Years passed like petals falling from a dying tree.
Xiao Lan grew strong and kind, just as Ye Zai had dreamed. The boy could call the wind with a whistle, coax rivers to change their course with a glance. He was a prodigy, even by celestial standards, though he used his power only to help repairing broken bridges, healing wounded animals, lighting the hearths of the elderly.
Lin Xue watched him with pride, and Ye Zai… Ye Zai felt a peace so profound that even the distant whispers of the cosmos could not stir him.
But nothing stays perfect forever.
One day, rumors reached Ye Zai of an ancient being a remnant god who had survived Ye Zai's old purge stirring beyond the edge of the known universe. A being too dangerous to be left unchecked.
Ye Zai hesitated.
He had sworn off violence, had sworn to remain by his family's side.
Yet… if he did not act, if he allowed this god to grow in power, the quiet world he had built could one day be shattered anyway.
Lin Xue, sensing his turmoil, simply took his hand and smiled. "Go," she whispered. "Protect the peace we've built. We'll be waiting."
So Ye Zai left just for a short time, he promised.
The battle was swift.
Ye Zai, though "Limited now", he was a veteran of wars written into the bones of reality itself. The god fell, broken and screaming into the void.
But in the time Ye Zai spent away… death crept into his home.
Not by gods. Not by war.
By something far more cruel: disease.
Lin Xue had fallen ill suddenly a sickness no human medicine could cure, no power could mend without Ye Zai's immediate presence. And young Xiao Lan, refusing to leave his mother's side, had fallen as well.
By the time Ye Zai returned, the town was silent.
The bakery was closed.
The cherry blossoms had withered.
The flower shop's door swung open in the cold wind.
He found them lying together in their home.
Lin Xue's hand still curled around Xiao Lan's tiny fingers, as if even in death, she refused to let him face it alone.
Ye Zai stood there, unmoving, for a long, long time.
The world seemed to tilt around him, a slow collapse of color and sound.
"No," he said softly. "No… no…"
He knelt between them, cradling their bodies in his arms, pressing his forehead to theirs, willing begging the universe to reverse, to undo, to erase this reality. He would have shattered himself into dust to bring them back.
But nothing answered.
Not the stars.
Not the gods.
Not even the faint heartbeat of fate he had once commanded.
They were gone.
When Ye Zai rose, the world around him felt unbearably small. Fragile. Insignificant.
The sky cracked under the weight of his grief.
The earth trembled under his first step.
Without a word, without a roar, Ye Zai unleashed his sorrow.
The very planet shuddered, as if in horror of what it had done allowed his family to die while he fought for a peace that now meant nothing.
Mountains crumbled. Oceans boiled.
The townspeople tried to flee, but there was no escape from the rage of a being who had once touched the fabric of creation.
Ye Zai raised his hand. The entire planet buckled like glass under a hammer.
A moment later, the world he had once loved was gone nothing left but scattered dust adrift in the cold void.
He floated among the ruins, the corpses of mountains and oceans spinning silently around him.
Alone.
Utterly alone.
He clutched Lin Xue's ring the simple silver band he had forged for her in his hand. Somehow, impossibly, it had survived the destruction.
Ye Zai pressed it to his chest, a broken god mourning a life he could never recover.
"This was my punishment," he whispered to the endless dark. "For thinking I could ever be something other than what I am."
A force of nature.
A destroyer.
A being not meant for peace.
From the ashes of his grief, something deeper stirred inside Ye Zai a vast, ancient truth he had always suppressed:
That he was destined for something far greater than this single, tiny universe.
That loss… was only the beginning.
And so, Ye Zai turned his back on the scattered remains of the Earth.
He drifted upward beyond stars, beyond time itself toward a future where not even gods, not even authors of reality, could ever again take anything from him.
And when he returned next…
he would not be "Limited" anymore.
He would be something else entirely.
The dust of Earth still clung to Ye Zai's robes as he stepped into the quiet void between universes.
His hands were bloodless.
His eyes were hollow.
In his palm lay the silver ring cold, lifeless, yet heavier than any star he had ever destroyed.
And in his heart burned one thought:
"Undo it."
He closed his eyes and reached into the foundations of reality beyond the cosmic weave, past the roots of creation where timelines coiled like serpents and causality whispered like winds through glass.
Here, Ye Zai found the Thread of This Universe, the narrative line stretching from the Big Bang to the last dying ember of entropy.
With trembling hands, he gripped it.
And began to pull.
The universe shuddered. Time screamed. Galaxies blinked out like dying embers. Cause and effect unraveled in spirals, spinning backward into origin.
He was resetting everything rewriting the cosmos from the first second.
He would stop the disease before it ever reached Lin Xue. Prevent the death of Xiao Lan. Unmake the tragedy.
"You don't have the right," said a voice.
The universe froze.
From beyond time, the sky tore and a presence emerged. Vast. Limitless. Cold.
The Almighty not a god in the sense Ye Zai once knew, but the very embodiment of this verses final authority. The One Above Narrative. The Watcher of Threads. The Law Itself.
"You are a creature of this universe. Its rules bind you. You cannot reset it simply because you grieve."
Ye Zai stood in silence, the Thread of Reality still quivering in his hand.
"You let them die," he said.
"It was necessary," the Almighty replied. "The narrative demands balance. Loss. Growth. You may mourn. You may rage. But you may not rewrite."
Ye Zai closed his hand around the thread.
And crushed it.
The universe convulsed.
The stars cracked. The laws wailed. The Almighty's face twisted in horror.
"You cannot—!"
But Ye Zai wasn't listening anymore.
"Your balance," Ye Zai whispered, "means nothing to me."
He rose above space, towering past the limits of causality, and tore open the walls of the universe with his bare hands.
The Almighty hurled the entirety of the universal code at him the axioms, the core constants, the divine equations but Ye Zai devoured them all. Words. Logic. Reason. Law. All burned in the furnace of his grief.
With a voice that no longer echoed but commanded, Ye Zai declared:
"This universe is broken."
And with a single breath,
he erased it.
What remained was nothing.
Not void.
Not space.
Just Ye Zai.
Alone in a place that had never existed, yet always waited.
From within him, something began to stir. Not power but authorship.
The grief no longer consumed him. It defined him.
He reached into himself into the place beyond the bounds of his universal self and spoke not as a man, not even as a god, but as a creator.
Let there be a world.
Let there be a river with cherry blossoms.
Let there be a woman named Lin Xue.
Let there be a child named Xiao Lan.
Let there be a moment, untouched by tragedy, where happiness is real.
He wrote it.
And it was so.
Ye Zai stepped into the world he made.
It looked the same blue skies, warm winds, familiar streets but this time, everything was right.
Lin Xue stood in the garden, sunlight in her hair. Xiao Lan played nearby, laughing as butterflies danced around him.
Ye Zai didn't speak. He simply walked forward, dropped to his knees, and held them both as if letting go would shatter everything again.
Lin Xue looked into his eyes, confused at first. Then she saw something ancient behind them something beyond time. She touched his face gently.
"You're back," she whispered.
Ye Zai nodded, voice cracking. "I'll never leave again."
And deep beneath this new world, in its core of rewritten essence, the presence of the Almighty lingered not as a ruler, but as a fossilized echo. A warning to all who believed narrative was immutable.
Ye Zai had not just reset the story.
He had rejected it.
And now, standing in a universe of his own making, Ye Zai was no longer just a man.
He was something else entirely.