A century for one ghost king.
For nine hundred and ninety-eight ghost kings, Wang Chen had waited close to a hundred thousand years.
It was a span of time so vast that an ordinary mortal would fail to even grasp its weight. Civilizations would rise and fall countless times within such a stretch, histories would be born and erased, and yet… for Wang Chen, it passed almost unnoticed.
Time, within the first floor of the tower, had long since lost its sharp edges.
It no longer dragged.
It no longer pressed.
It simply flowed.
Whenever he waited for a ghost king to appear, Wang Chen did not idle away those empty stretches. His hands were always occupied. Sometimes he would sit before a furnace, working with strange, unrecognizable metals, watching how they melted, fused, and resisted. At other times, he would sit in stillness, polishing his mind, refining his thoughts until even the smallest fluctuation became smooth and controlled.
