Silent Crown

“Wait!” Paganini held out his hands and was about to say something, but he saw Charles take a step back. Up in the air, he tore off his frost-covered coat, revealing his thin frame.

Paganini’s eyes went wide. He saw a single brilliant wing unfolding behind the young man, sprouting from his back. It extended slowly but did not reach into the realm of aether.

A torrent of music theory gushed out. At this moment, the tattooed records of the Abyss that decorated him turned into dark feathers and became part of the wing. Once it had formed, the wing was as small as a single human body. But when he unfurled it, the whole sky was darkened, as if it had been wrapped up in formless wings. Just by spreading his wing he covered the heavens and the earth.

In the vast sea of aether, the wing silently gave rise to an earth-shaking frenzy. Even Paganini could not stand firm in front of it as he was pushed back by an invisible tide.

As he stared in fascination, Charles’s wing whipped up a wind from the realm of aether.

Charles’s figure flickered like a phantom.

At that moment Paganini finally understood how he had appeared behind him silently: because he was not there at all!

He was neither here nor there.

Right now Charles was not in front of him, nor was he anywhere.

This was just a phantom that distorted the higher dimensions, becoming an intractable problem as he broke the conventional laws of space and time and then refracted through layer after layer to appear in front of him.

This was quite different from Wolf Flute’s ability to pierce through the higher dimensions and skip over the blockades of the Physical World. It was as if he had folded space like a piece of paper, or even crumpled it up, forming the little black dots on the paper into an intricate labyrinth.

Arbitrarily traversing through higher dimensions and even skipping over them would put the indescribable realm of aether in the palm of your hand, and the whole world at your fingertips.

“Phase distortion?” Paganini barely managed to ask. “That’s absolutely impossible. How did you achieve it?”

Charles looked at him vacantly. Soon, a blank smile showed on his face. He pointed to his back. “You mean this? If you want to learn how to do it, I’ll teach you when I have some time. It’s pretty simple actually, although it can be a bit troubling at times. Thanks to this, I often lost my way as a child. I had just gone out to buy some soy sauce, I don’t know why I went to such a strange place. I didn’t understand until recently, I had simply been going the wrong way.” He paused, reached out and grabbed Paganini’s wrist. “Don’t just stand there, go!”

He clearly did not move, but in an instant, Paganini felt like he had been immersed in a deep pool, with countless streams of light flashing before his eyes. The deep secrets of the realm of aether slowly unfolded before him. Numerous distorted dimensions and unknown spaces that were composed of what looked like iron sand were stuffed into his consciousness, causing his forehead to swell to the point where he felt it was about to burst.

At that moment he understood, but he forgot it even faster and could not recall anything.

All that was left was fear.

It was deeper than the fear of death. He simply trembled.

He felt like he had been submerged in thousands of years of solace. In that eternity, even death lost its meaning. But when he opened his eyes the lingering shadows quickly disappeared, and his perfect body created by divinity began to sweat profusely.

He couldn’t think.

What had he seen?

And when he awoke from that horror, the Wheel of Balance had already come into view.

The two people who had appeared out of nowhere had triggered a vicious cycle as if they had purposely jumped into a steel smelter. The frightful power that collided between the Great Wall and the Sacred City had created an arena of destruction that swallowed up the two of them.

The tremendous power of the heavens and earth in motion crushed them.

All the disappearing light swept through in but an instant, but Paganini was still intact. It was like watching a horror drama through a plane of glass. It looked frightening, but it was so far away.

It was as if two mountain peaks had collided together. They marched along the quickly disappearing tiny gaps, traveled back and forth through the labyrinthine turbulence, and passed through all the destruction, getting closer and closer to the Wheel of Balance.

“What the h*ll is that?” The sound of iron drums rang out as a man in a tall hat noticed their approach. He looked up at them, both eyes shot through with glaucoma. He pounded the Scepter in his hands on the ground like a drumstick. Malachite burst out from the earth amid the roar of its revolving.

Everything collapsed to the sound of the drums.

The red-hot music theory sent an invisible shockwave through the sea of aether, and waves crashed one after another sending ripples everywhere. Everything was shaken into broken bits. Numerous rippled echoes one after another, constructing a movement that cast an illusion of a wonderland of warriors with golden spears and iron-clad horses. An iron curtain was pressed down over the projections of mountains and rivers.

In the depths of the realm of aether, structures of distorted space were also shaken by this terrible shock. In a flash most of the exits collapsed, blocking the curved paths that Charles had made instantly. Destructive ripples followed close after.

At this moment, the four musicians in the City in the Sky joined hands and linked their music theory. After the man in the tall hat’s blow, the head of the Yuan family followed with an attack of his own. But his sword whistled coldly. After three weeks of confusing Charles, there was nothing more it could do. It was like he was looking at the situation through glass with no way to affect it.

The head of the Yuan family was stunned. “To insert what has no thickness into such spaces [1]? That can’t be right…”

The white jade pipa began to play, and in an instant, Paganini felt himself floating as evil thoughts sprouted within his heart. The pipa’s music transferred his soulless bestial nature into the School of Heart and quietly implanted it into Paganini’s body. If his Changing Music Theory was not equally as strong, Paganini would have suffered a bitter defeat.

The King of Red snorted. With one hand he contended with the four Devas. He lifted the other up and waved his fingers, stirring up the King of Black’s music theory. A holy song of judgment rang out from the void, and a destructive light spread everywhere. It flowed into the realm of aether and raced about in the higher dimensions. It locked on to Charles as he tried to avoid it, a single beam of light forcing him to flee in panic.

But soon the punishing light went in the wrong direction as Charles guided it towards the malachite.

The projections of the Sacred City and the Great Wall roared.

In an instant, both sides of the struggle had assessed the whole situation. The fight was based on how well they could handle their own music theory and the overall situation. Even the smallest thing could have profound effects. Using this as a bridge, the two sides fought recklessly.

After one attack both sides had taken some losses, and Charles’s strange ability surfaced.

“Phase jumping…higher dimension distortion…” The head of the Zhangsun family looked towards Charles. “He can actually do this…is he some sort of mix between the realm of aether and humanity?”

Suddenly, countless elements in the projections of both sides changed, key points shifted, and a lightning strike locked onto Charles and was ready to go.

Paganini felt a pressure greater than any before.

The Scepter of the Sacred City that the Church had created in the realm of aether and the Great Wall that the Nine Families of the Dragon bloodline had created thousands of years ago both locked on to each other. Even a greater catastrophe would suffer heavy losses from the assault that was coming.

A cold sweat broke out on Charles’s forehead.

“Wait!” Before everyone’s cold eyes, Charles jumped out from the higher dimensional labyrinth, looking serious for once in his life. “I have a rough plan to solve the problem!”

In the silence, everyone wanted to laugh.

Even Bai Heng looked at Gaius’s projection in surprise.

Gaius took a puff of his cigarette. He was cool and collected as if he had expected Charles’s interruption. He merely shrugged to indicate to everyone there that this was not his doing.

As could be expected, everyone looked over at Charles.

Charles paused for a moment, lowered his head and fake coughed a few times, and then looked back up at everyone with a sly smile that made them want to beat him. “Since everyone wants this d*mn thing, why don’t we divide it up?”

There was a long silence.

Even Gaius was stunned.

Only Bai Heng laughed after a slight hesitation. He laughed hard and applauded. “Great idea! I agree.” He smiled at the gloomy King of Red. “Actually, I can’t even use the whole thing. Just a piece of it would be fine.”

Charles and Paganini glanced at each other, then looked up at the City in the Sky which had fallen into a strange silence. The Devas who were incarnations of the four pillars glanced at each other with subtle expressions. Finally, everyone looked at the Wheel of Balance that had appeared in the center of it all.

This thing… how should they divide it up?

In the next moment, everyone moved at once!

…

Therefore, they did not need someone like Charles to stir things up. Everyone understood that under the current situation the fight for the Wheel of Balance could only end in a stalemate. But when their goal changed from the whole artifact to just a part of it, the whole situation would be completely different.

Either way, they’d first break it apart then talk about it!

First come, first serve!

But before they could, the King of Red stood in their way. The Sacred City had long regarded the Wheel of Balance as something they had in the bag. The King of Red had maintained this stalemate in order to give the King of Black a chance to cast stronger power through the wind tunnel.

Of the Three Kings, the King of Red had been controlled by 17 popes throughout history. His so-called body was just a tool used by the Popes in Nibelungen, he was not really there. Therefore, he was able to perform the near-miraculous feats of human transmission and resurrection.

But the King of Black couldn’t. He could set out a restricted area from the wind tunnel, but he was still thousands of miles away in an unreachable place.

And the King of Yellow had left after his initial intervention, having made up his mind not to worry about the disputes on the ground. If he was still there, even at the other side of the world he could still intervene in the situation through the Holy Cauldron’s systems.

There was no need to fight. As long as it was guided by its own power, the Wheel of Balance would choose on its own.

They would not fight this battle.

In an instant, the battle in the sky had already reached its climax. A great amount of music theory was born and died in the core. Elements collided with each other, were born, and died. The projections of the Sacred City and the Great Wall collided, hitting hard and throttling each other. And Charles had gone back into the twisted phase labyrinth after speaking, slipping away from the battle between the two sides and its aftermath.

In a flash, the two projections had interlocked thousands of times, and many towers in the projection of the Sacred City had been destroyed. And far away in the real Sacred City, the corresponding steel towers emitted the sharp sound of scraping metal as they collapsed.

The Great Wall was equally damaged, and several of the beacon fires had been extinguished in the great storm.

In that instant of collision, Paganini blocked all the attacks directed at Charles, resulting in half his body being broken and horrifying to look at.

After this, the King of Red and Yuan Changqing with Charles close behind had already touched the edge of the Wheel of Balance.

There was no need for them to look at each other.

A cold light flashed in Yuan Changqing’s eyes.

That iron light was fleeting, but it seemed to pierce through all the long nights throughout the ages, annihilating stars and the sun, destroying everything as easily as crushing dry reeds and smashing rotting wood, illuminating a future in which only he existed.

The true essence of the Yuan family’s swordsmanship was revealed.

The Chun Jun Sword slashed down!

Bang!

A sharp sound burst forth from the depths of the realm of aether, then swept out over everything, setting off the roar of the world collapsing.

In the twinkling of an eye, the sky went pure white. One moment the ocean boiled and the next it froze. The air became bits of iron sand that rubbed against each other, agitating everything and opening cracks everywhere.

Frenzied power flowed out of the cracks in the Wheel of Balance. that moment a terrible chain reaction arose from the sea of aether.

The whole world could hear the fierce voice that seemed to crack the heavens and the earth.

Everything seemed to have gone out of control in an instant.

The whole world was in turmoil.

In a flash, the Wheel of Balance fell apart, splitting into three pieces in the three-way battle. A great rush of music theory gathered towards the fragments, shaping them into new forms. They clearly looked the same, but each of the three gave everyone a very different feeling.

It was not only the form of the Wheel that had been split but also its power.

The King of Red looked downcast. The fragment in his hands still held the same form as the Wheel of Balance. Numerous elements converged and reformed it.

Its power, inherited from the “separation” power of the original Wheel of Balance, could cut off the ability of all musicians to sense the realm of aether.

The fragment in Yuan Changqing’s hands did not seem to be magical, but wherever it went everything became calm, everything seemed to have returned to the right path. The realm of aether and the Physical World were once again stabilized.

The power that he had received was “maintaining.” It maintained the balance between the two worlds and was most suitable to be a part of the Great Wall of Aurora.

The fragment that Charles had was faint, like a phantom. But wherever he went became like a huge hole, with bizarre illusions constantly flashing out from within the void.

This was the last part of the Wheel of Balance: “overlapping.”

In this way, the Wheel of Balance was completely split. The artifact that all the different parties had set their hopes upon was born, split apart in the battle, and turned into three mystical objects no longer the same as before.

It was simply a great big joke.

The battle had finally ended.

The aftermath was still there.

When the Wheel of Balance had broken, massive amounts of elements had burst out of it, turning into shockwaves that flew between heaven and earth.

A cry rose up from the Ultimate as if mourning the death of its child.

Wait… the Ultimate?

Paganini was stunned, and a puzzling thought appeared in his mind: why is the Ultimate still there?

The fate of the Ultimate was to give birth to a catastrophe, so with the birth of the Wheel of Balance the Ultimate should have already fallen apart and hidden away again. Why was it still there?

And it could still stay whole amid the earth-shattering three-sided battle?

“This isn’t right!” He looked down at the Ultimate. But then his expression changed.

He felt it.

Something giant was emerging from the realm of aether!

The behemoth that had been missing for a long time as it floated in the depths of the realm of aether was sinking towards the Physical World through the gap that had been opened up by the birth of the Wheel of Balance!

Through the complex turbulence, Paganini could only a faintly see an ethereal phantom.

It was like a dream.

A dream coming towards the Physical World… No, descending upon the Ultimate!

At this moment, the residual power that still lingered between heaven and earth seemed to hear a new call. It turned into a torrent and rushed towards the Ultimate.

Was anybody still there?

Paganini was stunned when he finally realized.

Ye Qingxuan!

[1]: This is a line from the Daoist sage Zhuangzi’s story “The Dextrous Butcher.”