Radeon kept his burned body bowed. He did not move. He did not flinch. He did not voice a complaint.

The shrine and everything around him held its silence like a vow.

Half a day passed. Radeon remained. Still bowed, still silent, still patient.

He had once ruled a cosmos, but that had never excused him from knowing when to lower his head.

Then he felt it. Something immense shifted above the pagoda.

Gigantic hands, ghostly and grey, reached out over the roofline and slammed into the double doors.

Stone and bone groaned. The doors burst inward. The hands lingered, hanging through the opening.

Radeon did not look up. He did not probe. He simply stepped forward and entered the unlit shrine.

Behind him, the hands tugged the doors closed again, slow and final. The sound died, and darkness returned.

In the black, he could make out a single altar. It was large, broad as a gathering place.

Twenty men could have stood in a circle around it with arms outstretched and still not touched.

No incense waited there. No ash. No stain of devotion. It looked as if it had never been used.

Then pain bloomed where his right wrist should have been. A phantom burn. A brand that was not on his skin, yet still seared like hot iron.

The debt. The thing in the void calling for payment, wanting to know, wanting to see.

And under the chill of the shrine, Radeon sensed it.

A sliver of immortal energy. Thin as a breath.

It could be dust. It could be a scrap of bone. It could be no more than a grain of salt buried beneath stone.

Small did not mean harmless. Small did not mean worthless.

Radeon's qi twitched, eager to reach. He forced them still.

He could not start probing a sacred place like a thief in the dark.

Radeon knew what followed rash movement in a room like this. Consequences came fast, and they lingered.

He weighed his options and chose the one that would not insult what was watching.

Radeon slipped the incense back beneath his cloak. He approached the dais.

He climbed the raised platform and walked to its center.

Each step left a clear print in the pristine white sand, darkened by his presence.

He did not stop to fret over it. Cleanliness was not holiness. Not here.

The gaze on him sharpened. It pressed hard enough to make his scars itch.

This time it carried intent, not curiosity. An intent to wipe him away like a smear on glass.

Radeon did not retreat. He raised his only hand. He spread his legs, stance open, showing he held no blade and no trick behind his back.

If they meant to strike, they would have a clear target. He tipped ten blood pills into his mouth.

They burst bitter on his tongue. Heat flooded him. His veins swelled fast, roping under burned skin until they looked ready to split.

Then he began to chant a hymn, low at first, and steady. Words shaped to be heard by the dead. Words meant to turn a judgment into a conversation.

"For those whose hands have guided the dead through reincarnation, I call upon thee."

"And unto those who have weighed the merits of the passed and set judgment upon the departed, I bring mine offering."

"Behold what I have, and take it. My life. The span thereof. The years appointed unto me. The age I was meant to bear."

It was an immortal chant, the kind reserved for those who had once held office in the Celestial Court.

Radeon had held such a position before. He knew the weight in the words, the way each syllable knelt without groveling.

The presence in this shrine carried the same austere aura.

It did not ask for offerings. It asked for faith, for acknowledgment, for the ritual respect that told the dead they were still remembered as more than tools.

The chant began to sap him. Vitality bled out with every measured line, drawn from him as cleanly as breath in winter.

He felt himself becoming the incense. Not smoke and perfume, but the sacrifice beneath it, the slow burn that made reverence real.

Radeon's skin began to sag, losing what little elasticity it still held. The patches of hair he had left dulled to grey, then to white, then fell away one strand at a time.

Teeth loosened in his gums and dropped without pain. Each breath started to feel like a hand tugging him toward death's door. His burned flesh thinned into skin and bone.

What he gave was small. A drop of life into an inky sea of death. Yet in a place like this, drops still made ripples.

Radeon slumped into the sand, frail now, his joints clicking with every small shift.

The wrinkles on his face ran deeper than any scar. His lips puckered inward, hollow.

He assessed himself with the habit of a man who counted costs before he bled.

'Half a day. One day, at most.' he thought calmly.

Radeon did not show it. A day was long enough for him to turn things around.

He waited as the lamps began to light one by one, climbing the pagoda's height until the shrine glowed with a cold azure light.

In that new light stood a figure before him, a man carved with a thick beard and curved horns.

Radeon could not see the eyes clearly, yet the statue's lifelike presence made it feel as if the being itself sat there, breathing in the dark.

Behind its back, a thousand skeletal hands rotated in slow clockwork, turning without sound, turning without pause.

Radeon felt the attention settle on him. It stared straight through him.

The statue's eyes remained closed. Its mouth lifted into a thin smile, almost imperceptible.

Then the smile sharpened into a sneer. Radeon heard it. He felt his soul tremble.

The sneer was not for him. It was for whoever had dared to call him overlord of the void.

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