White drops the world, then hands it back too bright.
Knee-high grass. Dry wind with a seed-sour bite. Two pale moons - one fat, one a clipped coin. A thousand strangers blink in the same breath and don't know what to do with their hands.
A toddler wails. Someone retches into the yellow. A ring of keys lands in the grass and turns into jewelry for no one.
Wang Shuai stands barefoot with a damp towel over one shoulder, steam still peeling off his skin. Soap. Dust. The faint iron of his own heartbeat. Faces everywhere - office suits, grocery baskets, swim shorts, a grandpa in slippers, a girl with a paper star taped to her shirt.
The voice threads every skull, toneless and absolute.
[I am the Heavenly Ordinance: Hongjun.]
Every head lifts as if pulled by one string.
[Earth's doomsday has arrived.][All humanity will migrate to Veld Prime, 1,321 times the size of Earth.][Warning: demon beasts roam Veld Prime. Death is possible at any moment; longevity is also possible.]
The wind keeps combing the grass. People forget to breathe until they notice they forgot.
A man in a security shirt says, "Is this a -" and the voice erases the rest.
[Each starter village contains 1,000 people.][Defense Level: 1. Blocks Level-1 beasts. Does not block Level-2 beasts.][Villages can upgrade. Elect a Village Chief to reach Level 2. Progression continues: Town → County → City → States → Dynasty. Defense increases at each tier.]
A white-haired woman whispers, "States? Dynasty?" as if naming birds they might see if they live long enough.
Wang turns in a slow circle. The field rolls away like a sea holding its breath. No trees close. No buildings. Far off, something dark - rock or water. The sky looks too large, as if someone raised the ceiling in the night.
[A Heavenly Dao System appears in each person's sea of consciousness. The System Store sells essentials.][Kill demon beasts to obtain beast crystals; exchange them for gold to use the Store.]
"Gold," someone laughs too brightly. "We're medieval again."
A boy grips an aluminum bat like a riddle; the bat doesn't promise answers. A child tugs a stranger's sleeve. "Where's my mom?" The stranger pats air two inches from her back, afraid to make this real.
A tall man with a soldier's back climbs a splintered crate. He opens his mouth to speak.
The voice reads over him, not rudely - like weather.
[Announcement: Heavenly Blessing begins to promote human bloodline evolution.][Different bloodlines awaken different abilities. The rarer and stronger the bloodline, the higher the chance of multiple abilities - including a super ability.]
The tall man shuts his mouth and nods once, as if he knows where he belongs in a sentence like this.
A thin howl drags a line across the horizon. Another answers from left. A third farther out. Metal striking metal, the body thinks when it doesn't want to say wolves.
The wind shifts; the grass answers.
The voice becomes a countdown that teaches silence how to count.
[Ten… nine… eight…]
"Down," someone says, and a dozen obey without knowing why.
[Seven… six… five…]
The tall man sets his jaw on east.
[Four… three… two… one.]
Light doesn't fall. It climbs.
It starts as a pinprick under Wang's breastbone - carbonation turning into weight. White threads run in from nowhere, stitch themselves to a point, and harden into a shape: eight trigrams, lines and circles remembering themselves, a furnace not of metal and not of metaphor forming inside him.
Heat without heat. A miniature bellows-breath.
Panels unfurl in his mind with clean, impossible edges.
[Bloodline] A3 evolution triggered.[Super Ability] Heavenly Furnace.[Abilities] Tenfold Critical; Hundred-Meter Blink; Electromagnetic Pulse; Chromatic Camouflage; See Through Hearts (Good/Evil); Cellular Regeneration; Beast-Tongue.[Realm] Level-1 martialist (early).[Weapon] Level-1 dao-saber (issued).
The phantom furnace opens and closes once, a hand-sized mouth inside him, then sinks deeper and goes still.
Around him people gasp, fold, laugh once like a bark, pray to gods that have no jurisdiction here. Somewhere a woman screams, not in pain but in the shock of being chosen. Somewhere a man vomits and is only a man again.
The tall man on the crate raises both hands. "I'm Li Jianguo. We need water, shelter, and a headcount. Elect a chief, we get Level Two defense. Volunteers -"
A chorus of howls shreds the end of the sentence.
Wang tastes the sound - Close the circle. Drive them to the teeth, the meaning arrives in him, Beast-Tongue making grammar out of rage.
Li Jianguo doesn't flinch. "We need meat. We move as a line. Anyone with a blade - form on me. Tonight we eat wolf."
He jumps down. Men and a few hard-eyed women step forward. Wang lets the towel slide from his shoulder and takes the dao-saber the System has hung at his hip by right no one voted on.
Stay small, he tells himself. Work later.
They move. Grass hisses at their thighs. The howls braid into instructions the pack understands. Flank left. Push the soft ones. Keep pups behind.
A cry from the line - someone tripped. The formation ripples and closes. The land dips, shallow as a held breath. The first wolf appears - a gray with a torn ear and a grin that isn't a grin. Then another. Then the veld pours knives.
The first seconds are ruin.
Teeth bloom red. A boy with the bat swings and finds nothing to hit; then everything to hit hits him. An elder goes down and doesn't rise. Panic unthreads the straight line into a curve, then a scatter.
Wang doesn't run. They're faster.
He drops into the grass and whispers, "Chromatic Camouflage."
Color ripples. Skin and clothes film to dead-straw yellow. He presses flat. Paws thunder inches over his face. Breath washes hot and rank. A pup missteps and plants a paw on his shoulder; its nails rake and find nothing. Level-1 eyes don't see him.
The main pack streams past after the screaming. What stays is chewing.
The slow tide arrives - old wolves, the lame, pups with bright pin teeth. They set to the fallen. The air fills with the wet rip of meat.
Wang counts. Dozens. A hundred plus. He eases the dao-saber free.
He vanishes.
The world smears a hundred meters; he reappears behind a limper. The blade is already falling.
"Tenfold Critical."
Steel kisses spine. The head parts. Hot red lashes the grass. Wolves rear, shocked into a ring.
He's gone again - Hundred-Meter Blink stitching him through their circle. The dao writes quick lines through throats; Critical turns each cut into a falling tree. Heads thump. Paws twitch. He doesn't touch pups. The furnace inside him beats one word: work.
The elders of the pack rally, slow and mean. He won't let them make a circle. Blink opens doors behind them; Critical slams the doors on their necks. Blood spatters his forearms; grass clots under his knees when he kneels to catch breath he pretends he doesn't need.
A thin high aoo needles the sky.
Call them. Call them back, the pups sing. Far off, the ground answers with drums of paws. Parents are coming.
"Faster," Wang says, and is.
He stops counting at seventy.
When the last old wolf coughs itself empty, the grass is a red rug and the pups are commas fleeing in every direction. Wang wipes the blade on a gray flank and goes to work.
Bellies open. The smell is worse than killing. His hands come out holding jade-bright beast crystals. He piles them, quick and neat: one, two, five - seventy-three.
The furnace hums like a struck bowl.
He opens his palm. White fire coils into an eight-trigram cauldron over his skin - Heavenly Furnace - quiet as a thought. He tips a carcass in; there is no time between is and ash. The ash tightens and drops as a smooth red bead.
[Heavenly Furnace] Refining: Level-1 beast → Level-1 core.
Another body. Another bead. Thirty. Fifty. Seventy-three. He stows the warm cores with the crystals. He tears belts, bundles a dozen dao-sabers from the dead who won't be needing them, knots them tight.
The veld says weather with paws.
A wall of gray crests the rise, sunlight strobing on eyes. The returning pack finds their elders gone and their pups screaming inventory.
Wang doesn't look back. He slings blades, cinches the pack, and blinks - grass ripping into a ribbon - and blinks again, a hundred meters at a time. Behind him, wolves find only ash.
The sound is its own horizon. He skims the veld toward the village's thin protection, chest burning, the furnace burning brighter. He drops into a swale, blinks to the far rim, and halts to see what he needs to see.
The front rank hits glass that isn't there.
Bodies jolt, snouts skid, anger ripples backward through the pack. The Level-1 barrier holds with no visible proof except frustration. Snarls pile up against the idea of a wall. A big gray with smart eyes paces, testing, learning. Not Level-2, not yet, but not simple.
Wang crouches in the grass outside the barrier. He listens to his breath. He feels the weight of loot on his spine - 73 crystals, 73 cores, a dozen blades. Inside the wall, a thousand people try not to count the dead. Li Jianguo is counting anyway. Children are learning to be quiet when they want to be loud.
He can walk in and drop meatless treasure on a table and light a furnace in his palm and let the village name him.
He can stay a rumor with a fortune on his back.
The big gray paces the invisible line and looks right at him as if it can't see him and still does.
Wang settles lower into the grass. The furnace settles with him, a patient ember.
He watches the unseen wall, and it watches him back.