Immortal Paladin

Chapter 460 447 Destiny Devouring Destiny

447 Destiny Devouring Destiny

"H-Hello, uhm… who are you?" asked a little girl with dark hair, her voice trembling but curious all the same. "My name's Yuan Shun… and umm… this is my twin brother, Yuan Shen."

In another life, it would have been Wen Yuhan herself who snuck into this forsaken place and taken these twins away, children already tainted by the Void's lingering influence. This time, it was me. The boy stepped half a pace forward, placing himself between his sister and me, his eyes sharp with suspicion despite his age.

"What do you want?" he asked warily.

I crouched slightly, lowering myself to their level. "Do you want to leave this place?" I asked, keeping my voice calm and even.

The little boy narrowed his eyes. "What's in it for us?"

"What do you want?" I asked in return.

Yuan Shun hesitated, her fingers clutching the hem of her clothes as if afraid the shadows themselves might hear her. "A place where I can no longer hear the whispers," she said softly, her voice barely audible. The boy straightened, his tone resolute despite the fear I could sense beneath it.

"Power," Yuan Shen said. "Power to protect myself from the darkness."

So, I took them in.

With a subtle 'twist' in their destinies, aided by Wen Yuhan's interference, their fates were severed from the Supreme Void. The same thing had happened in my world as well, except it was Wen Yuhan herself who had reached out and pulled them away from the beginning. History rarely repeated itself cleanly, but it often rhymed.

I continued to live through David's life, moment by moment. Before Wen Yuhan's Immortal Art was tampered with by a Supreme Being, she had voluntarily split it into two and entrusted them to Yuan Shun and Yuan Shen. Yuan Shun bore the brunt of the consequence, suffering terribly from the Heavenly Eye. Yuan Shen, on the other hand, became Wen Yuhan's disciple who pursued power with single-minded determination.

When Wen Yuhan witnessed the little girl's suffering and her slow march toward destruction, she asked David to take Yuan Shun in as his disciple. He agreed. Through his guidance, the girl managed to survive the horrifying side effects of the Heavenly Eye, stabilizing something that should never have been stable.

Unbeknownst to David at the time, Yuan Shun began seeing two different realities. In one, her master David existed as he was, guiding her patiently. In the other, he did not. That single divergence changed everything. Because of it, Yuan Shun grew to love her master ever more deeply, while her counterpart in the other reality withered under the weight of fate.

In my own timeline, Yuan Shun would have likely died if not for the knowledge carried over from David's version of events. Fate, once again, had been bent through borrowed experience.

Eventually, another disciple joined us. Quan Shou arrived and quickly became Yuan Shen's rival, the friction between them sharpening both into something greater. Little Zhou Yong came and went as she pleased, treating the Temple of the Four Heroes like a second home she could abandon and return to at will.

It was an okay life. Peaceful, in its own fragile way. Yet David never lost sight of his true goal, which was finding a way home. Unconsciously, his desires began to expand. Perhaps one day, he thought, he could come and go freely, living in both worlds at his leisure. After all, this world had begun to grow on him, rooting itself into his heart whether he liked it or not.

David became a pillar of the Temple of the Four Heroes. When rude guests from the Four Seasons and the Monastery arrived, he defended the place with everything he had. Even at a disadvantage in cultivation realm, he won through clever use of items and the steadily awakening memories of his game character, knowledge and instincts bleeding into reality.

In my own timeline, Wen Yuhan had suffered the humiliation of being suppressed by descendants and inheritors of her fallen friends. Watching David's life unfold, I felt the contrast keenly.

I continued to live his life diligently, absorbing every detail, every regret, every fleeting joy.

"Master, master, I can do an Ultimate Skill now!" Yuan Shun exclaimed one day, her excitement barely contained.

"Really?" I asked, playing along with the memory.

She nodded eagerly. "It's Divine Possession! But there's a problem. I can only cast it on myself."

It was a mutated form of Divine Possession, manifesting in one of her eyes as a radiant gold, reflecting the divinity she had unconsciously accumulated there. She looked at me, no longer the frightened little girl I first met, but someone standing on her own two feet.

"I've grown, right?" Yuan Shun asked, her voice filled with hope and quiet pride.

It was a bizarre mutation, one that David suspected had been caused by Yuan Shun's Heavenly Eye. Around that time, David learned about the existence of another "Yuan Shun," one who lived in a different reality that mirrored this one closely, except for a single, decisive absence. In that world, there was no David. That difference alone warped her fate beyond recognition.

I continued living through David's life, searching relentlessly for clues on how to find my way home, while Wen Yuhan poured nearly all of her energy into helping me, even when it visibly drained her.

At some point, the Eternal Undeath Cult vanished from the world. News spread rapidly that they had ascended, but the truth was far uglier, because the Outsider invasion had already begun in secret and had forced their hand. Around the same time, the long civil war between cultivation factions finally came to an end, leaving behind a fragile and exhausted peace. Yuan Shun and Quan Shou had long since left their master's care by then. Yuan Shun disappeared into deep seclusion, while Quan Shou went on to build a powerful clan that would later become a cornerstone of the world's order.

Then the Outsiders arrived in full force.

I already knew this story, at least from one angle. The Hollowed World was turned into a battlefield once more, and it hadn't been long since the Heavenly Demon had waged war against these invaders. From the Outsiders' perspective, they were merely continuing a conflict that had never truly ended. From the perspective of the world's inhabitants, however, the invasion was sudden, cruel, and profoundly unjust. Quan Shou lost his clan and, in time, became Shouquan, the man who would go on to found the Heavenly Temple.

That much followed the familiar course of history, except this era had David in it.

David fought in the war, though not by choice. The invasion erupted without warning, and the battlefield formed around him whether he wanted it or not. The ancient conflict between the Heavenly Demon and the Outsiders was recreated, with David standing where the Heavenly Demon once stood. The difference was stark. Where the Heavenly Demon possessed overwhelming power that defied the heavens, David carried an eternal fire that refused to be extinguished. His desire to go home and his need to protect the people he cherished drove him forward, step by step, through despair and bloodshed.

If there was one clear difference between David and me, it was this. He never made sacrificial plays. He cherished his life in a way I never did, and that restraint was admirable. He never took the easy way out, unlike me, who had been far too willing to throw myself into suicidal charges when cornered. David fought endlessly on the frontlines, carving into enemy forces that vastly outnumbered and outclassed him in cultivation.

Did he win? No, he lost far more often than he won. Yet he never stayed dead.

Unlike me, who dabbled in cultivation paths and borrowed power wherever I could find it, David devoted himself entirely to the Paladin Legacy, the singular power he had gained in this world. With it, he fought, killed, died, and rose again, repeating the cycle without end. The war dragged on, brutal and unrelenting, with David always at the forefront, accompanied by Wen Yuhan, Yuan Shen, Quan Shou, Zhou Yong, and so many others whose names would later be carved into history.

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This David had never been alone. Not like the one I fought outside this world of memories, isolated at the end of everything.

I continued to live David's life, fighting an endless war that ground down both flesh and spirit. So when an opportunity to end it finally appeared, David seized it without hesitation. He descended into a hidden realm, uncovered the Outsiders' true base of operations, and destroyed the Arch Gate, the artifact that allowed them to enter the Hollowed World. With its collapse, the invasion finally lost its anchor.

By then, Wen Yuhan had recovered her Destiny Seeking Eyes. Their value had been proven again and again throughout the war, saving cities, armies, and sometimes entire regions from annihilation. She looked at the aftermath with a bittersweet smile and said, "We won." Then she added quietly, "But the cost is too great."

Yuan Shun, Yuan Shen, Quan Shou, Zhou Yong, and so many others were gone. Even David's resurrection spells failed. Among the Outsiders were existences capable of delivering true death, the kind that no miracle could undo.

I heard myself say, "It's fine. You still have me," and at the time, I believed it.

The next day, I woke to find myself holding Wen Yuhan's corpse.

To the David of that era, ignorant and exhausted, it must have been unbearable and incomprehensible. He had no idea that a Supreme Being had intervened, ripping the Immortal Art from Wen Yuhan's very being, splitting it apart, and scattering it across the Hollowed World. All David knew was that he had failed again. The weight of everyone who had relied on him and died under his watch finally broke something inside him.

What did he do wrong?

I don't know. Sometimes there was no answer, only cruelty dressed up as fate.

In the end, the desire to go home became the only thing that pushed David forward. With ruthless efficiency and a relentless drive to escape, he conquered the world with his sword. He cut down sects, nations, and legends alike, no longer caring who stood in his way. Eventually, he encountered things that should have existed only in LLO. At some point, even the world of LLO itself descended into the Hollowed World, igniting yet another era of war and devastation.

David steamrolled every problem with violence. He no longer cared for anyone, even though people still gravitated toward him, became attached to him, and longed for his acknowledgment. He pushed them all away, and when he didn't, he used them for whatever they were worth. In his search for a way home, he performed a ritual he learned after acquiring the Warlock Legacy, and through it, he encountered the existence known as the Supreme Void.

It was through the Supreme Void that he learned of time reversal.

That knowledge began another series of tragedies, replayed across countless iterations. I heard his screams echo through the memories.

"Why? Why doesn't it work?"

"Fight, fight for your lives!"

"No, don't die!"

"Yuhan, please!"

"Don't leave me alone!"

"All of you, stay!"

"Please, I don't want to be alone anymore."

Only much later did David learn the truth. The so-called reversal of time was a petty trick that could not move destiny at all. Its true purpose was merely to let the caster replay a recorded past. In other words, David had trapped himself inside his own time, cementing a destiny that consumed itself, a serpent devouring its own tail, forever locked in stasis.

Out of rage and sheer fury, he challenged the Supreme Void to an endless war to the death. That, too, became another cycle of tragedy, grinding away at his emotions until there was nothing left to distort, except the truth.

And at David's core, that truth was unchangeable.

It was his obsession to go home.

In David's pursuit to go home, he found what he believed was a solution in his disciple, Yuan Shun. If he was trapped within his own time, then all he needed to do was steal a future from another. That was the conclusion he reached, and it was at that point that Wen Yuhan finally confronted him.

"You don't have to do this," she said.

They stood before the Arch Gate, a sight painfully reminiscent of the first iteration. The massive structure hummed with familiar malice, as if mocking them for returning yet again.

David frowned and asked, "What do you mean?"

Wen Yuhan looked at him quietly before answering, "It's the first time we've talked like this in a long time, isn't it?"

David's gaze drifted back to the Arch Gate. He remembered throwing himself at it again and again, desperate for a way home, only to be ambushed every single time. Outsiders would swarm him, attack him, pin him down, and force him to retreat without ever making real progress. The memory hardened his resolve.

"Let's just get this over with," David said. "I need your eyes. That was our agreement, right? I help you find a solution to the consequences you've been shouldering from all those destinies you touched. In exchange, you help me find my way home. Your eyes can do that."

Wen Yuhan stepped closer and held his hands. Her grip was warm, grounding, and unbearably gentle. "Please," she said, "just focus on me. Every time, you try to avoid me."

David frowned. "What are you talking about?"

Her voice trembled as she answered, "David, I saw them all. Every iteration, far and wide. I saw everything. Oh, poor David. Why do you have to punish yourself so much?"

Exposed, cornered, and unable to deflect her words, David lashed out. The irritation and desperation boiled over. "The eyes!" he shouted.

That was the last time he ever saw Wen Yuhan. In the iterations that followed, she never appeared again.

"What have I done?" David whispered into the void.

"You killed her," said a taunting voice.

The figure before him shared his face, but it was not him. It was that shapeshifting bastard, the Supreme Heart. In my own time, he had appeared to me the same way, wearing my face with that same mocking grin. David felt faint, his sense of self slipping. I felt it too as I relived it, the lines between Da Wei and David blurring until I could barely tell where one ended and the other began.

"Man," Supreme Heart laughed, "those eyes were beautiful. And yours? They're even more so."

That was the first time David noticed the change. His eyes had shifted, a strange pattern forming within them. Something unnatural had taken root.

More iterations followed, each more distorted than the last. The world stopped resembling anything I recognized. Laws bent, histories collapsed, and meaning itself seemed to unravel. I continued living David's life, watching him fracture further and further, until at last he devised a way to escape that static infinity.

Through Yuan Shun, he reached my world.

I blinked, and suddenly I was standing before him. We were surrounded by fragmented memories, some mine, some his, overlapping and clashing like broken mirrors. I wore my familiar robes, while he stood in battered armor.

"Wen Yuhan's in a good place," I said.

David snarled immediately. "Don't put her name in your mouth."

Even now, he still cared. And because he cared, it still hurt. In the grand scale of things, our feelings meant nothing, yet neither of us could fully escape them. We just coped in different ways. I tended toward suicidal charges, throwing myself into death if it meant moving forward. David pushed people away, isolating himself until nothing remained.

"Alice is the best girl," I added suddenly.

The joke came out of nowhere, even to me.

David scoffed. "Says the lying bastard. Xin Yune, was it? I didn't know you had a type."

I shrugged lightly and replied with melancholy, "May she rest in peace."

"Do you think everything is a joke?" David asked.

"At least I still have humor," I answered.

I faked a cough and continued in an exaggerated, almost theatrical tone, fully aware of how absurd this must have sounded to him. "Don't you see? Does any of this even matter anymore? We're the same person. So what if I have humor and you don't? In the end, we share the same existence, the same memories now, and apparently the same tangled destinies. My Xin Yune is your Wen Yuhan. My Gu Jie and Nongmin are your Yuan Shun. My Lu Gao and Hei Mao are your Quan Shou and Yuan Shen. The parallels are everywhere, aren't they?"

I gestured around us, at the fractured memories overlapping reality. "We both had meaningful fights, turning points that shaped who we became, and ultimately the same question staring us down. Do we stay, or do we leave? We are parallel, you and I, but not identical. We share the same core, yet we think differently."

"Enough," David said flatly. "Get to the point."

I smiled. "In true Da Wei fashion, I will die right now in a suicide charge like no other."

"And in true David fashion," he replied coldly, "you want me to devour you and find my way home."

I snapped my fingers. "Exactly."

David's eyes burned brighter. "I won't fall for your tricks. You're confident your feelings for your disciples, your daughter, and the people around you will outweigh my desire to go home. You think I'll hesitate. I won't. I'll devour you completely, then spit out whatever's left."

His presence surged, growing heavier with every breath as the buffs from Exalted Renewal stacked upon him. The pressure was suffocating. I responded by unleashing my trump card, chanting under my breath as I invoked the Hollow Star to suppress him. The crown tightened. David winced, his jaw clenching, but he pushed through it regardless.

I knew I could still wrench the Hollow Star away. It had been mine longer than it had ever been his. We were inside the Dark Veil, and that tilted the battlefield further in my favor. Everything pointed toward my victory.

Then David looked at me and said calmly, "There's still a piece of memory you haven't seen. Want to see it?"

I blinked, and the world vanished.

I was no longer standing anywhere. I was disembodied, suspended in nothingness, staring at a vast Earth hanging above me. It was impossibly large, impossibly real. Panic surged through me as I tried to move and realized I couldn't.

"What is this?" I thought, or tried to think.

David's voice echoed through the void. "We're probably going to forget everything that happens here after this. So here's my trump card. This is the memory of me glimpsing the Source in its entirety, brushing against the Origin itself. The information from Omniscience. It should be enough to open a gap and let me take over."

The moment the memory unfolded, my senses were overwhelmed. Information poured into me in an endless flood. Cause and effect collapsed. Past, present, and future lost their distinction. Meaning dissolved, then reformed into something quieter and deeper.

I felt peace.

Not relief. Not triumph. Just an overwhelming stillness, as if all struggle had finally exhausted itself.

I blinked.

I was lying within the Dark Veil. The blackness felt familiar, almost comforting. My thoughts were sluggish and disconnected.

Who am I?

The question surfaced naturally, without panic.

Ah.

I'm David.

I guess I won.

The realization settled without resistance, as if it had always been true. I could feel the pull now, distant but undeniable, like a door left slightly open.

It was time to go home.