Jin stood in the command center, a man surrounded by the dust of the guys who used to be his enemies. On the huge wall of monitors in front of him, he could see the whole world freaking out.
News reports were cutting to static as TV stations just disappeared. Military channels were a mess, with people screaming for orders that were never going to come.
He saw live feeds from cities everywhere, showing millions of people just pointing up at the sky, looking totally terrified and amazed all at once.
Yep, he'd let off some steam. Tied up his loose ends. He was satisfied.
He closed his eyes, not to pray, but to give an order. A single thought, sharp and clear, shot out into the void. Tian. It's time. Pull the plug.
The connection was instant. Tian's tired, see-through form popped up in front of him, a ghost only Jin could see. The old being looked at the chaos on the screens, at all the regular people facing an end they couldn't even wrap their heads around. Then he looked at Jin's calm, determined face and gave a slow, sad nod.
"Watch this," Tian whispered, and raised a single, shaky finger.
And just like that, the show began!
On the main screen, a live feed from the capital city showed the Prime Minister totally losing it during an emergency broadcast. "We're seeing some kind of... weird thing in the atmosphere," he was saying, sweating buckets while an aide handed him a note. "There's no need to panic! Our forces are..."
He never got to finish. A soft, white light touched the edge of the city. The broadcast didn't just cut to static. The camera, the Prime Minister, the whole city, and everything in it just poof—dissolved into fine, gray dust. The screen went blank, joining a bunch of others that were already dark.
Jin just watched, his face a total blank. He saw a feed from some billionaire's penthouse, the guy screaming into his phone, trying to get his private jet ready to go.
The white light washed over the giant window, and poof—the guy's panicked face was gone, and all his money and power meant nothing.
He saw another feed from a house in the suburbs. It was a general's wife—he'd seen her picture in a file—hugging her kids, trying to protect them from the weirdly beautiful light outside.
They all vanished together, a whole family just erased in a second. Their love, their fear... it all meant nothing in the end.
It wasn't a big, violent end. It was more like a quiet, neat deletion. All their plans, their power, their families, their legacies—all of it was just smoke, blown away by a soft, white wind. The world was being unmade, and Jin made sure the people who thought they ran the place had a front-row seat.
When the last screen went dark, the bunker itself started to dissolve around him. The white light ate through the concrete walls, the shiny floor, and the steel ceiling, until Jin was standing on his little patch of glassy ground again, just floating in a huge, empty, starless space.
The world was gone.
He turned his blank stare to Tian. The old being was just a faint, flickering outline now, like the last little spark of a dying star. All that crazy power he had was pretty much gone.
"Deal's done," Jin said. It wasn't a question.
"Yep, it is," Tian whispered, his voice like a faint echo. He raised a hand that was barely even there.
"Now, for my part. I'll use the very last bit of my energy to send you away. To a new world. A fresh start. Goodbye, my heir."
Tian's body completely dissolved into a cloud of sparkly silver dust. Then, the dust collapsed in on itself, ripping a screaming, crazy hole in the empty space.
It was a swirling mess of color and chaos, a doorway to another life. The pull of the vortex started to tug at Jin's soul.
But right as he was about to get pulled in, a streak of pure, total darkness shot out from the void. It wasn't just dark; it felt like a real, solid thing, a piece of night that just swallowed the silver light from Tian's gateway.
Before Jin could even do anything, the dark streak slammed into his chest and became part of his soul.
An ancient, cold voice echoed deep inside his mind, not in his ears.
"Round 2 starts!!"
At that exact moment, a violent tremor passed through the highest dimensions of existence. In the grand cosmos, the last thread of a forgotten, golden dream had just been permanently snipped.
You see, there are truths older than stars. One of them is the idea of the "Origin World." It was the very first reality, the foundation that existed before even the Creator.
The Creator did not make it. Instead, the Creator found it, studied it, and used it as a blueprint to shape all other worlds. Every universe, every echo of existence, was just a shadow copied from that first design. To truly ascend, one must return to Origin. But the path was lost, and the gate was sealed.
Tian's grand plan was to fix that. He created special worlds, near-perfect copies of that lost Origin, to act as keys. His plan was to use them to start a "Spirit Energy Revival," a new golden age for the entire universe.
But then he was betrayed and usurped, and his grand plan collapsed. His special worlds were destroyed or corrupted, one by one, over countless eons.
The planet they called Blue Star was the last one. It wasn't just a key; it was the final key. The last, fading hope of ever reawakening the cosmos.
And now, it was gone.
The reaction was not quiet. It was apocalyptic.
In a hall of starlight, a woman with galaxies burning in her eyes slammed her hand onto the living map before her. The board cracked down the middle, and entire constellations winked out like candles snuffed in the dark. Her voice ripped through the chamber, raw and jagged.
"TIAN!" she screamed, each syllable a shudder that rattled the stars. "You senile fool! That was the last seed, the last hope for the Revival! Do you even understand what you've done? You've burned the board rather than face defeat!"
She struck again, and the chart shattered further, shards of light raining around her like dying suns. Her beauty twisted with fury, her face no longer serene but terrible and godlike. "You destroyed everything. EVERYTHING!"
Her fury echoed across creation, and in the deep void, a different sound answered. A low, rasping laugh seeped from the darkness, cold and mocking.
"Jie… jie… jie…"
In a hall where light itself bent away, a figure of pure void leaned back on its throne of nothing. The laughter slithered outward, scraping like blades on glass.
"They never saw it," the being whispered between its eerie chuckles. "Not her, not the golden brute. All their eyes on the board while I switched the pieces beneath their gaze. And now the last key…" The void pulsed around him, trembling with his delight. "…carries me inside it."
The laughter rose again, sharp and cutting, until the dark hall shook with it.
But before it could fade, another voice thundered across the stars.
On a battlefield of shattered suns, a warrior clad in golden armor cleaved the head from a star-wyrm and froze mid-strike. His helm turned sharply toward the void where Blue Star had been, and a roar of fury tore from him, shaking the dying suns around him.
"TIAN!" his voice boomed, thick with rage. "You coward! You've destroyed the key! You've destroyed EVERYTHING!"
He did not linger. With his roar still echoing, the golden warrior hurled himself forward, each step tearing across galaxies in a blaze of light, racing toward the scar where Blue Star had once been. His wrath was not words but motion — a rampage that split the heavens.
The dark energy that had merged with Jin—like a computer virus getting into a program—had a crazy reaction with the chaotic power from Tian's dying gateway. The stable vortex totally fell apart, collapsing into a raging, black storm of pure void energy.
Jin's soul was thrown right into it.
The very last thing he felt was the faint, silver light of Tian's final spark wrapping around his soul, like a last-ditch shield against the crushing darkness.
Then, there was nothing.
The first part of a life, and a world, was over.