The woman’s gaze locked onto Xiao Lei’s. Her eyes held like blades—bright, merciless, and unflinching. He met them, trembling, his chest burned as if her gaze alone pressed an iron brand into his heart.

  For a heartbeat, he thought she might crush him entirely. Then—at last—her breath escaped in a long, weary sigh. The terrible pressure that had pressed on his soul ebbed, receding like a tide slipping back into the sea.

  Xiao Lei collapsed. His palms and knees struck the cold ground, his body shuddering as he dragged ragged gulps of air into his lungs. Each breath scalded his raw throat. A few more moments beneath that will, and he would have broken like glass, shattering before her will.

  “You are not right,” the woman said, her voice low and steady, “but neither are you wrong. Either way—you passed.”

  Her tone carried no softness, yet it stripped the crushing silence from the air. “Once, they named me the Sovereign of Will. I forged my heart until it defied even the heavens. It was that strength,” her lips curved faintly, though no warmth touched her eyes, “that drove my own husband to kill me.”

  Xiao Lei froze, his aching breath caught. Husband…. His mind reeled, the thought hammering through him with greater force than her aura.

  To kill your wife for power—what path was this god’s?

  And yet the answer twisted bitter in his gut.

  The same as mine. If strength demanded betrayal, I would not falter either.

  But in her words there was no hatred, no fire of vengeance—only the faint weight of memory. It unsettled him more than rage could have.

  As if hearing the storm inside him, the goddess laughed, a brittle, crystalline sound. “You wonder at my calm? Live long enough, boy, and even colours bleed away. Emotions fade into pale shades of themselves. His… simply lost their hue before mine.”

  She lifted a hand, slender fingers tracing a ripple through the air. From nothing, a heart appeared—dark as obsidian, pulsing faintly with shadow. It floated between them, a perfect black flame in the shape of life. Xiao Lei’s eyes widened. He had seen this before—vast, monstrous, filling the cavern. Yet here it was, small enough to hover like a phantom lantern.

  “This,” she said, “is my Black Heart. Fuse it within your body, and you will discover its purpose in time. But before that…” Her gaze narrowed, fixing on him as though measuring the thread of his soul. “I will answer your question. Better you hear it now—while you still breathe.”

  Xiao Lei pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, unease twisting his gut. “What do you mean? I passed, didn’t I? I… can still die here?”

  Her laugh shimmered like glass breaking. “Did you think you were the first? That you alone found your way here?”

  She waved her hand. The sea groaned, then tore itself away. A roar of retreating waves bared the ocean floor—what it revealed stole the air from his chest. Bones—white, endless, piled upon one another until the horizon itself seemed built of the dead. So many had come before him. So many had failed. His knees weakened, his spirit trembling at the sight.

  Yet the woman’s voice flowed on, light as if his horror were nothing. “The Black Heart was the first divine organ he claimed, as you now will. Beyond it, his desires reached further. The Bones of Dread. The Eyes of Eternity. The Marrow of Amplification. The Mind of Silence. The Blood of the Damned.”

  Her eyes lingered on the heart as though staring into the memory of another age. “No one knows what order he claimed them in. Only this: when at last he fused the Mind of Silence, his body turned against him. The backlash shattered him. And when the others struck—gods united against one—his body was torn into seven fragments. Each fell to earth like a star of ruin. Even in death, he dragged an entire era into oblivion.”

  At this point, Xiao Lei no longer knew how to react. Shock upon shock had battered him until his mind felt stripped raw, every nerve stretched thin. Yet the goddess spoke on—as if his breaking mattered nothing.

  “If you can fuse with my heart, this lingering will of mine will finally disperse. So I must warn you in advance.” Her tone was calm, yet carried the inevitability of a law older than heaven.

  “Though the six divine organs came from different gods, once… we were part of a single body. Because of that, we are drawn toward one another. But attraction is only the beginning. When two meet, instinct awakens. One will seek to devour the other. That thirst cannot be denied. Should you ever cross paths with someone who carries one of the remaining five, only one of you will live to walk away.”

  Her words sank into him like stones into deep water. He nodded, stiffly, though whether he truly grasped the weight of what she had given him—or simply clung to the gesture as a shield—he could not tell himself.

  “Well then,” she said at last, her lips curving. “Time to see whether you succeed… or simply join the pile of bones.”

  That smile should have been beautiful. Instead, it struck him like a knife. His chest tightened, heart hammering violently as if it already knew what was to come.

  The goddess raised her hand. Her fingers moved with almost casual grace, no more force than a breath stirring still air. Yet with that smallest motion, the Black Heart stirred.

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  It lurched forward.

  Xiao Lei flinched, but there was no time to retreat. The dark organ pierced into him without sound or wound. No blood spilled. No tear marred his flesh. Yet the sensation was as if a bar of frozen iron had been rammed through his ribs, crushing bone and splitting sinew. His breath seized. His knees struck the sand, body convulsing as the alien heart slid into the hollow behind his sternum.

  And then the true agony began.

  The Black Heart pressed against his own, pulse meeting pulse. For a moment—just the space of a single drawn breath—the two rhythms tangled together, neither yielding, neither dominant. Then the devouring began.

  A clawing suction gripped his chest, tearing him apart from within. His life essence was being stripped, thread by thread, pulled into the hunger of that vast, ancient beat. His own heart staggered, its rhythm faltering, shuddering weaker under the weight of the intruder’s crushing cadence.

  Xiao Lei collapsed forward onto all fours, mouth open but unable to draw in air. His veins burned, molten and merciless, as if fire had replaced blood. Within his skull, every heartbeat thundered—two rhythms, colliding, warring. One fragile and desperate. The other merciless, boundless, eternal.

  He bit down hard, teeth cutting into his tongue until copper flooded his mouth. The pain grounded him, an anchor in the black haze pressing down.

  If I yield now… I die.

  The Black Heart pulsed harder, suffusing him with a coldness more suffocating than death, darker than the deepest night. Shadows coiled through his veins seared as though fire had replaced blood.

  Then—cracks flared sharp in his chest, ribs snapping like brittle glass beneath the heart’s pulse. His hands clawed into the sand, nails tearing, leaving gouges in the ground. A raw scream burst from his throat, only to be devoured at once by the endless roar of the sea surrounding this cursed place.

  Yet still he endured.

  His will, beaten and battered, clung to the last truth left to him: if his mortal heart shattered, another would rise in its place. But if he yielded—if he let go—he would be nothing. Just another corpse in the endless heap of bones swallowed by this sea.

  The Black Heart’s rhythm deepened, spreading tendrils of its pulse through him, filling the hollow where his own beat failed. One final, brutal tug—

  —and his heart shattered.

  Not bone, not flesh, but essence itself breaking into shards of light. It was torn apart, devoured in an instant.

  For a heartbeat’s span there was nothing. No rhythm. No breath. No life. Only a silence so vast it pressed upon him like the weight of the grave.

  Then—

  Thud.

  A new rhythm struck inside him. Heavy. Alien. His chest heaved. His vision erupted white, then black, then bled into colours his eyes had never known. His body jerked, dragged back from a cliff edge he had already stepped beyond. A ragged breath tore free, raw and desperate.

  The Black Heart had claimed him. Or perhaps… he had claimed it. In that moment, Xiao Lei could not yet tell.

  The goddess stood in silence, a pale shadow against the endless sea. Her gaze drifted between the trembling child and the endless waters beyond, never quite resting, never quite still.

  She watched his body seize and twist upon the broken ground. Other times her eyes wandered toward the far distance, as if measuring the centuries she had endured here.

  She did not pity him. What he had said earlier mattered little. Words were fragile things—conviction in the mouth, hollow in the marrow. She, who bore the title Sovereign of Will, knew that difference better than any other.

  Conviction was what people believed about themselves. Will was what remained when the body screamed, when the mind fractured, when every breath was a bargain struck against death.

  And yet—though she dismissed his defiance—she still found herself hoping. Not for him, but for herself. Only his success could free her from this place. This prison where she had lingered through uncounted millennia. Neither alive nor allowed the peace of death.

  Time stretched thin. Then, at last, the boy’s cries faltered. His body, once convulsing like a fish stranded on shore, went slack against the sand. The silence that followed pressed like a weight upon the water.

  So he endured.

  A breath shivered through her unseen chest. A lightness—not joy, not even relief, but something close—stirred in the hollow where her heart no longer beat. For an instant she allowed herself to believe in escape.

  And then, unbidden, memory stirred. The moment long ago when her husband had carved her heart from her breast. The way their eyes had met, hers wide with betrayal, his shadowed with something more complicated. Hesitation. Guilt. Even sorrow. She remembered with cruel clarity—the mirror of her own grief glimmering in his gaze. That wound, like the absent heart in her chest, had never healed.

  Her hand rose, slender and pale. With a wave, a veil of white radiance unfurled—delicate in form, yet heavy with divine decree. It sank over the boy, seeping into torn flesh and broken meridians. His ruined body knit itself whole, breath steadying in his chest.

  “That is your gift, little one,” she whispered, voice thin as the foam on the waves. “For freeing me. Goodbye.”

  The sea answered in her stead. A deep, thunderous roar shook its depths. Waves surged, mountains of water rearing like beasts loosed from chains. The horizon folded in on itself, and the stillness that had reigned here for ages shattered. Tides swallowed bone and stone alike. Even the child’s body was drawn beneath, devoured with the same inexorable hunger.

  The world itself drowned.

  ?? — ? — ??

  When Xiao Lei’s eyes opened again, he lay upon cold floor. The air was damp, thick with the stale scent of moss and rot. He pushed himself upright, blinking at the familiar room—the same place where he had fallen through the yawning pit. Yet the pit was gone. No trace remained of the abyss that had claimed him.

  A sound stirred. The weeping chorus of countless spiders still filled the cavern, but it wavered, brittle, uncertain. Xiao Lei turned. Behind him lay the carcass of the Devouring Spider, its limbs twisted, its bulk discarded by some unseen hand.

  Perhaps the goddess had done this. Perhaps not.

  It did not matter.

  He seized the creature’s corpse, dragging it across the stone. At once the swarm recoiled, their cries snapping off into silence. The tide of bodies that had once blanketed the cavern scattered into nothingness. Where there had been millions, only their fallen queen remained.

  The boy’s steps carried him outward, through the ruin of the quarters, until at last the invisible boundary shimmered faintly before him. He paused there, turning once to look back.

  So many things had unfolded here, each one deeper and stranger than he could fathom. His hand pressed lightly against his chest. Beneath flesh and bone, a black heart pulsed—beating as if it were his own, though he knew it was not. He knew, too, that this foreign rhythm might one day carry him to his ultimate goal—or end him before he arrived.

  No matter.

  He drew the token from his robes and set it against the unseen barrier. A rectangular gate shimmered into being, cold light outlining its frame.

  Without hesitation, Xiao Lei stepped through.

  The gate sealed shut behind him, swallowing the place whole. Whatever had transpired here would vanish with it, leaving behind a story that no voice would ever tell.

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  Destiny Reckoning. It’s set in the same universe, and you definitely don’t want to miss it, because the stories will eventually crossover.