The Outer Void Battlefield was weeping.
For ten thousand miles in every direction, the astral winds howled like grieving gods. Black tribulation clouds, thick with the wrath of the Heavenly Dao, swirled above a shattered throne of meteors. Purple lightning, so dense it could instantly vaporize a mortal realm, crashed down in apocalyptic waves.
At the center of the destruction stood Mo Yuan.
He was the Immortal Ascendant Emperor. The undisputed sovereign of the cosmos. For a millennium, he had walked the path of a "Pain Carrier," climbing from the ashes of his mortal home, dragging himself over mountains of corpses to reach the absolute apex of cultivation.
He had done it all to build a fortress so high that the people he loved could never be hurt again.
Today was supposed to be his final triumph. He was undergoing the Supreme Tribulation to break the limits of the universe.
Instead, it was his execution.
Mo Yuan did not look up at the heavenly lightning threatening to crush him. He looked down at his own chest.
A hand was plunged directly through his ribcage.
The hand belonged to Ye Yan, the man Mo Yuan had called his sworn brother. The man whose back Mo Yuan had protected in a hundred death-matches. Ye Yan's arm was coated in Mo Yuan's golden Emperor blood, his fingers tightly gripping the glowing, supreme Cultivation Bone nestled near Mo Yuan's heart.
"Why...?" Mo Yuan's voice was barely a whisper, yet it carried a weight that made the surrounding space tremble.
Ye Yan didn't flinch. His eyes, once full of brotherly warmth, were now hollow pools of absolute greed.
"Because the peak is only meant for one, Brother Mo," Ye Yan said coldly. He twisted his wrist, severing the final golden meridian connecting the bone to Mo Yuan's heart. "You are too sentimental. You conquered the universe, yet you still dream of mortal peace. You are not fit to break the final limit. Your power is wasted on you."
Mo Yuan coughed up a mouthful of golden blood. His supreme aura, which had suppressed the galaxy just moments before, began to violently collapse.
He slowly shifted his gaze. Standing a few paces behind Ye Yan, untouched by the storm of lightning, was a woman. Li Lian. His wife.
Her flawless face, beautiful enough to topple empires, was a mask of absolute indifference. She stepped forward gracefully, avoiding the pools of his blood, and reached out.
She wasn't reaching for his hand to save him. She delicately slid the Supreme Spatial Ring off Mo Yuan's trembling finger. It contained his entire fortune, his life's work, and the absolute destiny of the realm.
"Lian'er..." Mo Yuan breathed, his vision beginning to blur.
"Do not look at me with those eyes," Li Lian said, her voice like chiming silver. "You promised me eternity. But eternity belongs to those who take it. You were just the stepping stone."
With a sickening crack, Ye Yan ripped his hand backward.
Mo Yuan's Cultivation Bone was torn entirely from his body.
The agony was indescribable, a pain that transcended the physical body and shattered the very foundation of his soul. But as Mo Yuan fell backward into the cold, empty abyss of the void, he realized something strange.
He didn't feel rage.
In the beginning, a thousand years ago, when his parents were murdered by stray cultivators, the rage had consumed him. It had fueled his rise. But now, betrayed by the very people he had chosen as his new family, the rage was simply gone.
He was just... tired.
As the darkness of the Outer Void rose to swallow him, Mo Yuan closed his eyes.
I fought for a thousand years, he thought as his physical body began to dissolve into starlight. I conquered the heavens. I slaughtered demons. I became a god.
But all I ever wanted to do... was paint.
He remembered the smell of his father's carpentry shop. He remembered the rough grain of discarded wood. He remembered the feeling of a cheap, pig-bristle brush he had never gotten the chance to truly use.
If there is a next life, the Immortal Emperor prayed as his soul finally shattered into dust, I do not want the heavens. I do not want revenge. I just want to be a mortal.
High above, the purple tribulation lightning struck the empty space where Mo Yuan had just been, obliterating the final traces of the Emperor's physical form. Ye Yan and Li Lian turned away, victorious, holding the supreme bone.
They did not notice that a single, microscopic fragment of Mo Yuan's shattered soul did not fade into the void.
Instead, it caught a hidden, golden thread of Karma and violently pulled backward—slipping through the cracks of the Heavenly Dao, falling down through the layers of time itself.