The night air was chilly.

Wang Xiao stood still, hands in his coat pocket, eyes trailing the figure approaching them across the empty road.

Lin Xue.

She walked like it was nothing.

As if she hadn't just broken out of prison.

Her arms wrapped around her shoulders, fingers rubbing faint warmth into her skin. The grey robe she wore like a forgotten hospital gown, draped and dusty, fluttering slightly in the wind.

He raised a brow, voice flat and judgemental.

"Getting too comfortable with freedom already?"

Lin Xue paused, just a few steps away, their eyes met.

"I…"

She opened her mouth, then closed it.

For a moment, her breath came out in a white puff, curling like mist from a dying kettle.

Then, "I didn't come to cause trouble."

Wang Xiao's gaze dipped. "Oh? You didn't?"

He gestured vaguely at her. "At this hour, in that outfit, walking barefoot in a prison robe—"He gave her a pointed look. "—you are trouble."

Zhang Sisi, still mildly stunned

of everything, misread his tone entirely.

"I—I'll go get her something to wear," she said quickly, stepping toward Lin Xue.

Wang Xiao blinked.

Clothes? Right. That actually made sense.

He was just about to nod when—

Crack...

A disturbance, barely noticeable. Like pressure folding in on itself.

His brow twitched.

He looked up.

Dark sky.

Crack...

A soundless shatter.

Like glass breaking in a vacuum.

And then, Gone!

The space around Wang Xiao folded in on itself like wet paper.

And he was crumpled inside it, and vanished.

"Wang Xiao?"

Zhang Sisi reached out, too late.

Only air met her fingers..

"W-Where did he go...?"

The silence that followed wasn't peaceful, it was hollow.

Wrong.

Lin Xue stood still, her eyes tracing the spot where he had just stood. "…What just happened?"

______

Netherworld, Eastern Block of the Yin Faction!

Cold.

But not the kind that numbs flesh, this was the kind that slowed time, that made every move feel reluctant, the kind that hollowed out thoughts like wind through a dead cathedral.

Above stretched a sky so black, it wasn't darkness, it was absence.

A canvas where even stars refused to shine.

And from that lightless canopy... snow fell.

Not white, not soft.

Each flake was sharp, like ash folded in glass.

They drifted slowly, eternally, as if gravity here was optional.

Some never reached the ground.

Some suspended mid-air, frozen in rebellion.

The land itself... Impossible.

Endless plains of grey obsidian, cracked like dry skin, stretched into a distant nothingness. Fanged cliffs jutted like broken gods' teeth, and in between them, castles, no, fortresses, rose like tumors.

Black spires twisted inwards, spiraling against the sky.

Some hovered, anchored by anti-gravity runes carved in a forgotten tongue.

Bridges, thin as needles, connected them,

impossibly suspended.

It was a city.

But not a living one.

A necropolis for ideas too old to die.

Sparse movement dotted the skyline,

not people, but mechanical constructs, gliding on beams of purple light.

Their shapes resembled jellyfish made of metal and bone, their translucent undersides glowing with suspended souls, each one a whisper of something long-dead.

This was not Earth.

Not even close.

This was the Netherworld, the inner dominion of the Yin Faction,

keepers of cosmic law, dream sorcery, and dimensional balance.

This was their Eastern Block, a territory vaster than entire galaxies.

A place where even time bent to authority.

At the heart of it all, one castle, taller than the rest, scraped into the void like a needle into skin.

Its dome opened like petals of black lotus, revealing an inner sanctum,

and inside it... Two Eldritch stood in council.

Ten meters tall, their bodies were vaguely humanoid, but twisted, like someone had melted a statue and let it reform in agony.

Veins pulsed with silver ichor under translucent skin, their arms long and bark-like, fingers ending in bone spurs that scratched symbols into the air.

Each held a staff, not made, but grown,

a spine twisted around a glass orb pulsing with unstable violet energy.

The air around them warped with the pressure of folded universes.

They weren't speaking aloud.

Their voices threaded directly into the space around them, felt rather than heard, like a language designed to bypass the mind entirely.

"The faultline is rupturing."

"We can't delay any longer."

"Summoning now is unstable. Any intrusion risks corrupting the spatial lattice of our domain."

"If we wait," the other hissed, "there will be no domain left to protect."

Inside the dome, the two Eldritch loomed beside the ritual dais, bodies abnormally tall, ten meters at least, skin pale and translucent, veins of silver running beneath the surface like star maps.

Their fingers ended in hooked bone, twitching as they argued.

"The Great Lord desires a soul," one growled. "A specimen from the other side."

"A spy," the other muttered. "Since our infiltration efforts failed… we resort to this."

"But what if we summon someone too powerful?"

"We won't. Powerful beings reject the tether. It will bounce off them like mist. The ritual automatically redirects to the next."

"And the weak?"

"They cannot resist. They come."

Their conclusion was simple: This chapter was originally posted on M^VLEMPYR.

Only the weak are summonable.

Only a compliant soul would pass through.

The strong had will.

The weak… could be shaped.

Below them, the summoning dais rotated slowly, a circle of obsidian and white bone,

rimmed with glowing calligraphy that pulsed like a heartbeat.

Each rune rearranged itself endlessly, responding to the energy in the chamber.

It hovered above a void well, not just darkness, but absence, a place where light had never been born.

Above, a floating ritual sphere spun gently, a cosmic model of the multiverse, its glowing threads weaving endless timelines, each flicker a life, each pulse a fading star.

One thread began to glow.

Then burn.

"Hiss…"

The Eldritch raised their canes in eerie unison.

Orbs at the tips pulsed with violet energy.

The ritual was delicate.

Even the slightest resistance from the soul would disrupt it.

If a being struggled, they'd be skipped.

Simple.

Clean.

Safe.

But then....Bang!

A rupture.

The dome trembled.

Their jaws opened in horror.

"!!!"

Something accepted.

No resistance.

No hesitation.

No fear.

Only a blinding, willing descent.

A soul came crashing through the ritual sphere, brighter than protocol, hotter than the sun.

Too fast.

Too vivid.

Too complete.

"He... he's not compliant!"

"He chose it!?"

Before they could finish, the dome detonated.

BOOM!!

A fireball exploded outward, swallowing the top of the spire in an inferno of folding light and collapsed space.

Ritual sigils burst into flames

Void essence bled from the ceiling like leaking gravity.

The Eldritch vanished into vapor, thier screams cut midway.

At the center of the chaos, a humanoid materialized, still half-formed, his soul burning, searching, absorbing, he reached out and ripped mass from nearby structures,

forging a crude physical body with bone and dust.

His eyes opened, crimson.

He landed softly as the smoke cleared.

Below him, an expanse that defied imagination.

He looked up.

There was no sky.

Only a folded firmament, spiraling inward like an eye watching itself.

This was no planet.

This was a collapsed universe, folded into a single plane, so massive that even his enhanced senses couldn't reach the edges.

Everything had been merged.

One geometry, folded inwards.

He stepped forward.

From the scorched perimeter, giant beings, more Eldritch, began to approach.

Massive limbs, glowing organs, no faces.

Each step they took bent the ground slightly.

They stared at him.

But not as predators.

As something closer to...

Witnesses.

Wang Xiao narrowed his eyes. "So this… is where I've come."

He tilted his head, watching the horizon twist beneath its own weight.

It was bigger than belief.

And none of them, not the Yin Eldritch,

not the watchers, not even the Great Lord of the Yin Faction himself, could have predicted what they had just summoned.

Not a soul.

Not a spy.

A god in human skin.

And he came willingly.