Lord of Prayer

Zhou Chen looked up at the pure, holy tower before him. From its highest floor, he could feel an expectant gaze fall upon him.

It was the look of a die-hard gamer waiting for their pre-ordered copy of the year’s biggest blockbuster to arrive.

“Tch.” Zhou Chen made no effort to hide his displeasure. “Not even giving me a moment to say goodbye. What’s the rush? In a hurry to get reincarnated?”

He turned and looked at the girl outside the Barrier, her eyes rimmed with red. He gave her a gentle smile.

“I’ll be right back.”

Li Xiye’s lips trembled. An indescribable emotion welled up inside her, making her heart ache and her breath catch in her throat. She gazed sorrowfully at Zhou Chen. After a long moment, as if she had come to some understanding, she lowered her eyes in grief.

“You have to swear.”

“I swear I’ll come back for you.” Zhou Chen raised his hand in an oath.

Li Xiye nodded softly. Raising her tear-filled eyes, she offered her friend a brilliant smile and a parting blessing.

“I wish you a safe journey.”

Zhou Chen gave a solemn nod, then turned and strode toward the tower’s great doors.

He pulled the key from his pocket, inserted it into the single keyhole on the doors, and turned it. With a heavy groan, the gates of the tower slowly swung open.

The interior of the Tower of the End was pristine white, without a single speck of dust. Before him was a pure white staircase spiraling upward like a strand of DNA—a seemingly endless flight of stairs ascending straight to the holy gates of Heaven.

Zhou Chen stepped into the tower, and the great doors slammed shut behind him with a boom. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at the endless spiral.

So he raised his Long Saber, pointed it skyward, and declared, “Get me an elevator, or I’m not going up.”

After a long moment, an elevator appeared on the tower’s ground floor. It was flawlessly white, as if carved from pure jade.

Zhou Chen stepped into the elevator. With a lurch of weightlessness, it shot upward at incredible speed. When the doors opened, he had arrived in the great hall at the top of the Tower of the End.

In the center of the pure white, ethereal hall, the Eternal Life Machine rumbled, its tuning forks humming.

Upon the throne, the Spirit of the End smiled. “Welcome, Your Excellency, Zhou Chen.”

As it witnessed the soul glittering with splendor once more, its eyes burned with a fiery, fervent joy.

“Let me get one thing straight. I’m not into men,” Zhou Chen said flatly.

“You dare assume my gender?” The Spirit of the End chuckled. Its form shifted into a little girl with pigtails, then into a mature woman in a business suit and black stockings. Next came a quiet, bespectacled girl in a school uniform, then a fashionable, long-legged beauty… All of them were people who had died because of the Forbidden Ancient Book.

“It is rather foolish to view me through the simple lens of gender. I am the Spirit of the End, the harbinger of this World’s destruction. I can be any gender, any race, any form,” said the voluptuous, bewitching woman on the throne.

“Fine, you win.”

On this point, Zhou Chen conceded defeat. He immediately cut to the chase. “What do you want?”

The bewitching woman that the Spirit of the End had become rested her chin on her hand and smiled. “I’ve told you before that the Eternal Life Machine is a massive Space-Time Secret Ceremony, and that it has a search function, correct? A long time ago, Charles and his group activated it. Each time, it would conduct a comprehensive search of the surrounding area, locking onto individuals bearing significant causal ties.

“On one such occasion, the machine detected an ordinary girl carrying an immense causal weight. Can you guess who it was?”

Zhou Chen froze for a second before realization dawned on him. “Li Xiye?”

“I traced her recent causality backward and determined that she would soon encounter someone who could defy fate. But when I continued my divinations, I discovered that person was located sixty years in the future. Do you have any idea how shocked I was in that moment?”

“—Shocked by the sheer coincidence of destiny’s design!”

The Spirit of the End sighed with genuine feeling. “An unwitting girl, about to meet a Destiny Rebel from the future. No matter how you look at it, it was an unbelievable turn of events. And yet, I just so happened to be building a Space-Time Secret Ceremony, which created the possibility for this incredible thing to occur…

“And just as I expected, the first time the Space-Time Instrument was activated at full power, you were dragged here by that immense and heavy weight of causal destiny.

“Do you understand now? It was all preordained. Destiny chose us. You were fated to arrive before me.”

’Causality…’ A thought struck Zhou Chen. He had previously wished for clues about his journey through time, and one of those clues had pointed to Li Xiye. Now, he finally understood. There was an immense causal link between them, and it was precisely this link that had pulled him across time.

It was just as the Spirit of the End had said—everything seemed to have been fated by some unseen hand.

“Isn’t it ironic? A hero who once defied his own fate is now just another puppet of destiny,” the Spirit of the End said, laughing gleefully.

Zhou Chen shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me. I’ve had a great time these past two months.”

“But after all that talk, you still haven’t told me what you want.”

“Don’t be in such a hurry.”

The bewitching woman purred, “We have plenty of time to get to know each other… intimately.”

“Then let me take a guess.”

Zhou Chen said coldly, “You covet my Soul.”

“Bingo. Correct.” The Spirit of the End snapped its fingers. “That much was obvious. But can you guess *why*?”

“You want me to fall and become a Corrupter, what else?”

Zhou Chen was all too familiar with this trope. “Humans love a good contrast, don’t they? A chaste Succubus, a promiscuous nun or Elf, a celibate man driven to lust, a saint made to fall… That extreme contrast is intoxicating. I imagine even the entities in the Abyss are no exception.”

“After all, the more brilliant the Soul, the deeper the Darkness it creates when it falls into the Abyss.”

“You’re only half right.”

The Spirit of the End reverted to its original form: the author who gazed into the depths of the Abyss. It smoked a pipe, its gaze calm and profound as it watched Zhou Chen.

“I want to become you.”

“Possession?”

“Yes, possession,” the Spirit of the End admitted freely. “Although I bear the title ’Spirit of the End,’ I don’t actually possess a Soul. I am a misshapen monster with the Forbidden Book as my foundation, a twisted amalgamation of knowledge, Undead souls, Curses, Abyssal sediment, and all sorts of other strange things.”

“Whether in the mortal World or the Abyss, a true Soul is of paramount importance. A being without a Soul wanting to become a World-Ending Demon King? If word of that got out, even the rats in the Abyss’s gutters would laugh themselves to death.”

“And you, with your Soul of Defiance, are the perfect candidate. Once I take control of your Soul and use the calamity from the timeline’s destruction to ascend, the ’Spirit of the End’—the true harbinger of this World’s extinction—will finally be born!”

“I see.” Zhou Chen nodded in understanding and raised his blade.

“I’d advise you to lower your weapon,” the Spirit of the End smiled. “Otherwise, your friend will become a Corrupter before you get the chance.”

“You can try,” Zhou Chen said, his face an emotionless mask, completely unmoved.

The Spirit of the End’s eyes narrowed. With a wave of its hand, an Investigation Mirror materialized in the air, showing Li Xiye outside the Barrier. With a mere thought, it detonated the Desecration Curse it had planted—the very essence of the Abyss’s evil, a Power far beyond what a Tier One Ascender could possibly resist.

Li Xiye suddenly cried out in pain as visible wisps of Dark Essence rose from her skin. Her body, however, showed no signs of mutation. A soft glow lit up on her chest as a gentle melody began to play, transforming into streams of Spells that shielded her Soul. The waves of sound washed over her, rapidly cleansing the erupting Abyssal Contamination.

“It seems the Star Association did quite a number on you decades ago. You didn’t even notice this? And here I thought you were supposed to be some formidable opponent.”

“You were wrong from the very beginning.”

Zhou Chen grinned, a mocking smile spreading across his face. “I’m not some pushover you can just toy with.”

With that, pale flames erupted in a whirlwind before the throne. A figure wielding a blade leaped from within, slashing fiercely at the Spirit of the End on the throne.