Chapter 685: 685

He could hear the confusion in his officials, whispers echoing through the halls of his palace, the endless speculation about his motives. They believed he had acted against the godlings, that the imperial order to obstruct their path was meant to humble these divine beings, to make them uncomfortable or provoke their wrath.

But they could not have been more wrong.

Chen’s actions had never been directed at the godlings.

His true target lay far deeper, the real owner of this so-called great empire.

"Owner" It was the only word that truly fit.

For the throne of the southern continent had never truly belonged to any of its emperors. Every ruler who had sat upon it, every dynasty that had claimed it, had done so under the quiet manipulation of a single, unseen hand, the one who shaped the empire’s rise from behind the curtain, pulling strings.

That hand belonged to his father.

To Murmur.

Chen’s jaw tightened as the name crossed his mind, the air around him seeming to chill.

His father, the whispering voice, the architect of countless fates in the empire had vanished years ago. No farewell, no sign, not even the faintest ripple in the ambient mana to suggest where he had gone. It was as if the great Murmur had simply ceased to exist.

Maybe for other’s, that disappearance was a mystery. For Chen, it was a wound that never closed.

He had lived his entire life beneath Murmur’s shadow, half in reverence, half in fear. His father’s absence should have freed him, but instead it left a void that festered with unease.

And in that gnawing uncertainty, something else had answered.

His turmoil, his dread, his obsessive longing for the truth all of it drew the attention of cursed spirits, hungry things born from despair and madness. They came to him in whispers, in dreams, in the long hours of his sleepless nights, drawn by the scent of his grief twisted by fear.

But Chen had not fallen. Not yet.

His will was strong. He clung to sanity the way a drowning man clings to driftwood. The cursed spirit that had taken root in him had never fully possessed him, for two reasons.

The first was his strength, the power he trained hard to acquire the past centuires.

The second reason... was the nightmare.

A nightmare that had haunted him for centuries, vivid, relentless, and far too precise to be dismissed as mere imagination. It came to him unbidden, unchanged no matter the era, no matter how far he ran. It clung to him like a brand. It reminded him of the line he must never cross, even as it shielded him from the cursed spirits that forever gnawed at his soul.

For in that nightmare lay a glimpse, just a glimpse of the origin goddess Mahu as she applied a miniscule of her power in the mortal realm.

It was a memory from long ago, buried deep beneath time and regret. The war in which Björn ascended to godhood. Chen had been there, not as a soldier, but as a tool, sent to carry out his father’s will. He kept his distance from the main battlefield, remaining in the shadowed fringes with the small escort assigned to him. They believed themselves safe. Hidden. Irrelevant to the greater clash of both opposing kingdoms.

But everything changed when the Silver Kingdom, cornered and desperate in their struggle against Björn, committed the unthinkable. They forced the descent of the origin goddess into the body of their queen.

The moment Mahu’s essence touched mortal flesh, the world itself seemed to shudder.

Chen, though far from the front lines, felt her immediately. Her presence did not simply spread, it blanketed. A pressure vast and ancient unfurled across the land like an ocean overturning. It was not directed at him. It wasn’t directed at anyone. Yet it revealed them all the same. Every soldier, every hidden watcher, even those who believed themselves beyond notice like him were suddenly, painfully aware that they stood exposed before something that was not meant to walk the mortal plane.

The tiny cavern where Chen hid with the men who accompanied him became meaningless. Their breaths, their heartbeats, their very thoughts reverberated beneath her awareness. Mahu wasn’t searching for them, of course she wasn’t. They were beneath her concern.

Her might was simply so absolute that hiding became impossible.

And above it all... the goddess’s gaze never fell on him. She did not even acknowledge him. Yet that indifference was more terrifying than any hatred.

For in that moment, Chen understood the truth: To a being like Mahu, mortals were not enemies, they were not obstacles, they were not even insects. They were dust in a storm she did not notice she created.

But Chen’s nightmare, the true source of it came after what he first witnessed.

Even though the goddess’s mere presence had already crushed his courage, it was the moment she acknowledged the mortal shell she wore that shattered something inside him forever. He saw her glance down at the weak vessel the Silver Kingdom had offered her. The queen’s body strained, trembling under the impossible weight of divinity. Mahu did not comfort her host nor attempt to stabilize the form. She simply lifted one hand a casual, effortless motion and flicked her wrist.

What followed was a curved, crescent-shaped wave of energy, pale and luminous like a sliver of the moon.

It didn’t merely tear through the battlefield, it rewrote it.

Stone turned to dust. Forests folded like paper under a flame. The earth itself curled and peeled away, creating scars in the landscape so deep they were turned to rivers by the world spirts who mended the land. An entire regiment, thousands of warriors ceased to exist between one breath and the next.

And Chen understood, with a clarity more horrifying than any nightmare: This was the enemy his father had told him to confront.

This was the being he was expected to "deal with."

His cowardice did not come slowly. It arrived all at once, he felt his sanity wobble under the strain of comprehending such divine power, power not at its fullest, not even at its focused, purposeful peak, but in a throwaway gesture.

Chen remembered screaming for a full retreat, his voice cracking, his hands shaking. The soldiers with him, men loyal to his father and sister hesitated only for a moment before obeying. They trusted him.

And that trust sealed their fate.

For when the panic in his veins finally settled into a venomous calculation, Chen made a choice that would stain the rest of his life. To hide the truth of his terror, he cut them down. Every man who had witnessed his breakdown, every soldier who had seen his fear, died by his hand. Their bodies were left in the wilderness, and Chen returned home alone.

He told his father a tale polished and deeply false. A tale of tactical errors, of enemy ambushes, of a retreat forced by circumstance.

It was a lie, and both father and son knew it.

But neither spoke of it.

Not long after, his sister Yuki was sent to that same distant land. Unlike him, she did not bend or break. She rose. She thrived. She carved her own name into that foreign soil, freeing herself from their father’s shadow and becoming a queen recognized by her own merit.

Chen lived, but he did not escape.

The war lived inside him still. That moment when the goddess used her power was etched into the core of his being, a scar deeper than the wounds carved into the land itself. The memory gnawed at him, eroding his consciousness, driving him to the edge of madness again and again.

There were nights, countless, suffocating nights when Chen felt his soul begin to freeze, as if the divine moonlight from that long-ago gesture had reached across centuries to clasp him by the heart.

And every time he remembered, he shuddered.

He never truly left that battlefield, Part of him is still kneeling there,

broken beneath the shadow of a goddess who didn’t even know he existed.

But he held on.

He survived the nights when his soul felt brittle, when the memory of that divine gesture threatened to freeze him from the inside out. He clawed his way through terror, through sleepless eras, through the erosion of his sanity and in enduring that torment, something changed.

The image of the goddess, once a source of suffocating dread, became... a pillar he leaned on. A reminder of scale, beacon and a goal.

And when he finally emerged from those centuries of suffering, when he no longer broke down at the thought of her power, a faint trace remained within him.

A shadow of divinity, not her power, not even a fragment; merely the imprint of her existence but even that was a treasure beyond measure.

He began to study it obsessively, he built his entire philosophy around it. He refined his techniques, reshaped his cultivation, and forged his body and mind according to what he remembered of her overwhelming presence.

And through that relentless pursuit, he climbed higher than he had ever dreamed.