City of Sin (Yanyu Jiangnan)

Rear View

Richard closed his eyes before slowly opening them once more, able to see the true side of the Darkness at last. The natives were no longer incorporeal, but living beings that were about a metre tall with four legs and two arms. They were clearly intelligent, with altars, houses, and all sorts of tools within, but all three villages were dead quiet with their populations dead.

Of course they couldn’t handle the full power of Norland’s strongest being. All this while, Richard had subconsciously treated the natives the same as he did nightmare creatures, cutting them down as he saw them by pure instinct. However, now he realised the truth of this world; even if he hadn’t dirtied his own hands, the removal of the distortion node was effectively like removing the veil of order from a normal town. They wouldn’t last very long in the environment that had mostly adapted to order.

His gaze moved past the corpses strewn across the ground, to another new scene in the wastelands. A good portion of the place was still lifeless, but the vicinity of the distortion node had been brimming with life. Lush grass covered the villages, only fading away into the distance.

……

Despite the newfound information, Richard continued to eliminate the distortion nodes along his journey. He didn’t go out of his way to find them anymore, but at this point he knew one thing— if he succeeded in building a Lighthouse of Time, they would all be wiped out in the process as the Eternal Dragon pulled this sector into the void. It was at his 56th massacred village that he found some soulgrass on the central altar of the village, which would serve as the wick for the Lighthouse. Now, all he needed was tinder.

According to Io’s map, he was also quite close to where the Lighthouse of Time had been built. He only needed to make some minor repairs, after which he could light the timeflames and bring the Land of Dawn into the domain of order. The tinder would be waiting for him there.

Over the next few days, he was forced to revisit a thought he had been dreading ever since he found out about the passed time. His heart was throbbing as it pulled him towards the Lighthouse of its own accord, and he stopped caring about his energy and mana as he dashed, blinked, and teleported there as quickly as he could. It still took two days and more than 10,000 kilometres of travel, but he finally came upon an almost-perfectly concealed distortion node that even he wouldn’t feel if he wasn’t within a hundred kilometres. If even he needed Intuition to notice it, no one else in this land would have been able to tell.

There were no natives living around this node, and after destroying it he found what would barely qualify as a village. The place only had three wooden houses and one well, but as he drew a bucket of pure water and drank from it to replenish his mana he found that below the well bed was the boundless void. This well could absorb energy from the domain of order and turn it into pure water!

He moved on to the central house, revealing a simple room in the style of Norland. The place had a wooden desk and chair near the window with a clothes rack and bed nearby, the desk having a quill pen and an ink bottle on top. However, he was stunned for a moment by a familiar figure sitting in that chair, watching as she picked up the pen and started writing something down on a sheet of paper.

“FLOWSAND!” he suddenly screamed, jumping into the room in excitement to grab her. However, time seemed to slow to a crawl as he saw her put the pen back into the bottle, stretching her body before her figure disappeared. His hand froze in mid-air, quivering at the realisation that it was only a phantom.

Tears started to trickle down Richard’s eyes as he confirmed his greatest fears. The phantom seemed so real that even he couldn’t differentiate, but his gaze landed on the table to find the letter with its ink still wet.

“Hey,

“Three thousand years should have passed if you ever see this letter. Maybe you won’t even make it here like I divined; your destiny is very strong, but it can still be changed.

I have some good news! I’ve already built the Lighthouse of Time, so lighting it shouldn’t be hard. At this point, I can truthfully say I’ve done everything I could. It isn’t my turn anymore.”

It was a simple letter, but Richard collapsed to the ground as he read it. He tried to hold onto it as it turned into motes of golden timeforce and dissipated through his trembling fingertips, but it disappeared from his blurred vision like it had never existed.

Unable to even speak, he gazed towards the table which now had a thick leather book with a bronze cover sitting on it. It was a tome he was very familiar with, one that Flowsand had never been apart from in all the time he’d known her. But now, the Book of Time lay silently on the table with its owner nowhere to be seen. The phantom she’d left behind only gave him a miserly view of her back.

Richard sat silently for some time, using his infinite memories to stabilise himself before he reached out for the Book of Time. It opened easily in his hands, flipping to the title page that had a single sentence in elegant handwriting, “The truth of the world is often the opposite of what we see.”

At this point, the meaning of this sentence seemed both obvious and vague. He couldn’t bring himself to think more on it, so he continued reading row after row about how to activate the Lighthouse of Time. Once he had gone through everything and the book had faded into blankness, he closed it.

A long time later, Richard brought himself to leave Flowsand’s room to go look at the two others. They were clearly the ones that housed Io and Nyra, possessing the two guardians’ distinct styles, but he only examined them briefly before leaving the small village and heading towards the Lighthouse of Time. He had considered protecting the entirety of this small residence, but with their owner gone he believed it was best for them to be torn down by the current of time as the Land of Dawn was brought into the void.

Seven days later, he arrived at a magnificent tower that was hundreds of metres tall, its mere sight making it clear just why it would take over a thousand years to build. Although people lived forever in the Darkness, they did not have outstanding strength. The materials to build this tower had to be ferried from tens of thousands of kilometres away, and the trio had accomplished that block by block, brick by brick. They had laboured ceaselessly to bring it to this stage… and then she hadn’t lit it.

He slowly walked up the Lighthouse, memorising every single brick and ornament within and without. It took a day to get to the lamp room and the giant copper brazier within, revealing a missing corner that he filled with a mere seven bricks of cyanite. He then poured the core oil he had gathered into the various individual pots, the black liquid bubbling as it was transformed into lamp oil. He heard weeps with every bubble that burst, but he moved on and twisted the soulgrass into a wick that he placed within. The black lamp oil immediately dyed it in its entirety, summoning streams of colourful light up in the sky.

The laws all around started to froth and rage, large shadows flickering about in the distance but being blocked by an invisible barrier. These were the inhabitants of the Darkness; they had realised just what was about to happen, but there was nothing they could do. Tens, hundreds of thousands of them started to charge over from the distance, but a few golden beams of light streaked across the sky and landed atop the Lighthouse to stabilise the barrier. These beams came from each of the cities in the Land of Dawn, the thickest coming from the City of Dawn itself.