Nezha rose slowly, breaking through the surface with a gasp. The air felt heavier than before. The clouds were beginning to clear, and the world looked unfamiliar — too bright, too quiet, too human.
The waves rocked around him, gentle now, almost tender, as if the sea itself mourned what it had lost.
He stood atop the water, Fire Wheels humming beneath him, and looked back once at the horizon. The blood from the battle spread out in spirals, faint and vast, dissolving into the dawn—divine ichor, luminous even as it faded, the last remnants of a prince who had carried his father's fury and his own sorrow.
Nezha's hands were stained with it. Rust-red and black where seawater had dried over his palms, mixing with his own wounds. He stared at them, uncomprehending.
He whispered, barely audible:
"I didn't want this."
No answer came — only wind and the endless, indifferent sea.
---
He turned toward the shore. Toward home.
Each rotation of the Fire Wheels left a ripple of flame across the surface — faint, fleeting, vanishing behind him like memories he could not hold.
His body ached in ways that had nothing to do with injury. The divine fire inside him—the one that had always burned bright and wild—now felt like embers scattered in ash. Not extinguished, but dimmed. Hollowed.
He had won.
But victory tasted like salt and iron and grief.
---
As he flew, the sun rose, gilding the water in light.
For a moment, it looked as if the world itself bowed to him—golden and beautiful and achingly still.
But Nezha's eyes were lowered, his face unreadable.
He was coming home.
But something of him would never return.
The sea had gone quiet again.
But Nezha could not bear its silence.
Every movement sent ache through his limbs — the kind of exhaustion that didn't live in muscle, but in the heart. He hovered a moment longer above the dark water, staring down where Ao Bing's body was already sinking back into the deep, swallowed by the same tide that had birthed him.
He felt the pull of it — not physical, but moral, spiritual, something older than law.
*I killed him.*
The thought came bluntly, without defense or denial. The waves rocked, and his reflection wavered between boy and god, between flame and flesh.
He closed his eyes.
Inside him, the divine fire flickered. It no longer roared; it whispered.
Each breath came with the taste of iron and ash.
He wanted to go home, to see his mother's face, to rest his head on her lap and hear her say the same words she always did — *"My child, it was just a dream."*
But this time, the dream had teeth.
And it had bitten deep.
---
He lifted his gaze toward the horizon. The coastline was visible now—fishing boats like scattered seeds on the water, the thin smoke of morning hearths rising from Chentang Pass.
So close.
*I kept my promise. I'm coming home.*
Yet the weight in his chest did not lift.
For the first time, the god-born child felt small.
---
He turned toward the shore and willed the Fire Wheels forward. They obeyed—reluctantly, as if even they understood the weight of what had happened.
As he ascended into the thinning clouds, his body left faint trails of embered light across the dawn—each spark dissolving into the wind, lost before it touched the world below.
The air above the sea was thin, crystalline. The world curved away beneath him—an endless shimmer of blue that made him dizzy with its vastness.
He flew higher, not because he needed to, but because something inside him demanded distance. The horizon looked cleaner from up here. Farther. Simpler.
Yet no height could wash the ichor from his hands.
Nezha's breathing slowed. The Fire Wheels dimmed to a soft glow, carrying him like drifting suns.
Below, the faint shimmer of the coastline began to appear—home, where his name had first been spoken with love.
He thought of his parents—of Li Jing's stern eyes, his mother's gentle hands.
Would they see what he had become? Would they understand?
He remembered Taiyi's voice before he left:
*"Power tests itself through consequence, not through mercy."*
At the time, he hadn't understood.
Now he wished he hadn't.
---
He pressed a hand to his chest, feeling the dull throb beneath his ribs. It wasn't just pain—it was a hollowing, a vacancy that spread outward like ice. The divine flame inside him no longer comforted; it scalded.
Tears burned at the edges of his eyes, and when they fell, they turned to steam before reaching the wind.
The mountains of Chentang Pass broke through the mist at last.
The morning sun had risen fully now, painting everything in the gold of false peace. Villagers below were beginning their day, unaware that the sky above them carried both salvation and tragedy in one small, burning figure.
Nezha slowed.
From this height, he could see the pond near the estate—his mother's pond—glimmering faintly in the distance. The same one that had frozen when he was three.
For a moment, he thought he saw two figures by it—one seated, one standing—and the ache in his chest twisted sharper.
He wanted to call out. He wanted to tell them he was home.
But when he opened his mouth, no sound came.
Only the wind answered, whispering through the fire trailing at his heels.
---
He hovered there for a long moment—the boy who was born from a lotus and shaped by Heaven, who had slain a dragon and felt no triumph. The boy who had learned, too early, that divine blood and mortal heart cannot live in peace.
The sea stretched behind him like a wound that would never close.
Finally, with a soft breath, he whispered—not to the world, not even to his parents, but to himself:
"I didn't mean to."
The Fire Wheels stirred.
He descended.
As Nezha crossed the final span of air between the sea and the land, the light of dawn reached him full—a blaze of red and gold that caught in his hair, in the sash that fluttered weakly behind him.
For a heartbeat, he looked again like the child of miracle he had once been—luminous, fearless, divine.
Then the light shifted, and his shadow stretched long across the ground, dark and thin, trailing like a stain.
He could see the manor now. The pond. Two figures standing at its edge, small from this height but unmistakable.
His mother. His father.
He wanted to call out, but his throat closed.
He wanted to run, but his body was lead.
Instead, he simply descended—slowly, carefully, like something fragile learning to land.
The heavens were silent.
The sea was still.
And in the space between sky and earth, between what he had been and what he had become, Nezha came home.
⸻
---
Far below, at the edge of the pond, Madam Yin looked up at the distant flame descending from the sky. Her hand pressed to her mouth, tears streaming down her face.
She whispered into the morning air, half prayer, half promise:
"Come home, my son. Whatever you've done, come home."
And perhaps—just perhaps—the distance between them was not as great as it seemed.
⸻
**End of Part III — The Surface**
*Next: Chapter IV — The Lotus and the Hearth*