Phainon's pupils suddenly contracted; he recognized this blatant "writing and then erasing"—
Through thirty million reincarnations, each time he was about to grasp the truth, this thing would emerge like a ghost and correct everything back to "how it should be."
Firewalls, whether they come from Lycurgus or the Iron Tomb.
He cleaved off Lygus's head, smashed through the barriers of time and space, and cut down mountains of the Antimatter Legion, yet no one needed to stop him personally.
As long as the firewall is on here, it can erase every move Phainon makes and every unexpected incident he causes, just like erasing a blackboard, ruthlessly formatting it into the past.
That moment of stunned silence lasted only half a breath.
Before Phainon could even process what was happening, his instincts, honed through reincarnation, issued a warning. His golden-black wings flapped sharply backward, attempting to bounce him away from his spot.
It's too late.
The swirling storm of Zephyro's figure silently dispersed, then silently regrouped behind Phainon.
There was no warning, no afterimage, no trajectory, not even the energy surge that should accompany a teleportation. He was already standing there, as if he had been there from the very beginning, only to be seen just now.
An arm made of blazing white flames slowly emerged from the edge of Phainon's vision.
Phainon first felt a chill on his right shoulder.
Then came the belated, excruciating pain, like one's own skeleton being brutally ripped apart.
Pfft!
The blade, formed from white flames, cut in from the base of his shoulder blade and cleaved cleanly down his right arm.
The right arm that held " Dawn's Advance," along with the entire sword, was completely separated from Phainon by this brutal cutting force, spinning and flying away, splashing up a large cloud of golden blood mist.
Following closely behind were the pair of golden and black wings that had just unfolded and had not yet been able to truly unleash their power.
The Zephyro blade did not stop in its momentum of severing the right arm; it swept downwards and to the right, cleanly severing half of the wing from its base.
Golden-black wings, covered with countless burning feathers, like half a torn flag, detached from Phainon's back and tumbled downwards.
The air it swept through was filled with thick, golden mist, thick enough to evaporate from the scalding blood of the Phainon.
"Ugh--!!!"
Phainon's roar pierced his throat; the sound carried pain, the excruciating agony of his right side being torn apart.
There was an even stronger sense of resentment, because he had just concluded that the Zephyro was nothing special, only to be severely injured right in front of him in the blink of an eye.
There is something deeper and more profound, something accumulated over thirty million reincarnations until it had become numb, yet now it was brought back to life by this single strike—that fleeting fear.
Phainon lost his balance and fell to the side and backward, beneath him appearing a wheat field.
It was golden yellow, covering everything, stretching as far as the eye could see, yet it was layered and stacked up, a "wheat" that depended on the boundary membrane beneath their feet.
They are clearly shaped like ears of wheat, yet each stalk shares certain common characteristics in terms of height, color, and orientation.
Phainon's vision blurred for a moment, then cleared up again, and he saw clearly—those were not wheat.
Those were golden, dry, curly hair; helmet tassels; fragments of a cloak with its luster faded; and countless, layered corpses covering the entire void.
Thirty million generations of Chrysos Heirs comrades, from Janusopolis, the Duskglow Courtyard, the Castrum Kremnos, the Dawncloud Cliff, the Vortex of Genesis...
In every lifetime, every soldier, healer, craftsman, and scholar who died in his cycle of reincarnation transformed into a golden ear of wheat in this wheat field, growing out of the void and sinking back into the void.
They piled up undulating hills, so softly and neatly, that when Phainon's shattered body fell, it was like a child falling onto a stack of wheat after the autumn harvest, without even making a sound.
Golden blood gushed from his broken right shoulder, flowing into the wheat ears and staining the golden area with a dark mark.
He lay there, gazing up at the deathly, collapsing void above him, his right half empty, with only the remnants of his left wing that could never flap.
A layer of golden mist clung to Phainon's eyelashes. He didn't stand up; he lay in the wheat field as if on a bed he had long ago prepared for himself.
Golden blood seeped into a small, dark, damp patch in the wheat field. Phainon lay on his back on layers of golden corpses, his chest heaving violently.
The remaining half of its left wing lay limply beneath it, the feathers at the tip of the wing still curled, blackened, and charred into a small ball of embers in the fire.
The deathly silence of the void pressed down on his eardrums. Zephyro stood not far away, the blazing white storm slowly rotating, two dark eye sockets silently looking down at him, without pursuit, without mockery, and without the slightest pity.
But Phainon's chest moved.
At first, it was just muscle pain—a burning pain from the exposed bone fragment at the break in my right shoulder repeatedly pulling at my nerve endings, and a pain from my right chest cavity being only half full, with each breath feeling like an air leaking out.
The pain weighed on him, making him feel as heavy as if his body were filled with lead, and even blinking required all his strength.
Then, something else welled up from the bottom of my heart.
First, a tiny flame silently ignited in his heart, in his chest cavity that had long been burned through and worn down by reincarnation to the point where only a hard shell remained.
The flames were no longer the golden, World-Saving's flames, nor were they entirely the cold, hard, dark purple- Black Tide.
Instead, it was a rough, intensely burned, and sweet-smelling crimson.