Tiamat blinked, her vertical pupils contracting as she surveyed the room. To the Chaos Karma Dragon King—a being who had slumbered in deep mountain ranges and ruled over territories vast enough to swallow cities—the space was insultingly small.
"Stay here?" she asked incredulously. Her voice carried the resonance of tectonic plates shifting, barely suppressed. "In this cramped box?"
Ren Ming leaned back, arms crossed over his chest.
"Not literally here," he said, a faint, amused smile playing on his lips. "I mean, stay with me. In what I'm building. Watch my method properly. Yell at me when you're frustrated. Take a front-row seat for when I start scaring the gods again. You know, the usual."
Tiamat narrowed her eyes. "That is all?" she demanded. "You call that 'direction'? Dragons seek territory, treasure, dominance. You offer… observation?"
Ren Ming nodded, his posture relaxing even further. "Sure it is. As long as we're doing it together. Scaring gods, going on walks, sharing drinks—doesn't all that sound better with company?"
His smile turned a shade more teasing, the kind of expression that usually preceded him doing something reckless.
"Call it a date or not," he shrugged. "Up to you."
Color rose, barely visible, at the tips of her ears. For a creature composed of ancient karma and scales, she looked remarkably human in that moment of flustered indignation.
"You…" She looked away, staring at a cheap calendar on the wall as if it held the secrets of the universe. "…You speak nonsense."
"And yet you haven't left," he pointed out.
Her tail—currently invisible, but spiritual pressure didn't lie—might as well have been lashing. He could feel her agitation in the way the air in the room grew heavy, static electricity dancing across his skin.
"…I will watch," she said at last, the words grudgingly torn from her throat. "For now. Because you are… interesting. Not because I crave your company, human."
"Sure," he said agreeably. "Whatever helps put your mind at ease."
Her golden eyes flashed back to him. "You are insufferable."
"And yet."
He stood, crossing the small space between them in two easy steps.
Tiamat tensed automatically. Centuries of battle-hardened instinct screamed at her—threat, approach, strike—but she did not rise. She remained seated, forcing her to tilt her head back to meet his gaze as he stopped just within her personal guard.
"Thanks for sticking around," he said quietly.
The teasing was gone. His voice was low, devoid of the usual playful lilt. It was the voice of a man who understood the weight of solitude.
"Honestly, I did suppress you at first. I had to. But you could've left at any time after that, and I wouldn't have stopped you. It's nice to have the respect of the Chaos Karma Dragon King. You're a wonderful woman, Tiamat."
Her throat worked. The compliment hit her harder than any spell.
"Do not… say it like that," she muttered, her gaze dropping to his chest. "It sounds… sentimental."
"Terrifying, right?"
He reached down.
Slowly, giving her every chance to pull away, to simply vanish, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and drew her into a hug.
Tiamat's body went rigid.
Dragons did not hug. They clashed. They wrestled. They coiled around mountains and crushed enemies. This was a human gesture, absurdly soft, dangerously vulnerable.
Her hands came up automatically, palms pressing flat against his chest as if to shove him away with force enough to shatter mountains.
She didn't.
Ren's aura wrapped around her in a warm spiral. It wasn't the domineering pressure of a Conqueror, but the vast, stabilizing weight of a Saint Kingdom. It brushed against her dragon instincts, not subduing them, but acknowledging them.
I see you, the aura seemed to say.
For a heartbeat, the eternal, cold loneliness she'd carried since the era she was hunted by the devils eased.
"…You are playing a dangerous game, cultivator," she murmured, her voice almost lost against his shoulder.
He smiled into her hair, smelling the scent of ozone and ancient rain.
"I live for dangerous games," he said. "Besides, someone has to make sure you don't brood yourself into an existential crisis."
She let out a breath that might have been a laugh, or perhaps a scoff.
"Arrogant pest."
After a moment, very slowly, the tension bled out of her frame. Her hands relaxed against his chest, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt, anchoring herself.
He held her a little tighter, memorizing the feel of dragonfire muffled beneath human skin.
Then, gently, he stepped back.
Her golden eyes were sharper now, but the edge had changed. It was less brittle, less like glass ready to shatter, and more like tempered steel.
"I'll be out for a while," he said, adjusting his collar. "Got some heavy thinking to do. Feel free to raid my fridge."
"It is empty," she said flatly.
"…Then feel free to judge me."
"That I was already doing."
He grinned. "Good. Keep it up."
With a final, lazy wave, he turned and stepped back out into the hallway. Space folded around him like a heavy curtain, rippling with the distortions of the void, and he was gone.
Left alone in the small apartment, Tiamat stared at the closed door for a long time.
Finally, she raised a hand, pressing it lightly to her chest where the echo of his aura still lingered, warm and baffling.
"…Ridiculous," she muttered.
But the corner of her mouth had softened, a hairline crack in the mask of the Dragon King.
....
Silence.
Not the silence of a room, or a forest, or even the dead silence of space.
This was the silence of the Dimensional gap.
Ren sat cross-legged in the middle of this void, eyes closed. His body was wrapped in a cloak of dim starlight, the chaotic turbulence of the dimension parting around him like water around a stone.
Buzz.
Behind him, within the unseen expanse of his Inner Void, his nine Fate Palaces unfolded.
They rose like ancient monuments, towering structures of crystal and light that pierced the gloom. They didn't just exist; they dominated. Each Palace was a world unto itself, crowned with a star that burned with the ferocity of a supernova.
Nine stars. Nine Palaces.
The mark of an Enlightened Being who had walked the Star Plucking realm to its peak and then stepped into the Ancient Saint realm with a foundation so solid it could crack the earth.
In the distance of his internal world, six other Soul Palaces flickered. They were tethered to him by thick, golden threads of the Myriad Origin Scripture: Rias, Akeno, Asia, Koneko, Issei, Kiba. Their inner worlds rotated steadily, roughly 60% condensed, humming with the power he had recycled and fed back to them.
Ren let his breath slow.
At his core, the Immortal Soul Bone began to glow. It was a soft light, unassuming, yet under its illumination, the infinite complexities of the Grand Dao unraveled into simple arithmetic. It allowed him to hold thousand-layered equations in his mind as easily as a child held marbles.
"Alright," he murmured to the darkness. His voice didn't echo; the void simply absorbed it. "Let's build something even more overpowering."
Images rose around him, projected by his intent. He was looking at the blueprints of four different epochs, four different answers to the question of immortality.
Nine Worlds: The original system. Refining worldly energy to strengthen the Fate Palace, Life Wheel, and Physique. Merit laws rooted in the flow of that reality's Heaven and Earth. Rigid, but foundational.
Tenth World: Chaos energy refined into Primordial Energy. A more flexible foundation, born from the same source as the worldly prime liquid. A path that gave more room for development, less shackled to the whims of the Old Villainous Heaven.
Three Immortals World: Cultivation starting from the Anima, the True Self. Using the power of the Fate Palace's four images to turn primal energy into True Energy. A system that cut out the middleman of Heaven and Earth and went straight to the self.
Eight Desolates: The body as a vessel, the Grand Dao as a treasury. Dao Fruits hanging from a Primordial Tree, each fruit a source of the Dao itself. A path meant to give mortals a way to reach beyond their limits, culminating in Dao Lords who stood at the apex of their epoch.
Four different roads.
Ren smiled faintly. In this world of Devils, Angels, and Gods, they were all stuck playing by the rules of a "System" someone else built. He was about to introduce anarchy.
"Step one," he said. "Soul Palaces."
In this world, he'd simplified things for his students—created Soul Palaces as personal inner worlds where their demonic power, holy power, or Touki could circulate properly. One palace each, for now. The Nine Worlds concept of Fate Palaces had inspired that.
Now, he reached forward and grabbed the underlying equation of reality.
With a thought, his nine Fate Palaces shifted.
BOOM.
The soundless explosion rocked his mental landscape. The Palaces unfolded like blooming lotuses made of adamantine, revealing inner rings, hidden channels, and unused capacity. The blueprints for dozens more palaces nested within the existing nine.
"Fate Palace decides how well you can learn," he murmured. "So let's use it as a printer."
He began to weave new pathways. Instead of making Soul Palaces rare, monumental achievements that required decades of meditation, he designed a loop.
Once someone condensed their first Soul Palace to 100%, the structure itself would seed the formation of the second, then the third. A cascading resonance.
Condense one world well enough, and it will teach you how to build the next.
Threads of the Myriad Origin Scripture coiled through the design, recycling waste, turning leakage into fuel. Every bit of lost energy became mortar for the next palace.
"Step two," he said, his eyes snapping open, glowing with a terrifying light. "Chaos."
From the Tenth World, he pulled in the concept of chaos energy refined into primordial energy.
In his mind's eye, he saw Rias sitting in meditation. Demonic power, usually chaotic and corrosive, swirled around her. But under this new law, it was stripped down, deconstructed into formless chaos, and then recombined into something purer. Something heavier.
He saw Asia's healing light undergoing the same transformation. Akeno's lightning. Koneko's Touki.
"Everyone gets the same clay," he murmured. "What they sculpt with it is up to them."
He anchored the chaos refinement process into the framework of the second Soul Palace.
Step one: Build your first world. Stabilize it. Step two: As the second palace condenses, you begin to touch Chaos and learn to refine it.
"Step three," he whispered. "Anima."
This was the hardest part. From the Three Immortals World, he drew in the idea of cultivating Anima—the True Self—from the very beginning. Not as some distant enlightenment for old monsters, but as an active force for the young.
Freed from the restraints of Heaven and Earth, Anima let cultivators anchor everything in who they truly were, not in some external judgment or "Evil Piece" system.
He bound this to the liminal space between the first and second Soul Palaces.
When someone condensed their second palace, his art would force them to confront the tension between the two worlds—the difference in their power, their desires. That pressure would squeeze out a nascent Anima. A flicker of True Self.
A mirror they couldn't look away from.
"Without True Self," he said, his voice hardening, "all this power just turns you into a stronger puppet for the devils or the gods."
He added safeguards. If someone tried to advance without acknowledging their Anima, the loop would stall. Power would circulate, but breakthroughs would cease. It forced introspection at gunpoint.
"Step four," he continued. "Fruits."
From the Eight Desolates, he shaped the idea of Dao Fruits—discrete crystallizations of one's path.
In his system, the Primordial Tree would grow in the third Soul Palace. Its roots would dig into the previous two palaces, feeding on the foundation and the chaos, while its branches reached toward the future.
Every time Rias mastered a deeper level of destruction, or Issei understood a new facet of domination, their Soul Palace would condense a tiny Dao Fruit. It would store that insight as something permanent. Failures would feed the tree as compost. Successes would hang like stars.
"Collect enough fruits," he murmured, "and you stop being just 'talented' and start being inevitable."
He stepped back mentally, looking at the emerging structure. It was a terrifyingly efficient engine.
First Soul Palace: Foundation, Myriad Origin loop, basic circulation.
Second Soul Palace: Chaos refinement, the first taste of Primordial Energy.
The Bridge: Anima spark, True Self seeded.
Third Soul Palace: Primordial Tree, Dao Fruits, crystallized paths.
Further Palaces: Each one a new "world" of the self, built faster and cleaner as the system compounded.
He could already see the ladder stretching up, past the traditional peak of Immortal Emperors, past Dao Lords, reaching for the realms of Ancestor and possibly even Supreme Giant.
"A True Self that doesn't beg Heaven for permission," he said softly. "A path where the Self is the Heaven."
He chuckled, a dry sound in the void. "Li Qiye would probably laugh his ass off if he saw this. Or call me a plagiarist. Whatever works."
Time passed without Ren Ming feeling it at all. He wove it all together into a single art, lines of alien Dao-script spiraling through the void like a living equation. It burned with multiple flavors: the solidity of the Nine Worlds, the flexibility of the Tenth, the introspection of the Three Immortals, and the ferocity of the Eight Desolates.
The name came to him as naturally as breathing.
"Myriad Epoch True Self Canon."
BOOM!
The void shuddered. The new Grand Dao Art sank into the deeper layers of his Saint Kingdom. His nine Fate Palaces glowed brighter, screaming in resonance, before dimming back to their usual steady radiance.
He let out a long breath.
"…That'll do for a prototype," he said.
He could feel the potential coiled in the structure, a sleeping beast waiting to wake. The foundation was there, but refinements were sure to come. He still needed to find a way for Chaos Energy to be the medium in which one could comprehend all other types of energies flawlessly.
Or how one could continually condense more and more Soul Palaces, leading to more Dao Fruits and Primordial Trees, which would trigger qualitative changes in the very soul.
Thinking of all this made Ren Ming feel an eagerness that was different from everything else. The thrill of battle was one thing; the thrill of creation, of usurping the laws of the universe, was another. He was beginning to see why those old monsters wouldn't mind passing hundreds of years alone in their pursuit of the Grand Dao.
...
Two quiet, dangerous weeks passed after Ren Ming stitched the Myriad Epoch True Self Canon into the bones of his Saint Kingdom.
In these two weeks, the new Grand Dao Art was no longer just raw lines of Dao-script; the equations had been lived in, stress-tested by his disciples during training and small skirmishes around Kuoh. Tiny imperfections revealed themselves the way cracks did in a sword after a few battles, and Ren polished them away with ruthless efficiency.
After various tweaks and improvements, he held a version that was good enough for the public.
But cultivation wasn't the only task Ren Ming got done in these weeks. He was also nicely enjoying himself with his girlfriends and future wives.
For a time, Ren Ming took the girls out on solo dates, making sure to be attentive and caring. He treated them not as pieces on a chessboard, but as women. And these dates were always a success, allowing the girls to drop their guards and simply breathe.
Eventually, Ren Ming managed to start coordinating double dates. Against his charms, the girls inevitably couldn't resist.
It was these types of dates that happened more often now.
Downtown Kuoh glowed softly as the sun dipped below the horizon, neon signs flickering to life one by one, painting the wet pavement in shades of electric blue and violent pink. Human couples strolled past cafés and game centers, their laughter spilling into the street, oblivious to the devils walking among them.
Ren waited under a streetlight in his usual relaxed slouch—simple dark jeans, a button-up shirt rolled at the sleeves, collar open. Casual, but nothing sloppy. He checked the time on his phone, more out of habit than impatience.
He didn't have to wait long.
"Ren."
Rias' voice carried easily even over the evening chatter. She approached from the station with Akeno at her side, the two of them drawing stares just by existing.
Rias wore a soft cream knit sweater and a slim skirt that went just past mid-thigh, perfectly balanced between elegant and youthful. Her crimson hair flowed down her back like a banner of war, softened only by the gentle city lights. Beside her, Akeno had chosen a black blouse with a modest neckline that somehow still made grown men swallow, paired with a long skirt that swished around her ankles.
"You're early," Rias said, a small, pleased smile tugging at her lips as she stopped before him. "Again."
"Time moves slower when I'm waiting for pretty girls," Ren answered easily, slipping his phone into his pocket.
Akeno's lips curved in that familiar, teasing smile, her violet eyes glinting with mischief. "Ara ara, such smooth words right from the start. You'll make Rias-chan greedy, Ren-sama."
Rias' cheeks colored slightly. "Akeno."
Ren stepped forward, unbothered by the envious stares of the passersby. He slipped an arm around Rias' waist, drawing her gently closer. She stiffened for half a heartbeat—Kuoh's main street was busy, and High-Class Devils usually kept to the shadows—then she relaxed, the faintest shiver running through her as she leaned into his frame.
"Evening, Rias," he said softly.
He kissed her.
It wasn't rushed. It wasn't obscene. It was a slow, sure press of lips that claimed her existence in the middle of the crowded street. It made her toes curl in her boots. She leaned into it for a beat longer than she'd intended, her fingers curling into his shirt, before he pulled back with a lazy half-smile.
Then he turned to Akeno and, without dropping his arm from Rias, reached out with the other.
"Akeno."
Her eyes softened, the teasing mask slipping just a fraction. "My, my."
She stepped in, letting him slide his hand to the small of her back. When he kissed her, she responded without hesitation, a soft hum vibrating in her throat. The kiss lingered, a little hotter, a little more charged than Rias'; by the time they broke apart, a thin thread of static electricity tickled against his lips.
"Public affection right away…" Rias muttered, trying and failing to sound annoyed. Her fingers still hadn't left his shirt. "Honestly, you… people are watching."
Ren smiled at her, eyes warm but hiding that glint of steel. "You wanted more confidence as a King," he said quietly. "That includes owning what's yours. If anyone has a problem with you kissing your boyfriend in public, I'll break their Dao Heart for them."
A passing group of high school boys turned pale as they walked by, instinctively feeling a chill run down their spines, and speed-walked away without quite knowing why.
Rias' lips twitched.
"…Idiot," she said, voice soft. "You can't just say things like that…"
But she didn't push him away. Instead, she stepped in on his right side, looping her arm through his. Akeno took his left, body pressed close, her laugh low and satisfied.
"Where to?" Akeno asked, looking up at him. "Dinner first? Or perhaps… something more exciting?"
"If I let you pick, we'll end up in a love hotel for 'research'. That's for later," Ren lightly chuckled, ignoring Akeno's pout. "Let's keep it simple. Food, walk, maybe karaoke."
Rias' expression softened at that, the tension of her peerage duties melting from her shoulders.
"…That sounds nice," she admitted.
They walked through the city like that—a King and her Queen wrapped around a cultivator who looked more like a college senior than a Saint capable of slaughtering gods.
At the restaurant, a cozy place tucked away from the main drag, Rias shyly let him feed her from his chopsticks once. Her cheeks flushed a deep red, but her eyes sparkled with something unguarded. Akeno, ever the provocateur, "accidentally" licked his fingers when he wiped a grain of rice from the corner of her mouth.
On the street afterward, the air was cool and crisp. Akeno clung to his arm openly, not caring about the looks they received. Rias took a little longer, but by the time they were watching the city lights from a small park overlooking Kuoh, she was leaning into his side, fingers tangled with his, breathing quietly.
Below them, the city moved like a river of light.
"It still feels strange," Rias murmured, watching car lights trace lines on the highway. "Walking like this after… Asgard. After you defied gods on a live broadcast… and then going back to school the next day like nothing happened."
Ren's thumb brushed over her knuckles in a rhythmic, soothing motion.
"Power doesn't cancel simple enjoyment," he said, his voice calm. "Like I said, the Dao Heart needs to taste the flavors of life. These flavors—this wind, this view, you two—include simple things to anchor one part of me."
Akeno rested her head lightly against his shoulder. Her tone was teasing, but beneath it lay a profound sincerity.
"Then we must become very sturdy anchors, Ren-sama. Or you might float away to fight the Heavens themselves."
"Exactly," he said. "So I'm going to be selfish and keep treating you all. Eat with me. Walk with me. Let me kiss you behind convenience stores and really anywhere we feel like."
Rias laughed softly, the sound bright and a little watery in the quiet night.
"…You really are unfair," she said. "You say such embarrassing things with a straight face."
"It's not embarrassing if it's true," he said easily, squeezing her hand. "Besides, you always did suit being treated like a proper queen. Not a piece on a board, but a Queen."
Her hand tightened on his, holding on as if he were the only solid thing in a world that was rapidly changing.
And perhaps, he was.