With the death of Other Xiao, the power of time surged across the stone platform, and everything began to rewind.
Damage from the battle, the energy Sebastian had burned to kill his other self, even the bear-print pajamas that had been blasted apart earlier—all of it was restored.
But this wasn't simply time being turned back.
It was selective rewinding—preserving anything beneficial across time, while erasing only the unfavorable outcomes. This was the deeper level of control wielded by the Daluo Authority.
Even with only two fragments, this glimpse was enough to stun anyone. Its true power was terrifying.
Countless motes of light drifted in from every direction, converging toward the Dao Fruit suspended high above. A moment later, they poured into Sebastian Xiao's hands.
"Daluo Dao Fruit… this power really defies comprehension."
Determination flashed in his eyes. Without hesitation, he swallowed it in one gulp.
He must reclaim every fragment, must ascend to become the one and only Daluo in existence.
As the Dao Fruit integrated into him, the existence of Other Xiao began to transfer—slowly dissolving, then merging into Sebastian's body.
The power, the personal world, the body, soul, memories, identity—everything that belonged to Other Xiao blended seamlessly into him. They had the same origin; all Xiaos were branches from a single source. Naturally, the main body could absorb his counterpart without resistance.
After the fusion, Sebastian remained the true self.
The memories of Other Xiao now sat inside him like an extra hard drive—accessible at any time, but never able to override him.
Moments later, he finished assimilating everything and opened his eyes.
But the more he browsed through Other Xiao's memories, the stranger his expression became.
It turned out—Other Xiao did not come from some high-tier supernatural world. He came from a very familiar one: the Courtyard World.
As someone who had read Siheyuan fanfiction for over a thousand days, Sebastian didn't even need to read the original to know the story.
And Other Xiao's "golden finger"—his cheat—was actually created when the Daluo Fragment absorbed the collective will of the Courtyard World.
In that era of material scarcity, people desperately yearned for somewhere to store supplies, produce goods, and preserve food indefinitely.
Their collective longing formed a massive wave of belief, and in a world with no mysticism, that belief was easy prey for a Daluo Fragment.
Thus, through a chain of coincidences, Other Xiao gained a Creator-level cheat.
Using its power, he lived extremely well in the Courtyard World.
He even secretly stole a huge stash of American weapons and ammunition from the Korean War battlefields.
Honestly, if a normal Xiao had arrived, the Siheyuan Xiao could've been blown to bits instantly by the heavy weapons stored in the King's Arsenal.
After all, modern weaponry dominates in many so-called "extraordinary" worlds.
Most carbon-based beings crumble instantly under sustained heavy artillery and area-bombardment.
And as for Other Xiao's small-world earth-manipulation…
If Sebastian hadn't possessed his absurd energy-absorption ability, he would've died in the very first earth-dragon strike.
It was a pity that Siheyuan·Xiao happened to run into the even more unreasonable The Boys·Xiao.
Not because The Boys world was especially strong—far from it.
Even in The Boys universe, aside from a handful of top-tier individuals, very few supers could ignore modern firearms.
The real problem was simple:
Sebastian Xiao's ability was a perfect counter to Siheyuan Xiao's entire arsenal.
Who could have predicted that a man wielding firepower comparable to a modern artillery regiment would meet someone outright immune to all physical attacks and most forms of energy?
Just watching through the memories of Other Xiao made Sebastian feel second-hand despair.
If he were the one fighting back then, he wouldn't have known how to win either.
Sebastian exhaled and raised his hand. A golden sun rose above the stone platform, bathing everything in soft, gentle light. It wasn't harsh, yet illuminated every corner like molten gold.
Beyond the edge of the platform was pure darkness—chaotic, shapeless, stretching endlessly like the gaping maw of a deep-sea creature waiting to swallow whatever wandered too close. The sight alone was unsettling.
After briefly reorganizing the Daluo space, Sebastian couldn't wait any longer. Othermmediately stepped into the small world he'd inherited—an ability so tempting it made him drool just thinking about it.
Entering the small world, Sebastian experienced true prosperity and vibrance for the first time.
The battle was long over, and under the power of the Daluo Dao Fruit, the world had been restored completely.
Even animals and plants that had died earlier were revived, and it looked as if nothing had ever happened.
"The power of Daluo really is terrifying…"
He sighed as he took in the revived landscape.
The small world was astonishingly complete. It could house living creatures, grow crops in endlessly fertile soil, and even manipulate the flow of time to mass-produce resources.
More than that—upon entering, Sebastian immediately sensed he could control everything within it as easily as moving his own limbs.
The world resembled a giant cube suspended between heaven and earth.
He tested the limits. With a thought, he altered the landscape, reshaping the terrain and sky instantly.
But when he tried to lower the sky to expand the surface area, he hit a restriction.
He could only raise the sky—at the cost of shrinking the land. And once the sky reached fifty meters in height, it hit an absolute ceiling; the space refused to stretch any further.
This experiment made one thing clear:
The small world's structure had a fixed internal framework. It could be reshaped, but not without respecting its "skeleton."
Regardless of the form he forced it into, the total volume of the world was locked. A larger surface area could only be achieved by thinning the height, and vice versa.
At its current limit, the small world measured roughly an acre—small at first glance, but that didn't matter.
Because the small world could grow.
When Siheyuan Xiao first received this ability, tOthernternal space was barely ten cubic meters—so cramped he could hardly stand inside.
But after years of planting crops and dumping corpses from the battlefield into the small world, its internal space expanded rapidly.
It had only been four years since "Other Xiao" transmigrated into the Siheyuan world, yet the small world had grown more than sixtyfold.
Its growth was nothing short of terrifyingly fast.