Crunch... crunch...
Heavy, ragged boots crushed the blood-red snow at the center of Floor Seven as the figure stepped out of the shattered thousand-foot Mirror of the Final Page.
Every single member of the Gu Family—and all one quintillion citizens watching the live sky-screens across a million worlds and a thousand galaxies—froze in stunned, suffocating silence.
Because the boss who had just walked out of that mirror was not a six-armed bronze giant like Warden Kuhai, nor was he a five-hundred-thousand-mile monster whale like the Despair-Ink Leviathan.
He was a twenty-five-year-old human youth.
He had the exact same brow, the exact same nose, and the exact same jawline as Gu Changsheng. And the exact same facial features as the fifteen-year-old Gu Nian standing right beside Gu Changsheng’s elbow, only ten years older and hollowed out by an eternity of unimaginable torment.
The twenty-five-year-old youth stood six feet tall, yet his frame was gaunt to the point of starvation, his cheekbones sharp as knives beneath skin as pale as grave-ash.
Welded directly into his bleeding collarbones and ribs was a suit of jagged, rusted Black Iron Armor of Eternal Solitude, crusted with the dried blood and ashes of ten thousand destroyed worlds. In his scarred, frostbitten right hand, he dragged a nine-foot World-Ending Chaos Demon Broadsword whose chipped blade wept black fire. And clutched tightly against his chest in his left hand—guarded as if it were the only warm thing in the entire cosmos.
