When I emerged from the portal, I found that Ke Jun's world was barely a world at this point.
The sky had lost its purple and was something else now, a colour that didn't have a name.
The bone-trees I could still see were translucent, their forms present only as outlines, like drawings someone had erased most of the way. The channels were dry, the bog was dry, the central water that had surrounded the statue was gone, and the statue itself was sitting in what remained of the mud, listing slightly to one side.
The three Realm Stabilising Trees were dust.
Even though I would have loved to give them a new home in my world, I had known this was coming. I had known it since the Weeping Root told me there were only three left, since I had felt what it cost them to hold the Blood Moon and move it even those degrees across the sky.
They were already at the end of their lifespan.
The Golden Sun energy had moved through them like fire through paper, and when it was finished, what remained was ash.
I didn’t know what to say, so I simply whispered a silent thank you.
Without their help, it wouldn’t have been possible to take the moon.
As I looked around, I quickly noticed the Weeping Root.
The boy was floating in the centre of what remained of the sky.
When he saw me, something in his expression shifted. It was pretty obvious that he had expected me to leave. The portal was closing, the people were gone, the Blood Moon was gone, and there was no practical reason for me to come back, but even then, I did.
"You came back," he said.
"I came back," I agreed.
"The world is almost gone," he said, in case I had somehow missed this.
"I know."
He wiped at his face with the back of his translucent hand; the same gesture he had made every time since I had met him.
“Why are you here?” he asked. “You should leave. There's nothing left here to save.”
"There's you," I said.
He looked at me like he very badly wanted the words that I had said to be true but was trying his best to protect himself from believing it.
"You should already know this," he said. "Inner world spirits can only exist with the inner world, or with the master's soul. Without one of those, I just…" he made a small gesture with one hand that was the closest an inner world spirit apparently got to describing their own cessation. "I stop."
"I know," I said.
I turned and looked at the center of the dissolving world.
I had broken the first lock. Ke Jun had gone back to sleep, but the locks were still there, and the statue was still here, and the inner world around it was becoming nothing, and the soul inside it had nowhere to go.
If I left it to its fate or tried to destroy it myself, the Masked One might be able to preserve the soul. Who knows what absurdly powerful techniques the madman had. And if that happened, the mysterious being would later use Ke Jun against me.
Ancestor versus descendant - that was the way things usually went in cultivation novels.
I had to admit, another battle with Ke Jun was not something I wanted.
So, the question remained, what should I do with Ke Jun's soul?
I had been thinking about this since before I crossed through the portal the first time. I had been turning it over and putting it down and picking it up again, because the list of reasons not to was long and legitimate.
A Civilization Realm expert's full soul in my inner world.
That was a terrifying thought.
But the tribulation was almost finished.
Once it ended, the Genesis Seed would be freed. And a Ke Jun who had lost his inner world, who had no cultivation to speak of, who was a soul without the apparatus that makes a Civilization Realm expert a Civilization Realm expert, would be a mortal.
Sure, he would still be Ke Jun. He would still be dangerous because of his intelligence and his experience, but with the Genesis Seed, he would be manageable.
So, with my decision made, I flew down to what remained of the central bog, to the listing statue sitting in dry cracked mud, and I put my hands on it. It was lighter than it looked, but then again, everything in a dying world was lighter than it looked, the mass was going out of things along with the light.
That was good for me because it meant that it was easy to lift.
The Weeping Root watched me fly back up to him carrying the statue of his master, and his expression went through something I didn't try to name because there wasn't a single word that would have covered it.
"You're taking his soul," he said. "Even though…"
"He asked me to destroy it," I said. "I'm not doing that. There are better options."
"He said the Masked One would sense it."
"The Masked One was already going to sense that his world collapsed," I said. "Whatever response that triggers is a problem I'll deal with when I have to deal with it. Right now I'm choosing the better option."
The Weeping Root was quiet for a moment.
"He's going to be difficult," he said, which was the most diplomatically cautious thing anyone had ever said about Ke Jun.
"He usually is," I agreed.
A very small laugh came out of the Weeping Root as he floated forward and put one translucent hand on the statue's surface very lightly.
"Come on," I said. "Before there's nothing left to come through."
The last thing I saw of Ke Jun's inner world as we went through the portal was the outline of the Bogspire against a sky that had stopped knowing what it was. The bone-trees as pure geometry, shapes without substance, holding the memory of form for a few more seconds out of sheer structural habit.
Then we were through.
The portal closed behind us.
I heard it more than saw it, a sound that was the absence of a sound that had been there a moment before. The pressure of the two inner worlds pressing against each other, which had been present since this tribulation began, simply wasn't there anymore. My inner world had its own weight and its own laws and they were the only ones in the room.
The spiritual manifestation that was me crossed the space to where the original me was standing, and we merged.
I closed my eyes.
The memories arrived in sequence but not slowly, more like water finding its level, the experiences from inside Ke Jun's world slotting into the architecture of the experiences I already had, complete and clear and mine. The first meeting with Snik. The prophecy recited by Ignis. The talk with Ke Jun’s main soul. Ke Jun's face when I told him I wasn't going to destroy his soul. The Leviathan opening one enormous eye. The Weeping Root holding out his hand in the shadow of the bog tree. And my plan to steal the Blood Moon.
When I opened my eyes again, I was standing in my inner world with a statue under one arm and a translucent child floating beside me and a stolen Blood Moon in my sky, and I felt completely like myself.
I handed over the statue to the Weeping Root and turned to look at the Genesis Seed.
If the tribulation had been passed, then the golden calligraphy should dissolve any second now.
But nothing changed, the Genesis Seed sat in the centre of my inner world still bound.
What was going on?
I had thought that if Ke Jun’s world was destroyed, then the tribulation would end.
So, why wasn’t it ending?
Had I been wrong?
Before the panic could sink in, I felt a strange pulse run through my inner world.
I wasn’t sure what it was, but it felt like my inner world was being evaluated.
It must have passed the evaluation because a second later, the golden calligraphy on the Genesis Seed began to dissolve.
It went quickly, the characters the Heavens had pressed into its surface fading out one by one, and the seed pulsed once, a deep resonant movement that I felt in every part of my cultivation simultaneously.
The roots that had been bound and locked reached outward again with that automatic exploratory motion, tasting the edges of the world, checking what had changed while they were restrained.
My cultivation settled.
That was the only way to describe it.
All the power that had been sitting outside its proper home, borrowed and channelled and directed through effort, came back to where it was supposed to be – Stellar Realm.
I was no longer an approximate or suppressed Stellar Realm cultivator.
I was a genuine Stellar Realm expert.
Expert? That was not something I ever thought I would call myself.
But it was true.
In the Cultivation World, those who achieved the rank of Stellar Realm were known as expert cultivators. And somehow, I was now included in that category.
The child star in the orbit above me pulsed in response, once, pleased with itself.
I stood there for a moment and simply existed as a Stellar Realm cultivator in my own inner world with everything in it that I had brought here over the past year, and I let it be good, because it was good, and not everything good needed to be immediately complicated.
Then I noticed the Leech-kin looking at me.
The whole group of them, still on the Leviathan's broad back, they were probably wondering what happens now, and whether I would keep my promise to them, or enslave them just like most blood cultivators would enslave other beings.
I opened my mouth to say something welcoming, something that dispelled their worries, something that acknowledged what they had been through, what they had left behind, and what I was hoping we could build here.
But before I could say any of that, the Weeping Root cried out.
I turned to see what was going on. What I saw made me freeze.
The statue's eyes had opened.
But it wasn’t the blood-red eyes I had expected. The eyes were clear, sharp, startlingly blue.
And the voice that came out was not Ke Jun's voice. It was the voice of someone younger, and considerably more indignant, and it said:
"Who dares to steal from me?!”