The Void Battlefield.
Earlier, the elegant and composed Yan, who seemed to have everything under control, was now on one knee, head down, gasping for breath.
Each breath seemed exceptionally difficult, carrying a hoarse rasp like a broken bellows; his chest heaved violently, as if trying to inhale all the air of this void, yet gaining no relief.
His black tailcoat, which had always been spotless and impeccably pressed, was now torn in many places.
A long gash was torn at the left shoulder, revealing a burn mark deep to the bone on the pale skin beneath; two charred holes on the chest, with faint golden energy corrosion traces at the edges; the cuffs and hem were covered in cuts and scorch marks, looking disheveled.
Even the ever-pristine white gloves—the right one was already damaged, the fingertips burned through, revealing equally pale, knobby fingers.
Most striking was the pure white, featureless mask on his face.
At the temple where Lin Mo’s elbow had struck, several fine cracks had spread like a spider web, destroying the perfect smoothness and mystery.
At the edges of the cracks, extremely faint, dark-golden light particles flickered and eroded, preventing self-repair.
In sharp contrast stood Lin Mo, not far opposite him.
Lin Mo’s back was straight as a ramrod, his Oracle in full bloom, like a lone peak that had weathered storms and become even more imposing.
All traces of fatigue, powerlessness, and defeat on his face had been swept away, replaced by a blazing, furnace-like battle intent and confidence radiating from within.
Most captivating were his blazing golden pupils.
That light no longer flickered but burned steadily and intensely, like two miniature suns hanging in this void.
The most basic, most real rules and states of matter.
He stood there, not continuing to attack, but quietly, with an almost scrutinizing gaze, watching the kneeling, gasping Yan.
The air seemed to freeze because of this extreme contrast.
After a long while.
Lin Mo suddenly spoke, his voice calm and clear, breaking the dead silence.
“A bizarre fate power…”
His gaze fell on Yan, as if penetrating the damaged tailcoat and mask to see the essence within.
“It’s not your origin, right?”
Yan’s breathing paused almost imperceptibly.
Lin Mo tilted his head slightly, the light in his blazing golden pupils swirling as if performing high-speed deduction and verification.
“Your true origin, the power you were born with, or rather, that descended with your Oracle…”
Lin Mo paused, then uttered his judgment word by word: “It should be some kind of… time-rule-type ability, right?”
The moment the words fell.
Yan’s body froze completely.
Even his labored breathing seemed to halt at that moment.
He slowly, very slowly, raised his head.
That cracked pure white mask looked at Lin Mo.
Behind the mask, in those blue pupils, all the pain, dishevelment, and even shock at being seen through were gradually replaced by a deeper, more complex emotion.
Seeing Yan’s reaction, Lin Mo understood that his guess was probably correct.
The only explanation for the sluggish, obstructive powerlessness he felt when White Jade Capital penetrated deep into Yan’s body was….
Time stop.
Time stop acting on the body.
Silence.
A suffocating silence lasted about five seconds.
Then—
“Ha…”
A very faint laugh, as if squeezed from the depths of the throat, sounded.
Then the laugh quickly grew louder, became clear, became unrestrained, and even carried a hint of indescribable madness and relief?
“Hahaha… hahahahaha…”
Yan knelt there, head back, laughing loudly at the void sky.
The laughter echoed in the empty space, seeming particularly eerie.
He laughed for a good while before gradually stopping, but his shoulders still twitched slightly from the lingering laughter and some emotion.
He lowered his head again, the mask looking at Lin Mo, his voice coming through the cracks with a strange hoarseness and… admiration?
“As expected of someone who can see through the trajectory of fate and even briefly deny fate with his own strength… Lin Mo…”
He spoke this name with a complex tone.
“You really are not simple.”
Under Lin Mo’s calm gaze, Yan neither denied nor justified.
He seemed to have given up all pretense and reserve.
He used his new, gloveless right hand to support his knee, somewhat laboriously but ultimately slowly stood up.
Although his form was still a bit unsteady and his tailcoat damaged and disheveled, his posture as he stood upright exuded a different, more real, and heavier aura than his previous elegance.
He stood firm, facing Lin Mo, as if he had made up his mind.
“That’s right.”
Yan’s voice sounded, no longer deliberately maintaining that flat, mechanical tone, but carrying a trace of human fatigue and vicissitude.
“You guessed correctly.”
“I am human, at least… I was. Now, perhaps still in terms of life form.”
He raised his right hand, his fingertips lightly brushing a scorch mark on his tailcoat.
“I am an Oracle.”
“Even… one of the earliest humans to survive from the end of the era known as the old era, when the Oracle first descended.”
This information was like a boulder thrown into a calm lake, enough to stir up monstrous waves in the hearts of those who knew it.
A survivor from the beginning of the Oracle descent?!
That meant he had lived for at least… 1,000 years?!
Lin Mo’s pupils contracted slightly, but he did not show excessive surprise on his face, as if this answer was also within the scope of his expectations.
“At first…” Yan’s voice suddenly became a bit distant, as if sinking into distant memories, “I also naively thought that my Oracle was a gift from heaven, a thread of hope and grace given to me by fate in the apocalypse.”
His tone carried a faint, almost blurred emotion from long ago.
“Momentary Splendor…”
Yan softly uttered these four words, as if reciting the most beautiful line of an ancient poem.
“My Oracle’s… name is very beautiful, isn’t it?”
He seemed to be asking Lin Mo, or talking to himself.
“Unfortunately…”
His voice suddenly became low, carrying a deep melancholy and bitterness that had accumulated over endless years, “My Momentary Splendor only has its initial ability. I cannot develop various application techniques like other Oracles. I cannot actively drive it, nor can I refine it or improve it.”
He paused, his tone thick with self-mockery.
“Over 1,000 years… Lin Mo, can you imagine? Over 1,000 years, I haven’t even been able to touch the threshold of the Ember level.”
“Forever stuck at the moment of awakening, my power, realm, even my understanding of the Oracle, stagnated.”
“Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
He raised his hand as if to make a gesture, but let it down weakly.
“But at first, I did regard Momentary Splendor as a divine gift and was extremely grateful…”
His voice became distant again.
“Because its ability was simple, and also… overbearing.”
“It fixed my life state at the moment I awakened my Oracle.”
Yan’s gaze seemed to pierce through time and space, looking at a version of himself long buried in the dust of history.
“No matter what kind of injury I suffered—piercing wounds, tearing wounds, poisoning, organ failure… even death, beheading, being burned to charcoal, or blown to pieces…”
His tone was frighteningly calm, as if stating something unrelated to himself.
“Soon… I would return from death.”
“Wounds heal, limbs regenerate, consciousness revives… as if time on me was forcibly rewound to that frozen instant.”
“Agingless, deathless, indestructible… at least on a physical level, yes.”
“This is… Momentary Splendor.”
He was silent for a moment, as if savoring the brief joy and confusion that might have accompanied the initial attainment of immortality.
Then his voice suddenly turned cold and sharp: “But later… I understood.”
Just then, Lin Mo, who had been listening quietly, suddenly spoke, finishing his words in a calm voice: “Eternal life… is actually a curse.”
Hearing this, Yan’s body shook violently!
He lifted his head abruptly, the gaze behind the mask seeming to look at Lin Mo truly and seriously for the first time.
After a few seconds.
He slowly, very slowly, nodded.
The gesture was filled with indescribable heaviness and… agreement.
“You’re right.”
Yan’s voice was very light, but carried a weakness and frankness after being soul-pierced.
“It was never a gift from God…”
His fingers unconsciously tightened, gripping the torn corner of his clothes.
“…But a demon’s curse.”
He raised his head, looking into the distant void, as if seeing faces long vanished in the river of time.
“I couldn’t die, yet I had no great power to protect myself or others. I had an immortal body, but I was as fragile as a mortal.”
“So I could only… watch helplessly.”
His voice began to tremble slightly.
“Watch friends age, get hurt, and die in disasters and battles over and over…”
“Watch loved ones live out their short lives while my appearance remained unchanged, only able to pretend to be a distant grandnephew by their deathbeds…”
“Watch lovers… wither and fade in my arms…”
“Deaths and resurrections, goodbyes and losses, again and again…”
Yan’s voice grew lower and heavier, as if carrying immeasurable sorrow and loneliness.
“Later… even I, for some reason I myself couldn’t fully understand, lost a very, very important ability.”
As he said this, he raised his hand and rubbed his temple, the movement somewhat neurotic.
His voice suddenly became abnormally shaky, filled with a kind of physiological pain and despair: “I… can’t sleep anymore.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to, but I can’t.”
“My consciousness is always awake, never able to sink into that darkness that brings brief peace and restoration.”
“No matter how tired I am, how exhausted my spirit, I can’t close my eyes, can’t enter even the lightest sleep.”
His tone carried a hair-raising, age-accumulated torment: “786 years… 3 months… 17 days…”
He reported an impossibly long, desperate number.
“I’ve tried every possible method—drugs, hypnosis, mental intervention, even self-numbing… but I can’t even get a single… 5-minute light sleep.”
“Eternal wakefulness, eternal… confinement.”
This understated description hid a hellish torment enough to drive any normal soul insane.
“Until later…”
Yan’s voice suddenly changed, a faint but real fervor and hope mixing into the extreme pain.
“He… descended His gaze.”
“The god of fate… or rather, the great being holding part of the authority of fate… she saw me, this wretch who had drifted too long in the river of time and was almost completely lost.”
“He gave me… incredible power.”
Yan raised his hand, a very faint gray-white light flickering at his fingertips, “Through the toss of the fate coin, to interfere with the direction of the future. I am no longer that powerless immortal.”
“More importantly…”
His voice suddenly became gentle, but beneath that gentleness was a deeper, almost obsessive longing.
“He gave me… a warm flame in the darkness, the only hope.”
Yan raised his head, the mask looking at Lin Mo, his tone solemn as an oath: “If the god truly descends into the world again and reclaims the authority of fate… as His agent, the first believer…”
He paused, every word seeming to burn with soul: “…I can present a wish to Him.”
“For example…”
Yan’s voice dropped, but with a resolute determination: “…a true, eternal… death.”
“A complete rest… no longer reset by Momentary Splendor.”
At this point, all of Yan’s behavioral logic, why he was so obsessed with pushing the script, why he was so devout and even frenzied towards fate… all had the most fundamental and pathetic explanation.
All his insane efforts, his ultimate goal, was simply… to seek death.
To seek an eternal rest that was easily within reach for ordinary people but a luxury for him.
Lin Mo quietly listened to all of this.
His face did not show excessive surprise or sympathy.
The light in his blazing golden pupils was steady and deep, as if he had already seen through part of the truth.
Or rather, Yan’s confession confirmed some of his previous guesses.
So, a moment after Yan finished speaking, Lin Mo spoke again, asking a seemingly abrupt but core-piercing question: “Your target…”
His gaze was sharp as a knife, locking onto Yan.
“From the very beginning… it wasn’t me, was it?”
Hearing this, Yan’s body visibly stiffened again.
Behind the mask, he seemed not to expect Lin Mo to ask this question at such a time, and so directly.
After a few seconds of silence.
“Haha… hahahaha…”
A burst of even more unrestrained, even more manic laughter erupted from Yan’s mouth.
He laughed until he was rocking back and forth, until the cracks on his mask seemed to widen, until tears nearly burst out.
“Lin Mo… you really, really… are smart…”
He said between laughs, his tone full of complex emotions—admiration?
Regret?
Or the excitement of meeting a worthy opponent?
“You had many chances… to really kill me, or at least severely wound me…”
Yan stopped laughing, looking at Lin Mo, blue eyes flickering.
“But you didn’t do that…”
“So I guessed… maybe you didn’t just want to win this battle.”
“You were also observing, probing, searching… for my deeper purpose, and… using my death or defeat to achieve some effect?”
Lin Mo neither admitted nor denied, just looked at him calmly.
Yan nodded, admitting frankly: “That’s right, my target… from the beginning, was not you, Lin Mo.”
He paused, the mask turning slightly in a certain direction, as if able to penetrate the void space and see somewhere in the death realm.
Then he clearly spoke that name: “…But, Chu You.”
Chu You!
The moment that name was uttered…
Lin Mo, who had maintained a calm and scrutinizing posture, narrowed his eyes sharply!
The blazing golden pupils flickered intensely, and an icy, bone-piercing sharp aura exploded outward from him like a tangible blade!
The surrounding void space seemed to twist slightly from the sudden surge of killing intent!
Yan immediately felt the undisguised hostility and warning locked onto him.
He quickly shrugged, making a slightly helpless and placating gesture.
“Don’t be nervous, Mr. Lin Mo…”
His voice regained some steadiness, but with a trace of… frustration and self-mockery at the deviation of the plan?
“It seems my script… has a small problem.”
He sighed and continued, “Chu You… she is different from you, from Gu Qiancheng, from anyone else in this world, from any living being.”
Yan’s tone became extremely serious, even with a researcher-like focus and amazement: “Her soul… is special, is unique.”
“She is the only key… that can truly fit and open that door connecting to my god’s dimension, guiding the descent of the god.”
“But…” Yan’s tone shifted to a mix of regret and urgency, “Her current soul… those unique qualities have not been fully activated, not reached the critical point to serve as the perfect key.”
He looked at Lin Mo, as if explaining or convincing himself:
“One of the main purposes of my plan… is to accelerate this activation process through various extreme pressures, struggles at the brink of life and death, intense emotional fluctuations, and contact and confrontation with high-rank beings like the Abyss, which are opposite but of the same level.”
“To let her, in the special environment of the death realm, amid destined tragedy and resistance, bloom faster… into the light that key should emit.”
“Then…”
Yan’s voice dropped, the rest unsaid, but the meaning was clear.
Then, use this forced key to open that door, welcome the descent of the god of fate, and realize his… ultimate wish.
Lin Mo listened quietly, his sharp aura not fully retracted, but the light in his blazing golden pupils became even deeper and harder to fathom.
He understood.
The key to everything was actually Chu You’s special, not fully understood by herself… soul essence.
Silence once again enveloped this void.