December 8, 2025 – 03:47 a.m.
Former Beijing Third Ring Road, now the outer wall of Safe Zone No. 1.
No announcement.
No warning.
Only two apocalyptic auras rising at the exact same second on opposite sides of the city, like two black suns colliding in the night.
Zhou Ling stepped out of a tear in space itself.
Thirteen pairs of devil wings blotted out the moon.
Her school uniform had long since burned away; what remained was living armor forged from the screams of ten thousand souls she had already reaped on her way north.
Her eyes were gone; only two burning inverted crosses remained.
Across the ruined city, Zhao Hu descended from the sky like a falling star wrapped in absolute darkness.
The Abyss Sovereign Devourer had fully awakened.
Wherever his shadow touched, matter simply ceased to exist; buildings, streets, people, concepts of "up" and "down"; everything was silently deleted.
They saw each other from thirty kilometers apart.
No words.
No declarations.
Only recognition.
You are the one who took everything from my brother.
You are the one who made my parents die screaming.
Killing intent thick enough to materialize exploded from both of them at the same instant.
BOOM——!!
The first clash happened faster than light.
Zhou Ling's thirteen wings became thirteen world-severing blades.
Zhao Hu's shadow became a tide that devoured the concept of distance itself.
They met above the central district.
The impact created a perfect sphere of annihilation one kilometer in diameter.
Everything inside; skyscrapers, awakened squads, civilian shelters, even the air; vanished without residue.
Then the real battle began.
Zhou Ling spoke the first and only word she had uttered since signing the contract:
"Die."
Her voice was the chorus of thirteen primordial devils. The word became law.
[Original Sin Pronouncement – Death]
Reality cracked along the syllable. Countless black chains formed from pure hatred erupted from the void, each link forged from the dying screams of her parents. They ignored space and locked directly onto Zhao Hu's soul.
Zhao Hu laughed; a sound like a billion graves opening at once.
"Too slow."
He opened his hand.
[Abyss Sovereign Devourer – Conceptual Erasure: Existence]
The chains disintegrated before they touched him. Not destroyed; erased from ever having existed.
Then he clenched his fist.
The entire safe zone's shadow rose up as a single titanic hand and crushed downward.
Zhou Ling did not dodge.
She welcomed the shadow hand, let it close around her, and detonated her own body.
[Original Sin Detonation – Despair]
A black-red supernova blossomed from inside the shadow hand.
The explosion did not spread outward; it inverted, dragging everything into a bottomless wound in space.
Half the Third Ring Road was simply gone.
The Zhao Clan remnants (three half-crippled ancestors who had survived the earlier massacre) arrived with thirty thousand private awakened troops.
"Stop them! That devil girl is—"
A single feather shed from Zhou Ling's broken wing fell.
It sliced through the entire Zhao formation like an invisible guillotine.
Thirty thousand people, three ancestors, armor, talents, souls; bisected in a perfect horizontal line.
The upper halves were still flying forward when the lower halves realized they were already dead.
The military finally reacted.
Strategic-level orbital weapons locked on.
Ten Level 150+ generals in god-tier exosuits descended.
"Both of you, stand down! This is—"
Zhao Hu glanced at them.
All light within fifty kilometers died.
When emergency floodlights came back on three seconds later, the ten generals and their weapons platforms no longer existed. Only their shadows remained, screaming silently on the ground before crumbling into black sand.
Zhou Ling regenerated from a single drop of blood, thirteen new wings unfurling.
Zhao Hu's erased body reconstructed itself from the concept of "hatred that refuses to die."
They collided again.
This time there was no technique, no skill names, no system prompts.
Only purest, most primitive violence.
Zhou Ling's fists fell like the judgment of extinct gods.
Each punch carried the weight of her mother's flayed shadow and her father's dismembered corpse.
Zhao Hu's claws tore like the abyss itself had grown teeth.
Every slash contained the ecstasy of the moment he stole Zhou Jun's talent and watched hope die.
Space shattered and re-shattered.
Time loops formed and collapsed.
The laws of physics gave up and fled the battlefield.
The former Imperial Palace, the Bird's Nest, the CCTV Tower; landmarks that had survived the Cataclysm; were ground to cosmic dust in the crossfire.
Two million civilians and soldiers who failed to evacuate in time were reduced to blood mist before they could even scream.
The safe zone's final defensive array; built to withstand an SS-class monster siege for three days; lasted eleven seconds.
Then the earth itself cracked.
A canyon five hundred kilometers long and three kilometers deep split Beijing in half, the wound cauterized by alternating flames of devilish black and abyssal void.
In the center of the canyon, only two figures remained.
Zhou Ling's thirteen wings had been torn to bloody ribbons.
Half her face was gone, revealing a skull of molten hatred.
Zhao Hu's body was missing everything below the waist, yet darkness continued to pour from the wound like an endless geyser, propping him upright.
Neither could regenerate fast enough anymore.
They floated, staring at each other through the dust of a dead city.
Zhou Ling raised her remaining arm.
Zhao Hu opened his remaining hand.
Both prepared their final attack.
At that moment, a tiny crack appeared in the void between them.
From the crack leaked a trace of aura that made both calamities freeze instinctively.
Crimson-black.
The scent of ten thousand deaths and ten thousand rebirths.
Zhou Jun's aura.
But it was different now; deeper, older, hungry in a way that made even primordial devils and abyssal sovereigns feel… small.
The crack widened just enough for a single sentence to drift out, carried on a voice that was no longer entirely human:
"Both of you…"
"…stop."
Then the crack sealed again.
Zhou Ling's remaining eye widened. A single tear of blood slid down her ruined cheek; the first emotion she had shown since signing away her humanity.
Zhao Hu's void-eyes contracted for the first time, reflecting something that might have been fear.
Because whatever was coming back from that hell…
…was no longer just Zhou Jun.
The ruined city held its breath.
Somewhere beneath the earth, in a sarcophagus of its own hatred, something that had once been a brother began to truly awaken.