Chapter 55: My Defiant Path (The End)

The voice was not in the air; it was woven into the very fabric of my being. The physical world around me—the shattered stones of the Buddha Suppression Pagoda, the groaning earth of Meditation Mountain, the bruised and darkening sky—seemed to fade into a secondary reality. The primary reality was now the presence that bloomed within my consciousness. From the epicenter of the pagoda's ruin, a form began to coalesce. It was not flesh and blood, but something far more fundamental. It was...