“What the hell just happened?” Words drowned out by the snowy white whirlwind all about him. The last thing he recalled was the fierce, bitter triumph of saving a city. Saving those he loved, and striking down the malignant, sneering countenance of his nemesis with a single killing blow of his fangtian ji.

Then he remembered the bitter horror of being dipped in a vat of deathly waters colder even than the liquid nitrogen his tumor-riddled corpse had once been lowered into. And that he still remembered that… his mind skittered away, for half a second as much the youth who would never make it to college as the veteran of dozens of life and death battles forged in fire over the most intense couple of years anyone could imagine.

And then he was a corpse once more, drowning in frigid waters, wrapped in the coils of Shui Jun once more.

A thousand years of frigid, bitter regret.

A thousand heartbeats.

Before he remembered the shaft of wood in his hand and taught his serpentine opponent just how sharp was the hate the propelled him forward, refusing even death’s hoary grip.

And he still didn’t know how many days, years, or centuries he had been trapped, before finally breaking free of death’s waters for the second time.

For the thousandth time.

He had so many questions that would probably remain unanswered for all time.

Alex was immediately jolted from his confused stupor by the bitter cold. Sharp pinpricks of icy pain that demanded immediate attention. So unlike the numbing lethargy of the river of souls.

He desperately wrapped himself in his cloak as best he could, pressing his tricorn hat firmly against his head as howling winds whipped all around him, the entire world revealed as a brilliant white blur of whipping snow.

He took a deep breath before his eyes bulged, quickly lowering his mouth to breathe the warmed air of his cloak and changshan tunic, horrified to feel the freezing chill far more acutely than he ever had the River he had once more fled.

And if his sudden desperate shivering was anything to go by, he was already at risk of hypothermia and frostbite in ways he never had been… in the realm he had left behind.

He quickly spun around.

“WiFu?” He called to the howling winds, but there was neither gate, no reply.

Just the horrifying awareness that both his World Seed and the gates they could summon were now impossibly far away.

As was so much of his power.

Still his…

But somehow locked away.

And if he didn’t do something fast, it would be so for eternity. Because when these howling winds finally claimed him, he had the sense he’d be expiring to oblivion, not the eternally distant River of Souls.

For a moment he felt nothing but absolute despair, summoned into being in the middle of a snowstorm, nothing but blinding white all around. A final vicious prank by vindictive gods eager to do whatever they could to destroy that which they could not control.

His freezing despair was replaced by a sudden angry heat in his core, the very thought of Shalu’s wheezing laughter enough to compel him free of his numbing stupor and get him to MOVE! Move in any direction, just to generate some desperately needed body heat, while tearing eyes stinging with the cold desperately looked for something.. anything… THERE!

Alex was desperately slogging through the snow and howling winds in a landscape of blinding white, when he saw it through slitted eyes. A sliver of darkness in the blinding snow… or was it grit?

Shelter. A cave.

Or perhaps nothing at all.

Still, his stumbling pace quickened as he stumbled for what he prayed was an entrance to any sort of shelter at all. The growing panic in his chest, made all the worse when his nerves began to blaze with the chilly fire of frostbite… or was it thawing? Was ruthlessly quashed as he focused only on what, yes, was an entrance.

To something.

Even as the blinding whiteness turned to sandy grit, the bitter cold of snows more like hot sands scoring his flesh, knowing his damaged nerves were short-circuiting like mad and he was running out of time, he dared allow himself a fierce surge of hope as he made it to the entrance of that promising sanctuary in the soothing darkness that called out to him.

“Alex?”

A single word that changed everything.

Once exquisitely coordinated feet tripping over their own poleaxed confusion, his ears tormented by a voice he never thought to hear again.

“Mom?”

“Doctor, he’s here! He escaped the pod!”

“Lady Highblood, be careful! That could just be a projection. This plane is filled with rifts!”

“Alex, please! You have to—”

Whatever other words that hauntingly familiar voice was about to utter was abruptly cut off when the snow… or was it sand? By his feet suddenly gave out and he found himself falling right into the perfect slab of darkness. Not a cave entrance at all.

“Mo—!”

The terror of freefall was replaced by the jolt of impact that forced the air from his longs.

For long moments he lay there, fighting back the flood of tears that threatened to overwhelm him as he tried to make desperate sense of everything that had just happened.

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He had been stumbling through a howling winter storm.

Or had it been sand?

Shivering with cold, exhaustion, or maybe the awful fire of nerves too long thawing out at last.

Dizzy and disoriented, hearing voices that he now recalled all too clearly. The final days he had been in such a pain-filled delirium that he had stumbled out of his house in the dead of winter, desperate for relief from the endless pain of his disease, even be it madness or delusion.

He choked back a sob, not having felt so weak, vulnerable, or alone, with emotions so raw, memories so exquisitely sharp, in a lifetime.

Bitter tears streamed down his cheeks as he mourned for the loss of his family, the people who had loved him, the life he had almost had.

And that wasn’t all he had lost. Far from it. Even now, so many buried memories were raw and sharp, recalling with such exquisite clarity the beautiful realm he had left behind. Elder Panheu’s stern features flashed before his eyes, as did Lady Jidihus, Prince Cheng Lei’s, and all the friends and acquaintances he had made at Royal Phoenix Academy.

It was all he could do not to choke up when recalling Hao Chan’s exquisite smile, melting his heart, holding the hands of her kung fu sister, Yinzi’s face so hauntingly familiar, only understanding at the end just how strong their bonds truly were. His disciples. Woman who had claimed his heart. A love that would have blossomed into something wondrous and grand… Before his tale blazed bittersweet and bright as it always did. The blazing phoenix once more coming to a fiery end.

A city saved.

An invading army destroyed.

And all it had cost him was absolutely everything.

Again.

Before he was lost in the darkest depths of the River of Souls, trapped in Cui Jing’s endless serpentine coils. His final doom, his ultimate damnation as demanded by furious howling gods who hated him and the trickster god he had called master and friend for countless lifetimes above all others, for daring to embrace the power of transformation, for struggling against endless eons of monotonous stagnation. For the pair of them daring to defy the wishes of desperate ancient cultivators playing at being gods. Monstrous manipulators determined to keep an entire realm running like clockwork, so long as their own place at the top remained eternally secure.

Alex choked back another bitter sob, sensitive cheek rubbing against grit that yes, was definitely sand, and not snow at all.

Because it wasn’t that simple, the story of his existence. Nothing like the tales told, both bitter and grand. It had been no clean, glorious, storybook rebellion. Because now the fragments of memory he had over a half dozen lives told a far darker tale. That of a young lad isekaid into a world of adventure and wonder who would have been happy to embrace the most innocuous of lives, wanting only to better himself and the people around him… before being targeted by malevolent spite horrific in both its depth and power, a handful of supposed divinities hating him so deeply, so fiercely, that their greatest joy seemed to be crushing him under their heel, forcing him to flee their jealously guarded and claimed realm for as many years, decades, or centuries as they could, before he was eventually reborn yet again.

Alex clenched his fists with bitter fury, as he glared into the perfect darkness of the sand-filled cavern he had fallen into as the storm howled outside.

“How many times did those monsters take everyone away from me? How many times had I fallen back into the river of souls with nothing but the screams of my loved ones and the laughter of spiteful gods to torment me as I drowned in death once more?”

He screamed his fury then, every bit as loud and bitter as the storm outside.

“But I got you fuckers this time! All your mockery, all your spite, twisting your own rules to force an empire-wide purge… I finally got you!” Alex cackled with bitter glee. “I tore out your throat with my fucking fangtian ji, channeling the whole fucking river! Channeling so much sorrow you could drown in it for eternity! So let your asshole brother and spite-filled father shove you back in those pods you think to hide from the world! Nemesis means the wounds won’t close, asshole! Not ever! I hope you writhe with the agony of a ripped jugular for eternity, you malevolent homicidal fuck!”

Yet no matter how raw and bitter his emotions were at that moment, no matter how he shrieked and howled, his exhausted voice warbling as the winds howled beyond his shelter, even as he writhed with the exquisite agony of nerves that might have been frozen for a thousand years before being abruptly forced to thaw out once more… he still had the presence of mind to resist whispering a handful of words.

Zheng Yei, Long Wang, Qui Jing… and most of all, Shalu. A bloated monster of a god that he hated above all others.

Because even as he sobbed and howled, overwhelmed by the flood of raw emotion tearing through him, horrified by his memory of the bitter prison that the river of death and rebirth had become, he knew better than to actually say those names aloud.

Because as much as his heart ached with emotion, as much as his fists clenched with fury, he wasn’t such a fool that he didn’t understand what had happened.

His tale, violent, glorious, and tragic as it had been… had finally come to an end.

After daring the absolute heights of Silver, devising a Divine Tier cultivation technique unlike anything forged before, he had fallen in death at last.

As he did at the end of every one of his bittersweet tales.

But not before saving a city.

Not before facing down an entire fucking army!

And most importantly… not before cleaving open the throat of his Nemesis, a spite-filled monster of a god it had been Alex’s absolute pleasure to bring to the depths of agony and despair even as he himself was pulled into Death’s hoary clutches as a city-wide gate ruptured with the power of a massive nuclear bomb.

And Alex, of course, had been at ground zero.

Before finding himself drowning in the River of Souls once more.

Wrapped in the eternal coils of a snake goddess and lost in an eternity of freezing regret for who knew how many years, centuries, or eons… before he finally broke free.

Endless coils of a divine goddess were no match for a divine tier artifact he had almost forgotten was in his hands. An artifact that had torn out Shalu’s throat. An artifact that had no problem cleaving through the massive snake that had had no choice but to envelop him, just as compelled by spite-filled cards of fate as Alex himself had been.

Which made a bitter, tragic sort of sense.

Especially when he realized that the snake he had cut down had once been a girl.

A girl who had once called herself WiFu’s disciple.

And had Alex not fled the very moment WiFu’s eyes explained so many horrific revelations… he would have taken her place guarding the souls of the dead.

For eternity.

Plans within plans.

Schemes within schemes.

Spite-filled gods willing to do whatever it took to secure their eternal control…

No matter how much agony they inflicted.

Yet as the howling storm finally died down, anyone who would have dared approach that cavern entrance would have heard not the furious bitter screams of a youth who had lost everything.

No. They would have heard laughter.

The manic laughter of a boy who only then felt the lifting of a terrible weight that had been his burden to bear for countless centuries.

An awful, endless doom he sensed no longer.

Alex’s sobs had died with a disbelieving gasp.

Trembling fingers frantically felt each other in the darkness.

He felt no rings of brass, copper, or bone upon his fingers.

None, whatsoever.

His eyes widened in the darkness, feeling a surge of dismay and euphoria unlike anything he had ever experienced before.

He was no longer lost in an endless bitter-sweet tale.

He was no longer the Fox’s eternal disciple.

He was finally free.