacher, it was the Firekeeping Cult's "Second Sun," the largest Torchlight Lighthouse in the Civilized World. Even here, in the distant Outer Flame Frontier, its burning light was visible.

The air held the sickly sweet stench of rust and rotting flesh, as if someone had stabbed a rusty knife into a rotten apple. It was a common smell in the Wilderness.

The boy drew a deep breath and shouted his teacher's name across the Wilderness.

"Nuen!"

"Nunn Soflova!"

His voice echoed across the empty Wilderness. No one answered.

After a long while, the boy reluctantly accepted the truth: that strange sandstorm had separated him from his teacher, Nuen.

He glanced at the sinking sun, then at the shadows slowly spreading across the horizon. He calculated the distance to White Cliff Town and thought of the Death Zones that would emerge from the Wilderness after dark...

He recalled everything he had been through in the nearly ten years since arriving in this world, drew his longsword in fury, and slammed it against the cracked earth.

Xilian shouted until his voice was raw.

"I've had enough!"

As someone who had crossed into another world, Xilian Soflova's memories began when he was seven years old.

That was when Nuen found seven-year-old Xilian in the Wilderness and brought him back to White Cliff Town.

The townspeople called Xilian a lucky child.

In the perilous Wilderness, Xilian had neither been eaten by Demons nor corrupted by Chaos. Apart from being a little dehydrated by the sun, there was nothing wrong with him.

Nuen adopted him, named him Xilian, and gave him his own surname.

The townspeople sang and danced around Xilian, while the young boy eagerly welcomed his new life.

Then one night a year later, Nuen told him, "It's time you saw how cruel the world can be," and took him up onto White Cliff Town's high wall to look out into the pitch-black night.

In his previous life, Xilian had imagined all sorts of stories about crossing into another world: turning his life around, becoming invincible, roaming wherever he pleased... It was not until that night that he realized what a cruel joke fate had played on him.

"Does this trip to another world have to be quite so hard?"

Still complaining aloud, Xilian finally found shelter from the wind just before nightfall.

It was the remains of a building. Xilian had no time to ponder its former grandeur or history. Ruins like it lay everywhere across the Wilderness of the Outer Flame Frontier.

Xilian gathered dry grass and dead branches, hauled over some stones, and built a makeshift campfire.

The warm firelight eased Xilian's sense of danger a little. But before he could relax, the last ray of sunlight on the horizon vanished into the dark.

Xilian paused, opened a jar, and poured out a stream of dustlike red crystals, tossing them into the campfire.

The crystals burned with the flames, causing a reaction that turned the fire pure white and drove back the chill creeping in from the night.

A chill cold enough to freeze the soul.

With his most basic protection in place, Xilian checked the rest of his equipment.

Besides his gun, sword, food, and water, he had only the little jar of red crystal powder.

Once he had checked everything, Xilian let out a breath. Spending a night in the Wilderness was practically suicide, but with these supplies, he might survive.

Might...

Xilian grabbed his longsword, tightened his grip on his gun, and sat against a corner of the ruins, the campfire burning before him.

The night deepened. Xilian felt no trace of sleepiness; his eyes stayed fixed on the darkness ahead.

"You're already here, aren't you?"

Xilian spoke to himself, his expression turning grim as every muscle in his body tensed.

A series of keening howls rose from the darkness, as though answering his greeting.

The world had once suffered a disaster called the Noonday Calamity. Ever since, whenever night fell, thick Grey Fog covered the world, and creatures of Chaos emerged from it to sweep across the land.

Xilian murmured their name.

"Demons..."

The darkness beyond the firelight seethed!

In an instant, eerie shrieks filled Xilian's ears.

The sounds did not come from throats or tongues. They were a chaotic symphony of grinding bones, squirming organs, and splitting shells.

Backlit by the fire, the Demons' outlines twisted like melting metal. One moment they swelled into tumors the size of mountains; the next they collapsed into spheres crowded with hundreds of compound eyes.

A deformed, clawed forelimb probed into the campfire's light.

In an instant, the Demon's flesh burst into flames, as though scorched by the light. Its scales curled and peeled away, exposing bloody bone and meat beneath, but the wound immediately sprouted more thornlike appendages.

Xilian held his breath.

A spark popped from the fire, illuminating the face nearest him.

Where its head should have been stood a row of jawbones. Each mouth gripped half a human finger bone, and slime dripping between its teeth ate honeycomb-shaped holes into the ground.

"Blood... flesh..."

The indistinct words came from its mouths. The Demon crept hungrily toward Xilian, but the firelight held it back. It could not advance another inch.

After a plaintive cry of disappointment, the restless darkness settled. The hideous face withdrew into the shadows.

Xilian did not relax. The Demons had not left. They lurked in the darkness a few yards away, watching him like predators, patiently waiting...

Waiting for the Soul Marrow to burn out and the campfire to die.

"This world really is the worst."

Grumbling, Xilian picked up the little jar and poured more of the red crystals called Soul Marrow into the campfire.

The flames leaped higher. The Demons retreated again, disappearing into the hazy Grey Fog.

Once he was sure he was safe for the moment, Xilian looked up at the night sky.

Unlike the land blanketed in Grey Fog and Demons, the night sky was magnificent.

Whenever he gazed into its depths, Xilian was reminded that this was no longer the world he knew.

In the world Xilian remembered, there had been only one moon in the night sky. Here, the heavens were split by the Twin Cold Moons.

The Shattered Moon hung high in the east, pale as the pupil of a stillborn child. A ghostly blue light seeped from its cracks like poison injected into a vein.

The Blood Moon loomed in the west, scarlet as a rotting organ. Tar-like shadows shifted across its surface, and whenever they surged, a metallic screech pierced the atmosphere.

A faint ring of stars ran between the two moons, drawing a clear dividing line across the night sky and around the planet.

If he forgot his awful circumstances, it really was a fine view.

Xilian added a little more Soul Marrow to the campfire, making sure its light could still keep the Demons at bay.

Soul Marrow was refined from the blood of a Torchbearer. When burned, it had the power to resist the encroachment of Chaos.

Xilian's teacher, Nuen, was the only Torchbearer in White Cliff Town. To keep the town safe after nightfall, he would have to return and make his rounds.

So when Xilian realized he would have to spend the night in the Wilderness, he had no expectation that Nuen would risk coming to search for him.

Nuen clearly cared more about the survival of all White Cliff Town than about one person's life.

Xilian peered into the vast darkness. After searching for a while, he could just make out a faint point of light: the glow of White Cliff Town's Torchlight Lighthouse.

The Torchlight Lighthouse burned great quantities of Soul Marrow. Its light covered all of White Cliff Town, keeping Chaos out so its residents could sleep safely through the night.

But that did not include Xilian.

Ever since Nuen had shown him the Demons when he was eight, Xilian had not slept soundly for a single night.

Nuen handled all of White Cliff Town's security. As the stray child he had taken in, Xilian naturally became his student and accompanied him on his night patrols.

Thanks to years of experience on those patrols, Xilian had made it past midnight. An ordinary person stranded overnight in the Wilderness would probably have been eaten by Demons as soon as darkness fell.

But experience could not solve the problem in front of him.

"Almost empty..."

Xilian tipped the jar. Only a thin layer of Soul Marrow remained.

At this rate, the Soul Marrow he had brought would burn out before dawn.

To make it last longer, Xilian added less to the fire. The price was a dimmer flame.

The fire seemed to lose its color as its pure white light gradually faded.

At the same time, shapes that should have dissolved into the night grew distinct again, wavering in the gloom.

The Demons sensed the fire's weakness and tried once more to cross its light. Enduring the fierce burning, they stretched out deformed hands, desperate to claw at the fresh, tempting soul before them.

Xilian pressed against the wall and held his ground against the Demons.

"You look sick, drooling over me like that... Stay away!"

Even as he made that terrible joke, Xilian spent a dozen seconds wrestling with himself.

In the end,

Xilian managed to convince himself not to use the bullet in his gun as the final answer to his predicament.

Rather than put a bullet through his own skull, Xilian would sooner put one down a Demon's throat.

But he had still been driven into a corner.

His fingers dug into the sword hilt, his knuckles scraping against its crust of rust with a coarse rasp.

"People keep saying the Noonday Calamity, which began dark millennia ago, is over."

Xilian challenged the horrifying faces before him. Only meaningless moans answered.

"But if the Noonday Calamity is over, why are you still walking the earth?"

Xilian swung his blade in a warped streak of deathly white. Its sharp edge sliced clean through a claw and sank into a Demon's skull.

"Wouldn't it be more accurate to say—"

As Xilian dragged the blade through the Demon's skull, he spoke the final words.

"The apocalypse is still unfolding!"

The instant the firelight dimmed, he pulled the trigger!

Dark red blood gushed from the Demon's eye socket and splashed across Xilian's face, caking there like a bronze mask.