Raizen moved like wind through the cracks of space.
The ocean had spit him back out hours ago, but he hadn't stopped. He didn't need rest. Not here. Not yet.
In his hand, the shard of the Whispered Moon Sect pulsed faintly, like a heart trying to remember how to beat. It wasn't dangerous… not to him. But he could feel it drawing attention.
So he went where no one followed.
The Sky-Rift Wastes.
A land so devastated by an ancient battle between saints and void lords that the very sky above had never healed. The clouds there split in unnatural lines. Lightning fell without sound. Cultivation crumbled in the air like sand.
No sect had ever built a stronghold there.
And no beast had ruled it.
Because something already had.
When he arrived, the first thing he saw was the scar.
Not a canyon. Not a valley.
But a wound.
A vertical crack across the sky that never closed, hovering like a tear in reality.
It didn't bleed light or darkness—it bled pressure.
Everything near it bent down. Trees curved toward the earth. Stones were half-submerged in solid rock. Even the air felt like it was being pulled into the sky, gasping upward.
Raizen stood at the edge of the Rift, eyes steady.
"Untouched by heaven…" he muttered.
"Then this is where it belongs."
He pulled out the shard and crouched near the base of a withered mountain. With one small motion, he pressed it into the earth.
The ground accepted it without resistance.
No glow. No reaction.
Just silence.
But he felt it root.
Then the wind died.
The air shifted.
Raizen turned slowly.
Behind him, something massive stirred.
A breath—deep and slow—rattled the bones of the dead buried beneath the Wastes.
"Void…" a voice whispered, ancient and hungry.
"I remember that scent."
From behind a hill of fractured swords, something emerged.
It walked on four legs, but its body shimmered with runes that twisted around its skin like scars. Horns curled back over its head, and its jaw was cracked open permanently—exposing rows of bone-blades instead of teeth.
Its eyes were blind.
But it didn't need to see.
Because it could feel him.
The beast had no name in the current age.
But in the distant past, it had been known by one:
Void-Eater.
Raizen didn't move.
The beast circled him slowly, claws dragging through the dust.
"They sent you back," it growled. "You smell young. Unfinished. You're not them. But you… could become."
Raizen's eyes narrowed.
"So you've fought void cultivators before."
"Hundreds. Thousands." The beast's head snapped toward him. "They all thought they were chosen. They all screamed when I unmade them."
"Try me."
The Void-Eater pounced.
Not like a beast—but like a storm.
The ground where it had stood cracked in three layers. Dust didn't rise—it collapsed.
Raizen stepped sideways, folding the air, and vanished before the claws could reach him.
He reappeared behind the beast, fist charged with raw, compressed space.
He struck.
The beast's hide buckled, then healed mid-blow.
Its tail whipped around, and Raizen twisted gravity to duck beneath it, slamming his foot into the creature's hind leg.
It didn't stagger.
Instead, it grinned.
"You hit harder than the last one."
It spun midair, biting down on the space around Raizen. The void screamed—not from pain, but rejection.
It couldn't exist near this thing.
"So that's it…"
"It doesn't just eat void—it cancels it."
Raizen stopped attacking.
He stepped back.
Breathed slowly.
Then raised a hand and snapped his fingers.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the beast's left side buckled.
Not from force.
From absence.
A chunk of its body vanished—neither burned nor torn.
Just removed.
"Void Collapse." Raizen whispered. "Targeted."
The creature screeched, staggering.
Its body tried to regenerate, but the space it lost couldn't be reclaimed.
Raizen's expression stayed flat.
"You don't devour void."
"You only know how to eat noise."
He stepped forward again.
The beast lunged, half-panicked now.
But this time, Raizen reached into the air.
And twisted.
The beast stopped mid-lunge—its body folding unnaturally, as if caught between one second and the next.
Raizen opened his palm.
A void chain appeared—made not of energy, but of reality itself.
He wrapped it around the creature's skull.
"Sleep."
The chain vanished with the beast, locking it into a rift sealed behind Raizen's will.
Not killed.
Not erased.
Stored.
He turned back to the seed.
It pulsed once.
Then again.
And from the cracked soil, a small black flower bloomed.
Not pretty.
Not poisonous.
But alive.
Above, in a far-off divine watchtower, a god-level cultivator tore off his scrying ring and crushed it.
"He's planted the Whisper."
A second figure nodded.
"Then we'll begin the burn."