The blood world was ending. Crystal could feel it in every fiber of her being, the sensation of reality itself unraveling like a tapestry being pulled apart thread by thread.
Crystal was trying desperately to hold on as everything around her crumbled. Her hand gripped the statue tightly, knuckles white with the force of her hold. But even that anchor point was failing, the stone cracking and splitting beneath her palm.
It was wrong to watch a realm crumble like this. Not wrong in a moral sense, but wrong in a fundamental way that made her mind rebel against what her eyes were showing her. Realms weren't supposed to collapse. They were supposed to be eternal, unchanging, the bedrock upon which existence rested.
Yet this one was falling apart, piece by piece, in a cascade of destruction that seemed to accelerate with each passing moment.
The moon continued to break apart above her. Pieces fell one by one, each chunk descending in a lazy arc before picking up speed and crashing into the shrinking ocean below. Some pieces were small, no larger than a person. Others were enormous, massive sections of the crimson sphere that created impacts violent enough to send waves racing across the entire realm.
At the center of it all, the vortex continued to grow. More and more of the ocean was being pulled into its swirling darkness, the blood-red liquid spiraling down into depths that seemed to lead nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. The ocean was being reduced steadily, its level dropping as vast quantities of liquid simply ceased to exist, consumed by that hungry void.
But that wasn't what gave Crystal pause. That wasn't what made her heart skip a beat despite the chaos surrounding her.
It was the statue she was holding onto.
The cracks were spreading faster now, multiplying across the stone surface like a disease. Each fissure branched into smaller cracks, which branched again, creating an intricate network of fractures. It looked as if each piece would start to separate from the main statue at any moment, the entire structure on the verge of complete collapse.
Everything was ending all around her. The sky was falling. The ocean was vanishing. The statues were crumbling. The realm itself was dying, and she was trapped in the center of it with nowhere to run.
Then something strange happened.
As Crystal held onto the statue, trying not to be pulled toward the vortex by forces she couldn't see but could definitely feel, something appeared in front of her face.
It materialized out of nothing, hovering in the air at eye level. The object was transparent, somehow glass-like in appearance but clearly not made of any physical material. It was like a screen, a flat rectangular surface that glowed faintly with internal light.
A transparent screen floating in the void before her eyes.
Crystal stared at it, confusion cutting through her fear for a moment. She could see words written on the screen, text that appeared in a language she understood perfectly despite having never seen it written in quite this way before.
The screen read: [Accessing Host]
Below the text was a loading bar, a simple rectangular outline that was slowly filling with color from left to right. The bar crept forward with agonizing slowness, each percentage increase taking what felt like an eternity.
Crystal watched as the bar increased, her attention split between the screen and the destruction around her. She was lost in trying to understand what this meant, what this screen represented, when a loud crash snapped her focus back to the dying world.
She looked down and saw another large piece of the moon had fallen into the ocean. This one was enormous, easily the size of a small mountain. It hit the blood-red surface with catastrophic force, sending up a spray that reached hundreds of feet into the air. The impact created waves that rolled outward in all directions, and Crystal could see the piece being pulled immediately toward the vortex, dragged inexorably toward that swirling void where it would be swallowed and cease to exist.
Crystal returned her attention to the screen, waiting as the bar slowly filled to completion.
Finally, the loading bar reached one hundred percent and vanished. Immediately, new text began appearing on the screen. Lines of words scrolled past faster than she could comfortably read, information flooding the display in rapid succession.
She caught fragments as the text flew by:
[Host is dead. Soul is barely holding.]
[Trying to locate body… Unable to locate.]
[Trying to locate position of host body… Error. Unable to locate.]
[Error: Host current save zone is unstable due to system power surge.]
Crystal just watched as all this unfolded before her eyes. The words made a strange kind of sense, even as they raised more questions than they answered. This thing, whatever it was, was analyzing her situation. Assessing her state. Trying to find solutions.
The screen continued:
[Locating new save zone…]
Another loading bar appeared, and Crystal felt a flicker of something that might have been hope. The bar began to fill, creeping forward with the same torturous slowness as before.
As she read the information on the screen, Crystal realized something important. This thing had just called the blood world her "save zone," and it had identified that zone as unstable. Which meant maybe, just maybe, it could help her. Maybe it could move her somewhere else, somewhere safer, somewhere that wasn't actively collapsing into a vortex of nothingness.
She watched the bar increase slowly, each percentage point feeling like a small victory. All around her, the world continued its descent into chaos. More pieces of the moon fell. The ocean level dropped further. The vortex expanded outward, its edges now close enough that she could see details in the swirling darkness.
The loading finally finished, the bar reaching one hundred percent and disappearing.
Then something happened that made Crystal's newfound hope wither and die.
The screen turned red. Not the deep crimson of the blood ocean or the moon, but a bright, alarming red that pulsed with warning. New text appeared, and the words felt like a physical blow.
[Error: Unable to locate stable save zone for host.]
Crystal just looked at the screen silently. Her mind processed the words with a strange calm that came from being too overwhelmed to feel anything properly anymore.
Was this it? Was she really going to be swallowed by the vortex? After everything she'd been through, all the suffering and isolation and watching this realm for what felt like an eternity, was this how it ended?
Then again, she thought with bitter humor, she was already dead. She'd died in that courtyard, killed by Noah and his army. This realm had been some kind of afterlife or prison or transition state. Maybe being swallowed by the vortex would just be the final end, the absolute cessation of consciousness that death should have brought in the first place.
She looked at the transparent screen floating before her as new text continued to appear:
[System request: Use all available power to find any possible solution?]
[Yes / No]
Crystal stared at the options for a long moment. Her hand was still gripping the crumbling statue, which was now more crack than solid stone. The ocean beneath her feet bucked and heaved. The vortex pulled at her with increasing strength. Pieces of the moon continued to rain down around her.
She reached out with her free hand and tapped the "Yes" option.
The moment her finger made contact with the transparent screen, new text appeared:
[Looking for possible solutions…]
Another loading bar materialized below the text. Crystal started to think that these bars were just another way to mock her, another way for the universe to draw out her suffering by making her watch incremental progress toward an outcome that would probably be disappointing anyway.
But at this point, she had no choice. It was do or die. Or rather, since she was already dead, it was do or cease to exist entirely.
The bar loaded with the same agonizing slowness as before. Each percentage increase took what felt like forever. Crystal watched it creep forward: five percent, ten percent, fifteen percent. Around her, the destruction accelerated. A massive section of the statue broke off and tumbled into the ocean, pulled immediately toward the vortex.
Twenty-five percent. Thirty percent. The ocean level was dropping noticeably now, whole sections of the blood-red expanse disappearing into that central void. Forty percent. Fifty percent.
The screen flickered slightly, the transparent surface distorting for a moment before stabilizing. Sixty percent. Seventy percent. More of the moon fell, pieces raining down like crimson hail.
Eighty percent. Ninety percent.
Finally, mercifully, the bar reached one hundred percent and vanished.
New text appeared on the screen:
[Possible solutions have been found.]
Crystal felt her heart skip a beat. Solutions. Plural. The system had found something, some way to save her from being swallowed by the vortex and ceasing to exist.
Then more text appeared, and what she read made her breath catch in her throat:
[Linking host soul with system: 1%]
The percentage increased rapidly, numbers scrolling past faster than the loading bars had moved.
[7%… 15%… 30%… 50%…]
Crystal watched, not daring to move, barely daring to breathe. What did it mean to link her soul with this system? What would that do to her? Would she still be herself afterward, or would she become something else entirely?
[70%… 85%… 95%…]
The numbers climbed higher, approaching completion.
[100%]
[Link established. Initiating solution protocol.]
Then came the words that changed everything:
[Sending host soul back in time.]
Crystal's eyes widened. Her breath stopped completely. Even her face, which had maintained that indifferent, blank expression throughout most of the realm's collapse, finally showed emotion.
Shock. Pure, absolute shock that cut through every defense she'd built, every mask she'd worn.
Back in time.
The system was sending her soul back in time.
Not to another realm. Not to some new prison or afterlife. But back. Back to the world of the living. Back to a point before everything went wrong, before Noah's betrayal, before her death in that snowy courtyard.
Crystal stared at the screen, unable to process the enormity of what she was reading. This was impossible. Time manipulation was theoretically possible in cultivation, she knew that. The highest-level immortals were said to be capable of bending reality itself, including the flow of time.
But for her? A dead woman's soul trapped in a collapsing pocket dimension? To be sent back through time itself?
It defied everything she understood about how the world worked.
Yet the screen was clear. The words were unambiguous.
[Sending host soul back in time.]
Around her, the blood world reached its final moments. The vortex had expanded to consume most of the ocean, its edges now terrifyingly close to her position. The last pieces of the moon were falling, the sky above almost completely empty except for the black void.
The statue she'd been holding finally gave way entirely, collapsing into rubble that was immediately pulled toward the vortex.
Crystal felt herself beginning to be dragged toward that swirling darkness, her feet losing purchase on the vanishing ocean surface.
But even as the realm collapsed around her, even as she felt herself being pulled toward oblivion, her eyes remained fixed on that transparent screen.
On those impossible words.
[Sending host soul back in time.]