Chapter 88
In the silence of his heart, amidst the fading pulses of the Cancer plague that had begun to calm upon realizing that he was not the target, Ling Xu murmured in a voice that could not be heard by anyone—not even by Huan Zheng who stood only a few steps beside him, not even by The Singer who remained frozen with tear-filled eyes, not even by The Silent One who stared at the red-haired woman with a gaze full of both hope and despair.
"So… it's not me," he muttered inwardly, his inner voice no longer cold, no longer angry, but relieved—a strange relief that felt like a thorn being pulled from flesh that had long rotted, like a wound finally being cleaned after years of being wrapped without ever being properly treated.
"It's not my body that he's after."
On the other side, within that same silence, within a heartbeat that moved in rhythm with Ling Xu's—because they had shared death eleven times, because they had walked side by side through blood, fire, and tears, because they had become two sides of the same coin that could never be separated despite desperate attempts—Huan Zheng murmured, continuing a sentence never spoken by Ling Xu, completing a thought never finished.
Like two singers performing the same song without rehearsal, like two rivers meeting downstream and deciding never to part again, like two souls that had known each other since before they were born, before the universe existed, before time was named by the first being who dared to give meaning to passing seconds.
"And that means," Huan Zheng continued in his mind, his inner voice no longer lazy nor flat, but sharp—like a scalpel slicing through layers of lies built over thousands of years by the Silent One around his shattered heart.
"The reason behind The Silent One's obsession with obtaining The Singer's love—the reason he orchestrated the Harmony Conflict, why he allowed the Goddesses to be violated and passed around, why he beheaded them and turned them into a collection, why he was willing to destroy entire civilizations just to draw the attention of that red-haired woman—was not purely driven by genuine romantic affection. Make no mistake, The Silent One's feelings toward The Singer are not false. He truly loves her. Or at the very least, he truly desires her. But behind that toxic love, behind that destructive obsession, behind all the blood, tears, and meaningless deaths, there lies another motive—older, colder, more absolute: the soul of the God of the Vast Cosmos residing within The Silent One's body seeks to reclaim its physical nature, to seize the body that has long hidden behind The Singer's beautiful face and mature form, to become whole again after thousands of years of being split into two parts that long for each other like two sides of the same coin that can never be separated despite every effort."
The Silent One stood in the midst of a settling vortex of dust.
Both of his hands were stretched to the sides like an inverted cross, and when his mouth opened, the words that came out were no longer the voice of a thirty-six-year-old man who once sat in a bamboo pavilion at the edge of the universe, but the echo of something older than time itself—something that had waited thousands of years to be spoken.
"I call back what is mine—flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, the nature separated by foolishness and despair. Awaken, the body I left behind. Remember who you were before you hid behind the face of a girl who never asked you to stay."
And whether because those words carried the force of an unbreakable rule, or because that call had been etched into every fiber of its physical nature since the very beginning, moments later The Singer suddenly collapsed.
Her knees struck the stone floor made from flattened bones that had crumbled into dust, both hands clutching her temples that suddenly felt as though they would split apart, and from between her slender fingers, blood began to flow.
Not drop by drop like tears, but in an unrestrained surge—like a river finding a gap between rocks after heavy rain, like a truth that could no longer be contained by the walls of lies she had built.
Ling Xu instinctively stepped forward, his warm hand reaching out to support the Singer's swaying shoulders.
But before his fingers could touch the blood- and sweat-soaked red robe, Huan Zheng had already moved his left arm.
Not with violence, not with harsh rejection, but with a firmness born from knowledge he had never shared with anyone—from experience gained through witnessing too many battles and too many deaths, enough to distinguish when someone could still be saved and when they had already become something else.
"Don't, Ling Xu," he said, his voice no longer lazy nor flat, but heavy—like a gate closing before someone about to enter a place never meant for them.
His half-lidded eyes were now fully open, staring at The Singer's body that had begun to tremble violently.
Not from fear, not from pain, but because something within her was moving—something that had slept for thousands of years in the darkest corner of her consciousness, something now awakened by a call she could not ignore, by a rule she could not defy.
"The Singer right now is not entirely The Singer. Or more precisely—she is turning into something we have never known."
And there, the physical nature of the true body of the God of the Vast Cosmos—which, for reasons unknown, had chosen The Singer as its vessel, which had hidden within the flesh and blood of a nineteen-year-old girl who only wished to be loved by a lazy man who never took love seriously—began to activate.
It emitted an aura unlike anything Huan Zheng had ever felt in his thousands of years of life.
An aura neither hot nor cold, neither heavy nor light, but absolute—like a law that cannot be denied because it is the law itself, like a reality that does not care whether you believe in it or not because it will continue to exist, to speak, to force every breathing being to kneel before it.
From the pores of The Singer's once-pure white skin emerged a golden light—not a gentle glow like the morning sun illuminating dew-covered leaves, but a blinding radiance that forced Ling Xu to instinctively close his third eye with his palm, even though he knew such an action meant nothing before a power that had slept for thousands of years and now awakened with an indescribable hunger.
"That physical nature… it chose The Singer," Huan Zheng whispered, his voice barely audible amidst the roaring aura flooding that artificial hell from end to end—from shattered walls to a ceiling cracking in a hundred places, from collapsed ground to the depths of a crater still steaming with remnants of forgotten attacks.
"It chose her from the very beginning, even before The Silent One—or more precisely, the soul of the God of the Vast Cosmos residing within him—decided to call it back."
To be continued…