"Not all who die are granted a place in the cycle of reincarnation.Some are so forsaken, even the heavens seek to forget them.Yet they… were once the closest to touching the true essence of the Heavenly Dao."
Northern Wastes – The Ashen Ravine
Lâm Mạc journeyed alone through hundreds of miles of frost-laced desolation.
The wind bit at his flesh like a thousand hidden blades.Not a single living creature dared approach.
Before him lay an abyss—bottomless, shrouded in a gray mist like the overturned cauldron of heaven.A rotting scent of ancient bones and dead Spiritual Blood seeped from below.
This was Tàng Cốc, the Ashen Hollow—known in forgotten chronicles as:
"The graveyard of those who once dared to rewrite the Celestial Tome."
The moment he set foot inside, the blood in Lâm Mạc's veins surged—not from fear, but because the ash in his blood recognized this place.
"Welcome, you who possess no Dao, no name.""You have come to the right place.""This… is where those like you are buried."
A voice echoed—not with sound, but as remnants of will,whispered from bones that had decayed for ten thousand years.
He stepped deeper, into a wasteland littered with ash-hardened remains.
On each skeleton, Dao sigils had been carved—etched by dying hands, words that carried no power…but shook the soul.
"To defy the Dao—sin or path?""I saw the Heavenly Dao kill a child… for being born at the wrong hour.""If death preserves the Dao, then what purpose does life serve?"
No force was passed through these scripts.But each one forced the reader to confront themselves.
Lâm Mạc stood motionless.His blood stilled.And then—he saw himself…
…become each soul who had perished here:
A man who sacrificed wife and child as offerings, for a single chance to question the Heavens.
A cultivator who ascended to the Ninth Heaven, only to be slain by his master for "violating fate."
A nameless youth, hunted by every sect for daring to ask: "What is the Heavenly Dao?"
He screamed—yet no voice emerged.
"Am I them… or are they me?""If the Dao is just… why do all the righteous die?"
A streak of gray ash cut through the illusion.
Lâm Mạc emerged from the blood of the fallen, his eyes ablaze:
"I have seen it.""This Dao was never meant for us.""But precisely because it was not meant—I will take it for myself."
From within his Dantian, a new form of his Ashen Dao Heart unfolded:
Not only did it absorb his own blood-ash,
It also linked to the lingering wills of the countless fallen cultivators.
Beneath the earth, ancient bones began to glow faintly,passing into him shards of emotion, fragments of forgotten dreams—like countless broken threads weaving together a song that had never been finished.
He became the vessel of ten thousand unfinished Daos.
A single brittle skeleton cracked open.From within, a white shard surfaced, etched with bone-carved script:
"You are the one we waited for.""Carry this Dao… out of the grave."
It was the Mystic Bone Sigil—the first fragment of the lost Primordial Dao Canon.
Lâm Mạc took it into himself.His blood surged like a rising storm.
That night, as he left the Ashen Hollow,a strange phenomenon lit up the skies of the Northern Wastes:
The Summoning of Ten Thousand Souls.
The souls of unjustly slain cultivators drifted northward.
Those not yet dissolved into void… wept.
Even those who had transcended… turned back.
Amidst the stars, a voice resounded:
"You are the path that never existed—Yet all beings once longed for."
"You are… the Second Genesis."