Fate was a peculiar thing. Outsiders never understood it, assuming the power of a divination wizard was exaggerated to the point of rivaling the gods.
Sometimes it looked that way on the surface, but in truth, every divination wizard manipulating fate was merely a tiny butterfly.
When Anbaixiu wove a destiny of baldness for someone, he did not teleport next to the person and shave their head himself.
Instead, he continuously magnified small events, causing them to topple like dominoes in sequence.
At the beginning, the tile Anbaixiu pushed over might be smaller than a fingernail. The second was slightly larger, and the next larger still, until in the end, the accumulated force was enough to topple city walls or even destroy a world.
This was the true application of the Dice of Fate: gathering the odds of all low-probability events into a single inevitability, stringing countless coincidences into a thread whose terminus was the destiny Anbaixiu had woven.
Yet there was a catch. The power of fate required time to brew. Growing from minuscule to monumental was not instantaneous.
This was why Anbaixiu had only woven a destiny of baldness for that Iron-Blood General, rather than weaving his demise.
The time scales required were vastly different. Baldness could be brought about in a few days. The causal chain of death, on the other hand, needed years or even decades to mature—a process Anbaixiu could not possibly control for so long.
Mister Misfortune, however, was different. His comprehension reached far deeper than Anbaixiu's.
He did not create possibilities; he strangled them in the cradle. While the two approaches seemed similar—since the Dice of Fate also eliminated other possibilities by converging odds into one—they were fundamentally distinct. A possibility converged by the Dice of Fate could still be altered right up until the moment it occurred. But once a thread of fate was severed, it remained eternal nothingness until restored, rendered utterly impossible.
Put simply, the Dice of Fate locked in a future, yet so long as that future had not arrived, it could still be changed—even if a mere millisecond remained, it was still an unrealized future.
Severing a thread of fate, by contrast, took effect instantly. The very moment it was cut, the outcome became immutable.
If the two of them were to wager again now, that coin from years ago could never have been tossed into the sea. No matter how hard Anbaixiu tried, the coin would never touch a single drop of seawater, and he would never find Mister Misfortune's family crest. Even if he knew its exact location, unexpected accidents would endlessly derail his path to keep him from reaching it.
Such was the suppression a trailblazer held over those walking behind. Relying purely on divination wizardry, Anbaixiu was no match for Mister Misfortune.
Mister Misfortune was currently playing a domino game on an entirely higher plane. Over the past few days, the two had collaborated to calculate twenty-seven thousand possible futures, and through their combined power of fate, they had preemptively screened out ten thousand of them.
Yet time remained far too short. Mister Misfortune now had to isolate the final path from the remaining seventeen thousand unfortunate futures. Every severed thread triggered a chain reaction; an unfortunate future might be extinguished, or a new future might spawn.
It was like a seventeen-thousand-layer Rubik's cube. It could not simply be turned in a single direction. A side already solved had to be broken apart again for the sake of the whole.
This was the monumental task Mister Misfortune faced. Having forgotten the agony of his shattering body, he focused with undivided devotion on manipulating every thread of fate.
Tiamat gazed at the gradually disintegrating figure in the sky and probed Anbaixiu, "So, if I ruin his ritual right now, the Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn will fall into my grasp, won't it?"
Anbaixiu replied indifferently, "You can certainly try—if you aren't afraid of Ao's punishment, that is."
Tiamat sneered. "I don't need to act in person at all."
With that, she pointed toward the Astral portal that was still spewing forth Githyanki. A red dragon that had just poked its head out ignored its rider's commands entirely and soared toward Mister Misfortune.
Tiamat fixed her gaze on Anbaixiu, confident that he would step in to stop it.
Yet Anbaixiu did nothing. He merely watched Mister Misfortune in the sky in silence, as if determined to commit this final moment of his old friend to memory.
Compelled by the goddess of evil dragons, the red dragon flew straight toward Mister Misfortune. Its Githyanki rider, however, possessed no telepathic link with Tiamat. Believing his mount had gone mad, the rider leaped off without hesitation. He was supposed to deploy his parachute pack when nearing the ground, but whether out of sheer panic or a faulty mechanism, the canopy burst open the moment he cleared the dragon saddle.
As a result, the parachute became hopelessly entangled around the red dragon's wing. Deprived of lift on one side, the red dragon immediately lost its balance, entered a violent tailspin, and plummeted rapidly toward the earth.
Throughout the entire ordeal, Mister Misfortune remained completely undisturbed.
Only then did Anbaixiu explain, "Before the plan even began, we shielded against every external factor. Even deities cannot alter the future we have set our eyes upon. No matter what anyone attempts, those who harbor the delusion of twisting fate will reap only misfortune."
Tiamat hissed viciously, "He may be unaffected, but what about you? I doubt you two have enough strength left to protect two people."
Anbaixiu paused, momentarily taken aback. "Now you're just being unreasonable. What would you gain by killing me now? The Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn will still slip away, and you'll end up with nothing."
Who in their right mind lost a game of chess and smashed the chessboard over their opponent's head? Even if you killed your opponent, you still lost the game. Violence could not change that reality.
Tiamat mocked, "Watching you die would make me feel a little better. That reason alone is plenty."
Zariel, who had remained silent all this while, suddenly clapped her hands. "Splendid. The power of fate is truly wondrous. I find myself liking you more and more, little skeleton. Tiamat, we represent the prestige of the Nine Hells. Our opponent won fair and square; there is no need to be a sore loser."
Only then did Anbaixiu breathe a sigh of relief. While he wasn't afraid of being destroyed—he could always regenerate from his phylactery and craft a new body—what worried him was Tiamat's petty display. When a deity decided to be a sore loser, mortals were in grave danger. If a mortal wished to contend with an overwhelming power, they relied on rules to level the playing field. Once Tiamat resolved to abandon the rules, she had countless ways to torment Anbaixiu.
Having cultists sent to assassinate him day in and day out would be an absolute nuisance.
Fortunately, big sister Zariel was sensible enough. Indeed, devils had to care about their reputation; they weren't like those chaotic evil demons. Devils ran the casino. You were free to try your hand at cheating, but if someone won legitimately, you had to let them walk out with their winnings. Otherwise, if you ruined your reputation, who would ever sign a contract with a devil again?
Just as the thought crossed his mind, Anbaixiu felt a flicker of unease.
Tiamat was a seasoned Archduke of Hell. There was no way she didn't understand such conventions. For her to suddenly threaten him meant something wasn't quite right.
Yet, however unusual it seemed, it hardly mattered now. Mister Misfortune was on the verge of success.
The chaotic, overcast sky had turned profound and pitch-black, and the threads of fate had thinned out. Mister Misfortune had now entirely lost his humanoid form, reduced to a faint, ethereal shimmer of light.
Anbaixiu recognized it: that was his battered, fragmented soul.
There were many methods to burn life away to enhance power. Anbaixiu himself had detonated his own body before, producing a blast rivaling a ninth-tier spell. Paladins could ignite their lifespans to erupt with a more powerful soul; that paladin Fanxing had briefly stepped into the realm of legends after burning away his life.
Yet a method like Mister Misfortune's—burning flesh and soul together to fuel magic—was something Anbaixiu had truly never witnessed.
It was so extreme that virtually no one would ever research it.
This spell was Mister Misfortune's own creation. Ever since his youth, the man had harbored a relentless desire for self-destruction.
It could only be blamed on his family upbringing. From childhood, he had been indoctrinated with his family's unjust deeds, relentlessly brainwashed into believing descendants had to sacrifice themselves for their ancestors' transgressions, placing honor above life itself.
To Anbaixiu, such ideals were entirely meaningless.
Yet in the end, Anbaixiu had agreed to Mister Misfortune's plan. He did not understand it, but he respected his old friend's choice.
And now, he had succeeded.
Even with his soul shattered and his capacity for thought lost, he still severed that final thread of fate.
As the last thread snapped, the territory of the Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn severed its ties with the world entirely.
With its original bond broken, the land became akin to an invasive species, provoking a violent rejection from the world itself.
Under normal circumstances, repelling an alien entity meant endless natural disasters—thunder, gale-force winds, earthquakes... The world would employ every conceivable method to obliterate an intruder that did not belong.
This time, however, the world chose to push the land away. This was the precise outcome Mister Misfortune had engineered.
Merely having the land cast out by the world was not overly difficult; it might have left half of itself behind in the process. But to compel the world to expel the Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn without harming the land required nothing less than his ultimate sacrifice.
Massive chasms tore open along the borders of the Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn. It felt as if something beneath the earth was hoisting the entire realm skyward, thrusting it toward the gaping maw of the chaotic world waiting above.
The earth trembled. The battle between the Ryanites and the Githyanki had ground to a halt long ago as both sides stared in dumbfounded shock at the colossal landmass ascending into the air. They could not take in the kingdom in its entirety; they could only see the horizon completely blotted out by rising earth, as though a god had pried open the very crust of the world.
It was an undeniable miracle, far more terrifying than the banishment of the City of Alchemy.
The kingdom's ascent stirred violent gales, the atmosphere rushing inward to fill the void left behind.
Whether Githyanki, Ryanites, or the red dragons in the sky, all were caught and dragged by the ferocious winds, as if about to be swallowed into the colossal abyss left behind by the Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn.
Beyond that, seawater surged frantically into the void.
The Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn was flanked by sea on three sides. With such a massive tract of land departed, the sea instantly transformed into thundering waterfalls, hurtling down to drown the abyss.
The departure of the Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn would cause far more than just localized upheaval. The climate of the entire continent would undergo drastic shifts, and the ensuing natural disasters would affect countless lives.
Even within the kingdom itself, such a violent ascent would inevitably claim many casualties.
Yet this was already the best possible outcome.
As the entire Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn was cast into Chaos Space, Anbaixiu took flight, reaching out to grasp that lingering fragment of a soul.
He inspected it carefully and found the soul hopelessly battered, stripped of almost all memories. With its greatest obsession dissolved upon the kingdom's entry into the chaotic realm, it was now an almost entirely blank fragment.
Anbaixiu let out a quiet sigh.
"You have washed away your ancestors' sins. You have saved your homeland. From this day forth, neither you nor your family will be remembered as the Unholy Ones who usurped power, but as heroes of this realm.
"Rest in peace, Vladimir Rostov."
Chapter 349