When a god died, golden rain fell over Sardinia.
The rain did not come from the clouds. It peeled away from the god's corpse, which stretched across the coast. Each drop was wrapped in scorching divine power. When it struck the sea, it burst into a cloud of white mist; when it struck rock, it left behind holes like molten gold.
Lin Yuan knelt at the edge of the sea cliff, gripping half a bronze dagger in his right hand. An invisible spear had pierced his left chest.
He was seventeen, and he had been on the island for less than three days.
Three days earlier, he had been a Chinese boy washed ashore by a shipwreck. Three days later, two gods who had stepped out of mythology had turned the entire coast into a battlefield over a gate buried deep within the ruins.
The mages at the foot of the mountain had already retreated beyond the barrier. They knew the gods, understood rituals, and could recite prayers in a dozen languages, but not one of them dared set foot on the cliff.
Mortals could not defy the gods.
That was a truth they had written into their bones.
Lin Yuan knew nothing of that truth.
He only knew that the god wearing a deer-antler mask had said that once the gate opened, the entire island would become a sacrifice. The other god, who wielded a spear, had laughed and asked him why an ant had not knelt before it died.
So he had stolen the fragment of a stone tablet the mages were guarding so carefully and charged into the battlefield between the two gods.
It was a fragmentary page from Prometheus's Grimoire.
It could steal a divine miracle just once, and it would burn the user's flesh and blood along with it.
Lin Yuan had waited all night.
He had waited for the spear-wielding god to pierce the deer-antlered god's chest, for the stone gate covered in star marks to appear over the sea, for the victor to reach the moment when arrogance-and death-were closest.
Then he had used the grimoire to steal the God-Slaying Spear.
The mortal's palm split apart inch by inch as he gripped the divine spear. Divine blood flowed backward along its edge, like thousands upon thousands of red-hot iron wires burrowing into his bones. Lin Yuan did not let go. He stamped the last seven steps between himself and the god into the blood and drove the spearpoint into the heart no human should have touched.
"Why don't you kneel?"
For the first time, the spear-wielding god's smile vanished.
"Because I'll die either way."
Lin Yuan pushed the spear deeper and gave a bloody cough of a laugh. "Then I might as well make sure you die first."
Thunder crashed down.
The spear-wielding god disintegrated amid golden lightning, but the divine power scattered from its body did not return to mythology. Instead, it rushed in a frantic tide into the mortal body that had killed it.
Lin Yuan heard his bones being crushed, then reformed in the next instant. Deep within his soul, he saw a throne rise. Behind it, a boundless gate slowly opened.
Beyond the gate was no city, no coast, nor anywhere he could return to.
There was only a void deeper than the night.
And a serpent's eye, quietly opening.
The dying spear-wielding god gazed at him through the rain. There was no anger in its eyes. It looked instead as if it had finally been waiting for something.
"Remember the gate, godslayer."
That was all it left behind before it became a curtain of golden rain. The gravely wounded deer-antlered god sank beneath the sea along with the ruins and never appeared again.
Beyond the barrier, hundreds of mages finally bowed their heads.
No one bandaged Lin Yuan's wounds, and no one asked whether a seventeen-year-old stranger was afraid. They only prostrated themselves in the muddy water and called him king in voices trembling with awe.
That was the first time Lin Yuan had slain a god.
It was also the last time he was treated like an ordinary person.
In the three years that followed, the hidden world of Eurasia remembered a name from the East.
When he was eighteen, a golden boar shattered storms and mountain peaks on the snowy plains of the Alps. Lin Yuan shielded the town at the foot of the mountain before the avalanche struck, and usurped a second miracle from the divinity of plenty and war.
That same year, at dusk, he severed an immortal god's contract in the Aegean Sea. From then on, the flaming broken sword had the edge to end divinity. The price was that his right arm could not be raised for three whole months.
At nineteen, he crossed a sea of sand and nailed the fallen sun back into the sky. The platinum sun burned through the curse, and its light turned the night within a hundred li into daylight.
In a more distant land of tombs, he had once let the dead's whispers engulf the royal court. On a wasteland encircled by thunderstorms, he had stolen the entire sky from the lord of a thousand armies. In an unknown fire sacrifice, he had used stolen divine fire to burn the altar to ashes.
Fate split into three divergent paths before his eyes. A towering giant taught him to bear mountains on a broken body, while the formless night erased the footsteps he had left in the world.
Three years, ten divine battles, ten thrones.
Some called him the King of the Void, because no barrier in the world could stop that gate.
Others called him the Boundless Devil King, because no one knew which land he would appear in next.
Ancient societies offered him land, gold, and mages who swore their loyalty. He took none of it.
He had saved cities and destroyed mountains; ended divine disasters and, once, through a mistaken judgment, let an entire harbor turn to ash in divine fire. The survivors feared him, those under his protection praised him, and his enemies cursed him with the vilest words they could find.
Yet no one had ever asked where he was going.
A king did not need a place to return to.
Neither did a disaster.
For a time, Lin Yuan had believed that too.
Until the rainy night of his twentieth year, when he returned to Sardinia.
The sea was unnaturally calm. Forty-seven fishing boats had stopped three nautical miles from shore, their lights all on, yet not a soul was aboard. The island's birds and beasts were fleeing inland, while the coastal magecraft barriers looked as if something were chewing through them, layer by layer, from the outside.
Lin Yuan stood on the ruins of the old site and heard all ten thrones tremble at once.
The gate had appeared again.
It was larger than it had been three years ago, like a black wound standing between heaven and earth. The seawater, moonlight, sound, even distance itself, were all falling into the wound.
A black serpent coiled behind the gate.
Human eyes could not see its full form. Lin Yuan could only make out countless overlapping scales. Each one reflected an unfamiliar sky, an upside-down city, and stars that were going dark.
It did not speak.
But Lin Yuan understood its hunger.
It had not come for this island. It had not even come for this world.
It wanted Heaven's Imperial Gate. If it devoured this Authority that could cross boundaries, it would be able to use Lin Yuan as a coordinate and open the gate inside countless worlds.
Black serpent patterns appeared on all ten thrones at once.
Lin Yuan raised a hand, intending to summon the golden boar, but a thin wound split open in his palm first. Black lines crawled along his veins toward his heart, as if another will were awakening from within his Authority.
He could not use them again.
At least, he could not use them in this world.
Urgent footsteps came from behind the coast. Several mages responsible for monitoring the anomaly broke through the rain and dropped to their knees from far away.
"King, please give the order to evacuate!"
"The sages have already prepared the ritual. As long as you buy us ten minutes-"
"Ten minutes from now, it'll find you through the ritual's connection."
Lin Yuan cut them off.
He threw a metal token engraved with ten rings into the muddy water. The various societies had made it as his royal seal. It was also the closest thing he had had to proof of identity in three years.
"Take everyone on the island and leave. Don't look back, and don't remember my coordinates."
The old man at the head of the group looked up sharply. "What about you?"
Lin Yuan looked at the serpent beyond the gate and suddenly found the question a little amusing.
For three years, everyone had assumed the Devil King did not need to be saved. Now that someone had asked, he could not think of a decent answer.
"I'll close the gate."
The old man's lips trembled, but in the end, he did not try to dissuade him again.
After the mages left, the coast fell completely silent.
Lin Yuan pressed a hand to his chest.
The ten Authorities were miracles left behind after the gods' deaths, and ten nails the black serpent had driven into the world. As long as the thrones remained unfolded in reality, the serpent could crawl across them.
If that was the case, then he would make the thrones disappear from this world.
He pressed the last remaining page of Prometheus's Grimoire against his chest. The charred stone fragment touched his blood and immediately caught fire with a colorless flame.
This time, he did not want to steal a god's power.
He wanted to steal his own Authorities.
"By the name of the usurper, I reject the throne."
The first throne shattered.
In his consciousness, the golden boar let out a world-shaking roar, turned into a streak of golden light, and crashed into the deepest part of his soul.
The second, third, and fourth thrones...
The undying sun went dark, the gates of the underworld closed, and ten thousand bolts of lightning condensed into a sleeping seed. Each Authority he sealed stripped away another part of the foundation that made Lin Yuan more than human.
His skin cracked, his bones broke, and his heartbeat weakened.
At last, the black serpent spoke for the first time.
Its voice sounded like countless worlds collapsing at once.
The gate suddenly expanded. Countless black scales squeezed through the rift. They tried to take shape in reality as a giant claw and seize the last throne before it could be completely sealed.
Lin Yuan opened his eyes. Ten golden rings appeared in his gray-gold pupils.
"You want it?"
He smiled, his mouth full of blood.
"Then come and take it."
The final Heaven's Imperial Gate was not sealed inside a throne.
Lin Yuan used it to lock onto the void beyond the gate.
Near and far reversed in an instant. The coast vanished beneath his feet, and the world of reality was flung behind him. He willingly crossed a boundary no human should have crossed, while holding on to the black serpent's not-yet-formed giant claw and dragging it back into the rift.
Before the darkness closed, he heard a distant roar like a tsunami.
Perhaps the mage had activated the sealing ritual.
Perhaps the world was simply struggling to heal its wounds.
No one witnessed the Boundless Devil King's final battle.
There was no heaven or earth in the void, nor was there time. Lin Yuan's blood lost its color the moment it left his body, while his flesh crumbled inch by inch like a stone statue weathered for a thousand years.
The black serpent's massive claw was severed by the closing gate, yet one of its scales still pierced his soul.
Ten seals closed in around him.
Prometheus's dying embers, a fragment left behind by the first god, and the most stubborn will to live of a dying man melted together in the darkness, forming a dim coordinate.
Lin Yuan knew none of this.
His memories were fading. Ten divine wars became ten indistinct roars, and ten thrones sank into a bottomless deep sea. What remained in his consciousness at the very end was not any of his victories, but a question asked three years too late on a rainy night in Sardinia.
-What about you?
Lin Yuan thought he probably couldn't go anywhere anymore.
But if there really was a next time...
"I want to learn how to get home first."
The last ray of golden light went out.
No one knew how much time passed before the smell of damp earth replaced the sea breeze.
Lin Yuan opened his eyes in an unfamiliar forest.
The hand before him was small and pale, belonging to a child no older than ten. The ten thrones had vanished without a trace, and the Authorities he had once summoned with a mere lift of his hand gave no response at all.
Deep in the woods, some kind of giant beast snapped ancient trees, and its scarlet eyes lit up one by one in the shadows.
Then, a roar unlike any he had ever heard tore through the night.