Inside the do, the process completed. The last silver ray vanished into the Hourglass. The final Blade of Eternity rged with the pri weapon. The other copies were gone. Only the pri Nian Shi remained.
He stood there, radiating power that made the golden barrier around them tremble. The Blade in his hand was now a thing of terrifying beauty, glowing with a light that seed to contain entire dead universes. The Hourglass pulsed rhythmically in his other hand, its sands now moving with a slow, inevitable certainty.
He leveled his newfound gaze at Yue Bingyao. The pressure was imnse.
"Show sothing worthy of this power," he commanded, his voice layered with the echoes of his absorbed selves. "Do not make this a waste. I would be disappointed if you cannot even withstand a single strike now."
Yue Bingyao t his overwhelming pressure not with defiance, but with an eerie, profound calm. The God Slaying Sword in her hand humd in response to the Blade of Eternity, a quieter, sharper note against the chorus of endings.
She finally spoke, her voice clear and asured, cutting through the heavy air. "Nian Shi, do you know why your ambition is destined to fail? Why you will never beco the new Creator by your own design?"
Nian Shi’s narrowed eyes were his only response. He remained silent, but the intensity of his gaze urged her to continue, to speak her piece before he unmade her.
"Tianming told once," she said, the na of the God of Fate spoken with a hint of old sorrow. "All Primordial Gods, you and I included, are born from the Creator’s power. We are fragnts of her will, manifestations of her concepts. That is our origin. That is our limit."
She paused, letting the truth hang in the air between them. "You might wield one of the strongest powers she conceived—the authority over ti’s end. You have accumulated more of it than any other. But no matter how vast your power becos, its source remains her. You are trying to use the Creator’s own power to surpass the Creator. It is a logical paradox. You are building a tower to the heavens, but your bricks are made of sky. It will never hold."
Her moonlit eyes held his. "If you doubt my words, you need not look far for confirmation." She gestured slightly with her chin towards the golden barrier, beyond which Yin observed. "Ask the Uncreation outside. He understands this fundantal truth better than any of us."
"Haha!"
As if on cue, Yin’s laughter filtered through the barrier, slightly muffled but perfectly clear.
"She’s not wrong, Tikeeper!" he called out, his voice filled with dark amusent. "For once, the moon speaks sense. We are, all of us, bound by our origins. My power to unmake is the flip side of her power to create. I cannot create sothing from nothing, just as you cannot truly create a new beginning from your endless endings."
Yin’s tone turned almost conversational, like a scholar discussing a fascinating flaw in a rival’s thesis. "That’s why your second plan is your best one. Probably your only real chance. Taking over Yun Lintian’s body... that is a stroke of genius. He is sothing new. A potential that exists outside her original frawork. He is the only key that might fit the lock."
He chuckled again. "But this?" He gestured at Nian Shi’s overwhelming form. "This Convergence of yours? Forcing your way to godhood by piling up more of what you already are? It’s a child’s dream. A foolish, arrogant fantasy. You’re just making a bigger version of the sa brick, not finding a new material."
Nian Shi’s face, already cold, darkened. The silver light around him flickered with irritation. The mockery from Yue Bingyao was one thing, but the agreent and condescension from Yin, his eternal rival, struck a nerve.
"Both of you," Nian Shi uttered, his voice dropping to a deadly, frigid calm that was more terrifying than any shout, "speak entirely too much."
Action replaced words. He moved.
There was no wind-up, no gathering of energy. He simply thrust the consolidated Blade of Eternity forward. It wasn’t a slash or a grand technique; it was a simple, direct lunge. But from this weapon, in his hand, now, it was the most dangerous attack he had ever launched.
A beam of absolute gray shot forth, thinner than a hair but containing the condensed entropy of a million dead tilines. It moved faster than thought, aid to pierce through Yue Bingyao’s heart and unmake her completely, ending her interference once and for all.
Yue Bingyao did not dodge. She did not try to block with her sword.
Instead, she looked up.
Above her, the ceiling of the golden Forbidden Zone vanished, replaced not by the outside sky, but by the infinite vault of space. And there, dominating the view, was a full, brilliant, impossibly large blue moon. It was not a reflection; it was the true, celestial body itself, projected into their sealed reality.
A curtain of pure, ethereal moonlight shone down, bathing Yue Bingyao in its radiance.
Under this light, she began to glow. Her form beca semi-transparent, shimring with an internal light that was both gentle and unbearably intense. The God Slaying Sword in her hand dissolved, not vanishing, but rging with the moonlight that enveloped her.
She had beco one with the moon’s essence.
Nian Shi’s beam of temporal ending struck the curtain of moonlight.
There was no cataclysmic explosion. The gray beam, which could unmake galaxies, was simply... absorbed. It flowed into the moonlight like a stream into the ocean, its entropic energy neutralized, harmonized, and dissolved within the vast, constant, and eternal nature of the moon’s power.
The beam vanished without a trace.
Nian Shi’s eyes, for the first ti since the battle began, showed genuine shock. His flawless attack, powered by the convergence of his countless selves, had been negated. Not blocked, not deflected, but utterly nullified by what seed like a passive phenonon.
Yue Bingyao, now a being of pure moonlight, looked at him. Her voice echoed, no longer coming from a single point but from the moonlight itself.
"You see, Nian Shi? You wield the power of endings. But the moon... it does not end. It only cycles. You cannot unmake a cycle. You can only wait for it to begin again."
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