Ten million years leaves a mark deeper than grey hair or rotting bone. Jian felt the weight of that time in the texture of the lie itself.

  He recalled the scent of jasmine on Meiling’s skin. Sunlight had caught the amber in her eyes on their balcony in the desert city, a place built of golden stone and cool silk. Three centuries of love. Five centuries of mourning. Then, in the sixth century, he found her again in the marketplace. Every word she spoke was a rehearsed line he had heard ten thousand years prior from a different ghost.

  The realization arrived as a slow, agonizing rot rather than a sudden shock. One day, the world’s mask simply slipped. When he reached out to caress Meiling’s cheek, her skin rippled like disturbed water. Underneath the porcelain beauty lay the truth: the yellowed, cataract-filled eye of an ancient man leering with a hideous intimacy.

  The entire cast of this sprawling city—lovers, rivals, servants—were all him. The "Old Monster." A nameless, bored deity had folded a pocket of reality into a cage and populated it with trillions of roles played by himself. Jian had spent eons in a cosmic theater as the only audience member unaware that the actors were all the same puppet master in different costumes.

  Now the theater sat empty. Silks turned to rags and golden stone to crumbling salt. The desert city was a skeletal ruin with its illusions stripped away by the cold friction of Jian’s awakening.

  In the town square, amidst the collapsed pillars of a fake ancestral temple, stood the Old Man. The lecherous, shriveled prankster wore robes of celestial silk shimmering with stolen starlight. He laughed, a dry sound grating against the dead realm’s silence.

  "Oh, little bird," the Old Man cackled, wiping a tear from his milky eye. "You should have seen your face when you realized the 'Great War of the Three Kingdoms' was just me arguing with myself in three different hats! Ten million years! You’re the longest-running gag I’ve ever staged. Truly, a masterpiece of endurance!"

  Jian could not speak. His vocal cords felt like rusted iron, unused to anything but the internal screams he’d perfected over the last millennium. He stood tall and gaunt, his hair a midnight shroud falling past his waist. He looked like a crack in the world, a vertical slit of shadow against the blinding white sun of the simulated desert.

  In his hand, he gripped the hilt of a sword. He had forged this weapon in the fires of his own madness, crafting it from the void found at the edge of the Old Man's reality. The metal held a strange reflectivity, showing not the ruins around them, but the deaths of stars and the collapse of heavens.

  "Are you still playing along?" The Old Man stepped closer with a mocking skip. "Come now, Jian! Don't be a sourpuss. Wasn't it fun? Didn't you find it funny? All those nights of passion... didn't you love the way 'I' felt in your arms?" The immortal leaned in, his breath smelling of ancient peaches and rot. "You can't harm me, boy. I am the Eternal Soul. I am the Primal Lecher who birthed the very concept of dual cultivation in this sector. You are a footnote in my diary. A flicker of..."

  Jian moved with the efficiency of a man who had lived a hundred thousand lifetimes of combat.

  The blade erased the air it occupied.

  The Old Man’s head remained in place for a moment of absolute stillness. The immortal’s eyes widened, mockery replaced by a confused blink. Then a thin black line appeared across his wrinkled throat.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The cut was so clean that the body’s internal energies failed to realize they had been severed. Only when Jian stepped forward, boots crunching on the salt-dust, did the head slide slowly from the shoulders.

  "Funny," Jian rasped. The word tore from his throat like a jagged stone.

  The corpse erupted. Two streaks of blinding light shot upward from the neck stump. This was the true form of a high-tier immortal. The Nascent Soul appeared as a tiny, glowing replica of the old man twisted in a silent scream of terror. The Divine Eternal Soul manifested as a pulsing golden orb containing the essence of his immortality.

  "You think you can flee?" Jian whispered.

  He used no spells or techniques. He simply reached out with a hand that had spent ten million years clawing at the walls of a fake reality until the nails wore down to the bone.

  His fingers gripped the fabric of space itself. With a violent jerk, he snatched both souls out of the sky.

  The tiny version of the Old Man thrashed in Jian’s palm, wailing like a mosquito. "Let me go! I can give you worlds! I can give you real women! I'll make you a god!"

  Jian looked down at the writhing thing. His eyes glinted with a black, oily gleam fermented in the dark for eons. He saw the Old Man for what he was. A parasite that had fed on his life for a joke.

  "I don't want worlds," Jian said, his voice gaining strength and echoing off the ruins like thunder. "I want the source."

  Without hesitation, Jian smashed the two souls together. The Nascent Soul and the Divine Eternal core collided with a metaphysical crack that sent a shockwave through the pocket dimension. The desert sky tore like wet paper, revealing the cold void of the true cosmos beyond.

  Then, Jian did the unthinkable.

  Instead of dissipating the energy or refining it through meditation, he opened his mouth and swallowed them whole.

  The reaction was violent.

  The immortal’s energy was a sun entering a vacuum. Jian’s skin began to glow with a sickly radiance. His veins turned black, standing out against his pale skin like a map of a dying empire. His aura flared into a pillar of dark force rising miles into the sky.

  The ruins of the desert city could no longer withstand the pressure. Stone pillars disintegrated into powder. The ground liquefied and vanished. The air screamed as Jian’s presence expanded, overwriting the laws of the simulated realm with his own blackened divinity.

  The forbidden arts of soul-consumption he had theorized while staring into the abyss finally bore fruit. He stripped the immortal of memories, techniques, and the very right to exist.

  Jian threw his head back, letting out a roar like a prisoner breaking chains to strangle the jailer.

  "YOU IMMORTAL OLD BASTARDS!" he bellowed. The sound rippled outward, punching through the boundaries of the realm to vibrate through the higher planes. "I'M COMING FOR YOU!"

  The sound carried the weight of his ten million years. It was a promise to every high-seated being who thought of the mortal realms as a playground.

  Silence followed. The desert city was gone. Only a flat grey expanse remained drifting in the void between worlds.

  Jian’s aura settled, retracting into his body like a predator returning to its cave. His eyes were deep wells drawing light from the stars. He looked down at the sword in his hand. The reflective metal was stained with a faint golden hue. The blood of a god.

  He did not look back at the spot where the Old Man died. There was no closure there, only the end of a long, bad joke.

  Jian turned his gaze toward the horizon where the true stars of the celestial realm burned with arrogant light. He took a single step forward, and the void bent to accommodate his path. He had lost time to make up for, and an entire pantheon of pranksters to introduce to the concept of consequences.

  Nothing remained for him here. He was no longer a man. He was the debt that the heavens had ignored for ten million years, and he was finally coming to collect.