A soundless tear split the skies above the dying layers of Heaven.
From the shattered dome of the celestial sanctum, a massive rift spiraled outward, a collapsed dimensional fissure that pulsed with raw, lawless energy. Like the ripped seams of existence itself, it glowed with flickering edges of black, violet, and dying gold—where divine reality ended and the unknown void began.
Amid this chaos, the sky cracked like glass, raining down glowing shards of shattered god-law. The pillars of the upper sanctums had already collapsed, their once-immaculate marble now glowing cinders strewn across the burning plains of Heaven's last horizon.
At the fissure's edge stood a lone figure, dim against the storm Xian Ren.
What remained of his godly form shimmered weakly. His robes, once woven from immortal clouds, now hung in tatters, torn and burnt. Ethereal blood seeped from his chest and hands, vanishing into mist before it could fall. His once-proud posture now bent under the weight of what he had sacrificed—his immortality, his name, and most of his soul.
And in his hands hovered a cocoon of Soul Warding Threads—glimmering filaments of ancient law, wrapped around a single glowing orb no larger than a closed fist. This orb was not a soul, not truly.
It was a fragment of his cultivation memory, his strategic instinct and his echoing love for Yue Ling'er.
That was not enough to live, but just enough to begin again.
The fissure roared like a breathing monster. Its depths shifted endlessly—clouds made of dead time, shadows that spun without form, and streaks of collapsing worlds spiraling toward nowhere but he didn't flinch.
"Go," he whispered, voice raw and cracked.
With a flick of his wrist, the soul fragment shot forward—launched into the void, wrapped tightly in its protective threads, trailing lines of starlight behind it like a comet sent to defy destiny.
The light was swallowed whole within the Fissure.
Silence.
Then, motion.
The soul fragment tumbled through the space between realms—not empty, but layered, dense with faded rules, broken mana, and the corpses of forgotten laws. Across the path, flickers of discarded dimensions passed like memories. Phantom continents, upside-down skies, half-formed lifeforms crying silently into collapsing reality.
But the soul warding threads held.
Each shimmered with a golden glyph, pulsing rhythmically. These ancient weaves responded to pressure from hostile laws, deflecting, absorbing, nullifying. They bent space around the fragment, guiding it like a compass needle through a sea of chaos.
The destination: Veylanth.
As the cocoon approached the last border between realms, it passed through layers where thought bled into sight—where intent became vision. Within this liminal dream-space, the soul fragment saw glimpses of the world it would soon enter.
—A city built from thread, its towers spooled skyward like spindles of cloth magic. Loom-walkers danced across the air, weaving bridges that flickered into existence beneath their feet.
—Temples of woven stone, where monks inscribed reality using thread-bound mantras. Scrolls levitated, wrapped in living script, unfolding and folding with each breath of their creators.
—But the glory was crumbling.
The skies above Veylanth darkened. Mana threads frayed and snapped like overused string. Storms of untethered spellcraft tore through capitals. Empires of needle and rune collapsed into screaming ruin, Looms cracked. Weavers bled threads from their fingers in desperation.
In a mountain's heart, sealed in a cocoon of divine fabric—Yue Ling'er.
Her soul flickered like a candle trapped under water, sealed and unmoving, suspended in a prison of spell-threads and divine runes too complex to be unmade.
The fragment felt a tremor, a pull. A longing that echoed through its limited consciousness.
But it could not go to her yet.
The outer shell of the warding threads began to strain.
The fragment had reached the final boundary, where Veylanth's native mana pushed violently against foreign intrusion. The world rejected the divine—its thread-born laws suffocating any alien soul.
The cocoon shivered and runes sizzled. No full soul could enter, only a fragment and only a shadow can enter.
But even a shadow needed a place to land a host.
While searching for a host as the fragment pierced into the upper atmosphere of Veylanth, light returned.
Distant stars, pale moons and a sky draped in slow-moving veils of golden-thread clouds.
Below, the world mountains stitched into the horizon like wrinkles in old parchment. Rivers that flowed with mana-infused dye. Cities wrapped in silken banners fluttering weakly, their colors drained by war.
The fragment searched. It passed over forests, over battlefields.
It skimmed across dying capitals, watching as thread soldiers fell, their embroidered armor unraveling mid-battle.
But it needed someone dying, not dead. Someone empty, yet alive. Then—It found a ruined village full of charred walls, broken spindles and homes that were burned to the foundation.
Amid the ash and rubble lay a boy, no more than sixteen. His chest barely rose. A shard of stone impaled through his side. One arm crushed beneath a fallen loom frame. But his eyes—just barely—opened to the sky.
His soul was dim, threadless, dying and most of all, it's open. The fragment paused then threads flared and descended.
High above the world, back in the ruins of Heaven, the last breath of divine wind howled across the desolate plain.
Xian Ren stood at the edge of the crumbling chamber, watching the faint glow of the fissure disappear.
His vision had begun to fade—colors dulling, sound narrowing.
His fingers, once capable of collapsing galaxies with a flick, now struggled to stay curled.
As the last sliver of light from the soul fragment vanished into the world below—
He whispered, so softly even Heaven did not hear:
"Go. Be reborn. Then return to me."
Then his knees gave out.
He fell to the broken marble, hands scraping through divine ash. Above him, the laws he once ruled cracked into ribbons. The pillars of Heaven's highest sanctum collapsed in sequence.
One by one dust rose and the sky closed.
And the body of Xian Ren—final god of a fallen Heaven—was buried beneath the silence of the end.
To be continued…