The blood world was ending. There was no denying it now, no pretending that this was temporary or reversible. The realm was dying, collapsing in on itself with terrifying finality.
Crystal was trying desperately to hold onto something, anything that would keep her from being swept away. But the statue she'd been gripping had already crumbled completely, broken into countless pieces that tumbled into the churning blood ocean below. The fragments were immediately caught by the current, pulled inexorably toward the massive vortex that dominated the center of the dying world.
In front of her, the transparent screen continued to hover, displaying text that seemed impossible, unbelievable:
[Sending host soul back in time.]
Crystal was shocked. This was the first time since the realm began its collapse that her expression had truly changed, the blank mask she'd worn cracking to reveal genuine emotion beneath. Her eyes were wide, her mouth slightly open, her entire face reflecting the disbelief coursing through her mind.
She did not know what to think. Was this some forbidden art? Some technique that existed only in legends and ancient texts? Because going back in time, truly traveling through the temporal stream to a point in the past, if such a thing was possible, then surely people would have tried it before. Powerful cultivators seeking to undo mistakes, change outcomes, save loved ones, all would have attempted this if it were truly achievable.
But it was not possible. Everyone knew this. Time flowed in one direction only, forward and inexorable. The past was fixed, unchangeable, a foundation upon which the present was built.
Yet here was this screen, this system, claiming to do exactly that impossible thing.
Crystal just looked at the text, her mind struggling to process the implications. Then the words changed, new information appearing:
[Checking host body from the past to find optimal temporal anchor point…]
Below this, a loading bar appeared. But this one was different from the previous bars. It moved in jumps rather than smooth progression, the percentage increasing in irregular increments.
[1%… 4%… 9%… 15%…]
Crystal watched the numbers climb, her attention fixed on the screen even as the world fell apart around her. She didn't realize, lost in her focus on the impossible promise being made, that the statue had finished crumbling beneath her.
She was falling.
Her body dropped into the blood ocean with a splash that was immediately lost in the chaos of waves and destruction. The liquid was cold, far colder than it had any right to be. It felt wrong against her skin, more viscous than water, clinging to her clothes and hair.
Crystal immediately began to be pulled by the current. The vortex's gravitational force was immense, creating flows throughout the entire ocean that all led to that central point. She was being dragged toward it, swept along by forces far beyond her ability to resist.
[40%… 60%…]
The loading bar continued its climb, uncaring of her physical peril.
She tried to swim away, kicking hard and pulling with her arms, attempting to move in any direction except toward the vortex. But it was useless. The force was too strong, the current too powerful. For every meter she swam, she was pulled back three.
Crystal managed to swim upward, breaking the surface of the blood ocean and gasping for air. She looked around desperately, searching for something to grab onto, some debris or structure that could serve as an anchor.
Above her, another piece of the sky was falling.
A massive chunk of the black void, broken off from whatever held reality together in this realm, tumbled downward in a lazy rotation. It was enormous, easily the size of a building, and it was heading directly toward the section of ocean she was in.
The impact when it hit was catastrophic. A wave erupted outward from the collision point, a wall of blood-red liquid that rose twenty feet high. Crystal was caught in it, swept up and pushed back under the surface, tumbled end over end by the force of the displaced water.
She fought her way back up, breaking the surface again and gasping for breath. Her muscles burned with effort. The cold of the ocean was seeping into her bones, making movement harder.
[75%… 85%…]
A piece of the sky was falling again. Or perhaps it was a different piece, Crystal couldn't tell anymore. There was so much debris raining down that individual chunks had become impossible to track.
This piece was heading directly for where she was swimming, descending with terrible inevitability. Crystal kicked harder, trying to move out of its path, but the current fought her every movement.
She looked up and saw the falling fragment clearly now. It was massive and irregular, all jagged edges and broken surfaces. And it was going to land exactly where she was about to reach.
Crystal pushed herself harder, swimming upward with desperate strength. Her hand broke the surface first, then her head, water streaming from her hair and face.
The screen floated before her eyes, still there despite everything:
[95%… 98%…]
The falling piece of sky was almost upon her, its shadow blocking out what little light remained from the shattered moon.
[100%]
The bar completed. New text appeared immediately:
Optimal temporal anchor point located. Changing host temporary location.
And then Crystal phased out of the world completely.
It was as if she was deleted from reality itself, her existence simply erased in an instant. One moment she was there, swimming in the blood ocean with a massive piece of sky about to crush her. The next moment, she was gone.
The fragment landed with tremendous force, hitting the exact spot where Crystal had been a fraction of a second earlier. It sent up another massive wave, displaced thousands of gallons of blood-red liquid, and was immediately caught by the current and pulled toward the vortex.
But Crystal was no longer there to be crushed by it. The system had removed her, transported her somewhere else, somewhen else.
Meanwhile, as the ocean continued its inexorable flow into the vortex, something else was happening.
The man statue, the northern figure with the straw hat and crackling katana, had been crumbling throughout the realm's collapse. Cracks had spread across its surface, weakening its structure bit by bit.
Now, finally, it gave way completely.
The statue cracked one final time with a sound like thunder, then crumbled into thousands of pieces. The fragments tumbled into the blood ocean below, splashing down and immediately being caught by the current.
But as the statue broke apart, as the pieces began their journey toward the vortex, something strange happened.
Two eyes behind the mask portion of the statue's face started to glow. They turned a bluish-red color, bright enough to be visible even against the crimson of the ocean and the darkness of the collapsing sky.
Then light came out of those two eyes.
Beams of bluish-red radiance shot forth, piercing through the falling debris and the churning water. The light wrapped around itself, spiraling and condensing, drawing inward rather than spreading outward.
The beams coalesced, forming a shape. A sphere. A blue orb that hovered in the air for a moment before beginning to fall toward the ocean below.
Inside that transparent blue orb was a screen, similar to the one that had appeared before Crystal but smaller, more compact.
The orb fell through the air, descending toward the blood ocean that was rapidly vanishing into the vortex. All around it, the realm continued to collapse. More pieces of sky fell. The last remnants of the shattered moon tumbled downward. The ocean level had dropped so low that vast sections of what had once been underwater were now exposed.
Cracks started to appear around the falling orb itself.
Small fissures spread across its surface, spider-webbing out from random points. The transparent blue material began to fracture, structural integrity failing under some unseen pressure.
The orb was entering the ocean now, splashing down into the blood-red liquid. It floated for a moment, bobbing on the surface, before being caught by the current and pulled toward the vortex.
As it traveled toward that swirling void, the cracks spread further. The orb was breaking apart, shattering into pieces even as it moved.
It broke into hundreds of fragments. Then thousands. The pieces scattered across the surface of the ocean, each one caught by the current and swept along toward the center.
But before the orb completely disintegrated, before every piece was swallowed by the vortex, the small screen inside showed something.
Text appeared, displayed for just a moment before everything vanished into the darkness:
[Mission Accomplished]
[Reward: Soul Mate Rebirth]
Then the fragments of the orb entered the vortex and disappeared, consumed by that swirling void that led to nowhere and everywhere.
And the world broke.
The vortex, which had been large before, suddenly increased dramatically in size. It expanded outward in all directions, growing exponentially, consuming everything in its path with terrifying speed.
The remaining ocean was swallowed in seconds, billions of gallons of blood-red liquid simply ceasing to exist as they passed beyond the vortex's event horizon.
The few remaining pieces of the moon that hadn't yet fallen were pulled in next, dragged from the sky by forces that defied physical explanation.
The black void that served as the realm's sky began to collapse inward, folding in on itself like paper being crumpled. Sections of reality simply stopped existing, leaving gaps that the vortex eagerly filled.
The southern statue, the woman with the serpent, had remained standing although what was left after Crystal was dragged away. But now, finally, it too began to crumble. Cracks raced across its surface, and within moments it shattered completely, fragments tumbling into the vortex that had expanded to consume everything.
The entire realm was being swallowed. Every structure, every fragment of debris, every drop of the blood ocean, all of it disappeared into that central void.
The vortex grew larger still, accelerating its expansion, becoming so massive that it was no longer a feature of the realm but had become the realm itself. There was nothing left except swirling darkness and the sensation of everything falling inward, being compressed down to a single point of infinite density.
The blood world, which had existed for untold eons as a prison or sanctuary or waystation between states of being, ceased to exist.
The vortex consumed the last remnants of reality, swallowed the final pieces of broken sky and shattered moon, pulled in every fragment that remained.
And then, with a sensation more felt than heard, something like a cosmic sigh, the vortex itself collapsed.
It folded inward, contracting with the same impossible speed it had expanded. Smaller and smaller, condensing down to a point so tiny it might as well not exist at all.
Then nothing.
Absolute nothing.
No ocean. No sky. No moon. No statues. No realm.
Just void. Pure, empty void where something had once been.
The blood world was gone, erased completely as if it had never existed at all.
And somewhere, somewhen, a soul was traveling backward through time, carried by forces beyond comprehension toward a second chance at life.