Shimmer’s expression cycled through several colors.

He had no desire to fight this particular battle. It didn’t matter whether the young man standing across from him was a supreme powerhouse running deep concealment or a genuinely hollow pretty face — neither scenario produced an outcome Shimmer wanted any part of.

The question consuming him was simpler and more urgent: how did one lose gracefully? How did a person preserve their life and some shred of their dignity simultaneously?

His mind churned through the problem and kept finding no satisfactory answer. The harder he thought, the more agitated he became, and the more agitated he became, the further a good solution felt.

“I can tell you don’t particularly want to fight me.” Yue Yang proved to be a man of considerable perceptiveness, identifying Shimmer’s predicament in a single observation.

“Yes — yes, exactly, I — I actually—” Shimmer’s relief was immediate and enormous. Here was the opening he needed. He moved to take it — and found himself stopped by a small, easy gesture from Yue Yang. A slight raise of the hand, a mild smile.

“No hurry. Here’s what I propose: I’ll start counting from one. If you can move beyond my attack range before I reach one hundred, I’ll let you go.”

Shimmer wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

Then the meaning arrived, and something very close to joy flooded through him.

Count from one to a hundred?

With that much time, he could put fifty kilometers between himself and this platform. A hundred, if he pushed. If he couldn’t escape anyone’s attack range in the time it took to count to a hundred, the attacker would have to be a god.

He didn’t stop to interrogate the offer. He positioned himself immediately, every muscle coiled, ready to detonate the instant the first number left someone’s mouth. Dignity, honor, the opinions of ten thousand watching cultivators — measured against breathing, all of those things could go straight to whatever afterlife awaited them.

Yue Yang made a casual gesture toward Gold-Tooth, indicating he should step forward and handle the counting.

Gold-Tooth understood instantly that he was being given a moment of distinction by the young master.

His entire body began to tremble with suppressed emotion.

He breathed deeply, regulated himself with visible effort, then strode forward with the color high in his face — bowing deeply to Yue Yang first to convey appropriate reverence, then turning to acknowledge the assembled Sky-rank cultivators below the platform with the bearing of a man who represented someone worth representing. Under ordinary circumstances, not one of those cultivators would have wasted even the corner of a sideways glance on him. Today, however, he was visibly in favor, and any number of cultivators who were considering pledging to the Gentle Breeze Queen were deploying their most welcoming expressions and returning his acknowledgment. Even the most self-important national rulers present weren’t about to let contempt show on their faces.

“Entrusted by the young master Titan, this old servant dares not fail his duty. If National Ruler Shimmer is ready—” Gold-Tooth’s eyes were already glistening. The honor of it. Several thousand Sky-rank cultivators, bowing in return. Normally, if any one of them had aimed even twenty percent of their peripheral vision in his direction, it would have been an event worth remembering for years.

“Coward.” Savage Force had converted his feelings about Shimmer into something considerably more hostile, and nothing about his commentary was going to be charitable from here forward.

“Hmph.” Ink-Flame’s contempt was quieter but no less complete.

Losing a fight was one thing — it happened, and it said nothing unforgivable about a person. But to be so thoroughly unwilling to even try, and to have an opponent charitably offer a full hundred-count head start for the purpose of running away — to require that level of mercy just to participate — that was an entirely different category of humiliation. Savage Force at least had taken his punishment standing. Being spoken of in the same breath as Shimmer felt like contamination.

Across the platform, the assembled Sky-rank cultivators were making their own assessments, and the assessments were not kind. National rulers began publicly announcing the severing of any prior relationship with Shimmer, one after another, loudly enough to be heard.

Shimmer’s face moved through red, then green, then settled into something cold and rigid. He buried the shame and rage behind a thin layer of composure.

Easy for all of you to stand there making pronouncements. Standing in his position, this crowd of self-righteous observers would be running too. They’d all had their doubts about the Gentle Breeze Queen — the challenge hadn’t been his idea alone. Now that her strength was undeniable, they’d all retreated into performing virtue. He wasn’t going to be their sacrifice. He wasn’t a fool.

Fine. Let them sneer. He’d endure this one humiliation. Getting his face slapped by a servant wasn’t worth dying over.

Gold-Tooth cleared his throat with great significance and announced: “One — ahem — one hundred.”

Shimmer stared.

What.

Did your mathematics instructor die young, or is this something you were born with? Who in the world told you the number that comes after one is one hundred?

The crowd below erupted into laughter.

Savage Force, still heavily damaged, laughed until he was rolling, completely indifferent to the fresh bleeding his wounds were doing. The severe Ink-Flame permitted himself a small smile. It was a cheap trick on Gold-Tooth’s part, no question, but the comedic effect was undeniable — and seeing Shimmer’s expression, which had taken on the quality of a man who has just attended his own father’s funeral, produced a specific satisfaction that was difficult to explain and impossible to deny.

This is exactly how you handle someone like Shimmer.

“Gold-Tooth,” Yue Yang said, moving to intervene with some urgency. “We should conduct ourselves with integrity. I won’t have something this trivial handed to people as grounds to criticize my character or the Gentle Breeze Queen’s. National Ruler Shimmer, that exchange doesn’t count. Take a moment to prepare yourself — Gold-Tooth will count properly this time, one number at a time, no tricks. Whenever you’re ready.”

Gold-Tooth apologized immediately, explaining to the crowd that he’d simply improvised a small bit of levity to ease the tension of the moment.

He then turned to Shimmer with an expression of deep, entirely performative concern: “National Ruler Shimmer, my sincerest apologies. Would you perhaps like a bite to eat before you set off?”

Shimmer’s face did something complicated.

You absolute — are you done humiliating me? Just count the numbers. That’s all you have to do. Why are you apologizing out of one side of your mouth and slapping me with the other? You’re not going to be satisfied until you’ve publicly destroyed what’s left of me, are you?

For the sake of survival, he swallowed it. Letting a servant bait him into reaction on top of everything else wasn’t a trade worth making.

“One — two — three — four—”

Gold-Tooth finally counted in earnest, the rhythm steady and even, neither accelerating nor dragging.

Shimmer didn’t wait to hear the second number.

At the first syllable from Gold-Tooth’s mouth, he was already moving — launching himself from the platform like a released bowstring, crossing a thousand meters before the count reached two, and by three he had punched through a turbulence corridor in the air and was ten kilometers out, his form blazing like a falling star.

His speed was genuinely extraordinary. Velocity was his specialty, and the particular weight of death behind him had stripped away every limit. He was moving faster than he ever had.

Past Greenvalley City’s outer boundary, across the forests and the small post stations of the countryside, the winding green river that circled the city becoming something distant and irrelevant — Shimmer cut through the white clouds at a speed that outpaced the Thunder Swallow, the fastest flier known in the Tianhua Domain. Mountain ranges came and went. Rivers became memories. Farmland, rolling hills, deep forest, marsh, more mountains — he didn’t track the terrain, only the distance.

By the time he reached his internal count of one hundred, he had covered at least a hundred kilometers.

And he hadn’t only run. Every ten kilometers, he had used his division art to peel off several shadow copies that matched his real form exactly, scattering them in different directions to confuse any pursuit. Most cunning of all, each shadow copy was itself capable of performing the same division, fracturing again and again. Within a hundred-kilometer radius, false Shimmers were splitting and diverging everywhere. Meanwhile, the real Shimmer had rendered himself transparent.

He dropped into a lake.

The surface was mirror-flat, unremarkable in every way. No one would know — no one could know — that beneath its bed, Shimmer had prepared a hidden chamber long in advance. In the deepest part of the lakebed, inside a concealed tangle of underwater growth, a hidden entrance waited. He slipped inside it with the ease of a fish, and the moment he was through, a massive stone sealed the entrance behind him without a sound.

He waited. No pursuit. No trace of anyone following.

He breathed.

He moved through the chamber, opened two stone doors in sequence, and found what waited beyond them: a quietly glowing transport formation. He stepped onto it. And in the instant before the formation activated—

He left something behind. A puppet set to detonate. The blast would be small — the lake’s surface above would feel nothing — but it would reliably destroy the formation after he was through.

He stepped out on the other side, back inside his own secret stronghold.

He broke the transport formation immediately.

Then he pressed his hand to his chest, still not entirely steady, and let out a long breath. Too close. That young man was all posturing, thank the heavens. If he’d been anything more than that — the Gentle Breeze Queen is absurd. Someone from the upper Sky Realm, clearly. Fighting those people is just dying slowly. Let them have whatever they want. I’m not going back to Greenvalley City to be someone’s demonstration.

He thought for a moment, then raised his voice: “Someone — start packing. Everything valuable, I want a full count, nothing left behind—”

A guard materialized, blinked at him, and then asked with perfect sincerity:

“My lord — would you like something to eat before you flee?”

Flee.

That single word struck somewhere central.

Shimmer lost hold of the last restraint he had. He erupted: “Eat, eat, that’s all anyone says, eat — who said I was fleeing? That posturing waste of a pretty face — without someone powerful propping him up, I’d crush him with one finger! Get out of my sight. If you say the word ‘flee’ again, or the word ‘eat’ again, I will kill you where you stand—”

The guard seemed to have frightened himself into paralysis.

He stood there for a long moment without moving.

Then, just as Shimmer was genuinely reaching for him, the guard’s expression shifted into something peculiar — a smile that didn’t belong to a frightened man.

“National Ruler Shimmer — if you really don’t want something to eat before you flee… then I suppose I should start counting to a hundred.”

Counting to a hundred?

Shimmer went still.

And then the world cracked.

The way a mirror breaks, radiating outward from a single point. Everything he’d seen — the chamber, the stronghold, the packed guards, all of it — fractured and dissolved, leaving nothing behind.

Nothing except the fighting platform.

And over ten thousand Sky-rank cultivators watching in silence.

And Gold-Tooth, wearing a broad smile, speaking the final number aloud:

“One hundred.”

“That’s — that’s impossible—” Shimmer’s voice was the voice of a man whose mind is failing to process what his eyes are showing him. “I escaped. I was back in my stronghold. I was — this is an illusion. It has to be an illusion—”

He looked around. The crowd looked back.

“You’re all the illusion. I won’t be defeated by illusions.”

“Disappear. All of you, disappear. I order you to disappear. No — please. Please disappear. I don’t want to die. I can’t die. Tell me this is an illusion — it is one, isn’t it — please, tell me it is — stop looking at me like that, stop, I don’t want this, you’re all illusions, you’re lying to me, all of you—”

Shimmer was turning in a slow circle, looking at nothing, and the despair in his face deepened with each pass.

He looked down at his own feet.

He had not taken a single step off the platform.

Every moment of his escape — the launch from the platform, the hundred kilometers of flight, the false shadows spreading through the countryside, the lake, the hidden chamber, the transport formation, his stronghold, the decision to destroy the formation — all of it had been real in every detail. He’d felt it completely. He’d believed in it without reservation.

And he’d done none of it.

From the first number to the hundredth, Shimmer had stood on that platform and dreamed.

Something inside his mind made a sound like breaking.

The rational architecture holding him together collapsed under the pressure in a single instant, and what came out the other side wasn’t the Shimmer who’d walked onto the platform. Blood sprayed from his mouth. Then came the laughter — fractured, wrong, climbing out of him without his permission:

“Hahahaha — I did it — I won — I’m free, no one can hold me — I’m Shimmer, fastest of all the national rulers in the Tianhua Domain, fastest of them all — hahahaha — I won — I won—”

The crowd that had been laughing went quiet.

The expressions that replaced laughter were not kind ones, but they were no longer contemptuous. They were something else — the particular look that crosses a person’s face when pity and disgust occupy the same space.

This is what was behind a national ruler’s authority?

This thing that collapsed at a single blow?

It was almost more astonishing that someone like this had reached the position he had. Whatever machinery had elevated him, it had done so despite him rather than because of him.

Ink-Flame turned away. Looking at Shimmer any further felt like a transaction he didn’t want to make.

Savage Force spat. He’d been planning to kill Shimmer before all of this, and now found that he couldn’t summon any interest. Killing someone in this state was a waste of the hand it would take.

The Wild Bull Brothers hauled Shimmer off the platform. He was still laughing when they took him.

Silence settled over the arena.

Every face turned back to the young man in the silver mask.

And every person there was now grappling with the same understanding.

What they had just witnessed was not a parlor trick. The so-called ‘guard captain’ had imposed a complete subjective reality on Shimmer — and not on Shimmer alone. Every single person watching had experienced Shimmer’s escape as real. They had observed his flight path. They had watched his shadow copies diverge. They had seen him slip beneath the lake’s surface. They had perceived what his eyes saw and what his mind thought as though it were their own experience.

No one had questioned any of it.

No one had found it strange that they could somehow follow the inner experience of another person across a hundred kilometers.

In the moment, it had simply been true.

The only difference between the audience and Shimmer was that they had all known, somewhere underneath the experience, that Shimmer was still in someone’s grasp. What none of them had considered — not once, not even after the fact until this moment — was that Shimmer had never moved at all.

Not one step.

A young man who could impose a living dream on ten thousand Sky-rank minds simultaneously, who could make every last one of them inhabit a reality he had constructed for them — who was he? What was the actual ceiling of his strength?

No one present had an answer. What they had instead was the clear sensation, suddenly and completely, of standing at the base of something they could not see the top of.

And looking back — at the two sisters who had walked in and claimed the Tianhua Domain for their own, the way someone picks up something that caught their eye — perhaps the young man beside them was not an incidental detail.

Perhaps he was the reason.

Who is this person?