Above the shattered firmament…
Beyond the Vaulted Lotus Sky…
…They watched.
Archgods.
True Immortals.
Ancient Celestial Lords.
Some on lotus thrones spun from stardust.
Some with twelve arms clasped in mudras of clarity.
Some older than names.
All gazed into the unfolding chaos—
The Battle of the Forbidden Two.
---
> "That is… the Monkey King," whispered the Seraph of Ten Suns.
> "No," corrected the Pale Matron of the North Sea, "That is the mad version of him. The one who never bowed."
> "And the other?"
> "A man who reached the core of Samsara… and spat in its eye."
---
Below the gods, Yi Zhen stood like a cosmic colossus, his robes rippling like the winds of rebirth.
And then—he struck.
His hand, infused with the Nirvana Cycle Art: Samsaric Palm of Ten Thousand Births, came down.
CRACK.
Sun Wukong was SLAPPED into the moon.
The moon shattered into a thousand mirrored shards, each one holding a different expression of the Monkey King's shocked face.
But Yi Zhen wasn't done.
> "Dao Technique – Merciful Spiral of Eternal Return!"
A golden spiral of glowing reincarnation threads twisted around his arm like a serpent of fate, and with a single strike—
BOOM.
Wukong's body was blasted through five planetary bodies.
One of them held a sect that mistook the impact for the fall of a primordial beast.
The gods did not speak.
Even they blinked.
Wukong's body tumbled into the edge of the universe, where boundary laws began to thin.
---
And then…
…he rose.
Floating backward from the edge.
Golden blood dripping from his mouth.
His smile cracked wide.
> "Heh… alright then, kid," Sun Wukong said softly, spinning his staff.
"No more games. Let's go wild…"
---
The Monkey King's power surged.
Not in wrath. Not in madness.
But in focus.
His eyes turned white-hot, his tail straightened behind him like a divine spear, and his silhouette blurred between god and myth.
He roared—and space split.
> "Myth Technique – Heaven-Splitting Staff Swing!"
The staff grew—longer than the cosmos could hold—and swung in a slow arc that screamed with ancient rage.
Yi Zhen blocked it with his Nirvana Barrier, but it rippled, cracking with karmic stress.
> "Path Technique – Mind of the Golden Cicada!"
Sun Wukong split into seven mirrored selves, each representing a life from his mythical past:
The rebel.
The servant.
The immortal.
The sage.
The mad god.
The child.
The wrathful sun.
They all attacked at once.
---
Yi Zhen's eyes glowed with samsaric light.
> "Technique – Reincarnation Collapse: Thousand Lives Return to One!"
BOOM.
A supernova of soul-forged karmic force exploded outward.
The gods above flinched—not from the power, but from the meaning.
> "They're no longer fighting to win," one god murmured.
"They're fighting to define what the future of this reality even means."