Light and Tears

For the first time, Ji Jue heard the agonized shrieks, screams, and wails of boiling spiritus. It sounded as if someone were being sliced to pieces by the slow cut. A blurry face surfaced amid the roiling spiritual matter, twitching in terror and howling in agony. Time and again it tore at its own body, shedding countless fragments, yet it could not break free of the monstrous gravitational pull reaching out from the dark. Until at last, it made a desperate resolve. Formless detonated with a deafening roar! Hundreds upon thousands of bloody beams burst outward in all directions. Yet most were swallowed in an instant by the darkness, vanishing without a trace. Only a few scattered fragments escaped that horrific gravitational pull, fleeing frantically in immediate retreat, not daring to look back. They didn't even dare glance behind them. Just like that, they brushed past the deer-headed phantom treading across the blood. The grotesque monster paused in its step for a fleeting moment, then indifferently withdrew its gaze. Slowly, it walked through that dust-sealed door. In the dead silence of the dark, faint silhouettes materialized from the eternal gloom, humming an ancient melody in scattered, raspy voices. Like spirits of the dead trapped in an endless cycle of reincarnation. Futilely reminiscing about home. "Yearning for home... longing for home..." The departed souls sang merrily from hell: "How lovely is my home..." And from their song, a spine-chilling aura erupted like a torrential waterfall, sweeping out to gradually submerge the entire Border Realm. In a corner of the central core, Ji Jue's vision swam with darkness. He felt an unprecedented tremor and dread... as if an unseen, icy palm had brushed across his soul, inspecting its material, contemplating it with utter indifference, before slowly drawing away. What he sensed was a gulf as terrifying as heaven and earth, a helplessness and terror born of realizing he was fish on a butcher's block with no ability to resist. He still recognized the spiritus signature that had just been wailing in torment, and because of that, his dread only deepened. The Dragon Cult? What was going on? Seriously?! Did that guy just fucking throw his life away for nothing?! No, Ji Jue had already braced himself to go toe-to-toe with an off-the-charts monster like that just to secure Non-Offensive. He had even mapped out his battle tactics. He had planned to exploit the central core's movements, fighting as he retreated to hold aggro, pulling the monster all the way back to the spiritus sea outside... and then go straight for the jugular to fire up that pulverizing mechanism! He simply hadn't believed that a monster entirely composed of spiritus could withstand the Quicksilver Workshop's spiritus purification cycle! He had been fully prepared to take on a Shepherd, and now the enemy was gone, just like that?! No way. Seriously? You've got to be kidding me! It wasn't that Ji Jue was spoiling for a fight and looking to trade blows, but the problem was... if a Shepherd of the Dragon Cult could be snuffed out so effortlessly, how could someone of his modest weight hope to survive? "Prophet—" Ji Jue turned, his voice hoarse. "What on earth is that?" "What else could it be?" The Prophet remained expressionless, sensing the murky fluctuations rising with the distant song. "That is Quicksilver, Mr. Ji Jue. The embers once known as Quicksilver are instinctively drawing toward the remnant fire that has yet to go out." *Thump!* A dull, heavy thud seized everyone's soul. It was a heartbeat. Coming from the deepest dark. Within the spiritus solution, a shriveled heart gave a sudden, violent throb. And then, another... "Damn it! Mad! Everyone's fucking mad!" Outside the expanding, ascending central core, within the earth-shaking, sky-quaking Border Realm, specks of remnant spiritus coalesced over the corpses. A blurry face surfaced, ravenously gorging on the undissipated spiritus, barely reconstituting a vague outline that flickered like a candle in the wind. Trembling in terror. As Formless looked back at the gradually rising central core, he could no longer conceal his dread and trembling. He cursed in disjointed fury, muttering nonsensically, "Fuck the Sages... bunch of liars... They're all fucking mad! Every last one of them!" "Excuse me, sorry to interrupt." A gentle voice came from the darkness, accompanied by footsteps that made Formless's blurry silhouette shudder violently, nearly coming apart. Not even bothering to finish gnawing on the remnant souls, he scrambled backward, looking over his shoulder in wariness. Only then did he see a dust-caked face. She looked as though she had just crawled out of some obscure nook, carrying a heavy backpack and clutching a torn map, ripped in half out of sheer frustration. The elderly, white-haired woman took off her hat, fanned herself with it, and tilted her head back to gulp down more than half a canteen of water. Only then did she sigh in relief and sit on the ground. "Took a bad step and tumbled down below. Shitty map gave me the runaround, almost couldn't climb back up... Um, hey there, did you just come out from inside?" Curious, she asked, "Would you mind telling me, what's Quicksilver's current state?" At the mere mention of that name, Formless's silhouette wavered, nearly unable to hold itself together. Ferocity and malice surged uncontrollably as he stared fixedly at her face. She had... no matrix, no blessings, not even any discernible ability. Yet her soul was condensed to the point that not a single trace of aura leaked out, leaving no signs to read. Bizarre. And yet, so very appetizing. A ravenous hunger instinctively urged him to feast. He could no longer hold back—*eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat!* With a hiss, Formless lunged forward. Yet in the next instant, he froze dead in his tracks—caught between five closing fingers. "After all these years, why is the Dragon Cult still this same pathetic joke?" She gave a soft sigh, dangling Formless casually in her grip like a dead dog. "I even dismantled my matrix just to sneak in here. You could at least show some courtesy instead of jumping straight to murder. Still, since you're the one who was rude first..." Amid shimmering faint light, her face was swallowed by shadow, gradually shifting until it traced the ferocious outline of a predatory bird. A bloodstained, uncanny mask slowly surfaced, settling over her warm, gentle smile. Phantasmal scarlet trickled from its long beak as she looked down with savage malice. "Then I don't need to pretend to be a decent gentlewoman anymore, do I?" White Owl bared her teeth in a silent, predatory grin. *Boom!* A deafening roar accompanied the collapse of the ground, and thunder rolled across the entire Border Realm. The earth finally shattered into pieces. The central core bloomed like a lotus, opening wide to pierce both earth and sky. Bathed in eternal, dusky sunlight, intricate mechanisms unfolded from within, countless wispy strands spreading like hundreds of invisible giant hands, reaching toward heaven and earth to seize everything within their grasp. And from the very summit, a pair of translucent wings unfurled. Refracting the dim light of the setting sun, they gleamed with breathtaking splendor. Then came a second pair, a third, a fourth... Until countless wings blotted out the sky, and eye after eye opened upon the feathers, looking down once more to gaze upon the riddled, ruined earth. Blood-red tears rained down like water. No cries of grief could be heard. Yet a tide of sorrow caused the fractured earth to tremble once more, swallowing everything... Amid the myriad wings, faint outlines of hands emerged, overlapping, intertwining, stretching outward. Hundreds of palms spread from the center, weaving together into a grotesque, colossal ring. [■————] A shriek resembling millions of overlapping voices rang through the entire Border Realm. *Snap!* The Shepherd's final remnants vanished entirely from White Owl's grip, gone before he could even let out a death rattle. She looked up, gazing at the countless wings shrouding the sky and the tens of thousands of hands twisted together within them, and couldn't help drawing a sharp breath of cold air. "Hey, you old fossil—what the hell is that?!" White Owl shook the map in her hand, demanding angrily, "Before I came, you only told me I was picking up a package! You never said there'd be something this absurd inside the Border Realm!" *That is Quicksilver. Haven't you seen it with your own eyes?* Silent script slowly surfaced across the quiet map: *This bitterness, hatred, and despair is the sin and retribution Quicksilver bore on behalf of all Mohists.* "...A Sage's corruption?" Amid the dead silence, White Owl's throat squeezed out a hoarse rasp, no longer able to deny the reality before her. "The backlash from the severing of Tianyuan was this extreme? "When those Mohists severed the Tower of Tianyuan back then, didn't they foresee the consequences?" *The collapse of the Tower of Tianyuan was the worst possible outcome. Yet even the worst possible outcome was better than standing by and watching the tower reach completion.* *In the mortal realm, there is no place for gods, nor should an eternal sovereign and Emperor exist in this world. If the Emperor wished to strip this world of all meaning, then even if the world were destroyed, the Emperor could not be permitted to live.* *The fall of the Eternal Empire was fundamentally a counterstrike by the other Sovereign Virtues against Tianyuan's attempt to control all things. It could not have been brought about by a mere handful of Mohist Celestial-Humans alone.* *Likewise, severing the Tower of Tianyuan was never Quicksilver's duty...* The words flowed across the map like running water: *Yet when they breached the Empire's encirclement and reached the Tower of Tianyuan, more than half of the forty-one Celestial-Humans were already gone. Among the survivors, the Juzi was mortally wounded and near death. Only her blood remained to awaken Revolution.* *If it were you, what choice would you have made?* White Owl fell silent, staring at the colossal silhouette weeping in soundless grief. She no longer knew what to say. The world's final chance, the culmination of a thousand years of Mohist sacrifice, a destiny and duty passed down through generations... When the path reached its end, the world remained dark and battered by wind and rain, while the ideal utopia lay as distant and elusive as a dream. When everything reached the terminus, the cruelest choice lay before them. Turn back to the eternal dream promised by the Emperor, slumbering like infants in an iron cradle, or kindle oneself, sacrificing everything to hope for a future that might never arrive? In that instant, high above in the heavens amid rolling thunder, the phantom of the Tower of Tianyuan's collapse manifested once more. This time, she finally saw that brilliant light ascending toward the sky from the darkness... That was the first strike the Sage Quicksilver had unleashed against the Eternal Empire more than four hundred years ago. And falling to the ground was only the sorrowful radiance of tears.