Dominion's End

V3Epilogue: Afterword

Dominion's End Volume 3: Ice-Bound Splendor and Majesty

Original novel in Chinese by: 御我 (Yu Wo)

Epilogue: Afterword—translated by Elkin 

The afterword has spoilers

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All right, let's start.

The Ice Emperor has come solidly in first place as "the most pitiful person in Dominion's End," winning over even Guan Weijun. This is a real feat as the characters who are usually the most abused in my books are all the ones who are referred to as the main characters, so this is a rare instance where a side character takes the crown.

In this volume, I was most worried that I didn't properly portray the Ice Emperor's desire to die.

At the start, when the apocalypse descended onto the world, the Ice Emperor had the advantage of having firepower and his mercenary troop at hand, so life wasn't very difficult for him. As such, he underestimated the power of the apocalypse. By the time he made up his mind to go home, by the time he'd discovered that things didn't seem right, it was too late. "Going home" squeezed the Ice Emperor's heart like a vice. Having come to this point, whether it was the question of whether his younger siblings were still alive, or the sacrifice of his comrades for this purpose, all these hounded him to the point where he had no choice but to go home.

In the end, he got home and discovered that his family was long wiped out. His heart shattered into pieces.

Then, after thinking that he had found the right solution, which was to go back to the past, start afresh and change everything, he regained the impetus in life for his heart to start beating again.

And to this end, he even abandoned his last surviving comrade, Lily, and even turned his back on his responsibility as a leader.

When the Ice Emperor traveled through time and space, Thirteen was still alive, and he hadn't gotten his revenge for Xiao Sha.

For even someone as strong as Jiang Shutian, after mentally getting beaten over and over throughout the apocalypse, his spirit had become completely crushed.

He couldn't protect his younger siblings. He had dragged each member of his mercenary troop to their deaths. He couldn't avenge his troop's deaths. He abandoned his last comrade. And he even abandoned his whole world.

Remember, the extra chapter mentioned that the Ice Emperor was one tier stronger than the Thunder God and the Flame King (well, technically not one whole tier as the other two were close to breaking into his tier by just a little bit), and he gained another tier after killing the Shuyu aberrant. So the Ice Emperor could be said to be the strongest in the world, and the extra story was set less than ten years into the apocalypse!

With the Ice Emperor's might, it was possible that he could lead humanity out of its dire straits, but it wasn't bad enough that he didn't contribute anything to humanity's future, he even dumped humanity to one side without a thought.

The culmination of all this meant that he could no longer live with who he had become. The sense of guilt and blame had reached terrifying levels, to the point where even the Ice Emperor couldn't live with it. If not for the fact that he wanted to send Shuyu home and see Shujun, he probably would have completely broken down after looking at the world map and seeing that something was wrong.

So yeah, that just about sums it up.

But this is not to say that the Ice Emperor was weaker than Shuyu (Weijun). Rather, he was the classic type who was so strong that he became brittle. Rather, it's guys who're like weeds who can sway with the winds and storms and adapt to all sorts of environments who thrive best and take over the entire ecosystem.