The Celestial Wound drifted silently through the Maelstrom Expanse, a cursed nebula known for devouring fleets and bending time. Here, space twisted like a wounded serpent, and the stars screamed with the voices of the forgotten. Only madmen—or those with nothing left to lose—entered willingly.
Jin Long stood at the prow, eyes narrowed on the spiraling void ahead.
"The Third Echo is gone," Yue Lan said beside him, her voice tight with exhaustion. "But something's not right. The Genesis Core… it's pulsing again."
He nodded. "It's calling something—or something's calling it."
Suddenly, alarms screamed.
"Unidentified vessel approaching!" shouted Meiko from the helm. "It's… it's not from our reality."
The crew scrambled as a massive, obsidian construct emerged from the mist—The Maw, a living ship from the Void Realm. It throbbed with malevolence, its hull lined with screaming faces frozen in eternal agony. And from its core emerged a figure cloaked in entropy itself.
Echo IV: The Void Herald.
Neither male nor female, it spoke in tongues that cracked reality. "Bearer of the Core… your resistance is irrelevant. The Void does not forget. The Rift hungers."
Jin Long drew his blade. "Then let it starve."
The Herald raised a hand—and the very fabric of the Celestial Wound began to tear. Gravity fractured. Time stalled. Yue Lan collapsed, bleeding from the nose. Meiko screamed as the ship's AI short-circuited, babbling nonsense.
Jin Long staggered, his own mind splintering under the weight of the Herald's presence. Visions assaulted him: Earth consumed in shadows, Yue Lan as a prisoner of the Rift, himself as a puppet of Zhan Wuhen.
But then—
The Core surged.
A memory flared: his mother's lullaby. A field of lanterns. Yue Lan laughing beside a river.
He roared—and the Core unleashed a radiant shockwave that pushed the Void back.
The Herald hissed. "You cling to hope. How… quaint."
Jin Long charged.
Their battle shattered dimensions. Blades made of light and shadow clashed, each strike rewriting history. Jin Long bled, but he pushed forward. He wasn't just fighting for survival now—he was fighting to reclaim meaning from the chaos.
Finally, with a cry that echoed through the nebula, Jin Long struck the Herald down, cleaving its essence into formless nothing.
As the Maw crumbled, the stars whispered once more—but this time, it was Jin Long's name they spoke.
—
Back aboard the ship, Yue Lan awoke in the medbay. Jin Long sat beside her, bruised, burned, but alive.
"We won," he said quietly.
"For now," she replied. "But the Void knows your name now. And so does Wuhen."
Jin Long stood, the Core glowing within his chest. "Let them come."
—
In the shadows of a far-off galaxy, Zhan Wuhen stood atop a spire of obsidian, watching the stars align.
"He's waking up," the void lord murmured. "Good."
He turned to a cloaked figure beside him.
"Release the Fifth Echo."