Immortal Paladin

245 I Have Arrived

I tapped my finger on the armrest. The reality of the situation kept threatening to knock me loose. Was it my destiny to be kicked down by the universe over and over again? Had I wronged some divine order in a past life? I closed my eyes, inhaled through my nose, and tried to anchor myself through sheer will. But calm wouldn’t come.

Jin Chenglei’s voice pierced my thoughts with that grating, smug timbre of his. “It was a brilliant try, thinking of killing my commander. Did you think that was my General piece?”

I didn’t even bother turning to face him. “Shut up,” I said flatly. “You’re inconsequential to me. The fact that you can’t even see you were being used astounds me.”

He bristled at that. “How dare you?”

I didn’t answer him. I was already looking somewhere else… at Da Ji. My little sister was crumpled on the ground, hugging the supernaturally grown body of her son, tears painting her face like warpaint. She sobbed with a kind of pain that made my chest tighten. I scanned the frogs, trying to locate Chen Enlai’s soul and anything, only to realize there was no saving him anymore.

Chen Enlai was dead, and no amount of resurrection could bring him back. His body had been destroyed by some kind of method. Even my Divine Word: Raise couldn’t restore him. Not even the faintest soul fragment remained.

I turned my attention toward the octopus-thing, narrowing my gaze. But before I could probe deeper, the Dark Witch leaned forward, mouth curled in a pleased smirk. “How does it feel?” she asked, tilting her head. “I mean, that’s gotta hurt… Chen Enlai, is he?”

"It was you..." My voice came quietly, but steadily. “Why?”

Her eyes darkened, and I could feel them lashing me with invisible curses. I instinctively cast Cleanse, and a thin shimmer flickered around me, dispersing the filth she’d tried to latch on. Unexpectedly, her face flushed, not with anger, but with twisted delight.

“Because it amuses me, that’s why,” she hissed, her breath sharp as glass. “Also, a bit of revenge. How dare you take Wen Yuhan away from me? She was supposed to be mine—”

Her words crescendoed to a shout as she slammed her armrest. Her spine straightened, as if something within her cracked and forced its way out. “Her eyes… oh, her beautiful eyes… It was supposed to be mine! She was supposed to be mine!”

Tears ran down her cheeks now, but her fury refused to soften. “But you took her away. And what did you do with her? You wasted it. Wasted her. Built your silly little trinkets to what? Make mortals’ lives easier? That was your grand prize?” She leaned forward, trembling. “Maybe… maybe I’ll bring back your little mortal… if you give her to me…”

She was lying. My Divine Sense told me as much. Whatever trick she was preparing, it wasn’t resurrection. Chen Enlai’s death had already left an irreversible mark on the world’s reality. No spell or pact could unwind it.

I chose silence. No reason to offer her closure. No reason to tell her that Wen Yuhan was already dead.

Unfortunately, Jue Bu didn’t share my restraint.

“Wen Yuhan is probably dead,” he said offhandedly.

The Dark Witch froze, her grin still stuck on her face like a porcelain mask, but her eyes snapped to Jue Bu with venom. So much for camaraderie.

Jue Bu leaned lazily on his throne, one hand propping up his head, voice casual. “I left one of my seals on her. Subtly, of course. She wouldn’t have noticed. Technically, she hasn’t died. But her soul… it returned to the world. May she rest in peace... She had been a convenient pawn.”

The Dark Witch hissed, “How long did you know?”

He shrugged. “Hmmm… Roughly before we sat on these thrones.”

The air between them turned brittle.

“If you betray me—” she began.

But then the Game Master’s voice echoed across the space like a divine bell. “The Heavenly Alliance declares war on the Demonic Cult.”

The words slammed into her like a spear to the chest. “What!?” she shrieked.

Her expression contorted in confusion and rage. “What is the meaning of this?”

In response, the vast globe laid before us shifted. Glowing territories once painted in red were now flickering and unraveling from within. Green lights blinked across her territory, moving erratically, laying waste wherever they landed.

Ru Qiu remarked with a calmness that contrasted with the chaos blooming on the map. “That… is what you call a civil war. I will take what is mine, and the Demonic Cult… is mine.”

Of course. While the rest of us had played at diplomacy and games, Ru Qiu had been busy making side deals with the Game Master. Or maybe I was overthinking, and the Game Master’s timing wasn’t because of some deal with Ru Qiu. The important thing was that the so-called Demonic Cult was splitting down the middle.

Across the visualization, railroads began forming out of thin air, cutting through enemy terrain like veins of silver lightning. Our engineers had done their work. Logistics support had cleared the way. Soon, the tide would follow.

Of course, I’d help Ru Qiu in his endeavors. I’d appreciate it more if he could at least say thank you. But of course, that was asking too much.

“David,” said Alice in Qi Speech, “The plague has been suppressed. My rats are still active, but they no longer multiply unchecked. For now, the infection is contained.”

With Alice’s plague suppressed, my time was quickly thinning. The brief reprieve we had wrestled from chaos gave me space to breathe, but not to rest. I looked at Da Ji once more, feeling a growing ache in my heart. I should’ve been beside her. I should’ve whispered words of comfort and promised her safety, but the moment was wrong. If I hesitated now, everything we’d built would unravel.

Jia Yun stormed in, robes shimmering faintly as she chanted under her breath. Every syllable from her lips was laced with sacred power. Her hands moved in practiced arcs, casting calming charms and exorcism mantras like a seasoned priestess unafraid of wrath. The 'baby' cried, louder this time, not in hunger or fear… but protest. Jia Yun paused, her brow furrowing. She noticed it too. Da Ji wasn’t just unwell. There was something deeper, older, embedded within her. And the child… no, not just him. Even the damned octopus beside the Game Master radiated the same eerie cadence.

All threads pointed to one thing: there was some kind of secret about “Ancient Souls” and the “Prisoners” lurking within the False Earth.

“I need to know what they are,” I muttered to myself, fingers curling on my armrest. It wasn’t knowledge for knowledge’s sake. If I were going to pull Da Ji from whatever this was, I had to start somewhere.

I declared, “The Sacred Groves declare war on the Heavenly Alliance.”

Jin Chenglei burst into laughter, spittle flying as he leaned forward. “FOOL! DON’T YOU SEE? YOUR TERRITORY IS UNDER SIEGE! SOME GENIUS OF WAR, YOU ARE.”

I let the insult pass. My gaze fixed on him, voice calm and almost pitying. “I gave you a chance to redeem yourself. Maybe you still can. Forfeit, and I’ll guide you to the afterlife. No torture. No chains. Just peace. Your army is broken. You’re nothing but a carcass draped in pride.”

He sneered through his cracked teeth, “I am going to be a god!”

The Game Master interjected, tone diplomatic, “Withdraw your declaration at once. I’m willing to negotiate. A temporary truce, diplomatic relations with the Sacred Groves, perhaps?”

But I had grown tired of the show. I turned toward him, eyes narrowing. “You could end all of this in a blink. You are a Supreme Being… why bother with this game?”

The Dark Witch jolted, voice rising like a blade unsheathed. “You… are a Supreme Being?”

So they didn’t know. How quaint.

Ru Qiu growled, his aura surging with betrayal. “I knew there was something off about you. No castaway soul could command such power… it all makes sense now.”

Only Jue Bu remained unmoved, lounging on the throne with his usual irreverence. “Wow. Big reveal.” He scratched his chin. “Doesn’t matter. Supreme Being or not… the game continues.”

Of course, there was Jin Chenglei, too, but he didn’t understand the gravity of the situation with a Supreme Being right in our midst.

I looked out over my territory. From the Sacred Groves, the rebellion was being beaten back to the western borders. It was a hard-won breather, barely a heartbeat of peace. Then came the new presence from the east, an army of undead and legions upon legions rising like a tide.

Jue Bu’s voice was smug and playful. “Surprise.”

On the suspended False Earth, I saw another “Jue Bu,” leading the undead. This one had my face, too, wearing purple robes with silver orchids. The sky behind him crackled with dark clouds and holy light. A contradiction of death and sanctity.

“I, Jue Bu, declare war on the Sacred Groves.” The Jue Bu in the throne chuckled as he tapped his scepter on the floor with theatrical flair. His skin peeled away, revealing white bone wrapped in divine radiance.

“I cheated a bit,” he admitted without remorse. “I stole what was left of the Yama King’s army. Even recruited a few from the Exorcist Pagoda. So here’s a trick question: How am I there and here at the same time?”

I scowled. “Divine Possession?”

He wagged his bony finger. “Nope.”

Alice provided. “Necromancy.”

A chill ran down my spine. She was right. A fragment of Jue Bu, bound in bone and magic, animated by his will across great distances. It wasn’t a clone. It was a second body, acting as a receptacle for the main body. It was hideously effective.

As if the room hadn’t endured enough madness, the Game Master announced with a cold tone, “I retract my statement,” he said sharply. “There will be no diplomatic relations with the Sacred Groves.”

The Dark Witch narrowed her eyes. “What are you playing at?”

The Game Master didn’t look at her. He didn’t look at anyone.

“I misspoke,” he said, as if the words tasted like ash. “The Heavenly Alliance hereby declares truce with the Demonic Cult. And war… against the Sacred Groves.”

Fucking hyena...

I tried to rattle the Game Master, pressing with the edge in my voice, “You’re changing sides too much, Game Master. I just hope it won’t come back to bite you twice as hard in the ass…” His expression didn’t shift, but something behind his eyes twitched, something nervous. Good. At the very least, he wasn’t as omnipotent as he appeared.

Meanwhile, I had far more pressing matters than his betrayal. City after city under the Sacred Groves banner collapsed. Entire populations were displaced, and I was desperately rerouting refugees to the main city, funneling them through broken bridges, scorched woodlands, and shattered ley lines. Every gate we opened risked infiltration. Every caravan that arrived was a gamble. Still, we kept moving. One by one, families were ferried in from the rivers or lakes, dragging their lives behind them in blood-soaked wagons and soul jars.

Days passed.

Then weeks.

The map of my territory became less a pattern of green and more a disease of red lines and blue lines, pressing in from every direction. From the north came the Heavenly Alliance, their banners shimmering with heavenly decree. From the east came the Undead Legion, a choking tide of bone and rot, never-ending. The West hadn’t relented either. The Rebellion still lingered, its remnants clawing at every opportunity like a rabid beast that refused to die. If not for Ru Qiu stirring chaos in the Demonic Cult’s lands, and Alice occasionally throwing her plague-wrapped familiars into the Heavenly Alliance’s rear lines, we’d have collapsed already.

Ru Qiu spoke to me in the resonant, burning rhythm of Qi Speech, his tone flat but brutal, “If you have any trump cards you are hiding in your sleeves, you better show them now, or is this all you amount to?”

I wish it were that easy.

Lu Gao was locked in a brutal counteroffensive with a small contingent against the Undead Legion, buying time and losing ground in inches. Yuen Fu held the north like a weathered stone, fighting the Heavenly Alliance with every ounce of hatred he could summon. And in the west, the Night Blades had taken full operational control, weaving in and out of villages, sabotaging supply lines, and keeping the Rebellion’s bones from growing flesh again.

I tapped the armrest of my throne, knuckles white. The pressure was rising. Every report sent another drop of lead into my stomach. Still, we endured. I exhaled slowly, caught somewhere between defeat and defiance. A part of me almost missed Nongmin. His brutal efficiency in mass slaughter would have come in handy now, and his uncanny instinct for spinning hopeless battles into mythic victories. At least, that was how I remembered him from memory. But I knew better. I had no right to ask him to become that monster again… not for me. Not for this.

My strategies had holes. I knew that. I had leaned too heavily on Alice’s plague to buy time. I hadn’t handled Da Ji’s situation the way I should have. There were too many threads fraying in every direction. But I was used to high stakes. I hated them, but I had lived among them too long to pretend otherwise. This path, thorned and cursed, was one I had chosen to walk, eyes open, and back straight. The burden I bore wasn’t placed on me. I picked it up myself.

I let out a slow breath. Jue Bu had been watching silently from his throne. His gaze held none of the mockery it once did.

"Is that it?" asked the skull. "Really?"

So I gave him the answer.

“Jue Bu,” I said, voice even, steady, “I told you I would give you one opportunity to redeem yourself, right? To get what you want? Here it is… I forfeit... It’s my defeat… My soul is yours.”

There was a rush of clamor. The declaration hadn’t even fully settled in the air before it rippled across my fellow players. I had forfeited so suddenly to Jue Bu, of all people.

Alice's voice cut through the rising noise like a blade. “David! What are you thinking!?” She surged forward, not from her seat but from some distant corner of my tethered perception, her fury a glowing thread laced with fear.

I raised my hands with practiced innocence. “Okay, okay, maybe I kind of lied to you when I said I wouldn’t die,” I admitted. “Technically, I will survive... but also... I’m still gonna die.”

Her eyes widened, the whites flashing like storm-lit glass. “I swear, if standing didn’t automatically count as a forfeit, I would’ve stood up right now and smacked you to death where you sit, David—”

I never got to hear the rest.

The moment the words of surrender finalized in the rules-encoded air of the Divine Games, something seized me from within. It was a slimy grip, folding around my soul. Not cold, not hot. Not flesh, not claw. It was wet, like I was being pulled into the throat of a thought that had been starving for centuries.

And then came the voice.

“I will gladly partake in this feast…”

Jue Bu's voice didn't speak through sound, but through taste, foul and metallic, like licking rusted chains soaked in stagnant blood. My limbs froze. My heartbeat stopped.

I was being swallowed. Not just consumed, but erased. My memories, identity, and Dao began to slough away like scales scraped from a molting corpse. My perception warped and stretched thin before it started to collapse in on itself like a dying star. A crushing silence filled my ears, and my thoughts no longer had space to breathe.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

This was it.

And yet, at the final moment, as the last flicker of ‘me’ threatened to vanish, I cast Divine Possession.

"Lo' behold, as it was foretold, for the beast had let me in his maw, the only way out from now... is to cut."

“Ah shit, motherfucker! I knew it!” Jue Bu’s voice cracked like thunder in the void as the world bent into tunnels of kaleidoscopic color, stretching and folding with every step we took. I laughed, not out of mockery but genuine amusement, and mentally flipped him the finger while sprinting ahead through this warped realm of mindstuff and memory shards.

“Do you really think this is worth it?” he snarled, his footsteps pounding behind me. “I am gonna devour you all the same~!”

Nah. I’d be fine. Worst-case scenario, I had five other souls to fall back on. Not ideal, obviously. But still, not the end. I wasn’t planning on cashing in those extra lives just yet. No need for heroics when all you had to do was talk.

I threw out a thought, not quite a plea, more like a memory hook. “Let’s talk... A cup of coffee sounds good. Maybe iced coffee and mocha?”

Reality shifted on cue.

The riot of colors bled into walls, chairs, and the sound of coffee machines steaming milk. Tables replaced nebulous floor tiles, and light fixtures hummed overhead. I blinked. We were seated inside a memory of a 21st-century café. Clean, modern, with too many indoor plants and pop songs I couldn’t remember the lyrics to. Somehow, it all felt authentic.

Jue Bu sat across from me, wearing my face, but dressed in a polo shirt and jeans, like a budget version of my subconscious idea of “adulting.” He cradled an iced coffee. Mine was mocha, I think? Maybe? My memory was fuzzy. I took a sip and murmured, “Man, I miss that taste…”

Considering how many memories I’d flushed down the drain with Meng Po’s soup—or was it tea?—this one moment of sweetness hit me harder than I expected.

Jue Bu watched me with a calm that bordered on bored, then leaned back. “You do know it was me who taught you how to fight in mental worlds, right? A battle of possession is the last thing you want with me. I have experience. Unlike Wen Yuhan with her broken, fragmented bits, I am complete.”

I let him talk. It was always better to let your enemies tell you what they thought they knew.

“That’s why you should give it up,” he added, sipping his iced coffee with a deliberate slowness that mirrored my own past mannerisms.

It was uncanny how similar we looked. Only the outfits set us apart. I wore long sleeves and jogging pants, the default comfort getup of someone who was used to living alone. He looked like someone trying to pass as human at a job interview. Somehow, both versions of us felt equally real.

“You’ve lived inside my ‘memory’ so long,” I said, “you’re barely distinguishable from me anymore. Are you even Jue Bu?”

He smiled, shaking his head. “The existential dread tactic won’t work on me. I have too much self-confidence.”

Maybe. I wouldn’t know what that felt like. Being confident and acting like you were confident were two very different things after all. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

“So why this particular café?” I asked, lifting my mocha again, only to see the cup morph in my hand. It wasn’t porcelain anymore. It was a blocky mess of pixelated textures, like someone had tried to model it in a game from the early 2000s using lego bricks.

“As you can see,” I went on, “my memory of ‘Earth’ is damaged. So why are we here, and not some other café? Why this one?”

“It's chance—” Jue Bu began, but he was cut off.

Because suddenly, someone else was sitting beside me. It was an older man with gray streaks in his hair, a familiar smile, kind eyes, and a posture that spoke of restraint and quiet pride.

“Son,” the man said, not to me, but to Jue Bu. “Happy birthday~!”

Something tugged at my chest.

Dad.

The memory played automatically, like a video loop whose outcome I couldn’t change. Dad slid a small gift box across the table, his movements warm and casual. “This isn’t much, but here…” Inside the box was a watch. I never really liked watches. I had a soft spot for shoes… ugly, flashy ones… but watches? Never really got into them. Still, I felt something slide into place. It was fleeting warmth.

Bits of the moment surfaced, then vanished before I could hold them. The memory kept playing, Dad’s voice continuing along some predetermined script.

I asked quietly, “So… Dad. Why him?”

“Just a coincidence,” Jue Bu replied, his tone evasive.

“Does it have something to do with your grudge against the Game Master?” I pressed. “You tried to attack him, remember?”

He didn’t answer.

The ‘dad’ beside me began to glitch, his arm turning to floating boxes, his smile breaking apart like a jigsaw puzzle missing half its pieces. Even the table started to shimmer with digital fractures. And that’s when Jue Bu began laughing. It wasn’t the amused chuckle from earlier. It was sharp, cruel, and laced with something old and ugly.

“You couldn’t even remember your own father enough to finish the scene,” he said, eyes twinkling with mockery. “What a joke… What kind of unfilial son are you?”

He leaned forward with a grin carved too deep.

“I don’t even have a father, and somehow I remembered yours better.”

“Apologies,” I said with mock gentleness, “It’s not your fault your dad went to buy milk and never came back.”

“...”

“Hey,” I kicked him from under the table. “This is the part where you throw a quip back.”

Calmly, Jue Bu’s tone changed. “How did you survive the Greater Universe with so little power?”

The shift caught me off guard, but I didn’t show it. The cafe window darkened, the world outside flickering into a looping memory when his robed form struck me with that modified exorcism spell, launching me across planes like a ragdoll in a storm. My soul had reeled, ricocheting through dimensions. For a moment, I had thought I would unravel. Then came the sudden stillness as I found myself in the middle of the Bridge of Forgetting.

Jue Bu's voice hummed, analytical and begrudging. “I see. You used the Destiny Seeking Eyes. You chose a specific fate to aim for. That’s how you landed where you needed to. Clever.”

I gave a little bow in my seat, tipping my pixelated mocha. “Thank you, thank you. You’re quite the strategist yourself. I didn’t even notice you’d 'kidnapped' two of the Seven Sages. And you managed to keep your ‘main body’ free from Sealed Island’s snare… Now you can finally fight at full strength without playing nice. I’m dying to know, how did you pull that off?”

Outside the window, the scenery changed again, showing a twisted retelling of the tales after Jue Bu successfully stole my body. Jue Bu slaughtering a Grand Exorcist, stripping the soul from the broken corpse, then using necromantic rituals to reconstruct it into a wraith so lifelike that it looked like him. It fooled everyone! He puppeteered undead, conned a desperate exorcist clan, and even wore my stolen face like a perfect mask.

Jue Bu leaned forward with that self-satisfied glint in his eyes. “It took years to refine the Grand Exorcist’s soul. But in the end, the result was worth it, flawless down to the heartbeat.”

I tilted my head, unimpressed. “Yeah, great…”

He smirked, gesturing to himself at the body he claimed as his own. “It’s a body I built from the ground up. Its lifespan was a miracle, held together with sheer will and the promise of revenge.”

The cafe around us flickered again. Walls folded inward and cracked open like rotten fruit, revealing chambers of aged architecture. The floor stretched into courtyards, bedrooms, and altars… each room containing scenes of Jue Bu engaged in passionate acts with dozens of women. Memories of himself moaned through expressions of ecstasy.

“Dual cultivation,” I muttered. "And the risque kind too..."

“They enjoyed it,” Jue Bu said with a shrug, lounging on a throne of tangled limbs. “There was mutual consent. I made sure of it.”

I raised a single finger. “I just have one question. Are you really that starved for affection?”

His laugh was loud, hollow. “Starved? Me? Pfft—”

“You were technically dead when Joan and Alice found you,” I reminded him. “So I propose a theory. Your libido, your vulgarity, the way you dress your words in crass… those are symptoms. Not the root. This isn’t about sex. It’s about obsession.”

I gestured to the melting scene around us. The women, the clones, the marble columns… they all slumped into liquid wax, running into the cracks between tiles. When the last candle guttered out, only ruins remained. We stood in a forgotten temple, shattered walls circling us like teeth. The only object of note was a single coffin at the center, flanked by crumbling demonic statues whose faces had been carved off.

We were no longer sitting. Jue Bu stood naked, the flesh stripped from his form, leaving only blackened bones. Two orbs of cerulean flame floated in his empty sockets, flickering with something between amusement and fury.

“What’s your unfinished business?” I asked. “Why steal my body? Why do you want revenge on the Lost Supreme?”

The flames flared once… then dimmed. Jue Bu raised his skull slightly, lips no longer there to smirk, but the tone remained.

“I refuse to play your game,” he said.

The world tilted like a shifting Rubik’s cube, reality snapping and turning in sharp mechanical movements. With each twist, the distance between us stretched. One shift, and he stood a mile away. Another, and he vanished altogether.

When the noise stopped, I stood alone, inside a colorless maze of towering, shifting walls.

Hah~! For once, I had Jue Bu on the back foot. I cast Soulful Guiding Fire without hesitation, summoning an emerald flame that twisted into the shape of a butterfly. It fluttered gently, leaving trails of verdant smoke in its wake as it soared into the void. I smirked as I followed it, stepping forward into the illusory depths of Jue Bu’s soul. “This is a technique you taught me, Jue Bu,” I said aloud, letting my voice echo, daring him to respond. “And I’m going to find you with it. Come on, little pervert… I’m gonna find you…”

The path was never straight in a soulscape. The butterfly drifted across fields of broken memories and smoke-bleeding corridors. Ghosts howled behind doors without handles, cultivators fought illusions of themselves, and I just danced around them all. No need to play with distractions. Jue Bu should’ve known better than to think memories could hold me down.

Eventually, the butterfly turned sharply and descended through a crack in the air itself. I followed it into a familiar scent of ink and paper. A library. A particular memory played out at the end of the corridor… my ex, the librarian, was getting absolutely plowed by the principal on top of the historical records. I stared for a beat, groaning in disgust. “Seriously? That’s the most traumatic thing you can summon to stop me?” I summoned a burst of wind and simply bulldozed through the bookshelves. The illusion shattered like cheap glass.

I found myself floating next. Space surrounded me, stars distant and trembling, chunks of fragmented worlds hovering in the black. All of them were slowly being pulled into a singular black orb. I didn’t need to guess what it was. The Hollowed World. Smaller than the one I’d glimpsed before… but no less hungry.

“You’ve found me,” said Jue Bu.

He floated beside me in all his skeletal majesty, his eye flames dim with fatigue. His voice carried a weight that made the stars flicker.

“Once upon a time, there were ten layers of the Underworld,” he began. “Each ruled by a King. But one by one, the Kings fell. And in their place… rose the Supreme Death.”

The air… no, existence… shivered at the mention of that name. The memory world around me cracked like porcelain. My soul felt pinched, scraped by something older than time itself.

I asked without really expecting an answer, “So… is the Game Master…?”

Jue Bu raised a bony finger, “David, let me finish my story first. And no… it wasn’t him. The one who calls himself the Game Master isn’t like the others. Not like the Supreme Death.”

He paused. His voice became more reverent, almost fearful.

“To a Supreme Being, perception doesn’t exist the way it does for us. For cultivators, a life of mortals was but a blink of an eye. For a god, the existence of cultivators was merely a footnote to their greatness. For a Supreme Being, they are existence itself, and to understand their 'personality' was a futile endeavor. At their essence, they are the ideals that replaced the old gods. That is what it means to be Supreme. But… there was one who stood apart. The Supreme Void.”

Black splotches bloomed around us, consuming bits of scenery until only floating tatters of memory remained at the mention of the Supreme Void. I floated still, holding onto the butterfly flame, forcing the memory to continue. Jue Bu did not stop.

“If the Supremes have too much personality, they become incapable of wielding it; in other words, they are a paradox,” he whispered, “the Supreme Void had none from the start. The Void was apathy incarnate. It cared for nothing. Watched nothing. Knew nothing. It slept, far beyond the reaches of any world… untouched, untouchable. But even the Void…”

He hesitated.

“…was lonely.”

I squinted. “How can the Void be lonely if it’s the Void? How can it be a Supreme Being if it’s a non-being?”

“I don't know,” he replied. “For all intents, a Supreme Being's motivation could be as mysterious as they were incomprehensible.”

The scene changed again. A small courtyard, modest and plain. An old man knelt in prayer before a piece of darkness that writhed like oil on water. Jue Bu narrated with growing dread.

“Worship is a powerful thing. Add desperation, and you can summon even the strangest of things.”

Tentacles slithered out of the darkness. A voice boomed, shaking the skies.

“I AM THE VOID, MASTER OF THE DIVIDE BETWEEN THE LAYERED WORLDS. HOW MAY I BE OF SERVICE?”

Jue Bu’s voice trembled, softer now. “I wish I could take it back. Everything that followed. I would’ve rather bartered with a prince of hell than ever speak to that ‘thing’ again.”

The old man pressed his head against the ground. “The Heavens have forsaken us. Of the Ten Kings, only I remain. Please… save us… I will give anything…”

The Void answered with a chilling question:

“DO YOU WANT TO PLAY A GAME?”

Jue Bu turned his head from the memory, as if ashamed.

“When I understood what I had summoned, it was already too late. We flipped a coin. If I won, the Underworld would be saved. If I lost…” He trailed off.

“You lost,” I murmured.

Jue Bu nodded. “And then he appeared.”

The Void’s true form emerged, not a formless terror, but a bald young man with blank eyes and a hollow smile, naked and unassuming. He stood above the kneeling king and whispered with wonder.

“I will watch you. Learn from you. Shed my apathy. And then I can enter paradise. No longer will the void in my heart grow… I will be happy. You’ll help me… right?”

The bald man stared straight at me. And I felt it, that void scraping at the shell of my existence, as if memorizing me.

Jue Bu exhaled, voice breaking. “That was the end of the Tenth Layer. The other Supreme Beings descended in fury. And the Foolish King was thrown into the Hollowed World… forever bound to be a warden for the Supreme Void.”

Everything vanished in an instant.

I blinked.

And I was back at the café.

Jue Bu now sat across from me, comfortably wearing a fresh copy of my body like a tailored meat suit. He even scratched my nose when it itched, his nose, technically, but my body. The absurdity didn’t even bother me anymore. After the floating world fragments, the tentacled void deity, and the terrifying awareness of Supreme Beings, body-snatching had become mundane.

Back in the Hollowed World, Meng Po had mentioned that the decimation of the Tenth Layer of the Underworld had been a demonstration of power. At the time, I believed her. But now, seated across from myself while sipping iced coffee with deliberate slurps, Jue Bu offered a different truth.

“The layer of the Underworld I once ruled,” he said, “wasn’t just destroyed. It was repurposed. Turned into raw material for the Hollowed World. My kingdom, my people, even my enemies… all ground down into psychic mortar to build a prison.”

I didn’t interrupt. He spoke with the calm of someone who’d repeated these lines a thousand times, maybe to himself, maybe to others who didn’t remember.

“For an eternity,” he went on, “I lived through countless iterations of that world. A hundred thousand dawns, a hundred thousand betrayals, a hundred thousand screams. I tried every way out, every death, every trick, and every plea. And the more souls that were packed into the Hollowed World, the more tangled the fates became. I could no longer untie my thread.”

He paused to sip from his straw again, the plastic bending slightly as he made an exaggerated slurping sound. A little spasm of delight crossed his face.

“There was one guy, though,” he continued, “who managed to build a Gate. Beautiful thing, elegant even. But some powerful schmuck demanded it. And poof. The Gate was taken away before I even got to try it.”

“That schmuck wouldn’t be me, would it?” I asked, dryly. “I don’t remember taking away any… Gate… But it does sound familiar.”

He waved dismissively. “Nah, you’re too interesting to be just another schmuck. Besides, your story’s still in motion.”

“And yours?”

“Stuck. Bound.” Jue Bu leaned forward, elbows on the cafe table, my eyebrows raised as if to emphasize the irony. “Even if I had the Gate, I couldn’t leave. The Supreme Beings nailed my glorious undead ass to the Hollowed World. They made sure I’d suffer forever… and as a result, I developed some strange habits along the way. It's tough living sane when every reincarnation, your past comes along with you.”

He stirred his coffee with a straw, eyes going distant. “Imagine watching all your friends die. Not just once. But again. And again. And again. Different people, but friends all the same. You try holding on to your mind when every joy is replayed until it curdles.”

His fingers twitched. “Then came the day. Boom. Kablam. Two hot chicks kicked over my resting place. Led me to you.”

“You’re welcome, I guess.”

He chuckled, then took a longer sip, the slurping louder than before.

“With you came the opportunity for me to use the Reincarnation Scroll of Blasphemous Continuance at a different capacity,” he said with reverence and disdain braided in equal measure. “And through that, I got here to the False Earth. Not paradise. But a chance. A loophole. And now, revenge.”

Another loud slurp. He licked the straw.

I folded my arms. “Why are you telling me all this?”

Jue Bu smiled. My smile on his face looked strange in this context.

“Easy,” he said. “Because you’ve got a soft heart. Divine Possession, empathy, bleeding soul… all that. You’ve seen my memories. You know where I’m coming from.”

I didn’t respond immediately. But I did understand. The pain, the madness, and the desperation for an ending that wasn’t damnation. It was never just revenge.

“You want to die,” I said at last. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I saw the confirmation in the tremor of his fingers and the silence that followed. I wasn’t ready to make judgments about the Game Master or the Supreme Void. I didn’t even know if I was qualified. But I had seen Jue Bu’s soul. I’d walked its ruins and lingered in its storms.

So I said softly.

“Let me help you.”

There was no fanfare, no lightshow, and no flare of divine thunder to signal what I had done. My soul simply flickered, faded from Jue Bu's grasp like a candle snuffed before the wind. He laughed, a hollow, dry chuckle coated in bitter resolve, “Unless you can free me from a life of eternity, then there’s no better deal than oblivion itself staring you in the eyes.”

I wanted to shout at him. Shake him. Tell him he was wrong. But instead, I tried reason, my usual flawed instinct. “Eternity isn’t so bad… I mean, does an eternity of fluff sound that bad? Of course, it won’t be all fluff, because I am not that lucky—”

He scoffed, cutting me off. “Is that your… pitch? Are you trying to recruit me to your… club?”

Honestly, yeah. A part of me liked him. Another part pitied him. And Divine Possession blurred the line between sympathy and sentimentality in the worst way. The more I understood, the harder it was to condemn. “If you die now,” I told him, “you’ll only be playing into the Game Master’s hands. There’s a reason this ‘game’ exists. If you want to go out in a blaze of glory, then fine, but this isn’t it. You deserve better than a shallow, pointless ending. If you really want to die, do it with a shard of hope still lodged in your chest… do it believing it meant something.”

He looked at me long, his expression unreadable. “Are you some kind of sadist? Isn’t it better to die with no one left behind to mourn for you?”

“That’s just bleak.”

“I am sorry, David. But this is it.”

I felt it too, the shift. My body flickered, parts of me turning into stuttering blocks of glitch and distortion. “I tried,” I said with a helpless shrug.

“You are hopeless,” Jue Bu muttered. “If your plan is to give up your soul and talk down your enemies, soul to soul, then you’re truly beyond hopeless.”

“Not every villain…” I paused, shivering at a specific memory. “Okay, the Dark Witch… I’m definitely never touching her soul.”

He laughed, loud and heartfelt. “Goodbye, friend. I am going to consume you now…”

But I wasn’t done. Not yet.

“If you aren’t thinking of winning,” I said, “why go so far as to send a decoy here to Sealed Island? You can’t fool me, Jue Bu. You came here to play. To win. Even if you’ve given up on life, something in you still wants to resist. Otherwise, why even bother making this move?”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. I knew I was right. “But here’s the thing,” I continued, even as my existence unraveled, “you’ll lose. I’m going to beat the shit out of the Game Master before he destroys you. That’s my promise.”

My soul vanished. My perception of Jue Bu shattered like glass. The last link severed.

But instead of turning to ash, I remained. The other players eyed me with suspicion, curiosity, and confusion. What they saw was a man who should have been dead. Instead, I remained seated firmly on my throne with a clarity that didn’t belong to someone who had just forfeited.

With everything I’d learned from Jue Bu, I was more certain than ever. The Game Master could be defeated. And I didn’t need to play his game anymore.

“The Sacred Groves surrenders,” I declared, loud and clear, “and no longer desires to fight this war. You lot can go kill each other. The land is free for the taking. From now on, the Sacred Groves declare indefinite neutrality. In other words, don’t bother us, we want to be pacifists.”

With a flicker of thought, I sent the command. New Willow rose into the sky, my floating city, carrying over a hundred thousand souls, refugees and survivors alike. It was the largest platform, the grandest vessel, and the strongest safehaven I had ever built.

I’ve decided it was time for its virgin voyage.

“I’m tired of playing king,” I said, voice firm. “I want to be a warrior. I want to smash heads and fight with my own two hands. So, from this point on… I’ll let my ‘General’ piece command my side of the board.”

Blank stares. Murmurs. A wave of confusion rippled across the spectators.

And then I invoked it.

“Castling.”

In that instant, I switched places with Gu Jie, trusting the soul I had planted within her to complete the translocation. My body shimmered, and the battlefield twisted as the two of us exchanged roles, king and general reversed.

“I have arrived.”