Myth Beyond Heaven

Yin’s smile turned razor-sharp. “You’ve been scheming behind the scenes for eons, pulling the strings of gods and mortals alike. No one ever truly challenged you. It made you complacent. It made you believe you could always have everything your way—neutralize me, take the boy, achieve your ambition, all without risking a true, messy confrontation or revealing your full hand.”

He let out a soft, derisive laugh. “You thought you could have the best of all worlds. But reality doesn’t work that way. There’s no path where you get everything you want without paying a price. Even that naive boy inside understands that.”

Yin pointed a finger at the meditating Yun Lintian. “He knows it’s impossible to keep all his people safe and defeat the two of us. He had to make a choice—to retreat into himself, to gamble on a breakthrough, and leave them to their fate. He accepted loss.”

Yin’s gaze returned to Nian Shi, his expression turning merciless, his voice cold and final. “But you? You wanted a flawless victory. You held back, trying to keep your trump card hidden from me, trying to preserve your strength for our inevitable fight. And in doing so, you gave them time. Time to despair, time to sacrifice, time to build this… this monument to your failure.”

He took a step closer, his voice dropping to a deadly whisper. “You had the perfect opportunity. The boy was right there, undefended, lost in his meditation. You had one chance to seize him, and you fumbled it with your over-caution and arrogance.”

Yin spread his hands wide in a gesture of conclusion. “Now? Now you have no chance. That barrier is a testament to their will, and it is stronger than your indecision. The opportunity is gone. You have lost.”

The words hung in the air, each one a hammer blow to Nian Shi’s pride and calculation.

Nian Shi’s face, already a mask of cold fury, contorted into something truly unsightly. The calm, calculating God of Time was gone, replaced by a being of pure, incandescent rage. Yin’s words, each one a perfectly aimed dagger, had found their mark, shattering the last vestiges of his composure.

“I… lose?” Nian Shi repeated, his voice a low, guttural rasp that seemed to vibrate from the depths of his soul. It was not a question, but a statement of utter, blasphemous denial.

The Hourglass of Beginnings in his left hand hummed violently, its frame trembling.

“I will never lose,” he hissed, the words dripping with venom. “Not to that meditating fool. Not to his sentimental sacrifices. And certainly not to you.”

Yin merely chuckled, the sound light and mocking. “Even at the end of your rope, you’re still bragging. If you had such an ability, you should have shown it by now. Empty threats are beneath even you, Timekeeper.”

As Yin’s final taunt hung in the air, something snapped within Nian Shi.

The air around him congealed.

It wasn’t a technique. It was a simple, absolute exertion of his will. The grey-silvery aura around him didn’t just intensify; it transformed. It deepened into a shade of primordial gloom, darker than the void between dead stars, and a pressure a thousand times heavier than before descended upon the entire Land of Beyond Heaven.

Time. Stopped.

Utterly. Completely.

The motes of dust hung motionless in the air. The faint, dying embers of spiritual energy froze in their fading glow. The crossed swords behind the barrier, the World’s Ender and the God Slaying Sword, their mighty auras were suspended, their light petrified.

Long Qingxuan and Long Niu’s dissolving forms were frozen in their final moments, their gentle, fading light captured in an eternal instant. The barrier itself, the magnificent layered dome, was frozen mid-shimmer, a perfect, unmoving sculpture of sacrifice.

The only things that moved were Nian Shi, the source of the stasis, and…

Yin.

Yin, who had been leaning back with amused detachment, now straightened up. His dark eyes, for the first time, showed a flicker of genuine surprise. He looked around at the perfectly frozen world, then at his own two hunters.

Number One and Number Two, his most powerful void-born hounds, beings infused with a fragment of Uncreation itself, were as motionless as everything else. Their forms were locked in place, their void swords half-drawn, their Guqin strings still. They could not resist this level of temporal authority.

This… was unexpected. Nian Shi had been holding back far more than he had ever let on.

Nian Shi turned his head, his movements slow and deliberate in the frozen time. His eyes, now pools of absolute darkness shot through with silver, locked onto Yin.

“You are Uncreation,” Nian Shi stated, his voice now devoid of all emotion, flat and dead, yet carrying unimaginable weight. “The equal and opposite of the Creator. I acknowledge that.”

He took a step forward. The frozen space cracked around his foot like ice. “But do not forget. It was I who ended her. I, who brought the final sunset to the one who gave you form.”

Another step. The pressure intensified. “And you, Yin… you are a shadow of your true self. Trapped, weakened, languishing in this withered era. You are not the absolute void you once were. Right now, you are not so different from the weakened state she was in when I struck her down.”

He raised the Blade of Eternity, now pulsing with the dark, consolidated power of his convergence. The Hourglass glowed like a dead star in his other hand.

“You miscalculated,” Nian Shi said, his voice dropping to a whisper that somehow echoed infinitely in the silent world. “You thought my caution was fear. It was not. It was efficiency. But now… now you have become the largest obstacle.”

Then, in a move that defied all of Yin’s predictions, Nian Shi attacked.

He did not turn to the barrier. He lunged at Yin.

The Blade of Eternity swept out, not with a beam of energy, but with a wave of absolute temporal negation. It was an attack that sought not to unmake Yin, but to sever his connection to the present, to isolate him in a moment of non-time, to effectively erase him from the current continuum.

Yin’s amused expression finally vanished, replaced by focused intensity. He moved, his form blurring as he avoided the direct edge of the blade. But he was not fast enough.

Shhhink!