Time has swept away the mountains and rivers, carried off the people of the past, and left behind only history—remembered or forgotten.
The years flow like a song, and its melody is always vast and mournful.
Quinn Shepherd stood atop the box, embracing the girl. Sunlight poured down like the years themselves; as its rays touched him, the maiden in his arms turned to drifting sand, flowing away with the retreating darkness.
The sunlight was clear, scattering across the golden sands of the desert, illuminating the scale-like dunes. This place was once a valley, ringed by gentle mountains and blessed with clear waters and lush scenery.
But the passage of time has woven through this land, leaving behind nothing but endless yellow sand.
Quinn jumped down from the box. Though he knew this would happen, his heart was still heavy with regret.
The Taotie Bone Box opened its lid and spat out Bruno the Dragon-Qilin. Even the box seemed puzzled—just moments ago, its belly held hundreds of people, so how had they all vanished in an instant?
Bruno was terrified and restless. Always superstitious and deathly afraid of ghosts, he now buried his head in the sand, quaking with fear.
Quinn looked up. Ahead of him stood a bare cliff, solitary in the sea of desert sands. Though it had weathered countless millennia of dust storms, it had never eroded or collapsed.
On the cliff face were characters he himself had carved tens of thousands of years ago.
"Human life is greater than heaven!"
Quinn stood there, dazed—he had truly left his mark on history.
Everything that happened last night wasn’t just history’s returning light, nor a dream. He couldn’t explain the strangeness of that night, couldn’t say why he’d ended up thirty or forty thousand years in the past, or why he’d fought through the darkness with the people of Baillong City.
Nor could he explain why he had returned to the present, or why the Supreme Sovereign Era vanished after the darkness.
Yet it had all truly happened.
He had fought shoulder to shoulder with people from tens of thousands of years ago, watched them shed blood and lay down their lives, witnessed the suffering they endured, and saw another Heavenly Court destroy the Supreme Sovereign Era’s Heavenly Court, leaving only death and devastation behind.
"The Supreme Sovereign Era was destroyed. The Pioneer Era was destroyed too. Was it the same Heavenly Court that wiped out both ages?"
He had his suspicions, but nothing to prove them.
"Maybe the same Heavenly Court will come to destroy Everpeace too. But where do they come from?"
From beneath the box, Ben Coates silently wormed his way out, raised his head to study the lonely cliff in the desert and the inscription upon it, then drawled, "Cult Master Quinn, you must be feeling pretty down, pretty melancholy right now. Maybe that girl from the White family liked you, and maybe you liked her too. But she knew you’d have to part, so she never said a word. Time’s just too cruel, isn’t it…"
Quinn's gaze flickered. The gourd slung across his back silently opened, and clusters of blood quietly floated up into the air, making not a sound.
Ben Coates stared coldly at Quinn Shepherd's back. The blood clots overhead writhed like venomous serpents, and his voice slithered into Quinn's heart, gnawing at his spirit, corroding his Dao-heart, trying to poison it and force a crack in the youth's composure.
"If you had stayed in that era, maybe your whole life would have turned out completely different," he murmured.
Ben began to shuffle his feet, steadying his breath. His voice grew ever more seductive as he spun an utterly unreal picture: "Maybe you two would have fallen in love, had a bunch of children, faced countless setbacks and dangers, but your lives would have been so colorful! History would become a riot of colors, and you—a young couple—would have lived through it all together... What a shame."
Suddenly, his tone turned venomous: "But in the end, you parted, separated by tens of thousands of years. Love, affection, any future—all of it is just yellow sand now, nothing but illusion after so many ages!"
He flashed a twisted grin, and his voice warped to match: "That girl from the White family—odds are she's long dead. After you left, she probably died at the hands of her pursuers! Even if she escaped, maybe she married someone else, had children, grew old, and only in her final years—when her beauty had faded—did she ever think of the boy who appeared that night and held her face. Cult Master Quinn—"
"Have you ever felt sorrow gnawing at your heart, poisoning your soul?"
Ben kept creeping closer, his voice warping into the whisper of an outer-realm devil, tempting Quinn to fall: "In the end, she died, turned to dust. Thirty or forty thousand years have passed, and in all this desolate desert, buried under drifting sands, you're the only sentimental fool who remembers her. She's been swallowed by the dust of history, buried beneath these endless dunes."
He chuckled darkly: "A boy knows nothing of sorrow, loves to climb high, loves to climb high! But now, knowing sorrow through and through, he wants to speak but can't, wants to speak but can't! Cult Master Quinn, your heart is so fragile—let me just..."
Just as he was about to strike, Bruno the Dragon-Qilin's body grew larger and taller. Suddenly, he lifted a massive claw and slammed Ben Coates into the ground.