Pov Author
The silence did not last.
It shattered with the sound of Shou Feng's laughter—a cold, sharp thing that echoed across the barren plains like breaking ice.
"Afraid?" he repeated, the word dripping with disdain. "I am the cage everything fears. I do not fear loss. I define it."
But he did not move from his place in front of Anna.
Lord Kazan descended slowly, his feet never touching the black stone. The air around him shimmered with a sickly, opalescent light—the magic of a master who twisted souls into tools. His eyes, a hungry, molten gold, remained fixed on Anna past Shou Feng's shoulder.
"You always had a taste for the divine, Shou Feng," Kazan mused, his voice a smooth, poisonous silk. "First power. Then dominion. Now… a broken healer from a forgotten world? She is a ghost wearing my Nahan's face. Give her to me. She belongs with her maker."
"I am not yours!" Anna shouted, her healer's light flaring defensively, a soft gold against the oppressive gloom. It was a candle against a hurricane.
Kazan's smile widened. "You even sound like her. That same… defiant spark. It was the first thing I carved out of her."
Rage, white-hot and unfamiliar, burned through Anna's fear. This was the man who tortured Shou Feng into a weapon. Who killed a girl she resembled. Who saw people as things to break and own.
Shou Feng's power spiked.
It was not a build. It was an eruption.
The black stone beneath them screamed, fissures racing out from his boots like spiderwebs of oblivion. The very light bent away from him, deepening the shadows until only the three of them existed in a pocket of swirling darkness and Kazan's false light.
"Enough!"
The word was a law.
Shou Feng moved.
There was no blur, no teleportation. He simply ceased to be in one place and was in another—directly before Kazan, his fist already driving forward.
It was not just a punch.
It was a collision of concepts .
His fist met a hastily conjured shield of Kazan's light. The impact did not sound . It unmade . A sphere of silent negation exploded outward. The shield shattered into dissolving motes, and Kazan was hurled back a hundred feet, skidding across the stone, his robes smoking.
Anna gasped, the shockwave of pure force hitting her like a physical wall. She stumbled, but her eyes remained wide, locked on the battle.
Kazan straightened, a trickle of black blood—god's blood—leaking from his lip. His amused facade cracked, revealing the endless cruelty beneath. "You strike me for a mortal?"
"I strike you," Shou Feng said, his voice deathly calm, "because you are in my way."
He didn't let Kazan breathe.
Another step, another punch. This one Kazan dodged, weaving aside with unnatural grace. He retaliated with a whip of condensed malice, a blade of pure hatred that could sever a soul from its history. Shou Feng didn't block it. He caught it.
His black-clad hand closed around the ethereal blade. It sizzled, screaming as he crushed it into nothingness.
Kazan's eyes narrowed. "You have grown stronger in your cage."
"You have grown stagnant in your obsession," Shou Feng countered.
He flung out a hand. From the swirling shadows above, a dragon descended.
It was not a creature of flesh and bone, but of shadow and silent fury. A Japanese dragon, long and serpentine, woven from the darkness between stars, its eyes pools of chilling void. It coiled around Shou Feng once, a possessive, living extension of his will, before launching itself at Kazan with a soundless roar.
Kazan met it with a sphere of devouring light. The two forces clashed in mid-air, light trying to consume shadow, shadow trying to extinguish light. The world tore at the seams. Anna fell to her knees, her hands over her ears, but the noise was inside her skull—the scream of conflicting dominions.
"You think your pet can hurt me?" Kazan snarled, veins of light spreading from his sphere, trying to bind the shadow dragon. "I taught you how to bind beasts!"
"You taught me how to break them," Shou Feng said, his voice cutting through the chaos.
He clenched his fist.
The shadow dragon detonated .
But not into nothing. It exploded into a thousand fragments of piercing darkness, each a needle of pure annihilation shooting toward Kazan in a horizontal storm.
Kazan cried out, a real sound of pain, as the needles shredded his defenses and peppered his form. He waved a hand, and the remaining needles dissolved. He was bleeding from a hundred wounds, his perfect image marred.
He was furious now.
"ENOUGH!" Kazan bellowed, his voice multiplying, becoming a chorus of the damned. He raised both hands. The sky answered. Crimson energy, thick as blood and teeming with the whispers of tortured souls, gathered above him. It formed into a colossal energy vall —a tidal wave of corrupted god-power, tall enough to blot out the churning sky, wide enough to swallow the horizon. "You forget who showed you the abyss! I will bury you in it, along with your little ghost!"
The vall crested, poised to crash down and erase everything.
Anna's heart stopped. This was beyond anything she could comprehend. This would not kill. It would un-write.
Shou Feng looked at the approaching annihilation.
He did not prepare a shield.
He did not summon another dragon.
He simply looked at Anna.
For a fraction of a second, his endless black eyes held hers. There was no plan in them. No cruelty. Just a terrifying, absolute certainty.
Then he turned his back to her, fully facing the cataclysm.
"Stay behind me," he said. Not a command. A fact.
He planted his feet.
And pulled .
He did not draw power from around him. He pulled it from within . From the core of his title: God of Destruction and Darkness.
The black stone plains heaved. The chains on his citadel glowed white-hot and snapped, one by one, their power draining back into him. The very darkness of the realm bent toward him, funneling into his form. It wasn't an absorption. It was a reclamation .
He became a singularity.
A void that preceded existence.
Kazan's bloody energy vall crashed down.
Shou Feng raised a single hand, palm open.
The vall hit.
And stopped .
It did not explode. It did not push him back. It simply… ceased to advance. The front of the world-ending wave pressed against his palm, held back by an invisible, absolute field of negation.
"Impossible…" Kazan whispered, his chorus of voices reduced to one, strained and desperate. He poured more power, the veins in his arms standing out, his form flickering with the effort.
Shou Feng's arm did not tremble.
He slowly closed his outstretched fingers.
As his fist clenched, the colossal energy vall compressed. It was forced inward, crumpling like parchment in a giant's fist, from a wave miles wide into a sphere, then into a pinprick of screaming light.
Then, with a final, soft pop , it winked out of existence.
Silence returned, deeper than before.
Kazan stood panting, drained, his light dimmed.
Shou Feng lowered his hand. He took a step forward. Then another. His walk was slow, deliberate, the click of his boots on the stone the only sound in the universe.
"You came for what is mine," Shou Feng said, his voice low, each word a stone dropped into a still pool.
"She is Nahan—" Kazan began, rallying.
"HER NAME IS ANNA."
The roar was not loud. It was absolute . It carried the weight of collapsing stars. It was the first time Shou Feng had ever raised his voice for her. For her name.
Kazan flinched.
Shou Feng was before him again. "You look at her and see a tool. A memory. A thing to own." He leaned in, his black eyes holding Kazan's golden ones. "I look at her… and the silence breaks."
Anna's breath caught. Her hands were pressed to her mouth.
Shou Feng didn't understand what he was saying. But the truth of it was in the air, sharper than any blade.
"You… love the ghost?" Kazan spat, a final, bitter taunt.
Shou Feng's answer was not in words.
His hand shot out, not as a fist, but as a blade. It pierced Kazan's chest, not through flesh, but through the very concept of his existence. Kazan gasped, his eyes wide with shock, not of pain, but of realization.
"I am not killing you for her," Shou Feng whispered, his face close to his former master's. "I am erasing you… because of her ."
He closed his eyes.
And erased Lord Kazan.
There was no blast. No dramatic dissolution. Kazan simply… frayed. His form, his light, his cruel, obsessive soul unraveled from the point of Shou Feng's touch like a knot coming undone. His expression froze, then emptied. His body became mist, then memory, then nothing at all.
A faint, final sigh whispered across the plain, carrying the last echo of a name: Nahan…
Then, true silence.
The oppressive, watching pressure vanished. The churning sky began to still, the crimson bleeding away into a deep, twilight purple.
Shou Feng stood alone, his hand still outstretched where Kazan had been. His shoulders were tense, his head bowed slightly.
Slowly, he turned.
His eyes found Anna, still on her knees. The void in his gaze was gone. In its place was something raw, exposed, and terrifyingly confused. The God of Destruction looked at the healer from another world, and for the first time, he had no concept for what he saw. No category. No strategy.
He had just ended an epoch of his existence for her.
And he did not know why.
He took a step toward her, then stopped, as if the ground itself had become uncertain.
Anna slowly rose to her feet. The healing light around her had softened to a gentle glow. She saw it—the conflict in him, the possession without a name, the devotion that wore the mask of ruthlessness.
The space between them was no longer just distance.
It was a precipice.
And they were both standing on the edge.
End of the chapter .