The Infinite Ascent
Chapter 0: The Day the Sky Broke
Before the heavens shattered, I was nothing.
No name. No family. No future. Just a hollow boy, one more forgotten soul in a world that had no space for the weak. The Nine Great Dynasties ruled with iron and splendor, their banners stretched across continents. Cultivators walked the land like living legends, their sects carving palaces into mountains and fortresses into the clouds. The common people looked to the sky and believed it eternal an unchanging dome of blue, beneath which generations were born, lived, and died.
It was a world of ambition and fear, where mortals prayed for scraps of protection from powers vast and cruel, and where even the gods themselves were bound by the laws of heaven. Life was fragile, yes, but it was certain. There was order. There was balance.
Until the day the sky broke.
It began with a sound that was not thunder, nor wind, but something greater the death cry of creation itself. The heavens, which humanity had once held as unchanging and steadfast, shattered like fragile glass, splintering into a thousand shards that fell like stars against the cold, unyielding stone of reality.
I do not remember dying, and perhaps that is the strangest truth of all. One moment I was alive, clinging to the edges of existence, and in the next I was somewhere else a place between worlds. Perhaps the shattering killed me, or perhaps it stripped me from the flow of life and set me adrift. I will never know.
Above me, the vast celestial canopy that had stretched like a protective blanket for millennia began to break apart, cleaving into countless fragments that spiraled through the air. No longer did it promise the permanence of a nurturing sky; instead, it revealed a gaping void an infinite abyss, dark and inscrutable that lay hidden behind the comforting illusion of blue.
Through this grievous wound in the firmament, an unfathomable emptiness stared back, vast and eternal, as if it were somehow alive, thrumming with the pulsing rhythm of an ancient and terrible heartbeat. From its depths, a presence loomed above, immense and cold, its gaze both intimate in its clarity and terrifying in its implications, as though all of existence had maniacally shrunk into the singular fragility of my own heartbeat.
In that transformative instant, the great empires of man crumbled to dust, their once-proud banners of the Inner Dynasties turning to ash in the cruel winds of fate. The divine armies that had marched confidently into battle scattered in abject terror before the onslaught of a calamity they could neither face nor understand. The grand sects, those proud institutions that had claimed dominion over the profound mysteries of cultivation for centuries, fell apart as their formidable ancestral wards evaporated like morning mist before the relentless sun. The legendary Sea of Verdant Eternity boiled into nothingness, while the majestic Mountain of the Ten Thousand Gods fractured, its shrines collapsing as idols wailed in horror and fled, consumed by the abyss.
Amidst this monumental unraveling of reality and the despair that gripped the hearts of billions, I alone remained aware. Others screamed, fled, or were consumed, but I… I stood apart unremarkable, nameless, and yet untouched. Whether by fate, curse, or design, I could not say.
And it was in that harrowing moment that I first heard the voice, cutting through the chaos like a beacon amidst a storm.
[You have touched the Boundary.]
[A path has been opened.]
The voice, calm and unwavering, echoed with otherworldly clarity, piercing the tumult as though the collapse of worlds was little more than a whisper brushing against the fabric of my consciousness.
I should have ignored it. I should have screamed, or fled, or collapsed into madness like so many others. But in the face of a void that devoured everything, the voice was the only thing that did not crumble. When the world itself abandoned me, it remained. I listened because there was nothing else left to listen to because to ignore it would have been to surrender to silence, and silence meant erasure.
In that instant, my reflection became something unrecognizable. Where once there had been frailty, a flicker of something greater ignited within me. Snow-white hair framed sharp, angular features. My eyes, now molten gold, glowed with a predatory intensity that seemed to hold secrets of the cosmos itself. My robe shimmered with embroidery woven from starlight, and upon my waist, a sigil of black and gold pulsed faintly resonating with a rhythm akin to a heartbeat, marking me as one who had crossed an irrevocable threshold.
Yet the voice did not offer praise or comfort. Instead, it presented a question, an ultimatum that resonated with the weight of eternity.
[Will you walk the Path?]
Even as continents crumbled into fire and despair, even as gods clawed desperately at the veil of reality, the voice offered me no sanctuary, no escape. I begged for oblivion, but my plea was swallowed by the vast emptiness. The voice remained resolute, demanding an answer.
And so I chose. Not because I was brave, nor because I was worthy, but because the alternative was nothingness. To remain still was to vanish. To step forward was to exist.
The day the sky broke was not merely the day I witnessed the end of the world; it was the day I was torn from the grasp of mortality. It was the day of my unmaking, a day when I was dismantled only to be remade anew. It was the moment the Path itself chose me, yearning to unfold the secrets of existence.
The road revealed before me stretches infinitely a tapestry woven from brilliance and shadow, from promise and peril. It is no ordinary destiny, but rather an odyssey that transcends the very limits of eternity, a journey fraught with challenges that would test the essence of my being.
And so, I walk it, step by arduous step, bound by the allure of discovery and understanding.
The Path of the Infinite Ascent beckons me onward.
The road without end stretches endlessly before me,
The curse and the blessing that all worlds shall ultimately come to dread.
To be continued…