Tonight, Alice joins the hunt.

Therefore, when the City of Mist unfolded, only Fujimaru and Mashu, who were merely mortals and half-Servants, had a chance to escape. Therefore, when Cheng Xiao stood before her, he didn't need to exert much effort to see her desire to die.

She wanted to die; she wanted to be killed by a god or a king killer in her own kingdom, as a queen.

That's why, when Cheng Xiao finally defeated her, she agreed to his final request—because she had nothing else to do.

She opened her eyes.

Unbeknownst to her, she found herself walking from the bridge of the stealth ship to the door of the main control room. She also discovered that her spiritual essence was crumbling. Only her upper body, with her right hand remaining, and her face with her right eye, were left.

Ah... this is so similar to that man's final fate.

—Looks like I'm really not going to die here.

So, the pale-faced king reached out and pushed open the door to the control room that was blocking his way.

....................................

She discovered that her body had returned to normal, her damaged body had been rebuilt, and her burned-out soul had been reconstructed—no, not rebuilt and reconstructed, but rather that it had never suffered any damage in the first place.

This is a dream, an illusion.

When she raised her eyes, she saw a bespectacled woman with pointed ears and a cool, elfin air sitting on the right side of the control room—the woman's eyes shimmered with a faint light, and she felt unable to look directly at those two faint yet pure lights.

She felt her physical strength had increased slightly, and the stability of her soul had also improved considerably. A rough calculation suggested that her overall combat power had increased by between 15% and 20%.

A sudden realization dawned on her.

“So,” she said in her usual tone, “I passed the trial?”

"You've only been given a chance to speak." A gruff voice came from the left side of the control room, belonging to a two-meter-tall Nordic giant. But the two-meter height was merely a facade; in her eyes, he was nothing more than a gigantic, frost-colored wolf! And those eerie green wolf eyes stared at her, causing the dragon blood within her to feel an endless terror as it rapidly cooled!

“I’m very angry,” the man said slowly, his wide grin revealing canine teeth that sent chills down her spine—but she stood firm, showing no fear, no retreat, and no panic.

The wolf-man continued speaking.

"Cheng Xiao's choice is his freedom. He is my comrade, and I respect him, so I won't hinder his actions when he makes up his mind. But—" His voice held the growl of a million wolves. "—He is a warrior, and even in death, he should fall before a powerful opponent after a bloody battle. Not hold back in his final fight because the last enemy he placed his hopes on is a little girl like you who is determined to die!"

“He didn’t hold back.” Yet the girl raised her head, and even though every drop of blood and cell in her body screamed for her to escape, she met the man’s gaze without hesitation. “He used all his strength to defeat me, and I used all my strength to lose to him. He left with satisfaction, and I came here to fulfill the last wish he entrusted to me.”

"So how do you plan to fulfill his wish?" The boy in the center of the control room spoke, and she only noticed him the moment he spoke—her gaze was drawn to something floating in his hand the moment she realized his presence, because the head of a giant, whose body was at least as big as a mountain, was imprisoned in the boy's hand and compressed to the size of a baseball, and she could even faintly hear the giant's unwilling roar and howl!

She remembered that when Cheng Xiao descended, the sky beyond was engulfed in flames of war. But by the time she reached the stealth ship, the battle in the sky seemed to have ended.

The outcome is decided, and Cheng Xiao should have been one of the winners.

“His wish was for me to help Chaldea, and now you control Chaldea.” The girl tried to look away and then stared at the boy in front of her, who, by appearances, barely crossed the line between age and gender.

“You control Chaldea, so I am here to follow your orders. Do whatever you want me to do next.”

"You broke your promise to a true god, and now you're at the beck and call of her teammate?" The young boy's voice held a mocking tone. Perhaps in the next moment, he would deliver the judgment in place of his 'true god teammate'.

However, the girl did not back down.

"I did not break my promise to that god, because she did not stop me from leaving the Seventh Singularity. I agreed to Cheng Xiao's request because I was defeated by him, and nothing else—"

"—Besides this, you have nothing else to do." The elven woman on the left said calmly, "It's a pity. If Cheng Xiao were still alive, you might have been able to join us. But since Cheng Xiao is dead, you can only become a tool for fulfilling Cheng Xiao's last wish here."

Do you have any objections to this arrangement?

“I have no objection.” The girl, who had once been a young girl, then a queen, and now had nothing left but herself, nodded and calmly accepted her fate.

Then, a pattern constructed of light appeared before her.

That was a star map of the Earth-Moon system, reflecting the three-dimensional structure of eight continents. Five of these continents were already engulfed in war. Of the remaining three continents, one was far from the war, one was this very place, and the last one, which should be the seventh singularity, had long, thin threads rising from the center of the earth and connecting to the other continents.

"Then," three voices rang out at once, "there is something we need you to do."

Chapter Ninety-Four: The War of Heaven - Limitations, the Temporary Meeting, and the Approaching End

Artoria left the main control room. She had something to do, something only she could do.

She will travel to the land formed by the Seventh Singularity, carrying the Holy Lance capable of anchoring the physical laws of the Earth's surface, to reunite with Fujimaru Ritsuka, Flora, and the others. She will play a role in their upcoming plans—of course, she won't be the only one going; the entire Chaldea stealth ship will accompany her.

For the reincarnators of the Central Continent Team, this matter was actually meaningless. Because this drama was nearing its end, and whether the mortals in this galaxy were alive or dead was not of any concern to them—because they knew the essence of this world, knew that all of this was just an illusion formed by the aggregation of power, and in this vast galaxy, apart from the reincarnators, there was only one person who could be considered alive from beginning to end.

They're just a bunch of highly sophisticated AIs, nothing more than a bunch of empty NPCs. They're not even worthy of being objects of empathy; at least compared to colleagues they've known for years, their existence or demise is meaningless.

—And the atmosphere in the main control room changed silently after Artoria left.

Xiao Honglu slumped onto the table with a thud, his neatly styled short hair drooping like a defeated general. His eyes were lifeless, his demeanor languid, and overall he looked much like a salted fish that had been dried out for over half a month.

"What do we do? Cheng Xiao is dead." His gaze was skewed, and his face twitched as he looked at his companion.

"What else can we do? Revive him, of course." Zhan Lan shrugged. "We've all worked together for so many years, and he just walks away when he's unhappy. It's not that easy. He's a veteran... a veteran newcomer who joined the team during the Star River era. We can't just leave him like this, can we?"

"But wouldn't he be very unhappy?" Overlord frowned, resting his chin on his hands. "His ideology has been clearly expressed; he doesn't want to be controlled, he doesn't want to accept our good intentions. If we resurrect him, wouldn't he..." Overlord gestured deliberately. "...would he feel like he's being controlled by us again?"

"That's just because his blockhead can't quite grasp it right now." Xiao Honglu rubbed his head vigorously. For him, this kind of problem was far more difficult than fighting the second echelon of the Demon Team for three hundred rounds—after all, battles of the extraordinary are either instantaneous life or death or a thousand years of wasted time. Having already reached the limit at the fourth level and touched the level of the simulated mental light, he naturally wouldn't be on the side of being instantly killed. And since he wouldn't be instantly killed, victory was naturally in his grasp.

In fact, he was confident he could eliminate the Demon Team instantly. After all, the Demon Team consisted of only a group at the peak of the fourth level. Here, however, were two individuals at their limits: himself and Zhan Lan. Zhan Lan was actually stronger than him, perhaps much stronger, given that she was always the fastest progresser in the second tier. The reason they were able to stall the Demon Team's second tier for so long was simply because prolonging the fight was beneficial to both sides, and they wanted to give Cheng Xiao a chance to transform himself.

As a result, Cheng Xiao died by suicide. It was only at the end of the battle that Cheng Xiao realized he could never have lost from the very beginning, just as Alice in the Apocalypse, no matter how weak, could never actually lose to the Emperor—the wise men had prepared a powerful enough enemy for him who was also determined to die, and whether he broke through in the heat of battle or through the Devouring of Fortune, his fate would not have changed.

The wise men had foreseen almost everything, but Cheng Xiao didn't want to be arranged for anymore.

So he died, a clean and swift death, and before he died, he made a point of watching the spectators in the sky and telling them not to interfere.

Now that Cheng Xiao was dead, there was no need for further feigned battle in the sky. Zhan Lan, no longer restraining her power, unleashed a Void Annihilation, followed by Xiao Honglu's Myriad Manifestations. The entire cosmic realm, serving as the battlefield, thus experienced a complete cycle of creation and destruction in spacetime.

—The weakest of the demon quartet, the Hundred-Armed Giant Dechai, was instantly killed. Of the remaining three, Tom and Amy escaped quickly thanks to their God Cards, while Kaguya Otsutsuki decisively severed her tail to survive, sacrificing most of her God Tree construct to create the illusion that she was also dead. By the time the Overlord realized what was happening, she had already completely left the battlefield.

The battle ended, and it was precisely for this reason that when Artoria arrived at the Chaldean stealth ship, these three pretentious—well, that's not the right word, they could now be considered gods, albeit in a haphazard way—would be able to appear in the main control room and have the leisure to strike their poses and poses.

Everything has its cause, and all causes eventually converge to produce this result.

“Cheng Xiao just hasn’t quite grasped the situation yet,” Xiao Honglu repeated his theory. “He doesn’t understand the essence of this multiverse, nor does he realize that so-called destiny is essentially a fact that those in high positions care about. He’s like a cartoon character who suddenly breaks the fourth wall, choosing self-destruction because he can’t accept his predetermined fate. However, he hasn’t considered that there are actually better ways besides this.”

A patch of earth appeared at Xiao Honglu's fingertips, and a colony of ants immediately emerged. His gaze fell upon one of the ordinary ants, and under his watchful eye, the thin ant rapidly grew strong and quickly emerged victorious in the power struggle within the colony, ultimately becoming the ant queen.

Then, the king of the ants looked up at the sky and saw Xiao Honglu beyond the sky.

"Just like that, Cheng Xiao chose to give up when he looked up at the sky, which is actually a kind of weakness."

On the other side, the Overlord flicked his finger, and the ant king, disturbed by this wisp of wind, underwent a bio-structural change covering its entire body. It grew wings, a furnace core accumulating energy within its body, and primordial runes capable of guiding natural forces generated on its surface. The next moment, it flew out of the ground between Xiao Honglu and landed on the ground of the control room, escaping into space through quantum tunneling!

"Cheng Xiao chose a path of compromise, seemingly magnanimous, but actually cowardly," Ba Wang summarized. He had only recently shaken off the Dao Erosion phenomenon on Alice, thus finding his own path to advancement. And because of this, he spoke with a slightly more assertive stance than the other two.

Then--

"So you mean we need to guide him back to the right path?" Zhan Lan turned her head slightly to look at her companions. "To impose our will on him, to do the very thing he least wants to accept?"

And so the tyrant's back buckled again.

"Zhan Lan, it seems you were the one who mentioned reviving him before..."

“Yes, that’s what I said.” Zhan Lan nodded slightly and adjusted her glasses. “But all I said was to revive him. I don’t think we should do anything else.”

"what do you mean……"

"Everyone has to pay the price for their choices, and everyone should bear the consequences of their choices. We are not Cheng Xiao. Unless we analyze his soul and even delve into the depths of his heart, no one can know his true thoughts—whether he is open-minded or cowardly is just your... our conjecture, and the actual situation may not be like this."

"He chose to close his eyes, no longer subject to external interference—we should respect that. But while we respect him, as reincarnators, as comrades in the same camp, we have obligations to fulfill." She said calmly.

“We will resurrect him, whether by reversing the timeline, using secret tools, or by going back to the main god and using the reincarnation authority. In short, we will resurrect him. And after resurrecting him, he will make the final decision himself.”

"Whether he self-destructs, returns to the source world, retires in any world, wanders among the multiverse, or breaks free from this obsession and continues to fight with us—his fate is in his own hands. Everything else is irrelevant to us. We have fulfilled our duties as companions and friends, and on this planet, it was he who chose to abandon us, not the other way around!"

Her tone was resolute, and her gaze was firm and unwavering.

Her companions could only respond with wry smiles in response to this situation.

“Sister Zhan Lan…” Xiao Honglu wanted to say something, but ultimately could only swallow it down—what could he say? Say that Zhan Lan was completely wrong, and that Cheng Xiao’s ideas were correct? What a joke, he couldn’t even deceive himself with such words. Because Cheng Xiao’s refusal of their arrangements represented a certain distrust—as teammates, what couldn’t be discussed openly? Did he think that if he directly said he didn’t want to be assigned anything, the wise ones would risk causing disharmony within the team to scheme against someone below the extraordinary level?

He said nothing, then drew his own conclusion to reject everything. Even if it meant parting amicably to save face for everyone, did he think that after so many new members had been reincarnated in the Central Continent Team, they would still need his spot? Or did he think that death of this magnitude would be enough to free him from this multiverse and completely distance him from everything interfered with by fate?

Xiao Honglu and the others' fury was not without reason, nor was Zhan Lan's pre-emptive anger and subsequent indifference. They couldn't understand Cheng Xiao's true feelings because they wouldn't analyze Cheng Xiao's heart as if he were a mortal enemy. But they still wanted an answer, because this level of distrust could be interpreted as a betrayal!

Zhan Lan wanted an answer, and all she needed was one. She wanted to know if the bonds and friendships between companions, spanning countless millennia of shared time, were so fragile, and whether the man named Cheng Xiao was truly so fixated on his 'path to absolute freedom,' which, from its initial understanding to its ultimate execution, lasted only a few minutes!

“Then that’s settled,” Zhan Lan nodded, shifting her oppressive gaze away from her companions. “I’ll contact you later…”

—Patchouli's form, a projection avatar, silently appeared.

"No need to contact me, I can hear the message from God."

"Patchouli." "Miss Patchouli." "Sister Patchouli"—the three greeted her one by one. Patchouli nodded back to each of them. She raised her hand and slightly organized the nearby timeline, the corresponding event records rotating in her eyes, and all the records were then reflected in her mind.

She lowered her eyebrows slightly.

"I have a general idea of ​​the specifics." She raised her drooping eyebrows, as if she hesitated for a moment.

"That's fine," Patchouli said softly.

"That's it?" Zhan Lan's pupils widened slightly, a hint of disbelief surfacing within them. "Cheng Xiao's matter, is it really over just like that?"

"What else can we do?" Sirin's avatar appeared on the other side of the main control room. She pursed her lower lip, tilted her head slightly, and revealed a slightly sly smile. "He doesn't want to be controlled, doesn't want to be influenced; in other words, he even wants to deny the existence of the Supreme God. If that's the case, what other options are there? Shouldn't we, as reincarnators, serve the Supreme God while receiving its protection? Should we take all these benefits for granted?"

“It’s good that he has ideas. Every independent person should have their own ideas, but since he’s not going to face them or rise to the challenge, are we going to drag him out of his grave and make him die again?”

“Um… I think Cheng Xiao might simply want to climb to the fourth tier independently without relying on our power… Didn’t you see that he broke through the barrier at the last moment and possessed some characteristics of the extraordinary level?” Zheng Zha’s avatar appeared on the other side, saying somewhat awkwardly and uncertainly, “Maybe he has completely figured it out now and is waiting for us to revive him so we can fight together…”

—If that's really the case, then your previous doubts about him are just another manifestation of distrust. Don't you believe your teammates will stand shoulder to shoulder with you?

He didn't say the second half of his sentence, but the implication was clear. And this ending was followed by a profound silence that enveloped the entire main control room.

However, the next moment, Zhao Yingkong's voice rang out in the main control room.

"Cheng Xiao carries a resurrection item." — Zhao Yingkong's voice flashed by, but she didn't even leave behind an avatar, continuing the war in the Imaginary Ocean. A slightly chaotic aura surged into the real world along with her words, causing scattered pale hands and black eyes to grow on the floor of the main control room, which were then casually brushed away by Patchouli.

Silence, an even denser silence than before.

Even the true god has limitations, and the group of people present here today clearly recognize this.

"I'll go ask him at the point in time when he died." Zheng Zha gritted his teeth, about to ignore the slight battlefield control in this universe and directly rewind time. However, just as he was about to turn his idea into reality, a hand from afar tapped him on the head.

—It was Chu Xuan's hand.

This also represents Chu Xuan's will.

Zheng Zha slumped, abandoning his hastily devised decision. He was preparing to leave, reinvesting the limited computing power he had been using to maintain this avatar back into the war against Ex and Adam. However, before that...

"I have something to tell you all," Patchouli's voice suddenly rang out, and then she delivered the shocking news in a calm tone.

"I have observed the collapse of the boundary of the universe, and the end of the era is coming at a speed that exceeds the original timeline."

"The Saint-hunting ceremony is about to begin, or has already ended. And everything here..."

"Everything here, everything, every story, every struggle, will come to a permanent end."