The grand formation that Dae and his team had been working on was no regular feat of arcane mastery. The core spell circle that Yoshika began feeding her essence was only one tiny fraction of the whole, and like the Reflecting Pool and Teleportation formations before it, brought together comprehensions of the body, mind, and soul, of both the self and the world. Yoshika felt herself spreading through the complex matrices of the formation, weaving her and it through physical, spiritual, and elemental planes—even touching upon the void beyond the world.

  There was a gap, leaving room for the divine. Something none of Jiaguo’s experts could fathom or access without her. Even those who had achieved the xiantian realm for themselves had no divine essence except that which they created for themselves. As long as the seal was in place, there was nothing for that part of the formation to reach for—nothing but her.

  Yoshika filled that gap herself, inhabiting the formation as Heian and Iseul did when practicing the arcane arts. Then, with everything in place, she reached through herself to touch the anchor points spread out across the world.

  The resistance started immediately. The three gods assaulting her soul redoubled their efforts, but only one of them was truly divine. The others were shadows, and while they carried echoes of comprehensions more profound than Yoshika could fathom, they were only echoes. Though the formation had scarcely begun its true function, she found that merely by inhabiting it, she could feel her entire existence being stretched out and woven through reality, creating more and more connections each moment and reinforcing the ones that were already there.

  She pulled together the straining and tearing fabric of reality to rebuild the defensive wards around her soul. They would hold as long as reality did—Qin wasn’t the only one who could play that hand anymore.

  At her furthest extremities, tribulation lightning slammed down upon the anchor points, the essence of the world twisting and writhing under her influence as she reached out to every distant corner. Yoshika drew each point together within her, one after the other, until many became one and one became many—a single point that existed everywhere at once.

  At the eastern node were the protective formations of the Sky Hall, an ancient gift to nurture and protect future generations. A symbol of safety and protection, life and growth. Under its gentle embrace, the wrath of heaven was dispersed, slipping off the formation like water from a duck’s back.

  At its opposing node to the west, yet occupying the same space, was the ruin of Kasuga. A toxic and desolate place rendered barren by greed and ambition. A symbol of loss and sacrifice, death and decay. It consumed the power assaulting her hungrily, an insatiable maw of avarice eternally fueling the cycle of life and death.

  To the south, the roiling maelstrom of an eternal storm was a locus of power. A grand arena where great leviathans vied with dragons to conquer even a fraction of the unspeakable energy held within. It was a place of never-ending movement and constant change, rage and conflict. It matched her foes blow for blow, an inexhaustible wellspring of strength.

  Opposing it in the frigid north was a cold and empty wasteland. At the pinnacle of Emperor Qin’s influence, nothing dared remain that wasn’t Him. Yet it was not his power she sought, but what he left behind. A place of utter stillness and deep calm, unchanging and eternal. It ignored the fury of heaven and earth alike with stoic grace—mere moments in the face of eternity.

  With the formations active, Qin Yang could no longer fail to notice what was happening so close to the heart of his power. His voice obliterated Lee Jia’s body, but failed to impact the anchor point she guarded as Yoshika continued her work.

  “What are you doing?!”

  The divine emperor couldn’t hide the panic in his voice, and his soul no longer felt as oppressive as it had.

  “I am doing what you have been too cowardly to do all this time, Qin Yang. I am doing something. I am carrying our world into the future, one way or another.”

  “You will destroy everything! Are you truly so petty that you would damn yourself simply to spite me?”

  “You still don’t understand, do you? This has never been about you or me. It’s not even about the Bloody Sovereign or the divine seal. It’s not about rulers and subjects or strength and weakness. You would leave this world to its fate, but I only want to give it a future to strive for.”

  “It has no future, you fool! It has been marked for death from the beginning. That is and always has been its fate. You will drag us all along with it in your pathetic, fruitless struggle!”

  Yoshika sighed. She couldn’t deny that it was possible Qin was right. That her efforts would amount to nothing but a sudden and ignoble end to everything. It shouldn’t be her decision to make—anyone’s decision. But it was, and she’d made it.

  “I would rather risk everything for a chance at a future than accept the inevitability of fate and wait quietly for the end. That is the difference between us. You cannot fathom my struggle because you are like Chou. You think that fate is immutable, and that struggle is pointless. That the world has no meaning beyond that which the heavens grant us. But meaning is not something to be sought out and found—it’s created in the hearts and minds of everyone who strives to be more than they are, to forge a better tomorrow. It is better to try and fail, than to never try at all.”

  Qin’s response was lost to her as the final anchor nodes lit up in Yoshika’s senses. Two forces in the center of it all, representing heaven and earth, Yin and Yang. Yoshika’s soul realm at the center of Jiaguo, and the Jade Palace of Qin. It wasn’t yet clear which was which. Yang’s nature was to strive and expand, to grow and flourish. Yin’s nature was to wait and constrict, to recede and wither. Qin and Yoshika’s domains clashed in the center of it all, neither wholly representative of Yin or Yang.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  Yoshika sought change. She wanted growth and movement, yet her ambition was muted. It was not for herself that she strived. She was gentle and forgiving, accepting and welcoming. Yin and Yang existed in harmony within her.

  Qin demanded power, yet his domain was one of structure and order. He sought to expand himself, yet allowed his land to stagnate. He had given up on the world, even as he searched for a way forward for himself. Yang and Yin existed in conflict within him.

  Life and death, motion and stillness, conflict and harmony, all of it existed simultaneously, as one and as many, opposing and complementary, within and without. It was a paradox that resolved itself at the core of Yoshika’s being. She had always been a creature of discord, for all that she embraced Unity as her nature. A contrarian, compelled to question everything that others took for granted. A hypocrite, who wanted a quiet peaceful life even as she pursued ever greater heights of power.

  In the center of everything, Yoshika finally understood that it didn’t matter which was heaven and which was earth, life or death, Yin or Yang. Everything was within everything, nothing was within nothing, and both were within each other.

  You see it at last.

  Yoshika felt the silent voice of Nothing at the edge of her soul. The inscrutable will of the Void, her most unusual teacher of all, gave her one final nudge of encouragement.

  It is time. You are ready to meet your fate. We will see each other soon.

  With that, the presence faded. Ironically, it bothered Yoshika slightly that it would mention ‘fate’ of all things now, but Void’s assent didn’t change what she was going to do next.

  Everything until that moment had only been preparation. As Yoshika’s essence wove itself through the formation and all of its anchoring nodes, the entire world shone within her perception. From her perspective at the center of it all, it reminded her of the cosmology of a living being. Her soul realm sat within the spiritual world like a cultivator’s core, spinning within their dantian as it refined the essence of their soul. Her domain and the people living within it were the beating heart of a body that spanned the entire physical realm. The grand formation was a keen mind, coordinating so much information across dimensions. And at the center of it all, Yoshika was the divine spark. The profound connection to something higher—infinite potential condensed to a single point.

  All that was left was to begin cultivating the essence of that cosmic entity, the formation’s infinitely recursive channels acting as the meridians.

  “This is it, my love. The moment of our triumph.”

  The voice was hers. It was Jia, Eui, Meili, Kaede, and Eunae all at once. And it was Yue and Yoshika. All the parts of her that she’d brought together to craft her persona as the mighty Goddess of Unity, and the parts that she’d temporarily set aside.

  “It’s not supposed to be our triumph. It’s not about us, remember?”

  “But it will be. When we succeed, the world will not be ours—it will be us.”

  “How can you know that? What if we fail? Even if we succeed, there’s no going back. Yue isn’t going back.”

  She shuddered and scoffed in fear and confidence.

  “Of course I’m not. We were never going to and we knew it.”

  “But we didn’t want to admit it. We’re scared.”

  “We’d be fools not to be. But courage is not a lack of fear—it’s the strength to rise above it. Come back to us. We needed me to face Qin, but I need you for what comes next.”

  Yoshika held out a hand, and Yoshika took it. Whole again, as she always had been, she gazed up at the infinite expanse of the cosmos intertwined with her soul.

  “And to think this is just one of an infinite number of worlds just like it. How ironic that becoming everything would make us feel small.”

  She closed her metaphorical eyes and reached out with infinite arms in infinite directions. The Void parted for her, bringing her back to that place at the end of it all, where the primordial essence of creation floated, lost and trapped in a place it was never meant to be. She would return it to where it belonged, or die trying.

  A voice, impossibly small and weak, probed tentatively at the edges of her perception.

  “Y-Yue? Yoshika? Is that you? By the emperor, what have you done?”

  When had Yan De gotten so tiny? Size and distance were meaningless here, and yet the man who had once been so overwhelming was reduced to an infinitesimal speck, so fragile that she couldn’t even respond to him without scattering his soul.

  Or...perhaps it was just that she’d grown. Yoshika wasn’t sure what to make of that, but she ignored it for the time being—she had a job to do.

  Even as she was now, the ocean of primordial essence was intimidating. She understood somehow that it was not mere divine essence as she had always assumed. It was something more, something that wasn’t meant to be outside the origin of everything. It drifted aimlessly within the eternal void of nothingness, just waiting for anything to disturb it, to give it form and purpose. And once it did, it would start a chain reaction—an incomprehensible explosion of raw creation that would be impossible to control.

  She had underestimated it. They all had. From Do Hye to Qin Yang, Shen Yu and the divine sovereigns, and even the Bloody Sovereign himself. No—perhaps of everyone, only Sovereign Chou had understood. A final act of spite against the creators he so despised.

  The mass of primordial essence wasn’t just a threat to her world. It finally fell into place, why Void had been willing to help her. Why its only priority had been the removal of the Sovereign’s Tear from the reliquary Chou had carved into Void’s soul. Why the oldest being in all of creation, an unkillable entity from the dawn of creation, had been so worried.

  Yoshika had no frame of reference for how large the divine realm was, but she understood vividly just how large her own world was. If her world was a grain of sand, then the power contained within that essence was still so great that she lacked the ability to conceptualize how many entire worlds it could wipe out. Enough to fill her entire world with grains of sand, each representing its own universe filled with sand, and so on and so on until scale lost meaning.

  It was too much. It was beyond her—beyond anybody. But it was there, and so was she. Nobody else understood, nobody else could do it. Perhaps the stakes had changed, but to Yoshika, it made no difference. She was already betting everything, and a redefinition of ‘everything’ wasn’t about to forestall her now.

  She stilled the trepidation in her heart, then reached out and pulled.

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