The lines of unformatted white light splintering across Haoran's silhouette were not merely wounds; they were chronological ruptures. By sewing his flat shadow into the perimeter of Yuxiao's body to act as an external chassis, he had bound his own timeline directly to the twins' expanding mass. Every micro-millimeter the heirs grew tore away a piece of his history.
The first rupture struck the very beginning. Within the cracking geometry of Haoran's chest, the memory of The Mortal Ascension began to leak out into the bleached void.
Suddenly, the conceptual weight of Chapters 1 through 10 vanished from his foundation. The initial Structural Pillars he had climbed as a mortal warrior simply ceased to have happened in his personal ledger. The phantom feedback of those early, grueling ascents—the sweat, the shattered bones, the raw mortal triumph—was wiped from his existence. Because those chapters were unwritten from his core, the foundational strength he derived from them evaporated.
The silhouette sagged, the jagged white cracks widening.
Yuxiao felt the sudden drop in the structural integrity behind her. Her hands reached back, trying to grip the edges of his shadow, but her fingers passed through the unformatted white light. "Haoran! Your beginning... it's gone. The script is pulling from the source of our first years!"
The twins did not care about the origin of the legacy; they only required the momentum. The Starlight Princess absorbed the unwritten energy of those ten chapters, using the mortal climbing instinct to accelerate her own metabolic ascent within the womb. The amniotic fluid of the Womb-Gate Horizon surged, glowing with the stolen effort of a young warrior's first climb.
Haoran did not flinch, though the loss of his beginning made his silhouette flicker violently, almost fading into the chalky white background of the dying universe. He tightened the Threads of the Absolute, pulling the external chassis even closer around Yuxiao, reinforcing her form with the remaining ninety chapters of his foundational era.
He was shrinking, condensing his entire 500-million-year majesty into a smaller, denser shield, refusing to let the rupture touch her.
In the pale, bleached air above them, the countdown script felt the sudden acceleration of the timeline, the numbers rewriting themselves in a jagged, liquid pulse: 455 chapters remain.