Immortal Paladin

The city without a name lay in ruins.

It had once been full of light, full of the noise of migrants and their dreams, full of hammer strikes on stone, laughter that echoed down alleys, and the scent of hope—yes, hope!—wafting from the street stalls and freshly built shrines. Now? Silence, dust, and craters. Broken stone instead of architecture! Mangled banners fluttered limply from shattered towers. The angels’ descent and our battle had reduced it all to rubble.

I cradled Joan in my arms like she was something both fragile and sacred. She was heavier than she looked, limp and still breathing… barely, but breathing. I looked down at her face, brushing aside the matted strands of blonde hair stuck to her cheeks. My eyes searched for something I wasn’t even sure I’d recognize.

Her face stirred a memory… not mine, not entirely. It came from him. David_69. That dumb username. That even dumber character. That was me once, in a way.

The memories flowed in—his thoughts, and his emotions. Joan had been important to him. No… more than that. He was smitten. Yeah, smitten was the word. Back in Lost Legends Online, there was this stupid “lovemaking” button. If you were married to another player, hitting that gave you buffs. Who didn’t want buffs? I used it because it worked, and there were no strings attached. But for Dave? It wasn’t just a mechanic. He thought it meant something.

He loved that button more than I would ever do.

I didn’t have that connection. Not really. To me, Joan was more like a… daughter-in-law? Yeah. A weird way to put it, but it felt right. She mattered because he loved her. After all, some part of him still lived inside me. Maybe that part wouldn’t shut up until she was safe.

I reached the Summit Hall, or what was left of it. The thrones were broken. The roof was gone. Light poured in from the shattered sky, as if the heavens themselves wanted to witness this quiet failure. I laid Joan down gently on a cracked stone table at the center. She looked so peaceful, even in forced sleep. Her chest rose and fell with an unsteady rhythm, but she was alive.

I stared down at my arm.

The black stone crept like vines, wrapping around bone and sinew. Petrification. The Punishment of the Wicked Who Pretends to Be Good. Aixin’s leftover gift. It pulsed, advanced, then retreated as if trying to decide whether I deserved to be consumed. My karma had always been complicated. I might have gotten rid of the Never Ending Bond of Regrets, but this curse? This one had teeth.

Then, with no fanfare and no warning, my left arm burst into motes of light.

Gone. Along with the curse.

I flexed phantom fingers that weren’t there. Pain flickered behind the emptiness, but I didn’t complain. There was no use complaining.

The angels still hovered in the skies above. Low-tier, winged automatons of judgment. They didn’t attack. They just floated, directionless, without their master. Dangerous, yes. Dormant, for now. But to the people of this world? They’d be nightmares. Weapons left behind with no trigger discipline.

I looked at the sky, still scarred and bleeding divine light through the seams of the rift.

“Let’s fix that.”

I unleashed the Heavenly Punishment still imbued in my weapon, Silver Steel. Its core pulsed with righteous wrath, and from it erupted a massive golden blade, shaped like judgment incarnate. I swung it upward, slicing through the divine tear.

The rift shattered like glass, raining pieces of glowing starlight across the ruined city.

I let the weapon fall silent.

Then, I walked down the aisle of the broken Summit Hall. Columns stood with nothing to hold. The air was thick with the weight of a battle no one had won. I reached into my Item Box and pulled out the head. My head. It still looked fresh, preserved by the magic of the Item Box. Strange, staring at yourself like that. The smiling expression was especially disturbing. Shenyuan had done a good job separating it.

“You’d think I’d be more disturbed,” I muttered.

But I wasn’t. I was just tired.

I set the head carefully on the stone, a few feet away from Joan. Not close enough to startle her if she woke, but close enough to matter.

Knowing what demi-god physiology was like, I wasn’t worried about rot or decay. This wasn’t about function. It was about presence! The head was a contingency. A marker. Something to draw in the angels, something to hold them at bay. And maybe something Dave could use, if he ever found a way back.

I looked at Joan again.

Peaceful. Beautiful. Unreachable...

“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “Dave… David_69… I did what I could, man. This is the best I had in me.”

It didn’t feel like enough.

Some part of me hoped he would come back. That he’d recover his strength and find her. That the dumb, earnest fool with his buffs and game romance would walk through these ruined gates and kiss her awake like it was a fairy tale.

But me?

I was no prince. Just the husk left behind.

I glanced back up at the angels. 

“Well,” I sighed, cracking my neck. “Guess it’s time to make use of this head.”

I thought about it. Having only one hand sucked. Everything was twice the effort and half the grace. I gave my other arm a look and muttered, “You better not go kapooch on me too.” No reply, obviously. I wasn’t that far gone. But still, there was a real chance the other arm would vanish soon too, and I needed to finish this before that happened.

I picked up Silver Steel with my remaining hand and drove it into the stone just in front of what used to be the gate of the Summit Hall. Not that there was much left… more like two sad, half-standing arches barely clinging to their foundation. The sword struck true, standing upright, its blade buried deep in the wreckage. Then I took my own head and placed it atop the hilt like some macabre totem.

“Artistic,” I muttered, stepping back. “Functional, disturbing, and a little poetic. If this doesn’t scream ‘do not touch,’ I don’t know what will.” I let out a sigh. “Gods… this is so pathetic.”

But it had to be done.

I closed my eyes, internalized the mechanics, and adjusted the bindings of Divine Possession… It was a spell only tweakable thanks to the ridiculous knowledge given to me by that old man. Self-proclaimed God of Games. He’d been eccentric, but the stuff he knew? They were next-level dangerous.

In any ordinary use, Divine Possession required a Spell Slot to activate. But with minor tweaks, I should be able to cast a smaller version of it on the head. The idea was that I used the ‘head’ as the proxy for the next spell I was about to cast. So I opened my eyes, pulled the power into my palm, and wrapped it around the severed head. Divine power etched itself briefly in the air, coiling into the crude totem.

Then I spoke. Not loudly, but with force.

“Divine Mandate of Proximity.”

The words hit the air like the toll of a great bell.

The spell was activated, and a spell slot was burned as payment. It was an Ultimate Skill, after all. One of the old man’s parting gifts… What it did was simple in theory and brutal in execution: anyone affected by the Mandate would find their strength tied to how close they were to the caster… or in this case, the totem. The further they drifted away, the weaker they got. Stats would crash down to near zero if they tried to escape. No invader could simply run off with a hostage or retreat to regroup. Not without turning into a glass cannon without the cannon part.

In other words, it was the Ultimate Skill version of the Compel Duel skill.

It was my way of protecting this broken world and guarding Joan.

Couldn’t have some creep snatching her up like she was loot on a raid timer.

Moreover, the angels would be quarantined in this area.

I turned my eyes to the sky. The angels still hovered there, pale silhouettes against the wounded sun. Low-level or not, they were powerful by mortal standards. But I recalled their behaviors, how they wouldn’t strike the inanimate, the thoughtless, or the dead in instinct. The head-totem shouldn’t provoke them. Unless they evolved sentience midair, they’d leave it alone.

Still, as I gazed at my own head… its vacant eyes staring back at me… I felt a chill crawl up my spine. Too real. Too me. I reached out and gently closed its eyes. ”There,” I muttered. ”That’s better.”

I knelt, hands clasped, and then I prayed. “Dave… David_69… if you’re still in there somewhere… I don’t know, but maybe you can steal Mao Xian’s body. I hope you find your way back to her. Joan’s waiting.”

This really sucked hard.

I thought about Joan. About Dave. About how utterly stupid and beautiful this entire journey had been. Then, on a strange impulse, I cast another discounted version of Divine Possession. No grand trickery this time. Just a small recording of a memory. A piece of my thoughts, emotions, and regrets, transcribed onto the head, like a data file left behind in the ruins.

Just in case.

Then it happened. My right arm burst into motes of light.

“Oh, come on!” I groaned. “Couldn’t it at least be stylish? Like one big explosion of light, and I go out all heroic? Just poof, one epic flash and done?” I grumbled as I watched my shoulder dissolve like burning embers in the wind. “Xin Yune got to vanish in a poetic burst. I get patchy light spots. Typical.”

There wasn’t much left to do.

I walked out of the Summit Hall’s threshold and slumped down on the wide stairs just outside. The stone was cracked beneath me, warm from the light. I leaned back, staring up at the broken sky, letting the silence of the ruined world settle around me.

The sun was high, casting gold over the rubble. A breeze moved the dust. Somewhere in the stillness, I thought of her… of Xin Yune. The woman who smiled when she didn’t have to, who stood by me when I didn’t deserve it.

“Maybe I’ll see you again,” I whispered to the wind. “One of these days.”

And then I waited… It was quiet, one with the ruin, with only the warmth of the sun and the faint hum of divine power left to hold me together.

I had a sudden thought.

Nongmin. That lunatic. I remembered how he once said he tried to reach the sun by literally flying at it like some divine moth with a death wish. I couldn’t help but chuckle. What was that Emperor doing now, anyway? He’d mellowed out a bit lately, yeah, but I’d still deck him if he wouldn’t stop those genocidal campaigns against the migrating realms.

Still… I feared for him. If the Heavenly Temple ever came for him next… well, that’d be messy. But no. I shook my head. That wasn’t my problem anymore. I had enough on my plate. Or rather, enough ‘off’ my plate now that I barely had any limbs left.

This death was coming for me… maybe I could pretend it was my final prank on the Emperor? A petty little “gotcha” from the afterlife, like now, I am gonna die, so I am gonna leave this mess to you, okay? Eh. Didn’t help. I still felt that dull ache in my chest… the kind that wasn’t physical.

“…I’m gonna miss that guy.”

No point staying still. I reached inside myself one last time and cast Zealot’s Stride.

Golden flashes bloomed beneath my feet like divine fireworks, launching me upward with force that cracked the air. I rocketed through the sky, tracing the path of the sun. The buffs from Exalted Renewal still lingered, still cradled me in borrowed strength. That old miracle had juice left.

I might just reach it. The Sun.

Nongmin said the Hollowed World was shaped like a Dyson Sphere, right? It wasn’t exactly the words he used, but that was the idea. A fake sky built around something at the center. He’d been curious about what was at the core of this world. Me? I never really cared, until now.

I cast Flash Step. Again. Again. My vision blurred. The clouds shattered behind me. The heavens stretched endlessly above me, trying to pretend there was no end.

But I pushed forward.

I let my Divine Sense flood outward, farther than ever before, ignoring the way it frayed at the edges. It pierced the illusions above, bypassing the formation arrays that tried to warp my perception. If this were Earth, I’d have already broken through the stratosphere. Up here in Xianxia land, I might’ve even outrun reason.

And yet, even with the wind howling and my skin flaking into light, my mind wasn’t on the sun.

It was with them.

Ren Xun. He wasn’t technically a disciple, but in the end… he kind of was. That stubborn, sharp kid.

Gu Jie. That serious lass, and always carrying too much. I hoped she could break free of that shell someday. I wanted her to live, not just exist.

Lu Gao. Bright-eyed and filled with fire. That boy had a future if someone hadn’t snuffed it out. He would probably be fine.

Hei Mao. That little ghost kid… Damn it, I still hadn’t found a way to bring him back. I felt like I owed him more than just a pat on the head and a promise I couldn’t keep.

And then… Ren Jingyi. My little goldfish. She’d be so pissed if she knew I just fizzled out like this. Not sad but furious. Probably find a way to curse me even in death. Man… I was such a shitty master.

Suddenly, the sky fought back.

Formation lines blazed like stars igniting mid-cloud. Cosmic glyphs flared into life, locking across the heavens like a celestial gate. Fiery energy raged forward, divine punishment made real. The Hollowed World didn’t want me going higher.

I zigzagged between them, weaving between the starfire trails. My legs were gone, dissolved into motes of light trailing behind me like a comet’s tail.

I didn’t stop.

I wouldn’t stop.

Not until I reached whatever lay at the center of this hollow shell of a world.

My limbs were already gone. My body flickered, a fading image sprinting through divine turbulence. Even my Divine Sense began to sputter and blink, unable to keep hold of who or what I was anymore.

And still… I thought of her.

Alice.

She’d said she’d turn me into a thrall if I dared to die before upholding our deal. And yet, with how I was going, there wouldn’t even be a corpse left for her to enslave. Sorry, Alice. Looks like I scammed you after all.

A single tear trailed from my eye, the only part of me still physical.

It evaporated a second later in the heat of the sun’s path.

And then…

I ceased to be.

…

..

.

But that wasn’t the end.

You see, I lived.

That was the important part. Not that I died. Not that I broke apart.

No.

I lived.

With my regrets, my joys, my stupid jokes, and my broken promises. With my friends, my disciples, and that big dumb heart of mine that always bit off more than it could chew.

That’s the legacy I left behind.

Not my body.

Not my spells.

Just this truth:

I lived.

When San Pedro or whoever’s manning the gates of whatever afterlife was out there, asked me how I died?

I’m gonna argue. If not, maybe throw hands. I’d puff out my chest, plant my foot, and argue like a common thug or a bratty kid who thinks the world owed him lunch.

“I didn’t die,” I’d say. “I lived.”

And there’s a difference. A big one!

Ask yourself this… how many times do you live in a day? Really live, not just breathe and exist. And no, that was not some trick question where you gotta pull out a calculator or solve for x. 

To me?

My answer would be: forever.

I lived forever in a day. The next day. The day after that. And every yesterday I dragged with me, kicking and screaming.

In a way, that made me immortal, didn’t it?

Not because I beat death.

Not because I dodged karma or pulled some divine cheat code.

But because I lived. Really lived. Burned like fire. Shined like gold. Screwed up. Tried again. Loved, lost, fought, wept… and laughed harder than I should have at the worst times.

So no… when they meet me on the other side, I didn’t want them to ask me how I died.

I wanted them to ask:

“How did you live?”

And I would smile, with nothing left but memory and grit, and I’d say…

“With everything I had.”