Gen stood on the crumbling battlement, his body coiled like a spring, itching to join the fray. But a deeper instinct held him back—a desperate need to understand the abomination Xian had unleashed. The more he watched, the more he felt it was a cheat, a glorious, terrifying fraud.
He turned to Lorel, his voice low and urgent. "If the Dark Wheel requires you to poison the Acupoints of the orthodox Wheels *before* they can be awakened… doesn't that make it restricted only to those who can already use the Wheels? How does that solve Xian's problem, then?"
Lorel fell silent, contemplating the same flaw. It made a terrible kind of sense.
On the opposite side of the devastation, Liang glanced in their direction, a knowing, almost pitying smile on his lips. "It's so easy to understand, Gen Jiang. Why don't you see it?" he called out, his voice carrying over the rumble of distant annihilation.
As Xian's main disciple, Liang held all the details. It was, to him, the most beautiful and profound revelation he had ever witnessed.
"The Dark Wheel is not biased toward anyone," Liang explained, his tone that of a patient tutor. "We were taught that every cultivator has five Acupoints—the Root, the Sea, the Heart, the Mind, the Crown—with the sixth having no physical point. But what we were not told is that the Acupoints are not *limited* to Wheel users. They are foundational spirit-doors. For *every* person who has a soul."
He let the words hang in the charged air.
"Thus, anyone who is alive has these Acupoints. Whether they know it or not. Whether they are open or not. Do you understand now?"
Gen felt his heart stumble in his chest. The realization hit him like a physical blow.
*So this was it.*
It wasn't a corruption of the path. It was a **demolition of the gate**. You didn't need the key. You just needed to break down the doorframe and crawl through the splinters. By corrupting the existing Acupoint locations—whether they were open and flowing or dormant and sealed—anyone could bypass the need for orthodox talent entirely. It was a **backdoor to power** for anyone, regardless of who they were or how they were born.
On the battlefield, Xian and Wushia had entered the final, brutal phase of their clash.
Wushia summoned beams of World Nova that seared the very concept of space, shooting like falling stars from every conceivable angle. At the same time, he barreled toward Xian in a constant, shifting motion. By moving erratically, he was able to **shift the sweet spot** of his own domain, making the stable band Xian had found a moving, treacherous target.
Xian flapped his tattered wings, zipping through the void with dominated speed, evading the beams. But a few landed on his chest with solid, concussive ***THUMPS***. Yet, his newly hardened skin showed incredible resilience, and the chaotic, healing energy of **Happy Disaster** swarmed over the wounds, sealing them almost instantly.
Wushia was already in front of him. A fist sheathed in condensed World Nova hammered into Xian's guarding forearm. The impact was sickening. Wushia did not stop. He hit again. And again. A relentless barrage of world-ending fists drove Xian back through the sky.
Xian could only defend while retreating. If he went too far, Wushia would finish him from a distance. Even this close, he was in mortal danger, but at least here his opponent was face-to-face.
With another titanic blow, Xian was sent skidding through the air. As he retreated, he pivoted mid-flight, flapping his wing to jump back into the shimmering, shifting sweet spot—this time, moving upward. From that precarious perch, he unleashed **Melancholic Disaster**.
With dominated speed, the void-black orb arrived with impossible swiftness directly in front of Wushia's face.
But this time, Wushia smirked.
He caught the little orb of nullifying disaster in his bare palm.
Even Xian was stunned.
Wushia crushed **Melancholic Disaster** in his hand. The contained explosion of negation consumed him entirely in a silent, black flash.
When the cloud of dissipating smoke cleared, he was gone.
He was above Xian, hammering downward, his palm pressing the **entire condensed weight of the World Nova** down like a god stamping a seal.
Xian's face turned grim. He lifted his arms, flapping his wings with aggressive force, and met the descending doom.
He held it.
Wushia pressed from above. A furrow of screaming energy appeared between them, sparking and bursting with power. But Xian was slowly, inexorably, being pushed down, cursed by the weight of a fabricated apocalypse. Yet, his body continuously healed. Bones cracked and reconstructed. Flesh seared and regrew. He would have died a hundred times over without the Dark Wheel's horrific, sustaining power.
Every observer understood this. At this point, all doubts evaporated.
The Dark Wheel had a price. Yes. But it was **definitely worth it**.
Many had sought power—for family, for friends, for vengeance. But nature was not kind. It did not distribute talent according to need. Now, the Dark Wheel had reset the wheel of nature to zero. They could see it with their own eyes. Everyone's faith in Xian solidified, not because he was supremely strong—they all knew he was a genius who had *shattered his own foundation*, reducing himself to nothing like most of them. Yet he had returned to this level of strength. What better proof could there be?
Wushia wiped silvery blood from his lips. "Stories must have their end, Xian. Whether you like it or not. Whether *my* tale ends here or not, yours shall, definitively." A strange, genuine light entered his eyes. "I have never been so happy to finally see the end of a story. Thank you, Xian. Thank you."
He spread his arms like an angel accepting dawn. He let the World Nova gather.
As a Divine General, Wushia had seen many things, taken countless lives. It wasn't the thrill of combat that animated him. After witnessing so many stories with the same ending—the Damocles always claiming the worlds they visited—he was tired. He was bored. He wanted a *different* ending. And this was exactly what he wanted. Could Xian rewrite this ending, or would it be the same as all the others? Wushia needed to know.
He joined his palms together and summoned it.
Just as Buqu had once given form to Forged Destiny, Wushia gave form to **The World Nova**.
A single, orbiting sphere of energy appeared between his palms. The world seemed to change. It was a tiny, perfect ball with a shining ring of blue around it—a microcosm of finality. Gen could feel all the dispersed power of the World Nova from across the sky retreat, concentrating into that single, terrible point in Wushia's grasp.
As it finished forming, Wushia's own hands began turning into particles of light, disintegrating from the strain. Buqu's Forged Destiny was destiny given form. Wushia had given form to **an ending**, and his body was paying the price.
When Xian saw the completed World Nova forming, he knew it would be decided now.
He flapped his wings one final time, summoning all his remaining Qi. He flickered forward, pushing **Zhadao** to its absolute maximum. He didn't attack Wushia. He dominated the very concept of **Resilience** and drove his fist, sheathed in black dominance, **into the forming World Nova itself**, before it could fully stabilize.
The impact was a silent bloom of blinding blue and dark red light that consumed the world.
The energy spread outward in a perfect, expanding sphere, disintegrating everything it touched.
Gen and Lorel became beams of light, using **Infinity** not to attack, but to flee, racing backward faster than thought. They were not the only ones. Every elite cultivator still present used their utmost speed to escape the radius of the conclusion.
As they ran, they could see the magnificent, horrifying scene behind them.
Wushia's hands fell limply to his sides. Xian's arms also fell, the two figures facing each other in the eye of the silent storm. Xian's body had reverted to normal, the alien wings and scales gone. Wushia stood there, a bright, serene smile on his face, his eyes completely white.
Xian's voice echoed through the spreading ring of destruction as he began to walk away from the falling Divine General.
"You don't have to fit the mold," he declared, his words rockslide-heavy, imprinting themselves on the soul of the world. "You don't need it. All you need… is the Dark Wheel."
As if summoned by his triumph, scrolls of ancient-looking parchment materialized in the sky above the fleeing masses. They fell like a rain of dark manna amidst the chaos.
By the time Gen and Lorel found safe ground at a brutal distance, they could see it. The cultivators—terrified, desperate, ambitious—were snatching the scrolls from the air. Some fought over them. One after another, they took them, clutching the promises within to their chests.
The scene made Gen's heart bleed. A single parchment drifted down and landed at his feet.
He stared at it.
"It's too late, Gen," Lorel said softly beside him, her voice thick with a grief that wasn't for the dead, but for the living.
Together, they lifted their heads to the sky.
Of the three Damocles left hanging in the heavens, one began to dissolve. It turned into a shower of brilliant, harmless particles of light that drifted down upon the world, a beautiful lie masking a fundamental change.
The first pillar had fallen. Not by orthodox strength, but by a corrupted, convincing alternative.
Xian's revolution had begun.