Those were words I had never wanted to hear in my entire life, in any world, from anything.
My identity as a world walker was the single most closely guarded secret I possessed, a truth I had shared with fewer people than I could count on one hand, and every one of those people had earned that knowledge through trust.
Sect Master Yuan knew because his own master had been a World Tree Sutra user and the Dao of Karma had probably shown the sect master the threads coming from me that stretched beyond the Cultivation World before I ever opened my mouth. Kal had known because I had chosen to tell him, weighing the decision for weeks beforehand. Azure knew because Azure was part of me.
Now a being that lived in the darkness between worlds had declared it out loud, and worse than that was the "at last" because "at last" meant this thing had been aware of my existence for far longer than the few seconds it had been staring down at me through that tear.
And I wasn't the only one who was terrified.
For the first time since I had begun cultivating the World Tree Sutra, I felt the Genesis Seed tremble. I never thought I would see the day when something like that happened.
The Genesis Seed had devoured a Saint's Essence that was designed to enslave chosen vessels, had torn apart the soul projection of the Masked One who collected souls professionally, had faced down the Heavens themselves when they arrived to bind it during my tribulation, and through all of it the seed had responded with nothing except territorial aggression and a bottomless, patient hunger.
When Kal had pinned me against a stone wall by my throat with the full pressure of a Rank 8 behind his hand, the seed hadn't so much as stirred. I had long suspected that the thing rooted at the center of my inner world consumed worlds just as readily as it connected to them, and now that same entity was shivering in the depths of my soul with an emotion I could only interpret as fear.
If the Genesis Seed was afraid, then I had wandered so far out of my depth that the surface wasn't visible anymore.
The worst part was that I had been right earlier, standing on that grass while Sorrin's blue eyes glowed. Somebody had wanted to speak with me. The order to take me alive, the instruction to deliver me intact, all of it traced upward through the possessed elders and past the Blue Sun itself to the thing now regarding me through a wound in the sky, and it had gone to the trouble of prying open reality because it wanted a conversation.
I had absolutely no intention of giving it one.
I didn't hesitate or waste a single thought on whether the tree was reachable, because every instinct I had built across every loop and every world was screaming the same single thing at me, and that was to run.
A blockheaded protagonist might stay and fight, thinking that one way or another they were going to defeat this higher dimensional being and save the world, but I wasn’t naïve to hold that hope.
I might not have been able to save this world, but it didn’t mean that I couldn’t save others. If I lingered, nothing could save my soul from whatever this being was. It was better to live to fight another day.
With that thought, I reached inward and the Ethereal Anchor that Sect Master Yuan had inscribed for me activated, and the sensation of leaving a body swept through me from the feet upward. Tomas's frozen flesh released its grip on my soul one layer at a time until I tore free and rose out through the crown of his head as a formless shimmer of light.
Below me his body remained standing in place with its hand still extended toward the bark, an empty vessel locked in the posture I had abandoned, and beside it my golden avatar was already dissolving into drifting motes without a soul to sustain it, and I turned my focus upward and flew.
The tear opened further.
The dragging rip of its widening rolled across the sky, and through the expanded gap a hand came reaching into the world. What struck me as strange, even through the terror, even while I was fleeing for my existence, was how the hand refused to remain a single thing.
In one moment it was human, five fingers, pale knuckles, the anatomy of a hand any person might own, and then between one heartbeat and the next it was bestial, covered in matted fur with black claws curving from each digit, and then it was demonic, all cracked obsidian skin with molten light seeping through the fissures, and then it was plant matter, a lattice of woven roots and thorned vines shaped into fingers.
It cycled through these forms continuously as it descended, never settling, and some quiet corner of my mind that refused to shut up even now was whispering that a being who had devoured enough worlds might simply have too many shapes to remember which one was originally its own.
It reached down to grab me.
My soul veered sideways with everything I had, banking through the air in a desperate arc, and the hand adjusted its descent, its shifting palm opening wide enough to enclose a house.
The distance between us was collapsing faster than I could generate speed, fifty meters, thirty, the churning surface of its skin close enough now that I could see the forms flickering across individual fingers.
Just before it closed around me, I triggered the pendant's second function.
Every scrap of karma I had accumulated, the saved Realm of the Chosen, the rescued Lithari, the purified corruptions, the Leech-kin carried out of a dying world, everything I had accomplished during the tournament, all of it converted in a single instant into force.
My entire vision turned white as the karmic explosion detonated between me and the descending hand, a soundless eruption of accumulated goodwill weaponised into something that even the laws of higher existence were obligated to respect.
When my vision returned, the hand was gone, the wrist was gone, the entire reaching limb had been erased back to the boundary of the tear. I hung there in the empty air with my karma spent down to nothing and my soul still intact, and I looked up at the eye.
The eye looked shocked.
Its vast red iris had contracted, the vertical pupil narrowing, and the pressure of its attention flickered with something I would never have expected to witness from a being of that scale, surprise.
"You have been far more active than I anticipated," it said. "Tell me, little walker, just how many worlds have you saved?"
I didn't respond to that, and I never would, it already knew too much.
The question itself confirmed that it was aware of at least some of my history, and the most likely candidate was the Realm of the Chosen, the realm I had pulled out from under its years of corruption, which meant this being had felt me undo its work from across the void between worlds and had been keeping track of me ever since.
A higher dimensional entity, or whatever category this thing actually belonged to, was stalking me across realities, it had just shrugged off a karmic detonation built from the frankly stupid quantities of karma I had accumulated, and it only lost an arm it would probably regrow without difficulty.
The eye performed something that carried the same meaning as a shaken head, its iris rolling in a slow, dismissive rotation.
"It doesn't matter how many worlds you have saved," it said. "Will you be able to live with the guilt of destroying this one?"
My eyes widened, and I looked around, and I realised the being was right.
Everything below me was destroyed.
The Vermilion Vale was a scoured bowl of grey ash, the ancient forest burned down to bare blackened earth, and the Eldest Tree itself was a shattered, smoking stump barely taller than the crater walls surrounding it.
There was no sign of the Rank 7 elders who had been frozen mid-battle in the sky, no sign of Corwin where he had knelt in his shattered faith, no sign of Lady Laelyn at the rim of Beric's crater, no bodies, no wreckage, nothing except a wasteland spreading outward past the mountains and across the land beyond, the devastation continuing to every horizon I could perceive.
The karmic explosion had gone off with the force of something I had no reference for outside of my old world's worst weapons, and when I extended my soul's senses outward, straining across the distance, I found no life anywhere, no cultivators, no villages, no birds, no insects, nothing across the entire continent except silence.
My soul continued rising, but the guilt arrived and kept arriving, wave after wave of it with no floor beneath.
All I had wanted, across every loop, through every death and every scheme and every sacrifice, was to save this world. I had come back again and again for these people, for Laelyn and Beric and Yggy and Elder Molric and a village boy named Tomas whose life I had promised to honor. And in one instant of self-preservation, I had done what the Otherworldly Being, the Blue Sun, and Hiron's ritual had all failed to accomplish across thousands of years, I had killed everyone.
"I once faced a decision of my own," the being said, conversational again now that the shock had passed. "Whether to become a devourer of worlds or a saviour of them. I will tell you honestly, little walker, that being the devourer has proven considerably more rewarding."
I couldn't answer. There was nothing in me capable of forming words while my mind replayed Laelyn taking my hand, Beric smiling through bloody teeth, all of it ash on the wind below.
"Don’t burden yourself with grief,” the Otherworldly Being consoled me. “Now that you have got a taste, you will seek it out yourself sooner or..."
The words stopped abruptly because around us, the world began to rewind.
The ash stirred and lifted and flowed backward into standing trees, the crater walls of the Vale rose and smoothed themselves into forested slopes, the shattered stump of the Eldest Tree rebuilt itself ring by ring toward the clouds.
And above me, the tear in the sky began drawing its ragged edges together, the wound closing against the being's will.
Seeing all of this, my soul shuddered with a relief so violent that it nearly undid me.
It turned out that I had been wrong about this being the final loop. The reason I had thought that was because Kal was absent and that his absence meant that the time loop had died with him. But am I glad I was wrong, the world was resetting, and everything I had just destroyed was being unwritten in front of my eyes.
"It does not matter," the being said, and its voice was fading now along with the closing tear. "This world has almost nothing left. The reserves that fuel this trick are nearly spent. You have one more chance, perhaps two, and then the loop will fail, and this world will become mine."
A promise like that from a being capable of devouring worlds was terrifying to hear but honestly, in that moment, I didn't care about the arithmetic of remaining loops or the being's timetable of conquest.
The only thought with any room in my soul was that the continent below me was refilling with life, that Laelyn and Maya and a million strangers were being restored, and that I had not committed genocide on a planetary scale. Even though I would have to carry the memory of having done that for the rest of my life, I would gladly pay that price in exchange for those lives returning.
My soul reached the dimensional barrier separating this world from all the others, and the being spoke one final time from the shrinking sliver of the tear.
"We will meet again, young world walker. I am certain of it."
Those were the last words I heard before the barrier took me and thrust me through, dimensions folding past my awareness in a tumbling rush of pressure and darkness.
I opened my eyes in the hidden room within the Sect Master's quarters, my physical body drenched in sweat, my chest heaving as I dragged air into lungs that felt as though they had forgotten their purpose, my hands trembling against the meditation mat beneath me.
Sect Master Yuan was already crouched in front of me, and his eyes, which had watched me leave for the Two Suns World with confidence only a short while ago, were now moving across my face with concern.
"Ke Yin, what happened?"
A/N
We return on Monday with a timeskip, have a nice weekend!