Myth Beyond Heaven

The shock on Nian Shi’s face was fleeting, smoothed away by eons of practiced control. A mere setback, however surprising, would not deter the God of Time.

His shock transformed into cold, focused intensity. He acknowledged her counter not as a defeat, but as a data point. The Moon God’s power was more profound than he had calculated. So be it.

“Cycles can be broken,” Nian Shi stated, his layered voice resonating with absolute certainty. “Everything has a beginning. And every beginning has an end. I am that end.”

He did not lunge forward again. He did not need to. The battle shifted from a contest of force to a war of cosmic principles.

He raised the Hourglass of Beginnings. The sands within, now infused with the essence of his countless selves, glowed with a complex, multifaceted light. He focused his will.

“Severance of Origin,” he intoned.

The attack was invisible, silent. He did not target Yue Bingyao’s form. He targeted the concept of her connection to the moon itself.

He sought to find the very first moment the moon was created, the origin point of its cycle, and impose an end upon it. If the cycle was eternal, he would simply go before the cycle began and declare it finished.

The air in the Forbidden Zone grew strange. The shimmering moonlight around Yue Bingyao wavered for a fraction of a second. It was as if the very history of the moon was being questioned, its right to exist challenged at the most fundamental level.

Yue Bingyao, now one with the moonlight, felt the assault. It was a coldness trying to seep into her core, a nullification of her very essence. But her will was as constant as the tides.

“The Eternal Return,” her voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere.

She did not defend. She reaffirmed. The moonlight around her pulsed, and within its glow, countless images flickered to life—the moon being formed from cosmic dust, its first orbit around a primordial earth, its first pull on an ancient ocean, its phases repeating across billions of years, seen by countless extinct eyes.

She presented not a shield, but the undeniable, continuous evidence of the moon’s existence. She made its history a solid, immutable fact, against which Nian Shi’s “severance” broke like a wave against a cliff.

The wavering stopped. The moonlight shone brighter, its truth reinforced.

Nian Shi’s eyes narrowed. A direct assault on her concept had failed. He changed tactics.

He pointed the Blade of Eternity not at her, but at the space between them. “Stillness.”

Time did not slow. It fractured. He created a zone of absolute temporal dissonance around her. In this zone, a nanosecond lasted an eternity, and an eternity passed in a blink.

He sought to disrupt the rhythm of her power, to make the constant pulse of the moon stutter and fail. If her strength was in its rhythm, he would destroy the metronome.

The ethereal moonlight around Yue Bingyao distorted, stretching and compressing in nauseating waves. The connection to the celestial moon above flickered erratically.

Yue Bingyao responded by deepening her connection. “Shine.”

Buzz—

The distorted space around her suddenly stabilized. The moonlight began to pulse with a slow, deep, and utterly regular rhythm. It was the rhythm of a heart that had beat since the dawn of life, the rhythm of tides that had never ceased their pull.

It was a rhythm so ancient and fundamental that it overwrote Nian Shi’s temporal chaos, imposing order through sheer, timeless constancy. The dissonance smoothed out, replaced by a single, unwavering tempo.

Frustration, cold and sharp, finally began to prick at Nian Shi’s composure. His most refined temporal manipulations were being neutralized by passive, constant existence.

He abandoned subtlety. The Hourglass glowed fiercely. “If you embody the cycle, then I will bury you under the weight of too many endings!… The Graveyard of Eras.”

Crackle!

The space around them warped. Ghostly images materialized—the crumbling spires of long-dead civilizations, the dust of forgotten stars, the silent, frozen corpses of eras that he himself had ended.

This was not an illusion; it was a manifestation of his domain, the spiritual weight of every timeline he had personally concluded.

He made the entropy of a million endings physically and spiritually press down on her, aiming to crush her constant light under the collective despair of all that had been lost.

The pressure was immense. The golden Forbidden Zone groaned under the strain. The moonlight dimmed noticeably, compressed by the horrific weight of infinite loss.

For the first time, Yue Bingyao’s serene expression showed strain. To resist this, she could not just be constant; she had to be a beacon.

She raised her hands, and the celestial moon above shone with impossible intensity. “Full moon.”

Buzz—

Within her dimmed moonlight, new images bloomed—not of endings, but of beginnings sparked by the moon’s glow. A first kiss under a lunar sky, a navigator finding land by its silver guide, a seedling breaking through soil bathed in its light, a new hope born in the darkest night.

She countered the weight of his endings with the boundless, gentle weight of all that had ever begun or been comforted under the moon’s watch. She opposed the graveyard with a garden of memories sustained by her light.

The pressure lessened. The ghostly images of dead eras began to fade, unable to exist in the face of such persistent, gentle life.

Nian Shi’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to figure out her condition. Obviously, she was weakening in a faster rate than before.

A cold, triumphant smile finally spread across Nian Shi’s lips. The frustration vanished, replaced by the calm certainty of impending victory.

He had seen it—the slight tremble in her luminous form, the almost imperceptible flicker in the celestial moon above. Her power, though profound, was finite. The reconstruction of the Moon God was unraveling.

“Your constancy is impressive, Yue Bingyao,” he said, his voice losing its layered echo, becoming sharp and focused. “But it seems even the eternal moon must eventually set. Prepare yourself.”

The warning was a formality, a final twist of the knife. There was no time to prepare.

Without any further signal, the Blade of Eternity and the Hourglass of Beginnings in his hands hummed in unison, emitting a aura so terrifying it seemed to freeze the very concept of hope. The power he had consolidated from his countless selves focused into a single, dreadful purpose.

But he did not aim it at Yue Bingyao.

In a move of brutal, genius simplicity, he pointed the Blade of Eternity directly at the colossal, brilliant blue moon hanging in the fabricated sky above them…