Yoshika giggled at the sight of Melati’s tiny bodies wiggling around on her shoulders.

“Who are these adorable little ones?”

They both answered at once.

“We’re Melati!”

“I should have guessed.”

Ruiling caught up, rubbing anxiously at the scales on her face.

“Mel, what are you talking about? Humans don’t grow up any faster than—woah! Wait, there really are more of you! What happened?”

Yoshika bowed with her two new bodies, and Meili did the introductions.

“You can call me Meili, and this is Lady Hayakawa Kaede of Yamato.”

Ruiling blinked.

“Uh, wow? One of those introductions was a lot longer—wait, I recognize that name, isn’t your clan really important?”

Kaede nodded.

“My father is the ruler of Yamato, yes. Our clan is situated on the coast, so even before we came into power, we engaged in limited trade with the islands.”

Yoshika felt a bit odd talking about her father. Aside from Kaede, they’d only seen the man once, and not in person. Kaede had much stronger feelings towards their father, but they weren’t warm ones.

Ruiling scratched her cheek.

“Uh...and how did you get here?”

Jia coughed into her fist.

“That’s kind of a long story. The short version is that she isn’t. She’s connected to our avatar—that’s Meili, here—and through her, to us. After our ascension we gained the ability to sense our avatar, and had to handle a few things where she was. Sorry it took so long, by the way!”

It was a half-truth, but Yoshika wasn’t willing to share all of her cultivation secrets with Long Ruiling just yet.

“Right—Yun informed us about the time difference.”

Speaking of whom, their conversation had drawn the attention of the others, sparking an impromptu gathering. Even Han Yu was on his way over, a miserable scowl on his face. Jia bowed as he approached.

“Hello, Han Yu. How is Zheng Long doing?”

“He’s alive, no thanks to you.”

Behind him, Yu Xiang returned her bow.

“He’s doing a bit better, Miss Lee. He seems able to take care of himself, it’s just that left to his own devices he doesn’t do anything. Like he’s hollow inside.”

Han Yu reached back and cuffed his junior.

“Don’t tell the enemy about our weaknesses!”

Yue scoffed as she emerged from a nearby hut, now properly within her physical body.

“Don’t pretend that you’ve been the one making sure he’s seen to. It’s not like she wasn’t already going to learn everything from me.”

Han Yu sneered.

“Forgive me for being foolish enough to think that there was still some shred of loyalty to the empire within that traitorous soul of yours.”

Long Ruiling cleared her throat.

“If I may be permitted to cut through the bickering—I believe we should move on. We’ve wasted enough time here as it is.”

Han Yu crossed his arms and scowled.

“We’ve run out of time, more like. Our only hope was to race ahead while she was distracted and her pet demon couldn’t follow. But you were all too stupid to listen.”

Kaede narrowed her eyes at Han Yu.

“If you were so certain, why not just carry on yourself? I doubt anybody would have stopped you.”

“Tsk, I’m not stupid. With Zheng Long as he is, we wouldn’t stand a—wait, Hayakawa?!”

Yue rolled her eyes.

“Try to keep up, would you? I agree that we should move on, but Yoshika, you suggested that the trials were a distraction of some kind. If that’s true, then how should we proceed?”

Meili frowned.

“I’m not sure. Chou implied that we’d need to ascend in order to ‘conquer’ his realm, but I don’t actually know what that means. Let me see if I can sense anything different now...”

Yoshika cast her domain out across the realm, as far as it would go. That turned out to be a lot farther than she’d expected. Her domain encompassed the entire village, then beyond it to the fields outside, past the grand palace, across the sky, and all the way to the very limits of the realm—and it did have limits.

The sky didn’t go on forever, but it didn’t have a ceiling, either. After a point it just faded out, blending into the elemental chaos beyond. It was the same beneath the earth, and in every other direction. If one went far enough away, the world just faded into raw, untamed essence.

She’d sensed essence like that only once before, beyond the portal through which Longyan and his cohort had first arrived in their world.

“Jianmo, what do you know about this place?”

“Not as much as I’d like. Master didn’t share much with me in general, and he was particularly private about this.”

“I see. What about this—?”

She touched Jianmo’s blade with her soul, communicating the feeling of the strange elemental chaos beyond the edges of Chou’s realm.

“Oh! Learned how to talk properly, did we? I don’t hate diligent students. That’s Void.”

Yoshika furrowed her brows.

“No, it’s clearly made up of different types of essence. Every type, even.”

“You misunderstand, darling. I’m not talking about the element, I’m talking about the force of nature. The person, the place, the thing. The Void. You’ve met it before, haven’t you?”

“Wait—Iseul’s grandpa?! How is he here? I thought xiantians weren’t allowed in the tomb! Did he trick us somehow?”

She felt Jianmo’s amusement as they answered.

“No, silly. That old monster doesn’t go anywhere. It just is. And it’s everywhere. Or nowhere, depending on how you look at it. It’s the oldest living thing in existence—or so they say. There’s nobody around to verify.”

“If he’s already here, then why did he need us to open the tomb?”

“How should I know? You’re probably thinking about it the wrong way, though. Void probably doesn’t care about the tomb being opened or who gets the Sovereign’s Tear. It just wants the seal gone.”

Yoshika nodded.

“He said as much, yeah. I don’t really get why, though. Something about the ‘natural order’ or whatever. That reason has only felt more hollow the more I’ve thought about it.”

“Think about it this way, dear—how would you feel if someone carved a house out of your butt?”

“Uh, what?”

Jianmo chuckled.

“Void is an incomprehensibly huge being. It basically is the elemental realm—as you called it. Most of us in the divine realm just call it The Void. It fills the space between worlds, and it’s the source of all elementals.”

“But isn’t our world cut off from the others?”

“My point exactly! The divine seal captured a piece of the Void as collateral damage—carved a piece out of the poor thing, but fortunately for us, left an exploit as a result.”

Yoshika wasn’t sure she liked where this conversation was going, but she needed to know more.

“What sort of exploit?”

“You’ve still got a connection with your other selves across the boundaries of this phase of reality, right? I imagine it’s something similar for Void. It’s everywhere and nowhere—you can never truly cut a part of it away.”

“So they—what, traveled through it somehow?”

Jianmo sighed.

“It probably facilitated that travel itself. It wants the seal gone as much as anyone, but even Void doesn’t have the power to destroy it—only circumvent it.”

A spark ignited in Yoshika’s mind.

“Wait—that’s how you got the key out! I thought you just threw it somewhere random.”

“Hah! Hell no! You think I would leave something like this to chance? Even I’m not that reckless. I knew that the old monster would make sure the key ended up in the right hands. Though I can’t say Sovereign Longyan, of all people, is the one I’d have picked.”

Yoshika had a lot of questions about that—but they were already getting off track, so she decided to save them for later.

“Okay, never mind all that. What does that mean about this place? If Void is the elemental realm, then how can this place exist within it?”

“See, now is the part where I have to remind you that in a world where a monster like Void exists, my master was the most powerful being in the universe. Demiurges notwithstanding, Master’s power was in a completely different league. What better way to flex your superiority than to carve your final resting place into the very flesh of the next most powerful being around?”

“...Your master was kind of an asshole, wasn’t he?”

Jianmo just cackled.

“They didn’t call him the ‘Friendly and Personable Sovereign’ did they?”

“Alright, so how do we conquer it, then?”

“No idea! Good luck with that, though. I doubt he made it easy, even for you.”

Great. Yoshika sighed, withdrawing her domain. They were going to have to investigate the palace after all. As her senses swept across the realm, she noticed something off. There were living things scattered all over the otherwise barren fields—familiar ones.

Jia cast a curious glance towards Melati, who was averting her gaze like a child who’d been caught trying to snag someone’s coin purse.

“Melati, why are your bodies so spread out?”

The fiend blinked innocently.

“Hm? Melati’s all here! One, two, three Melatis! The whole hive!”

Long Ruiling whirled on her with a furious scowl.

“Mel! You told me it was just one extra drone, just in case!”

“Mhm! Little Melatis are too weak for fighting, so we need extra in case a baby dies.”

Ruiling buried her face in her palms and flapped her wings.

“How many, Mel?”

“Melati already said—”

“How many?!”

The wasp girl hung her head, her drones drooping sadly off her shoulders.

“All the eggs. Melati didn’t count.”

Jia did a quick tally in her head.

“Two hundred and eighty-three. Where were you even hiding them all?”

Ruiling shuddered.

“Seriously, don’t ask. Mel, we’ve talked about this. Your hive gets too dangerous when it's that big—the drones don’t all act like you anymore. They act on instinct—like beasts.”

“We know, but this place is scary. Melati needs the hive to be strong. Yoshi made more drones too! We promise we’ll cull them after.”

Meili gave Melati a sympathetic smile.

“It’s fine, I know you don’t mean any harm. That’s just who you are, right? Even when there’s only two or three of you, it feels wrong—like something’s missing.”

“Yes! Yoshi understands! Melati can cull the hive so we don’t hurt the islands, but the friends here are all strong! It’s okay, right?”

Ruiling groaned.

“Oh, fine! I’ll admit, it would be nice to have you at full strength, but you absolutely cannot take them all back home!”

While the two of them argued about the details of their arrangement, Yoshika thought about their predicament some more. There was something about Melati’s plight that nagged at the back of her mind—something missing.

There was something oddly familiar about Chou’s realm. The way they moved from one place to a seemingly disconnected place after traveling through the first gate, or how the army had just appeared on the horizon as if from nowhere. Most telling, however, was the way everything seemed so strongly connected to Sovereign Chou on a personal level.

Was it really just a demonstration of his ego, or was there a more fundamental reason for it?

“Jianmo, tell me more about your master. What was he like when he wasn’t...doing whatever bloody conquerors do to get the entire divine realm angry at them?”

“Heh. He was pretty boring, if I’m going to be honest. Spent most of his time cooped up in that palace of his, meditating. Every now and then he had to go out and put some challenger in their place, or he’d go on a journey to seek out some grand insight, but one doesn’t live for billions of years without a lot of downtime.”

“His palace? As in the same one he took from the lord who killed his family?”

Jianmo hummed thoughtfully.

“Probably. I wasn’t around back then, so I wouldn’t know, but the world his palace was in was completely barren, so it’s probably the one he scoured of life before ascending.”

Several pieces fell into place at once.

“Jianmo, how did your master die, exactly?”

The sword paused.

“I’m pretty sure I told you the story before, but he spent all of his power to create this place, reducing himself back to mortality. Shen Yu handled the execution himself, shattering master’s soul in the process.”

“But they were still fearful that Chou might come back somehow.”

“Well sure—he put all his power into the tomb, and while they destroyed what was left of his soul after, he might have kept some important pieces around. I don’t think he did, though—he was pretty intent on ending things.”

She’d figured it out. Now that she’d ascended, she understood better than most that xiantian beings were far more than just their bodies or even their souls. Ascending had required to assert a part of herself as a fundamental law of existence.

“Important pieces left behind. Like, say, a soulscape? Cleverly sustained by feeding off the essence of his most powerful rival?”

“Oh...OH! Master, you clever bastard! I don’t hate that ruthlessness! Yoshika, are you suggesting what I’m thinking you are?”

“Yeah, and if I’m right, then entering that palace without being prepared is absolutely going to kill us. Everything from the moment we set foot in here has been lies and misdirection. This isn’t Chou’s tomb—there never was a tomb in the first place.”

Yoshika tried to come up with other possibilities. Other reasons for the oddities she’d noticed. It didn’t make sense—it should have been impossible. But she reminded herself of the words she’d given Ruiling when they first entered this place—their idea of impossible would be challenged at every turn.

The more she considered it, the more sure she was. This wasn’t Chou’s tomb.

“It’s his corpse.”