Chapter 483: Supreme Being

“How?” Ji’an choked out, her voice a fragile, broken whisper. She looked wildly at Yan Zhaoge. “How did they get him?! He was at your monastery! He was in the training yards! He’s a Peak-Stage Sovereign!”

Yan Zhaoge’s jaw was clenched so tightly a muscle ticked visibly in his cheek. The Overtime Boss stared at the cage, his amber eyes burning with a dark, furious realisation.

“The transit gate,” Yan Zhaoge hissed, his knuckles turning white as he gripped his starmetal pipe. “When I opened the rift… it required me to temporarily drop the wards covering the Iron-Stone Monastery to bypass the World Will’s firewall.”

He looked at Ji’an, a rare, genuine expression of guilt flashing across his face.

“It was a window of exactly three seconds. The Seers must have been waiting in the upper stratosphere. The moment the wards fell, they didn’t come for us and dropped a concentrated celestial strike directly onto the training yards.”

Ji’an felt the bile rise in her throat.

While she was fighting Mo Wuchen in the desert… while she was walking the Corridor of the Eclipse, experiencing the agony of her past lives… Wangchen had been ambushed.

He had likely fought like a cornered, feral beast. He would have torn the sky apart trying to get to her.

But against the combined might of the Stargazing Tower’s elite enforcement division, catching him off-guard and un-warded… he hadn’t stood a chance.

“He fought with commendable, albeit primitive, ferocity,” the Head of the Tower intoned, completely ignoring the emotional devastation radiating from the trio. “It required the sacrifice of twelve High-Tier Seers to subdue him and affix the bindings. But it was a necessary expenditure to retrieve stolen property.”

“Stolen property?!” Ji’an shrieked, the panic morphing instantaneously into a blinding, white-hot, homicidal rage. “He is a human being, you sociopathic calculator! He’s a Sovereign of the Azure Empire! Release him right now, or I will dismantle your entire timeline!”

The Head of the Tower slowly shook his head, a gesture of pity.

“He is not a human being, Lin Ji’an. And he is certainly not a mere Sovereign of this lower realm.”

The elder raised his hand, pointing a pale finger at the unconscious, bleeding figure suspended in the cage.

“Look at him, anomaly. Look beyond the mortal vessel. Look at the absolute zero that bleeds from his core. That is not orthodox cultivation, not demonic magic. That is the foundational, unyielding chill of absolute cosmic law.”

The elder’s voice boomed, resonating through the chamber, vibrating against the glass floor.

“His name is not Xie Wangchen. He is the Prosecutor of the Heavenly Immortals. The supreme arbiter of the Highest Realm. He is the entity designed to stand above the gods, to freeze the corruption of the celestial courts, and to pass judgment upon the deities themselves.”

The words hit the chamber with the force of a physical blow.

Jiu Zui’s eyes widened in shock, his silver sword dipping slightly. Yan Zhaoge stiffened, his pipe completely forgotten in his hand.

Ji’an just stared. Her brain, already operating at maximum capacity, simply refused to process the data.

“What are you talking about?” Ji’an breathed, shaking her head in denial. “His mother was Immortal Fairy Xue. The Ice Queen of the Eternal Cloud Peak. He was born in the Azure Empire. I saw the memory! I saw her perform the Red Thread ritual!”

“Your vision was accurate, but your understanding of the actors is flawed,” the Head Seer corrected smoothly. “The woman you knew as the Ice Queen… the woman who called herself Immortal Fairy Xue… was not a mortal cultivator. She was the Heavenly Scribe. The chief architect of mortal fates within the Highest Realm. She was the one who wrote the ledgers we enforce.”

The elder’s black, void-like eyes narrowed, a flicker of ancient, bureaucratic disgust crossing his marble features.

“But she was flawed. She became overly invested in the mortal variables she was meant to manage. She developed… attachments. Specifically, to a mortal woman whose fate she was documenting. A woman named Ling.”

Ling Fairy.

Ji’an’s mother. The original Lady Lin.

Ji’an’s breath caught.

The pieces of the cosmic puzzle were no longer just falling into place; they were rearranging themselves into an entirely different, infinitely more massive picture.

“The Heavenly Scribe violated the ultimate edict,” the elder continued, his voice heavy with condemnation. “She abandoned her post. She descended to the mortal plane, masking her celestial aura, and assumed the identity of Immortal Fairy Xue. She sought out Fairy Ling, that woman who claimed to be her friend, intending to live a mortal life, to experience the chaotic, unscripted emotions she had only ever written about.”

The elder pointed at the unconscious Wangchen again.

“But before she fled the Highest Realm… she committed her greatest sin. She stole a spark from the Primordial Forge. The spark intended to form the next Prosecutor of the Heavenly Immortals. She brought it with her to the mortal realm, housing it within her own womb, intending to raise the supreme judge of the gods as a mere mortal child.”

The revelation was entirely paradigm-shifting.

Xie Wangchen wasn’t just a prodigy. He wasn’t just a boy born with a freakish affinity for ice magic.

He was a literal weapon of cosmic justice, stolen from the heavens before he was born, and raised in the dirt.

“The Stargazing Tower was created for one purpose, Lin Ji’an,” the elder declared, spreading his arms wide, gesturing to the spinning rings of the astrolabe above them. “We are not merely accountants. We are his servants. We were forged to serve under the Prosecutor. To guide him. To ensure he stays on the righteous path of absolute law.”

The elder lowered his arms, his gaze locking onto Ji’an with a terrifying, unblinking intensity.

“When we finally located the rogue Heavenly Scribe, we executed her for her treason. We also executed your mother for her complicity. But we could not extract the Prosecutor. The Scribe, in her desperate, final act of rebellion, had bound his soul to yours using the Red Thread. She tethered the supreme judge of the Heavens to a fragile, chaotic mortal anomaly.”

Ji’an looked at Wangchen in the cage.

She saw the blood on his white robes.

She remembered the Tenth Timeline, the boy in the rags, starving in the slums, his eyes dead and hollow. She remembered the First Timeline, the boy bleeding out in the snow, smiling because she had given him a flower.

‘They tortured him,’ Ji’an realized, a cold, nauseating horror washing over her.

“You knew,” Ji’an whispered, her voice trembling with a rage it transcended the physical realm. “You knew who he was. And you let him suffer. You drove him mad.”

“We did what was necessary to preserve his core!” the elder countered, his voice rising, projecting the unwavering conviction of a zealot. “The Red Thread corrupted his primary function! It infected the supreme judge of the Heavens with mortal obsession! With jealousy! With love! These are flaws, anomaly! They are systemic errors that render him incapable of unbiased judgment!”

The elder took a step forward, looming over the trio.

“We orchestrated the tragedies. We ensured your deaths. We forced him to watch you die, over and over again, in a calculated, centuries-long crucible. We intended to break the mortal attachment, to prove to him that his obsession with you would only bring ruin. We sought to temper his soul, to burn away the mortal infection through the agony of loss, so that he would finally abandon you and assume his rightful throne!”

The cruelty of it was unfathomable.

It was a level of psychological torture so vast and detached, that it defied human comprehension.

They hadn’t just been punishing Ji’an.

They had been trying to break Wangchen. They had used her violent deaths as a grinding wheel to sharpen the Prosecutor of the Heavens, hoping that if they made loving her painful enough, he would simply stop.

But they had fundamentally miscalculated the nature of the Ice Demon.

Instead of letting go, Wangchen had gripped the thread tighter.

Instead of abandoning his mortal attachment, he had doubled down, his soul fracturing into an yandere madness, fueled by the desperate, terrifying need to protect the only thing in the universe that mattered to him.

“You failed,” Ji’an sneered, a bitter, vicious smile crossing her face.