Chapter Two: The Great War

For the next four years, Ao Bing and Li Nezha had been inseparable. Training together, laughing together, growing stronger side by side. Even after all that time, neither of them knew the other's true identity. Each had assumed the other was a noble from an important family in their respective realms, a fellow heir burdened by duty and expectations. Knowing they themselves sought to keep their lineage hidden, they never pressed the other for answers, content in the quiet understanding that some secrets were better left unspoken.

When they were both the mortal equivalent of sixteen years old, duty beckoned with an inevitability neither could escape.

Li Nezha was to join the Celestial Plains Army, sworn to defend the realms alongside his brothers. Ao Bing, a son of the Eastern Sea, was bound to its Navy, entrusted with protecting the oceans and their borders. Neither had a choice. They would walk separate paths, each preparing for a war that would define the fate of the four realms.

On the eve of their departure, they stood at the edge of the vast ocean that marked the boundary between their worlds. The water shimmered under the moonlight, a silver ribbon winding between them.

“We’ll meet again when this war is over,” Li Nezha said, gripping Ao Bing’s wrist tightly.

Then, just as the wind stirred the surface of the water, scattering moonlight across the ripples, Ao Bing saw something that made his breath catch. The way the light hit Li Nezha’s eyes at that moment, transmuting them into a kaleidoscope of color. He’d known Li Nezha for years, but this was the first tim he was noticing how the emerald greens of his eyes glowed at the edges, gleaming like the first shoots of spring breaking through frost. Within them, warmer tones unfurled—browns as deep and grounding as the forest floor after rain, the kind of earth that cradled the roots of ancient trees. Amber specks, scattered like flecks of molten gold, caught the light and flared, burning like embers in the dark, alive with something untamed and unknowable. 

“Hey Jianyu, did you hear me?” Li Nezha asked, snapping Ao Bing from his trance.

Ao Bing nodded. “Yeah, yeah. When the war is over, find me,” he said, stubbornly, shaking his wrist away from Li Nezha’s grasp.

Li Nezha smiled, then looked up at the stars. 

“I promise,” he said to Ao Bing. “ I’ll find you.”

The two parted ways, and Ao Bing would not speak of the ache settling deep in his chest, nor the quiet sorrow that stretched between them like the ocean they stood before—steady, unspoken, and too wide to cross.

At sixteen, he did not yet have the language for such things.

In the time before war, before the heavens trembled and the seas roared with fury, there existed a realm beyond the reach of gods and mortals alike, a place known only in whispered legends and forgotten scriptures. It was called Xuandu, the Realm of Shadows.

Unlike the Underworld, which housed the souls of the dead and followed the laws of cosmic balance, Xuandu was a place that had never known order. It was a world between worlds, a chasm that stretched beyond the sight of celestial lords and mortal kings. It was born from the remnants of ancient chaos, from the ashes of the first war between gods and demons, where those cast out from the heavens and the mortal plane had gathered. A realm of exiles, of forsaken creatures, of those too monstrous for the mortal realm and too defiant for the underworld.

Xuandu did not obey the natural order. It was a land of shifting landscapes, where jagged peaks tore through the sky and rivers of black mist devoured all light. Time did not flow as it did elsewhere. Days could stretch endlessly or vanish in an instant. The land itself was alive, pulsing with a dark energy that warped everything within it, shaping its denizens into beings of nightmare and hunger.

It was in this forsaken realm that Kui Lou Mo Wang—the Demon King of Chaos—had risen.

The demon lords of Xuandu had once ruled in fractured chaos, each hoarding their own dark corner of the realm, warring against one another in an endless struggle for dominance. But he had seen what they could not. He had seen the potential in the chaos. He had forged order from the madness, binding the warring factions into a singular force. The creatures of Xuandu, twisted spirits, forgotten gods, beasts of ruin, became his army.

Yet he did not seek to rule Xuandu alone. The Demon King’s eyes were set on the four realms, on breaking the balance that had kept his kind chained to this prison of shadows for millennia. The Heavens had long ignored Xuandu, treating it as nothing more than a festering wound, an anomaly best left undisturbed. But the Demon King would make them see.

From the heart of Xuandu, where the sky itself was torn open in an endless storm of black fire, he had gathered his strength. He whispered to the forsaken, to the embittered, to those who had been cast aside by the Heavens and the Mortal realm alike. He offered them something greater than vengeance. He offered them dominion.

His plan was simple: when his forces had grown too vast to be contained, when the Heavens would let their guard down, believing their peace eternal, he would unleash Xuandu upon the world.

And so, the storm came.

Xuandu’s forces descended upon the realms in a tide of shadow and flame. The Heavens, once untouchable, found their gates shattered. The Seas, once unyielding, churned with the bodies of the fallen. The Underworld, ancient and unshaken, quaked under the weight of something far more terrible than death: obliteration. It was no longer just a war. It was annihilation given form.

For the first time in history, the three great realms—the Heavens, the Underworld, and the Seas—set aside their ancient rivalries and stood together against a common evil. Celestial generals fought alongside underworld enforcers, divine warriors clashed beside the ocean’s fiercest defenders. It was a war unlike any before it, waged across the skies, the land, the depths of the sea. Five years of relentless bloodshed. Five years of battlefields drowned in fire and shadow.

Kui Lou Mo Wang, the harbinger of chaos, the ruler of the forsaken, tore through the Heavens with the might of a being who had never once tasted defeat. His power was an abyss, vast and insatiable, swallowing the strength of his enemies and twisting it into darkness. He was unstoppable.

Until, at last, he wasn’t.

The war reached its climax at the Gates of Xingyuan, the bridge between the Heavens and the Mortal world, where the last light of day burned crimson against a sky choked with smoke and ash. Kui Lou Mo Wang stood at its threshold, his form a swirling mass of darkness, his power vast and unyielding. Though his armies had been torn apart, though his generals lay slain or scattered, he remained the embodiment of chaos itself. 

Yet, from the churning seas, Emperor Ao Guang rose with the wrath of the Four Oceans at his back, his trident gleaming in the dim light, its tip crackling with the fury of the tides. The waters surged at his command, towering waves crashing upon the battlefield, swallowing the remnants of Xuandu’s flames and choking out the poison that had seeped into the land. The ocean itself became Ao Guang’s weapon, forming serpentine torrents that lashed at the Demon King, their divine currents coiling around him, crushing him with the pressure of the deepest abyss. The waters drowned out his fire, erasing the last traces of his corrupted army, but still, Kui Lou Mo Wang fought, breaking through the waves with a force that split the earth beneath his feet.

From the Heavens above, Emperor Li Jing, the Supreme Commander of the Celestial Army, descended in a blaze of golden light, his spear raised high. The very sky seemed to shudder as he called forth a tempest of divine fire, celestial lightning cascading down like the wrath of the gods themselves. The moment his feet touched the battlefield, the air thrummed with power, the weight of the celestial decree pressing down upon the land. He struck first, his spear clashing against the Demon King’s blade in a collision that sent shockwaves across the battlefield, splitting mountains, shattering the very ground they stood upon. But he did not falter. Each strike was heavier than the last, each movement precise, unrelenting, the force of the celestial realm bearing down upon his foe.

And from the depths of the Underworld, Emperor Yan, ruler of the dead, stepped forward, his robes billowing in the unnatural silence that followed his arrival. He carried no weapon, he needed none, for his presence alone was the weight of inevitability, the force of judgment that even demons could not escape. The ground beneath him turned to black stone, fissures of ghostly fire slithering through the cracks, and with a single motion of his hand, the very concept of time seemed to still. The battlefield grew cold. The air itself grew heavier, suffocating with the knowledge that Death itself had arrived, and it would not be denied.

The Demon King roared, his power surging, shadows twisting like living things, writhing and clawing to break free. He fought like a beast cornered, like a god betrayed, his strikes carrying the strength to tear through the heavens, to drag the world into the abyss with him. But the three emperors did not yield.

Ao Guang’s waters crashed upon him, relentless and endless, drowning his fire, stripping away the darkness that clung to his form. Li Jing struck with celestial fury, his spear carving through the shadows, divine law unraveling the chaos that had once made the Demon King untouchable. And Emperor Yan, silent and unshaken, raised his hand once more, not to banish, but to end.

The darkness around Kui Lou Mo Wang cracked like shattered glass. The shadows bled away, ripped from his form as if the very laws of the universe were rejecting him. His breath came ragged, his body faltering beneath the combined might of the three realms. 

And then, with a final, resounding blow, the Demon King fell.

But as the dust settled, as the warriors of the three realms stood in victory, Kui Lou Mo Wang, broken but not erased, lifted his gaze.

 

His lips curled into something that was not quite a smile, his eyes burned with something that was not quite defeat.

The gods of the three realms debated for days. To kill him would be the simplest solution, an end to a nightmare that had cost too much. And yet, the cost of such destruction was uncertain. He was no mere demon. He was chaos incarnate. To unmake him entirely might unmake more than just him.

So they chose to seal him instead.

At his trial, the Demon King stood before the three realms in chains of divine steel, his power stripped from him like torn flesh. No longer a conqueror, no longer even a demon lord, only a being bound and broken. His sentence was not death, nor exile, but eternal imprisonment.

They locked him within Xuandu, the Realm of Shadows. Its gates were sealed with the might of heaven, its skies bound with fire, its soil drowned in water, its heart pierced by divine law. Its demons, its resentful spirits, its forsaken horrors, all imprisoned alongside him, trapped beyond the reach of the living, beyond even the grasp of death itself.

It was over.

Or so they thought.

One day, he would return. And when he did, he would not come to conquer.

He would come to devour.

Author’s Note: Thanks for reading Chapter Two! This one had a lot of world building. I wanted to give you a clearer picture of Xuandu, the Demon Realm, and why it matters so much. Unlike the Underworld, which is part of the natural balance, Xuandu is pure chaos. It is where the castoffs of gods and mortals ended up, and over time it turned into something dangerous enough to threaten all the realms.

Xuandu  became a kind of dumping ground for things too wild and too dangerous, or too defiant for either the mortal realm or the heavens to tolerate.

Hope you enjoyed diving into the lore!