After Slaying a God, I Guard the Ashen Wastes for Eternity

When the seventeen-year-old exorcist Su Jie kicked apart his first shrine, he never imagined that three hundred years later he would be trapped in the wind-swept Ashen Lands.

Su Jie was once the most defiant shadow beneath the neon lights. His talismans burned brighter than sparks, and his gaze was colder than the bronze bells of a shrine. Alone, he cleaved open the boundary between gods and men, believing that so-called gods were nothing but scum surviving on the faith of others.

Until the Boundary Ruler fell, and gray became the eternal backdrop.

Watching the sharpness he once possessed grind into a dull ache among the ice shards, and hearing the warmth of humanity drift across the boundary marker behind him, he finally understood: the blade that had once split a statue of a god had ultimately been turned on himself.

The cruelest curse is not divine punishment. It is being forced to stay clear-headed forever as you watch the fulfillment you traded your whole life for, knowing you alone are missing from it.

And the young people who later entered his life stood beyond the boundary holding signs that read, "We'll wait for you to come out." They stood there for three hundred years.