Immortal Paladin

[Chen Enlai]

The invasion had come and gone like a nightmare trapped in the breath between dusk and dawn. No one could have predicted the war would end as swiftly as it began. From the safety of the floating platform that now hovered high above the remains of New Willow, Chen Enlai stared blankly at the horizon, wondering if the village he once knew had truly perished in a single night… or if it had all been just a bad dream.

Below, the battlefield was stained with ruin. The floating formation, crafted by Da Wei’s bizarre ingenuity, cast a transparent screen into the air, revealing the aftermath with crystal clarity. In that image, Strategist Wen Yuhan stood triumphant. Her robes hung in strips from her arms and waist, melted from flame or acid or some unholy blend of both. Her breath misted faintly as she looked down at the collapsed figure before her: a naked, unconscious young man with dark hair plastered to his scalp, one arm twisted behind him. That man had once brought an empire to its knees. He was the rumored Yama King.

Murmurs surged through the crowd above, whispers blooming into cheers like fire igniting dry brush. Praise for Wen Yuhan spilled from every direction. Even those who moments earlier cursed the Da family now shifted their attention, as if the tide of opinion had simply flowed past them.

”She did it!” someone shouted near the edge. ”Wen Yuhan really beat that monster!”

”I saw it… she stood there like a demon slayer from the old tales. Not even Da Wei could’ve done that!” another voice joined in, thick with awe.

“Forget Da Wei and his black magic. That’s a real warrior down there,” grunted a man with a bandaged arm, nodding toward the projection. “She didn’t run. And she doesn’t have to rely on a giant skeleton to do her fighting...”

“Look at her, barely standing, robes half-burned… and still standing over that Yama King bastard. That’s strength!”

“Forget what I said before. If anyone’s keeping us alive, it’s her! That damn Da Wei destroyed our village, promising a solution... And we thought our trust was in the right place.”

Even those who moments earlier cursed the Da family now shifted their attention, swept up in the fervor. The platform’s energy shifted… words that had once bitten like venom now vanished beneath the noise. Da Wei’s name was still a stain on many lips, but no one shouted it now. No one needed to. The silence around his family became its own kind of exile.

“This is so… unfair…”

Da Ji stood apart, lips pressed in a thin line as the cheers swallowed the platform. She didn’t turn when Chen Enlai stepped beside her. Not until he said her name.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, voice stiff but not unkind. “Enlai, don’t associate yourself with my family… I suggest you turn away…”

Chen Enlai didn’t answer immediately. He hadn’t meant to walk toward her. His legs had moved on their own, driven by something unresolved in his chest. He looked at her. Her hair, wild from battle, clung to her cheeks. Her eyes were ringed with exhaustion, but she still held herself with strength. The illusion of the little girl from five years ago was long gone.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, his voice quieter than he expected. “I just… I needed to say something.”

He reached for her and pulled her into an embrace. She didn’t resist. For a brief second, time stilled.

“I love you, Da Ji.”

Then…

A sharp crack split the air.

Someone screamed.

A body fell from the platform.

The crowd surged, cries erupting in confusion and horror as they rushed to the edge. But the fall was long, and no one could see who it had been. Only the echo of the gunshot remained, bouncing endlessly through the dawn-struck silence.

…

..

.

[Da Wei]

Fate was a cruel and strange bastard.

If it were a god, then it was one indifferent to the cries of its creation. If it were an author, then it was a contemptuous one, flipping pages without mercy, slashing red ink across lives that meant everything to those within the story. But it was also strange. Strange in the way it never gave a straight path, only crooked ones that looped back into pain or twisted triumphs. I had just defeated the Yama King using Wen Yuhan’s body, riding her cultivation like a borrowed steed, and still… I didn’t feel like the victor.

The battlefield had gone eerily silent.

The undead evaporated. The demonic beasts dissolved into drifting ash. The wind itself seemed uncertain of where to blow now that the storm had ended.

And then… plop.

Like an egg thrown at a stone, it sounded wet and final.

It was a body with unshot wounds and a head twisted unnaturally. It had once been someone. Then another sound came, heavier. The shape was recognizable and unrecognizable at the same time. And then came the third body, soaring in the air. I stared at the silhouette that fell off the platform, the one I had designed to carry our people to safety. I saw her.

“Mother—”

I tried to fly, but my limbs refused. Wen Yuhan’s will lashed out from the body she had so graciously loaned me. Unlike before, when I had reigned at my peak, I lacked the raw stats to dominate another cultivator outright in my current Divine Possession.

Another plop. Another corpse.

My eyes burned with recognition as I stared at the bodies. My father… Da Jin. The man who trained me in the bow, who stood at my side even when I shamed him by beating him in the conscription draft. His body was sprawled out like he had leaped, not fallen.

And then the third… the first body that fell. I didn’t want to believe it.

Chen Enlai.

The red-haired brat had grown. His martial arts were rough but promising. His eyes were always on Da Ji, but they weren’t lecherous. They were protective, admiring, and genuine. I could not hate him. And now, he lay broken and lifeless.

I invoked the spell: Divine Word: Raise. A ripple of silver and gold surged through Wen Yuhan’s meridians… but nothing happened.

“You locked your cultivation,” I said coldly. ”That’s just petty.”

Wen Yuhan’s voice emerged from my lips like silk dragged over razors. “Perception is a cage, Da Wei. You imprison yourself with sentiment. Forget about them.”

“This isn’t the time for riddles. What did you do?”

I tried again… Exalted Renewal, drawing directly from my lifespan to override her resistance. The price would be years I couldn’t afford to lose, but I didn’t care. It was her lifespan I would be wasting. 

“If you don’t cooperate, I’ll fuse our souls right now and burn us both to oblivion,” I said flatly.

Her voice whispered back, almost amused. “There’s no need.”

The spell faltered.

“They were a hindrance to you,” she said with unnerving calm. “Your father… your mother… and your sister. I saved her, though. Of course. I knew you’d be… sentimental. But more than that, your sister has a bigger role to play.”

She gestured, through our shared body, toward the third corpse. “That boy? He loved her. Better him than her, wouldn’t you say? I knew what the right things to say, so I said the magic words and the result was this.”

My heart clenched. My vision trembled at the edges.

I thrust Soulful Guiding Fire through her soul. An emerald butterfly burst into existence and fluttered away into the recesses of her spirit. I followed, slipping from the waking world into the corridors of her past. Her memories wrapped around me like chains made of smoke.

Suddenly, I was sitting in a noodle shop.

Wen Yuhan sat across from me, slurping broth. She looked younger, tired but bright-eyed.

“No need for petty tricks,” she said, dabbing her lips with a torn napkin. “You want cooperation? You’ll have it. But first, you must understand.”

The butterfly fluttered again, and I was pulled from that table into her memories.

A brothel room. A child’s alley. A monk’s cave on a snowy cliffside. A concert hall beneath gaslight chandeliers. A war tent splattered with old blood. Each memory gripped me in first-person clarity. I could feel hunger. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Rage. Hope. Regret. Again and again, I lived and died as her.

She had been all of them… prostitute, orphan, wandering monk, minstrel, war advisor. Each version was a different life and a different world, but always here, in this twisted place we called False Earth.

The firefly-like butterfly fluttered again, dimming to a slow burn as it descended further and deeper than any memory I’d touched before. At first, I thought it had taken a wrong turn, falling into some fragment of false recollection, but then I saw it.

Her.

Wen Yuhan was no longer clad in rustic robes or bent by exhaustion, but standing with regal defiance under a trembling sky. Clouds above cracked open like split bone, and through the rift stared down colossi beings whose size couldn’t be measured, and whose forms refused comprehension. A single glance sent my soul shuddering.

Dozens of them were looming and watching.

I didn’t need to be told what they were.

Gods.

If not gods, then beings that dwelt on the same tier as Aixin… perhaps even higher. I could feel it. Their presence wasn’t simply spiritual pressure… it was law. Just by existing, they bent the principles of reality around them. And they were all looking at Wen Yuhan.

The sky warped. Time stuttered. And then…

Back in the noodle shop.

I jerked upright, gasping. My body was soaked in cold sweat. The bowl in front of me hadn’t moved, but the warmth of the broth felt distant now, like a comfort I was no longer allowed to remember.

Wen Yuhan leaned forward, chin resting on the backs of her fingers.

“I achieved the realm of True Perfect Immortal,” she began, voice calm but tinged with something brittle beneath the surface, “and in that pinnacle, I birthed the Destiny-Seeking Eyes.”

I didn’t respond. I simply listened.

“Apparently, two Supreme Beings took offense to my creation,” she said with a faint smile. “Perhaps they feared what it could see, what I could change. The Holy Temple I built was incinerated. Not by outsiders, mind you. By my own disciples.”

Her smile faded.

“They called me a heretic. Hunted me like one. I ran. For a while, I even hoped I could reason with them. But in the end, two of my most cherished students caught me. They didn’t see me as their master anymore. Just… an Outsider.”

She paused there, gaze flickering to the side as if she could still hear their voices calling her a traitor.

“They killed me,” she said simply. “But just as I reached the bridge to the Gates of Reincarnation, a Supreme Being snatched me out of the cycle. Ripped me from the river of Samsara and hurled me into this place. This False Earth.”

I tried to keep my breath steady.

“I reincarnated over and over,” she said. “In this qi-starved mockery of a world, where killing is purpose and mercy is a joke. At first, I thought it was punishment. But then… I met them. The others. Prisoners like me. Powerful souls, cast here like broken toys.”

She looked at me directly now.

“I was the youngest.”

”And?” I mocked her. ”So what?”

”And then you came, making you the youngest... but that’s beside the point,” Her fingers toyed with the edge of the bowl. “Anyway, all of this started with the suggestion of the Enlightened Scholar. He offered us something new amidst the virtually infinite reincarnations. A way out. He called it the Ascension Game. A single chance to escape this forsaken crucible.”

“You planned to win,” I said quietly.

“Of course I did,” she said. “And to win, I needed a fate strong enough to challenge the cage itself.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“You wanted to steal the Heavenly Demon’s fate,” I guessed wrongly.

She shook her head. “No. That one was always too volatile and too unpredictable. I’ve always had my eye on yours, Da Wei.”

“And for that, you had to kill my family?”

“I had to sever their ties,” she said. “Their fates were deeply rooted in this world. Your fate, by proximity, was entangled with theirs. I couldn’t risk it. If I wanted to leave, I had to eliminate every tether. If I wanted to steal your fate, then I can’t let their fates hinder mine...”

Her next words sent ice through my chest.

“So I stole their fates,” she said gently as if explaining a mathematical formula. “I gave them to Chen Enlai... and played my hand...”

“What?” My voice came out as a whisper.

“My Immortal Art,” she continued, “allows me to manipulate the distance between destiny and the present. I advanced the destiny of death for Chen Enlai… and for your parents. It’s too difficult to move the fates of your parents since yours and Da Ji’s were strongly tangled in them, so I have to soften it with another person’s fate… It helps that Chen Enlai also has a shared fate with Da Ji, making the process easier.”

“You killed them because they were on your way, is that it?”

“No, it’s for the sake of the greater good. That’s why they died. And what does it matter anyway? They were inconsequential. They will die in less than a hundred years, anyway. Their ends were simply drawn forward, like ink pulled across a wet page. This way, they will at least have a greater purpose. This way, the Supreme Beings won’t be able to hold any of your weaknesses and toy with you like a rat.”

My jaw locked, and my voice was brittle. “Inconsequential? Greater Purpose?”

“Yes, greater purpose,” She nodded. “I will remember their sacrifice forever.”

“You killed them,” I breathed. “You murdered my parents, and a good man.”

Oh shit.

Looking at Wen Yuhan right now from her poise, her calm, and the gentle way she spoke of deaths like she was discussing yesterday’s weather, I couldn’t help but reevaluate every twisted bastard I’d ever met.

Compared to her? Nongmin was a saint.

And that wasn’t me being sarcastic. Nongmin, for all his butchery and war crimes, was still chained down by something tangible. His Heavenly Eye had cost him his emotional spectrum. It dulled him and made his cruelty clinical, almost mechanical. The man sacrificed lives like offerings at a butcher’s block, but he did so without pleasure or guilt because he couldn’t feel those things. It was a side effect, an awful one, sure, but at least it explained him.

Wen Yuhan didn’t have that excuse.

Through my Divine Sense, I could taste her soul. She felt things, both deeply and richly. Her emotions weren’t stunted. Instead, they were cultivated into something serene and intentional. The way a sculptor nurtured form into marble, she had shaped her morality into something beautiful and inhuman. That was what chilled me most.

I broke the silence with a mutter, “Maybe it’s a difference in moms?”

Her expression twisted. “Excuse me?”

I smirked. “Never mind.”

She tilted her head, visibly confused by my casual tone. There was something almost offended in the way her brow furrowed. Did she expect me to break down? Rage? Scream?

She composed herself quickly, folding her hands like a magistrate. “This Ascension Game,” she began again, “is essentially a race to reach True Perfect Immortal. You have two choices before you, Da Wei: cease to exist… or bend the knee.”

I blinked.

Then let out a sigh of genuine relief. “Ah. Thank the stars. I thought this was going to be something serious.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What?”

“You could’ve just asked if you wanted an alliance,” I added with a shrug. “No need for all the backstabbing and fate manipulation.”

Now that threw her. For the first time, Wen Yuhan looked… uncertain. She was trying to process whether I was bluffing, crazy, or both. But she didn’t know. She couldn’t. I’d always made it a personal rule to mask the true extent of my Divine Sense after Nongmin. Not just the powers that Divine Sense was capable of, but the nature of it.

I saw things as they were, not as they were presented.

I’d known from the very start she was lying about not being able to manipulate others’ fates, about targeting the Heavenly Demon. She never wanted his fate. No, it was mine she’d been after. That much had been obvious to me the moment she started orbiting around my inner circle with all the grace of a calculating moon.

Still… even I hadn’t anticipated how far she’d take it.

Planting a fate-vision formation inside the platform to broadcast our fight? Yeah, I didn’t really think much of it in the beginning. Only now did I understand why she did that… It was clever and cruel. It was a political dagger, and it had worked. Someone killed my family, demonstrating her control.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why are you so… relieved?”

I grinned. “Because this means you’ve probably asked me to ally with you already in some alternate timeline. But you didn’t like the outcome, did you? That’s why you’re trying this heavy-handed method now. It was a relief, truly. Because that means there will never be a point of reconciliation between us. And here I thought I might find an ally in you. Thankfully, your Destiny-Seeking Eyes are not powerful enough to force an outcome from repeatedly visiting your visions. There is a hard limit, thus the holes in your scheme... I imagine the reason must have something to do with the restraints of the world you kept on talking about...”

The memory world shivered around us.

I clenched my fist and drove it into the table between us. The wood cracked like glass, splinters blooming in the air like frozen sparks.

Wen Yuhan reeled back. “Why are you so strong here?”

“My countermeasure had been simple,” I said, standing. “Beat you inside this memory world and steal your body before you get any ideas of rebellion. Since you have decided on confrontation, this makes it easier for my conscience to take what I want and leave nothing behind.”

Her laugh echoed like glass chimes in a storm. “You? Challenge me for control? With your inferior cultivation? I’ve heard better jokes from drunken beggars.”

I neither flinched nor blinked. I let the silence hang, just long enough for her smile to start twitching at the edges, with uncertainty creeping in where confidence had ruled. Then I stepped forward, slow and deliberate, and locked eyes with her across the broken table of her own memory world.

“I am going to make a prophecy,” I said, my voice calmer and clearer than I realized. “I’m going to get what I want.”