The chasm beneath the Island Bearing Kun was no longer just a wound in the world—it was a breathing tomb of ancient power. As Su Mengtian descended deeper, the layers of spirit pressure thickened. The storm parasite's essence had begun to churn, its whispers echoing in tongues lost to all but the oldest remnants of existence.
When Su Mengtian finally reached the final chamber, the air split like the skin of an overripe fruit. Lightning spiderwebbed across obsidian veins in the walls, but none of it struck him. The parasite pulsed at the center of a swirling vortex, a monstrous, shapeless thing—storm-forged and time-corrupted. Its body shimmered like mist and current, its many eyes spiraling open with each heartbeat.
"You wear the storm's scent," the creature hissed through a hundred unseen mouths. "But you are not its child. What are you, little thunder echo?"
Su Mengtian stepped forward, unshaken. The divine lightning sigils along his arms flickered, but then dimmed.
"I am not here to destroy you," he said. "But I will not kneel, either."
The Storm Parasite shrieked—a sound that shattered the stone beneath his feet. Winds surged, hurling raw storm qi like razors. Mengtian raised his arm.
The air behind him warped.
And then—he opened the gate within.
Black energy burst from his back, forming a massive, shifting void in the shape of a simian head with a crown of broken halos. A roar followed—not of rage, but of sovereign memory. The pressure inverted. The entire abyss trembled.
The Storm Parasite froze. Its many eyes blinked in disbelief.
"No... that blood... It cannot be."
Mengtian stepped forward again. The silhouette of a towering ape formed behind him—more than ten meters tall, forged from void and cosmos. Its skin bore scars of starfire and oblivion. Its arms crackled with gravity itself. It was the shadow of the Ancestral Void Ape God.
"This blood is mine," Su Mengtian said, his voice layered with ancestral echoes. "You will see it... and you will remember."
The Storm Parasite's memories surged forth—fragmented, chaotic.
Epochs ago, before the current cultivation era, the Ancestral Void Ape God had stood among the Primordial Nine—beasts that shaped the laws of heaven. It ruled the gravity wells of the old universe, its fists able to crush constellations.
It had not been cruel, but its presence warped reality itself. Cultivators once sought to tame it—none returned.
In its final battle, it had faced the origin of chaos—a mirror entity birthed from raw entropy. Their clash had sundered the ancient skies, and the Void Ape had vanished.
But one remnant survived: its bloodline, sealed in an unborn heir.
The Storm Parasite, once a lesser entity forged during the chaos era, had seen the Void Ape devour an entire plane to rescue a dying child. That image—the void-enclosed punch, the thousand-mile leap through dimensional storms—was etched into its core.
It trembled.
"You... bear His mark," the Parasite whispered. "Why would such a bloodline sleep so long... in a human?"
Mengtian said nothing. The void silhouette behind him extended one colossal hand toward the storm entity.
"Submit," he said simply.
The parasite screamed—this time not in defiance, but in awakening pain.
The storm cocoon shattered. Runes writhed across the ground. The abyss inverted.
The parasite shrank, coiling in submission.
It spoke with only one voice now. "I will follow... Great Ape Heir. But only in secret. The world must not yet see."
"Agreed," Mengtian said.
And with a flick of void-infused lightning, he sealed the storm parasite within a fragment of Kun's soulstone, now embedded into his left shoulder.
The pact was formed—not of chains, but of understanding.
As he ascended from the abyss, he bore the storm's wrath, Kun's inheritance, and the forgotten legacy of a god.
And no one—not Yueying, not the Hallmasters, not the Empire—knew the truth:
That Su Mengtian was now heir to the storm...
...and the Void.
Su Mengtian stood in the darkened sanctum beneath the Island Bearing Kun, a world apart from the surface and its squabbling factions. The Storm Parasite—ancient, immense, a consciousness threaded through raw, volatile aether—now pulsed in subtle synchronicity with him. Their pact, formed in silence and witnessed only by the living abyss, was sealed by revelation.
Ancestral Void Ape God.
The moment Su Mengtian had exposed the lineage dormant within his soul—a primordial stormbound beast, older than empires and gods—the Storm Parasite had changed. No longer wrathful, no longer whispering defiance. It had wept.
Now, bound not by chains but by reverence, it slumbered within his storm core.
But this divine bond had a cost.
Su Mengtian's body was no longer entirely his own.
His meridians twisted like threads of black gold, bearing marks not of cultivation, but inheritance. Every breath pulled not only spiritual energy, but fragments of echoing void. His skin hummed with ancient runes, faintly visible under moonlight—an ethereal silver ink like ancestral etchings.
The first change came during meditation.
He sat in stillness, deep in the storm-forged cavern, as Yueying stood watch. Within, he reached toward his core—and met resistance. The Storm Parasite's soul, while cooperative, now curled within his foundation, tethered to his newly awakened bloodline.
The Void Ape's power wasn't elemental. It wasn't confined to flame, ice, thunder, or shadow. It was conceptual.
It governed dominance over space and devouring of will.
Spatial folds trembled when he concentrated. Distance warped subtly in his presence. Once, as he reached for his water flask, it was suddenly in his hand—having crossed the room without effort. Another time, a scuttling centipede veered away, its instincts screaming to avoid something older than instinct.
Yueying noticed too.
"You're not releasing aura, yet the world bends near you," she whispered that night, studying his silhouette. "Even light resists falling on you directly. As if it fears being consumed."
He nodded. "It's not cultivation—it's inheritance pressure."
She touched his wrist, then recoiled. "Your veins... they're hollowing. Becoming conduits for something outside this realm."
Su Mengtian could feel it. The bloodline, while potent, brought instability.
At night, dreams plagued him. Not memories—visions.
He stood beneath black suns. He walked endless ruins where Void Apes knelt in silent meditation, each large enough to carry cities on their shoulders. He watched one—a king, perhaps his progenitor—tear through Ethereal Devourers, godlike enemies that had once ruled voidspace, cleaving them with hands wrapped in spiral galaxies.
And in the final dream, that king turned to Su Mengtian.
—Not all power serves. Some devours the one who dares awaken it.—
He awoke gasping.
The second change was in combat.
In a skirmish with elite scouts from the Golden Rock Clan who had attempted to steal mapping records from the secret realm, Su Mengtian reflexively activated the Void Ape's bloodline.
Time paused for a moment.
The scouts didn't notice. But Mengtian saw them moving slower—so slow. And then he moved.
In a breath, he appeared behind the lead warrior. Not teleportation. Void folding.
His palm brushed the warrior's back. Not a punch, not a strike.
The man collapsed. His spirit fractured. He screamed, clawing at invisible claws, whispering of eyes in the dark.
Mengtian had devoured a fragment of his soul—not by intention, but instinct.
Ji Yeyan later inspected the battlefield. "Nothing left of his aura. He'll never cultivate again," he muttered. "This isn't a battle art. This is... extinction."
That night, Su Mengtian locked himself in the storm sanctum and refused to speak.
The Void Ape God was no saint. It was revered, yes—but it had once reigned as the Tyrant of Nullspace, slayer of dimensional parasites and cosmic invaders. It had fought for balance—but did so by consuming.
And now, its heir bore the same burden.
He sought control.
Training in the sealed chamber, he pushed against the threshold of spatial distortion. For hours, he would stand unmoving, forcing his body not to fold space. He ran laps around the storm pillars without bending distance. He forced his instincts into submission.
He bled from his palms more than once. But by the seventh day, he succeeded.
He bent, but did not break.
The third change came within his cultivation path.
His old technique—the Heavenly Spear Rooting Art—could no longer hold his power. The Void energy shredded its channels. The meridians cracked under pressure.
He had to rebuild his internal world.
Using the knowledge granted by the Kun Echo and memories from the Storm Parasite, he devised a new system:
—The Ninefold Void Rings.
Each ring would anchor a portion of his spatial energy, creating loops of folded dimension within his dantian. Unlike cores, these rings expanded outward—spirals of abyssal strength that could manipulate pressure, momentum, and terrain in layered dimensions.
Even Yueying watched in awe as the first ring formed.
"It's not Qi cultivation," she said. "You're building a universe in your core."
Mengtian smiled faintly. "Void isn't emptiness. It's freedom. The freedom to shape meaning in space."
But the rings brought danger too.
Each time he formed a new fold, the seal on the Storm Parasite pulsed. Not in rejection, but in curiosity. It too grew stronger with each ring—bound yet ascending. And somewhere beyond the abyss, others had noticed.
—In the distant Astral Depths, a forgotten beast stirred.
—In a ruin beneath Crimson Sky City, a slumbering array blinked to life—recording the activation of Void Lineage.
—And in a sealed monastery far to the west, a blind monk wept. "The Devourer walks again. Balance must rise—or all shall fade."
---
Back in the secret realm, Su Mengtian sat in stillness, nine rings of layered shadow and light orbiting within his storm-forged body.
He had tamed the Storm Parasite. He had awakened the Ancestral Void Ape God.
But the world was not yet ready for either.
And his greatest challenge was still ahead:
To walk among men without becoming a god.