Neo appeared in the True World.

There was no grand arrival. No resistance from space, no surge of pressure from foreign laws.

One moment he was stepping through the tear he had created, and the next, his feet were on solid ground.

Silence greeted him.

It was a heavy silence.

This was the world where the Celestial Worthy lived.

Neo slowly lifted his head.

The sky was torn.

It was ripped open, like a wound that could never healed.

Through those gaps, nothing could be seen. No stars. No void currents. Just emptiness, swallowing light.

The smell hit him next.

Death. Iron. Rotting despair that had soaked into the land and refused to fade even after countless eons had passed.

Neo took a slow breath.

Then another.

There were rivers nearby. He could sense them.

But when he turned slightly and looked, what he saw were not rivers in the usual sense.

Blood.

Dried in places. Still dark and thick in others. It had flowed once, long ago, carving paths into the land, then stopped when there was nothing left to spill.

Neo's eyes moved across the terrain.

There were no bodies.

That was the strange part.

After a massacre of this scale, there should have been corpses. Piles of them. Remains left to decay, bones bleaching under a broken sky.

Instead, there were graves.

They were everywhere.

Simple mounds of earth. Some marked with stone slabs. Others with wooden boards. Many had nothing at all, only carefully shaped soil, packed down by hand.

Tens of thousands.

No—those were just the graves within his field of vision.

Neo did not move for a long time.

Then he took a step forward.

He did not run. He did not fly. He did not teleport.

He walked.

His pace was unhurried, steady, almost respectful.

Since he had come out of the Elemental Cosmos, he should have appeared next to Celestial Worthy.

But he had not.

Which meant this was intentional.

Celestial Worthy wanted him to see this place first.

So Neo walked.

The road beneath his feet was cracked, but still visible. It had once been maintained. He could tell by the stonework, by the way the edges had been shaped to guide carts.

On either side of the road were graves.

He passed what had once been a town.

The walls were broken. The buildings had collapsed inward, roofs caved in, wooden beams rotted and blackened. Grass and strange weeds had begun to reclaim the streets.

Graves filled the open spaces.

In the square where people had likely gathered, there were rows of them, arranged with care. Someone had taken the time to align them.

Neo continued forward.

From roads to destroyed towns.

From crumbling cities to forests that had begun to rot where they stood, leaves blackened, trees hollowed from within.

Everywhere he went, there were graves.

Graves. And more graves.

Everyone was dead.

Neo stopped beside one of the mounds.

He activated the Eyes of Echoes Firmament.

The world shifted.

The Firmament entered his eyes, layers of past and present overlapping.

The soil before him became transparent, not showing the body beneath, but the life that had once existed above it.

A farmer.

Middle-aged. Calloused hands. Sunburned skin.

He was standing in a field, staring at the sky with a worried expression.

His lips moved as he muttered to himself, calculating the chances of a locust swarm this year.

If it came early, the harvest would be ruined.

If it came late, maybe they could still manage.

Neo let the vision fade and moved on.

Another grave.

A young town girl appeared in his sight.

She was sitting by a window, eyes fixed on the road leading out of town.

Her brother had gone to the city to study.

He was supposed to come back this month.

She wondered if he was eating properly, if city life suited him.

Another grave.

A district magistrate, hunched over ledgers late at night, brows furrowed.

The numbers did not add up. Funds were missing.

He suspected corruption, but proving it would be difficult.

Still, he resolved to look into it properly the next day.

Another.

A king.

Not sitting on a throne, but riding through his territory, stopping in villages, listening to complaints.

He asked about taxes, about grain storage, about the condition of the roads.

He wanted to see the state of his people with his own eyes.

Another.

A cultivator, young but talented, sitting cross-legged in a borrowed room within his sect.

He was racking his brain, trying to comprehend a technique manual he had borrowed from the sect's library.

The concepts were just slightly out of reach, and it frustrated him.

Another.

A martial artist, sneaking out of training with a friend.

They laughed quietly as they shared snacks they were not supposed to have.

He promised himself he would train extra hard tomorrow to make up for it.

Neo watched them all.

Some lives were mundane. Some were grand.

Some days they lived peacefully. Some days happily. Some days burdened by sorrow and worry.

They were alive.

Then, one day, the [Entity] descended.

The vision shifted violently.

The sky burned. The land screamed. Power beyond comprehension tore through reality.

The [Entity]—

No.

Cole Calloway slaughtered the entire world.

Neo saw it unfold.

The True World, which had a far larger population than the Elemental Cosmos, fell in mere four hours.

Ancient Cultivators rose into the sky, unleashing techniques refined over millennia.

Legendary Martial Artists shattered mountains with their fists.

Hidden Beast Tamers released creatures that had not seen the sun in ages.

Gods descended. Devils crawled out of sealed dimensions.

None of it mattered.

Cole moved through them like a storm given form.

Rage and sorrow drove him forward, crushing everything in his path.

No one could stop him.

And yet—

Neo's vision shifted again.

After the slaughter, when the world had gone quiet, Cole did not leave.

He stayed.

Neo saw him kneeling, hands covered in dirt.

Crying.

With his own hands, Cole dug graves.

One by one.

For farmers. For kings. For cultivators. For children whose names he would never know.

He buried them all.

Neo saw him wandering the world like a ghost afterward, shoulders hunched, eyes empty, swallowed by guilt and regret.

Neo deactivated the Eyes of Echoes Firmament.

He resumed walking.

Eventually, the land began to slope upward.

A mountain rose before him.

Unlike the rest of the world, there was no blood here.

The ground was bare, the stone exposed.

Wind passed through cleanly, untainted by death.

Neo began to climb.

His steps were steady, his breathing calm.

Near the top, he saw it.

A broken hut.

It was small, crude, built with care, but without extravagance.

The remains of furniture lay scattered inside, long since ruined by time.

The Eyes of Echoes Firmament activated again.

In the past, a man and a woman had lived there.

The man was not from this True World.

He had come from another True World, after countless hardships, after struggling through realms and dangers that would have broken most people.

He was tired.

He wanted rest.

And here, in this foreign world, he found it.

He found love.

He found someone he could call family.

For the first time in a long while, he was happy.

Then, one day, he left.

There was a 'thing'—a ■—that lived in the voids between True Worlds. It had slipped into this world, unnoticed by most.

The man sensed it.

He chose to deal with it himself, before it could bring harm.

He wanted to protect the world that had become his home.

When he returned, his wife was gone.

"The Golden Age of Cultivators."

An age where almost everyone was born with Spirit Roots.

Cultivators, drunk on power and progress, eagerly forced everyone to cultivate. They believed it was salvation. They believed it was evolution.

While the man was gone, they had taken his wife.

They made her cultivate.

By the time he found her, she was no longer herself.

Her eyes were empty. Her will was overwritten.

She had become a puppet.

The man learned the truth too late.

The Daos.

They were controlling the high-rank cultivators. Manipulating them from behind the scenes. Ensuring that everyone who could cultivate would do so.

The more cultivators there were, the more puppets the Daos had to pull.

The man had to kill his wife.

Along with their unborn child.

His hands were trembling. His voice was breaking. His screams echoed across the mountain.

He began to search why his wife had become a puppet.

When he uncovered the full truth of Dao, something in him shattered.

He saw neither children nor elders anymore.

He saw only puppets.

So he slaughtered them.

He slaughtered them for revenge.

When his rampage finally ended, and the screams stopped, he realized there was no one left.

No—

There was one.

The vision faded.

Neo opened his eyes.

At the edge of the cliff, near the broken hut, a man sat quietly.

He was sitting in front of two graves.

He looked no older than Neo remembered.

His shoulders carried weight that could not be seen.

Cole Calloway.

He was watching the graves with a tenderness that felt out of place in this ruined world.

"You are finally here," Cole said, without turning around.

Neo stopped a short distance behind him.

"Yes," he replied.

Silence stretched between them.

The wind moved gently, carrying dust and the faint scent of stone.

Cole remained seated, eyes fixed on the graves.

Then he stood up and turned.

His face held the same smile Neo had always seen.

But now, Neo understood it.

The pain behind it.

The sorrow buried beneath it.

"Did you see?" Cole asked.

"Yes," Neo said, nodding slowly. "You were the one who destroyed the world."

Cole's smile did not fade.

It just looked a little more tired.

Neo kept speaking.

"Even if you hadn't done it, the Daos would've controlled everyone eventually. The world would've been destroyed anyway, even if it stayed pristine until the end."

Cole's expression shifted.

The smile thinned, turning quiet and melancholic.

"Follow me," he said.

He took a single step and vanished.

Neo followed without hesitation.

The scenery around them folded and stretched, and when it settled again, they were standing at the very edge of the True World.

There, Shadow Supreme was at work.

Dozens of corpses floated around him, dragged out from their graves, their bodies bound by threads of shadow.

He was forcing them into the boundary, trying to tear it open, trying to carve a path out of the world.

"He thinks leaving this world will let him escape the influence of the Daos," Cole muttered.

Neo noticed Cole's fists tightening.

His gaze was fixed on the corpses, on the desecrated graves left behind.

"That isn't possible?" Neo asked.

"No," Cole replied. "Everyone born in this True World, and everyone whose Cosmos is connected to it, follows the Daos. Leaving doesn't change that."

Cole exhaled slowly.

"What do you want to do with him?"

Neo didn't answer.

Instead, he stepped forward.

Shadow Supreme noticed him almost immediately. His eyes widened, and the shadows around him stirred, preparing to react.

Neo flicked his wrist.

Space twisted, and Shadow Supreme was ripped from his position and dragged toward Neo as if caught by an invisible hand.

Before he could even scream, Neo waved his hand again.

Jack was torn out of Shadow Supreme's shadow body.

With another motion, Neo severed Shadow Supreme's connection to the corpses.

The shadows snapped, and the bodies fell gently back toward the ground, sinking into their graves as if the world itself was correcting a mistake.

"What are you doing—"

Neo snapped his fingers.

Shadow Supreme's mouth closed mid-sentence, sealed shut by an unseen force.

Neo raised his hand and formed five figures out of condensed earth and elemental energy.

Five golems appeared, each radiating power at the peak of the Third Step.

"These golems are stronger than the corpses you were controlling. Take them," Neo said calmly.

Shadow Supreme stared at him, stunned and confused.

"What…?"

Neo had already turned away.

He walked back to Cole as if Shadow Supreme no longer existed.

"You're not going to kill him?" Cole asked.

"I don't want to. It feels like I'd be dirtying my hands. Besides, it's better if he leaves this True World. The 'things' in the void between True Worlds will give him a fate worse than death."

Cole glanced back at Shadow Supreme.

"And you don't want to kill him for desecrating the corpses?"

"I was also planning to let him leave," Cole said with a shrug. "And have him suffer at the hands of ■."

Cole raised his hand and slashed downward.

The boundary of the True World tore open violently, forming a jagged rift that led into endless darkness.

Shadow Supreme looked at the opening, then at Neo and Cole.

"Leave quickly if you want to. Otherwise, the boundary will repair itself, and you're far too weak to break it again," Cole said.

Shadow Supreme didn't hesitate.

He grabbed the five golems and rushed toward the rift. He didn't complain about losing the Necromancy Element he had cultivated to the level of partial Authority. Survival mattered more.

Until the end, he remained pathetic.

As he crossed the threshold, Neo materialized an Elemental Seed infused with Necromancy.

He flicked it toward Shadow Supreme's Seed of Existence.

With that, Shadow Supreme would still be able to use Necromancy.

Shadow Supreme staggered, shocked by Neo's action, but before he could react, the void swallowed him whole.

The boundary closed behind him.

"Why did you do that?" Cole asked.

"He'll survive longer if he has a way to fight, which means he'll suffer longer."

"And if he manages to survive?"

"Then so be it. The suffering he goes through to survive will be punishment enough."

Cole didn't say anything for a while.

He simply stared at Neo.

Then, slowly, a small smile appeared on his face.

"I wish I was as wise as you," he muttered.

They turned and began walking.

The destroyed world stretched endlessly around them.

Neo looked at everything, burning the sight in his eyes.

"So," Neo said after a while, "what was the [Fate] of Cruelty about?"

Cole glanced at him. "You know it's related to me?"

"Yes," Neo said. "Apollyon said Father was working with an [Entity] to save everything. That [Entity] wouldn't be the Daos, so it had to be you."

Cole nodded.

"Yes. It was me. But before I explain that, there's something else you need to understand."

"What is it?"

"[Fate] mainly encompasses three things. Your choices, and the consequences born from those choices. Those two are normal ability of [Fate]."

He looked up at the torn sky.

"But the third thing is what makes [Fate] special."

Neo listened without interrupting.

"Your [Fate] interacts with the [Fate] of others. That interaction produces different results. Some people have advantageous [Fate] against you. It becomes easier for them to defeat you. Others have the opposite."

He paused briefly.

"If two people share the same [Fate], it becomes possible to 'share' things between them. Power. Burden. Even consequences. And if two people have similar or opposite [Fate], they naturally gravitate toward each other."

Neo nodded slowly.

Pieces were starting to fall into place.

"I have the [Fate] of Cruelty. I gained it because I slaughtered an entire True World."

He stopped walking and turned to Neo.

"And now, you have the [Fate] of Cruelty too. Because you took all the negative karma from Moraine, Mother of All Dragons and Ouroboros."

"Yes."

When Neo revived everyone, he had taken the negative karma of those closest to him.

Hades hadn't had much to begin with, and 'he' had been erased entirely.

But everyone else's burden had been taken by Neo.

"And because we share the same [Fate] you can share your power with me?"

Cole nodded.

"Why?" Neo asked.

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