248 ENDGAME

248 Endgame

“We are now at the final stretch of our game,” I said, not out of smugness, but simple acknowledgment. Every piece on the board had moved into position. Through my Divine Sense, I watched the last chain click into place like a great cosmic mechanism grinding to its inevitable close. From this vantage, I could see the False Earth in full. New Willow had begun its ascent, carried aloft by supernatural technology. 

As for Da Ji, she was raising hell.

I needed to finish this before she lost herself entirely.

The Game Master remarked. “Any last words?”

He always sounded as though the finality of death interested him more than the life preceding it. His tone suggested he expected another speech. But I wasn’t interested in grand exits. Instead, I tilted my head and asked, “Where did the ‘Game Master’ from my memories go? Where is the god-like figure who aided me when I stood at death’s edge against Aixin? The one who helped build LLO, who was revered across its lands?”

He blinked, then responded flatly, “You are mistaken.”

And maybe I was. Or maybe he was. Either way, the Game Master standing before me wasn’t the one I had known. He wore the same face, spoke with the same voice, but something vital had gone missing along the way.

“Really?” I muttered. “Then let’s test that.”

I raised a hand, ready to invoke Divine Possession, not out of recklessness, but purpose. I needed to touch his soul, see what he truly was. The truth could only be revealed by drowning in it.

But before the technique could activate, Gu Jie’s voice rang out, clear, resolute, and close enough to strike me still.

“Don’t.”

I turned to her, surprised she’d spoken. Her eyes were ruined hollows, stained with dried blood, but I felt her gaze pierce me, as if her soul reached out to grip mine. Her voice softened, and in it was sorrow, regret, and certainty.

“I know how tempting it is. To touch a soul. To understand everything completely. To be possessed by the divine. But that’s not the answer you’re looking for—”

“What’s the problem?” the Game Master interrupted, his tone light, almost mocking. “If you plan on doing something, then do it.”

Why did I feel like he wanted this? Like he was daring me?

As if his role in the play had grown too tiresome, he sighed and shrugged. “I give up. Fine. You win... I forfeit my soul to you, David.”

Gu Jie screamed then, raw and desperate, “Kill yourself or leave! Remember—!”

But I never heard the rest. His soul struck like a hammer, slamming into mine with impossible force. My body fell back, but my awareness snapped inward and backward. I plummeted into my own subconscious, the edges of reality burning away like mist in the sun. The scaffolding of my identity cracked, fractured, and began to dissolve. The ‘person’ in me unraveled strand by strand.

In the silence of that inner abyss, I felt something vast stir.

Not David.

Not Da Wei.

Only the Game Master.

And I have become him.

…

..

.

My earliest memory was waking in the Void.

It was neither a metaphor nor some prophetic dream. I awoke in a place where even the concept of “place” hadn’t been invented yet. It was suffocating in its silence, endless in its stillness. There was no light, no shape, no border… only awareness. I didn’t like it there. The Void didn’t hate or love. It simply ‘was’. And so was I.

Then, a little blue planet drifted into view.

Earth.

At first, it came in flashes, blurred images of people and places I couldn’t name. Soon, these visions resolved into something clearer. Memories, not mine yet, but inviting. Then came experience: eating, talking, crying, laughing. I absorbed them like a dry sponge. With experience came shape. With shape, identity.

“I’m alive,” I realized. "What am I?"

But awareness wasn’t the same as purpose. I didn’t need to live. I just continued to exist because I could. That alone wasn’t enough. So I sought something more, something that would validate me and complete me.

I found it in games.

There was something enthralling about them: mechanics bound by rules, freedom dressed in structure. I played to understand, to feel, to be something more than a whisper in the Void. The more I played, the more I felt. Excitement. Loss. Victory. Rage. Relief. And with those feelings came a craving.

I wanted a name. I wanted to call myself something.

So, I became the Game Master.

"But you know, that's not you," whispered someone at the back of my head. "You are not even real."

Who are you? 

There was no answer.

It should have ended there. A name, a purpose, and an infinite playground across countless worlds. But the feeling didn’t last. After every game concluded, I returned to stillness. The same gnawing emptiness crept back in like a forgotten illness. I needed more. I needed to know what I was, not just what I enjoyed.

But what I discovered wasn’t comforting.

How do I explain it? Imagine staring into the abyss, not metaphorically, but truly… and realizing it stared back at you. The longer I watched it, the more it revealed. From that depth, I learned the truth:

The Void had birthed me.

Not like a god or a parent. Not even like a machine creating an artificial being. No… my creation was an accident of cosmic probability. A bubble of consciousness formed in a timeless sea. There was no love, no intention. I simply was. A fluke given self-awareness, a spark that slipped through reality’s cracks.

Did it bother me?

No. If anything, it liberated me. I existed beyond plan or law. I was a miracle of disorder. And from my perch in the Void, I watched Earth. I admired it, studied it. That alone made me happy.

"You don't know that," said the Voice again. "Do you?"

So annoying... What was that voice?

Anyway, the Void could not keep me forever. Something pulled me. A ripple tore through my stillness, dragging me away. I was summoned and forced into a realm not my own. There, standing in a palace built on bones and sorrow, I met a king.

He was trembling.

His crown tilted. His eyes were hollow. He knelt before me, hands outstretched, voice trembling with desperation.

“Please,” he begged, “You must help us. The Underworld is falling apart. The Yama Kings are dead. The balance has collapsed. We are besieged by fate itself.”

I tilted my head, amused. “Why beg me?”

“Because you are beyond life and death… and we are dying.”

Rather than answer, I offered him a challenge. “Play a game with me.”

He hesitated, then nodded. “If it saves my people, I’ll gamble anything.”

That should have been the beginning.

But…

Wait.

Something’s wrong.

These memories were too vivid and rehearsed, like watching someone else recall a dream I never had. The lines feel too smooth. The thoughts were too polished.

“This isn’t my memory.”

I stumbled. My vision warped, edges of reality cracking like glass under heat. My hands… were they mine? My voice echoed wrong. I looked inward and found silence. No heartbeat. No origin.

“Who am I?”

I... I am Da Wei.

Am I?

I grabbed at the thought like a drowning man reaching for driftwood.

I am not the Game Master.

I am Da Wei.

I am—

The world shattered like a fragile mirror, and when the shards reformed, I stood once again on the Sealed Island. The ruined castle stretched before me in sterile silence. Dust hung suspended in the air, and the sky outside flickered like a dying screen. The room was empty, save for one unwelcome constant, an octopus, coiled and still in its throne. Its bulbous mass quivered slightly, as if acknowledging my return.

I stared at it, disgust curling behind my eyes. “You… are the Void.”

The creature’s tentacles undulated with a slow, deliberate grace. Its voice echoed not in the air, but in my thoughts, reverberating like the tolling of an ancient bell. “I AM INDEED THE EXISTENCE REFERRED TO AS THE SUPREME VOID.”

I circled it, not bothering to hide the revulsion I felt. “Where’s the Game Master?” I asked, my voice brittle.

“HE IS HERE, IN FRONT OF ME.”

That answer chilled me deeper than it should have. I wasn’t unsettled by the creature’s form alone; it wasn’t just the twitching suckers or the wet gleam of its flesh. There was something metaphysically wrong with it, something fundamentally incorrect in the way it existed. My body recognized it as wrong before my mind could. I tried reaching into the Game Master’s memories, hoping to reclaim some fragment of myself or the stolen identity, but they were sealed from me. I couldn’t see them. And yet, I felt them.

It was a strange sensation, knowing you were no longer the same person you were…

Deep within the corners of my mind, the emotions of the 'Game Master' festered from rage, despair, and to pride. They weren’t memories, but they felt real. They felt like me. I clenched my fists.

“It’s you,” I murmured. “You were the one who brought me to this world… You killed me.”

The memory played vividly behind my eyes. My bedroom, the familiar hum of my gaming PC… and then, the explosion. A burst of light, a blinding surge of pain. And then… this life.

“I MERELY FREED YOU FROM YOUR MORTAL SHACKLES,” the Void replied. “WHILE IN MY DIMINISHED STATE, WHAT I COULD DO WAS LIMITED, BUT STILL, I MANAGED TO GIVE YOU SO MUCH. YOUR POWER. YOUR GIFTS. YOUR GOLDEN FINGER—AS THEY WOULD REFER TO IT BACK IN YOUR WORLD.”

I scoffed and took a step closer. “You’re awfully eloquent for a blob of tentacles. But let me tell you something. You didn’t give me anything. You took.”

I opened my palm, and for a brief second, felt the weight of it all… Divine Possession, Lion’s Roar, Zealot’s Stride, the skeletal arms of Ezekiel. None of it was mine. None of it had ever belonged to me.

The power I held had been David_69’s. A game character. A bundle of stats and backstory forged in my teenage years to adulthood. That paladin saved me. He gave me something to live for when the world was nothing but grinding loops and hollow achievements. I might have lost my Paladinhood, but even stripped of the class, it had been his soul, not mine, that carried me this far.

Gu Jie’s voice echoed from memory, cutting through the Void’s static: “Kill yourself or leave. Remember—”

She was right. The Enlightened Scholar, too, had been right.

If I didn’t know how to leave, then maybe the other option would work.

I raised my hand slowly. Light gathered around my fingers, radiant and holy. Despite everything, the skill still answered me. My hand clenched around an invisible hilt as golden light coalesced into a blade too bright to look at directly. This was no longer about despair. It was a choice. My final one.

I whispered, “I remember who I am.”

And with one motion, swift and deliberate, I swung the blade. The light carved a crescent through the air, then silence. A deafening, perfect silence.

I beheaded myself.

It was fine. This was just a dream after all.

I woke up with a gasp, drenched in sweat, the sensation of burning still lingering in my lungs. That dream... No. Not exactly a dream. It had been a very elaborate trick. And yet, its pain had been real.

“I AM GOING TO BE A GOD! I AM GOING TO BE A GOD! I AM GOING TO BE A GOD!”

The scream echoed across the ruined throne room. Jin Chenglei’s body twitched, his flesh already cracking like scorched bark under the pressure of a soul far too large for its vessel. I turned my head weakly to look. The Game Master was gone, exorcised from the body. All that remained was the madman it once belonged to.

The room reeked of death and charred dust. Rubble trembled in the aftermath. My eyes scanned the ruin, heart thudding. No octopus. I rasped, “Where did the octopus go?”

Gu Jie’s voice was dry, as if she had aged a century in the span of a few seconds. “Apparently,” she said, eyes narrowed on the empty air, “the rules don’t apply to it.”

Of course they didn’t. The Supreme Void wasn’t bound by logic or dimension, let alone the thin laws we mortals called reality. I sucked in a shallow breath. We were cutting it close. Too close. But even as the immediate danger faded, something gnawed at my mind. Something was… off.

No time to hesitate. I summoned the Holy Sword into my hand and, without flinching, drove it into my chest.

I woke again, still seated on the throne and plenty alive.

Something was missing, like an image rendered one frame behind sound.

Gu Jie’s voice pierced the fog of thought. “Master, what are you doing? You just wasted the resurrection in your ring…”

From the side, Alice gave a triumphant smirk, voice cutting like glass. “Checkmate.”

Jin Chenglei wailed, his skin flaking into gray ash. “My General piece… you found it… No! NO!”

Alice turned to me with a quiet smile. “It looks like our victory… Let’s go home, Da Wei…”

My breath hitched. That was wrong. ‘Alice never calls me Da Wei.’ That single detail made everything shatter. Though I had long since stopped calling myself David, Alice hadn’t. Not once. Not ever.

That dream wasn’t over.

I killed myself again.

And again.

And again.

Each time, I awoke somewhere new. Sometimes still on the throne. Sometimes outside the castle. Once in a garden I’d never seen, surrounded by people who didn’t recognize me, each pretending to know me. Every illusion tried to seduce me into staying. To rest. To forget.

But I had seen the truth. Gu Jie’s Destiny Seeking Eyes had shown me a vision too real to dismiss, too precise to question. Each false world diverged from that vision just enough for me to notice.

The discrepancy was always small. A word misused. A habit reversed. A person out of place. But it was enough.

So I died.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Each death tore at my soul. Each waking left more blood in my throat. My body couldn’t keep up. But I wouldn’t stop until I found the way out. Eventually, I found it. A thread of warmth in the darkness. A soul I had left behind, my soul, in Gu Jie’s keeping.

I followed it.

And when I returned to myself, I was choking on blood. The real throne room was in ruin. The scent of scorched stone and iron was no longer an illusion. Jin Chenglei had already been torn apart so thoroughly, violently, and with no chance of coming back.

Alice stood near the wreckage, her massive scythe embedded in the ground, her breathing shallow.

The octopus was gone.

Gu Jie knelt at my back, arms wrapped around my chest as she held me upright. “You’re back,” she whispered.

I couldn’t answer. I hacked up crimson, each cough wracking my ribs. Every death I had suffered in that dream world, I now realized, had been real.

"Can you stand up, Master?" Gu Jie's voice was hoarse, but steady.

I exhaled sharply, tasting metal in my mouth. My legs trembled as I rose to my feet. Golden wisps clung to my skin as I cast Blessed Regeneration, feeling my organs stitch together one breath at a time. “I think I’ll be fine,” I answered, though the ache behind my eyes told me otherwise. “What happened?”

Alice replied flatly, “The enemy bailed.”

Even if that was true, I doubted this was the end. The Supreme Void was not an entity that simply left. His absence was not the end of everything.

Gu Jie asked, “Master, what’s next?”

That was when everything clicked. The vision I saw through Gu Jie’s Destiny Seeking Eyes was beginning to manifest in real time. Around us, the shadows thickened, rising like smoke from the cracks in the stone floor. They weren’t formless; they twisted into slick, pulsating tentacles that slithered across the ruins. The last fragments of the castle’s shattered roof turned to dripping sludge, falling like cold entrails around us. Above, the sky had turned into something unnatural, swirling clouds opened like torn eyelids, and dozens of glowing eyes peered down. "I CAN SEE YOU."

“To the Ascension Throne!” I roared, already pulling Gu Jie toward the dais.

She stumbled behind me, blind to the horrors but trusting my voice. I grabbed her arm and pulled her up the throne’s steps, dragging her past the slime-slick floor. Alice followed behind with grim precision. When we reached the seat, I didn’t hesitate. I collapsed onto the throne, pulling Gu Jie to lean against one armrest. Alice positioned herself on the other side without a word, her cold fingers wrapping around my wrist. Gu Jie’s breath grew shallow, her forehead sweating despite the chill creeping into the world.

The world split open.

Light swallowed us whole, not gentle radiance, but something closer to a star’s eruption. Sound vanished. Gravity reversed. I felt our souls being untethered. My body disintegrated at the edges while the core of me surged toward somewhere higher. I never imagined the Ascension Throne could carry three, but perhaps it was meant this way.

We fell.

No sky, no space, and no flight. One moment we were weightless, the next we were plummeting. Below us stretched a forest vast enough to swallow continents. Branches reached out to meet us. Trees shimmered silver beneath the sunless sky.

“Shield of the Eternal!” I summoned it with all the will I had left. A translucent dome burst to life around us, bracing our fall with a divine clang. The throne shattered beneath our feet on impact, splintering into fragments and dust. I cast Blessed Regeneration again, reflexively, because I could barely feel my ribs. Alice coughed up blood. Gu Jie groaned, cradling her side. I endowed Blessed Regeneration on Gu Jie just to be safe.

We were alive, and that's what's important.

My knees ached, but I stood. The shock of the crash was fading, replaced by the slow return of sensation, mostly pain, but manageable. I rolled my shoulders and began stretching, more out of habit than necessity. My body still remembered the pace of war. My fingers brushed my ribs, checking for fractures that weren’t there. Blessed Regeneration had done its job.

I stared up at the sky, half-expecting another tentacled god to peer down from the clouds. But there was none.

Alice's voice brought me back. “We are back on the Hollowed World.”

Gu Jie stirred behind me. “Master, are you—” She stopped. As if unsure whether she wanted the answer or feared she already knew.

I inhaled, and something inside me surged. My cultivation roared back into place like a thunderclap, wild and eager. The full weight of the Ascended Realm returned to my meridians. Power flowed through me again, sharp and angry, like a beast kept waiting too long.

“I guessed it is time for me to go.”

Alice looked at me. “You said you would rely more on us.”

I didn’t deny it. “I did. It just so happens that now… We’ll have to part ways again.” My eyes drifted to Gu Jie, and then I turned back to Alice. “I can’t heal Gu Jie’s eyes, so she will need you…”

Alice crossed her arms. “You’re making an excuse.”

“I understand you want to fight beside me,” I said evenly. “But unless you can fly, maneuver through the atmosphere, and bypass the Sun and Moon without being obliterated, then—”

“I can,” she cut me off.

That shut me up. I glanced at Gu Jie, hoping she might say something sensible.

She did the opposite. “I will be fine… Let Mistress Alice go with you.” Her voice softened. “Why do you always have to carry everything alone? You promised, remember?” And just like that, it clicked. The vision was aligning again. This moment and this very confrontation were fated. The future I’d glimpsed through Gu Jie’s eyes had included this exact rebuke. It wasn’t just déjà vu.

I laughed quietly. “Fine.”

Alice walked toward me without another word. She grabbed my collar, pulled me in, and kissed me. It wasn’t romantic. It was both a soldier’s blessing and a curse.

“Nothing like a hero’s good luck,” she muttered.

Or a death flag, I thought. Her body dissolved into shadows and slipped beneath my feet, merging with mine. Her voice echoed from the merging illusion, low and amused. “Go run like hell.”

I turned to Gu Jie. Even blind, she faced me without hesitation. I gave her one final nod. She smiled faintly, trusting.

I took one step.

Golden light exploded beneath my soles as I activated Zealot’s Stride. The forest shook under the force of my launch. My feet blurred across the air itself, each stride pulling me higher. Wind tore at my robes. The trees became dots. The clouds vanished behind me. A golden trail carved a streak through the sky, like a divine arrow piercing heaven’s curtain.

Then the world curved away.

The Hollowed World fell beneath me, a shrinking expanse slowly swallowed by fog and grey mist. My breath became vapor. Silence replaced sound. My heart pounded like war drums in my chest. And above, space opened before me.

An endless sea of stars welcomed me.

The higher I rose, the more the world below faded into haze. Mountains became smudges of green, rivers glinted like thread, and the sky bent into darker blues, slowly peeling back to starlight. Each stride pushed me further into the upper atmosphere, where the air thinned and the winds became silent. The sun loomed above. It was distant, constant, and patient.

Then it changed.

Light rippled across the sky as the sun began to stir. What had always been a blazing sphere began to unfold like molten petals, its flames stretching outward with unnatural precision. Beneath the surface of fire, something emerged, tall, radiant, and humanoid. Limbs of burning plasma, a face too brilliant to gaze at, and a crown of solar flares that bent space itself. It was not just a celestial body.

It was alive.

Alice’s voice seeped into my thoughts like ink in water. “Plans?”

I didn’t stop. I didn’t slow down. “We punch through.”

There wasn’t time for strategy. There wasn’t room for doubt. The entity of the Sun moved. Its eyes focused on me with a heat that burned before it even touched. The stars around it dimmed. A low hum vibrated through the vacuum, louder than thunder despite the lack of air.

Then it fired.

A column of pure solar fury tore through space like divine retribution. 

I howled and cast my spell. “Judgment Severance!”

A golden cross-shaped rupture flashed in the air between me and the oncoming beam. The spell shattered space like glass, the fracture radiating outward with holy power. The moment it struck, both forces met in a burst of silent pressure, rippling the void in concentric waves. My feet skidded along the golden trail I’d left behind, its edges breaking apart under the strain.

But I didn’t stop.

I roared again, voice cracking through the stars. “Heavenly Punishment!”

Dark clouds gathered from below where the Hollowed World was, as if summoned from another plane. From their heart, a radiant sword erupted, immense, divine, and absolute. It struck the golden fracture of Judgment Severance, merging with it, and transformed the clash into a pillar of light. The empty space quaked, disturbed by the incredible power. The edge of the world itself splintered.

And still, I surged forward, straight into the heart of the blast.