The thunderous roar swept across the nine heavens as entities beyond immortality clashed to stop a man who was just a step away from reaching the pinnacle of cultivation.
"Tian Ren! This is where your progress ends."
A man mounted on a dragon's head yelled, his sword shivering, asking for the blood of his enemy.
Another man, a bald monk atop a brown bead, had no reaction on his face.
He warned, "Cripple your cultivation and we'll let you live. Don't waste your life on something you aren't meant for."
"Tian Ren, you remember me, right? We met thousands of years ago." a beautiful woman with purple seductive aura around her looked at Tian Ren.
"At that time, I had warned you of this outcome, but you still ended up following such a path." Her tone was stern, looking disappointed because of Tian Ren's pursuit of Godhood.
Finally, he spoke, followed by an erratic laugh.
"HA-HA-HA! So you all feel threatened that you came together to stop me today from advancing to Godhood!"
Almost half of the God Ascension Realm cultivators were present today to stop him from completing his ascension.
They didn't answer him but glares with grim expressions.
"Just accept that you bunch of God Ascension cultivators are afraid of a guy who hasn't even stepped into Godhood yet."
SIGH!
A sigh resounded as another man showed himself. From his position, it was clear that he was the one leading the charge.
"Tian Ren!" the man called out.
He looked younger, even younger than Tian Ren, but in reality, he was an old monster who had lived for more than a hundred thousand years.
His words were smooth, even ruling over time, as he continued, "Don't think you are special. We aren't afraid of you, but of the devastation that will follow because of the cultivation you practice."
"Excuses!" Tian Ren spat upon hearing their justification.
"Tell me, who among those present here—or those who are still hiding themselves—hasn't spilled blood to reach this place?"
His words hit home.
Everyone present had killed countless beings to reach this place, yet here they were making excuses and acting like saints for the very thing they had followed in the past.
Instead of answering Tian Ren, the man spoke, "There is no reason to argue with you. You have already lost your rationality."
Suddenly, Tian Ren felt the world begin to blur.
He was already injured from their pursuit, but when the man in front attacked him, Tian Ren didn't even have time to react before he felt his body begin crumbling like sand.
"This is your end, Tian Ren."
"This is the end of Demon Immortal."
The man's words were absolute, reverberating in Tian Ren's mind as he lost all sense of time.
His body withered, followed by his soul. However, a tiny wisp of his soul still managed to escape.
It wasn't his doing, but a cosmic anomaly that saved his soul from withering by attaching its own existence to it.
...
Somewhere on a dead planet, a few humans were running from mutated beasts.
The beasts were sand worms, but due to mutation, some of them could now even fly with their huge, dragon-like bodies.
"Shit! Whose plan was this, to kill sand worms for the bounty? Now we have become prey for them." The man with spiky yellow hair yelled.
"It was your plan, Gon Zee! You came with the bounty to hunt the worms so we could earn spiritual crystals."
The woman running beside him yelled, cursing Gon Zee for coming to this dead planet without doing any research.
"Shut up, Han Rui! You agreed with me when I proposed the idea." Gon Zee retorted.
They ran towards their spaceship's coordinates. Behind them were their other teammates following.
"Use quick teleport now! We are in range."
Gon Zee yelled and used quick teleportation, vanishing and appearing inside their spaceship, which was above the planet's orbit. Otherwise, the flying worms would have attacked the ship too.
One after another, they all used it and safely ended up on the ship. Just then, Han Rui noticed a man was missing.
"The guide? Why isn't he here?" she asked.
Gon Zee's eyes widened. "I forgot to share the ship's coordinates with him. It seems we lost him." He said this without a hint of remorse in his voice.
Han Rui, with guilt, called out, "You're stupid! He has those crystals with him; we have to go back."
However, Gon Zee shook his head. "We can't go back, you know that. With those dragon-like worms behind him, he must be dead by now."
"Forget it. Those crystals are now going to end up in the belly of the sand worms, along with our poor guide."
"Let's leave this shitty place."
They left without gaining anything but losing the guide which they had hired.
...
Tian Ren saw the others vanishing one by one, and his heart gripped with fear.
Without the exact coordinates, he couldn't use quick teleportation and now he was left alone with dozens of sand worms following him from behind.
Thanks to his cultivation, he managed to keep himself safe, but he knew that once his chaotic Qi depleted, he was going to die.
Still, he ran because he couldn't fly yet, especially without proper equipment.
Just then, the land beneath him moved, and a big mouth like a black hole opened and swallowed him whole.
"Shitttttt!" he cursed, but it was already too late. He ended up inside the belly of the worm.
Tian Ren slipped inside, a strange substance leaking from the worm's walls, causing him to begin fainting.
It was a mechanism of the beast that secreted an acidic liquid and gas to help decompose a body into nutrients.
However, just as he began losing consciousness, a buried memory began to surface—memories of his past as an immortal, in a different world from this one.
Suddenly, he found himself struggling for his life in front of dozens of Cultivation Gods but just as he saw himself being killed.
Then, an ancient aura with powerful ripples was released from his body, blasting the whole worm into pieces while his body flew away in the sand and he finally lost consciousness.
The worms who were trying to devour him suddenly began keeping their distance as anything that came close to him was shredded into countless pieces.
Like an unknown power was keeping him safe.
...
After an hour, Tian Ren, with a mix of current and past life memories, woke up to find himself still on a dead world but surprisingly alive.
"Wasn't I in that worm's belly?" he muttered, seeing that he was safe, while there was no sign of the worms who were chasing after him, earlier.
This confused him. Just then, he saw a screen flare up in front of him.
"What?"
There was no sound, just a message he saw on a virtual screen. This made him even more confused.
"I don't remember carrying any communication device with me, so what is this?" He muttered as the words changed.
"I'm Tian Ren, I know that." Tian Ren answered upon reading the message.
"How do you...know?"
He had just gotten his memories back and was still reeling from the reality that what he saw—a different world, where heavenly Qi still existed, unlike the chaotic Qi they used here—was all real.
A place called the paradise of cultivation with heaven & Earth still exists.
Heavenly Qi was the Qi used in the Nine Heavens to cultivate, a power born from heaven and earth, but here, in the Galactic Cultivation Universe, the earth had been destroyed after the apocalypse, and heaven had vanished somewhere, forcing beings of this world to absorb the chaotic Qi, an unrefined version of the heavenly Qi.
Another shock hit Tian Ren. "You saved me? Who are you?"
"Cosmic what? What does that mean? Are you some GOD or a divine being?"
<...>
It didn't immediately answer, as if it was contemplating Tian Ren's questions. Then it spoke.
It was Tian Ren's turn to contemplate what he had just heard. Then, with wide eyes, he asked, "Don't tell me, the medium you are talking about is me?"
Tian Ren now knew how he reincarnated in this world and who helped him, but there was still a question in his mind, so he asked, "I'm grateful to you for saving my life, and if my assumption is right, then you saved me just now too?"
The being calling itself a cosmic intelligence was in a deep slumber for an unknown amount of time or even existence, but one day it woke up when Tian Ren faced his demise.
Upon seeing this, it ended up saving Tian Ren's last wisp of soul.
After that, it suddenly again ended up in a slumber when Tian Ren fully lost his consciousness and his memories of past lives were sealed.
However, with the return of his memories, the cosmic intelligence also woke up from its short slumber.
"So what do you want from me?" Tian Ren asked, knowing nothing is free in this world.
I want to experience life, as I have already experienced death during the time of your demise.
I want nothing. Just let me accompany you to the end of this cosmos, and in return, I'll help you reach the pinnacle of Godhood, which you couldn't in your previous life.>
"Godhood!"
Tian Ren remembered everything—his goal, his life, and even his death. He felt frustration, he felt anger, and now he was getting a chance to relive that dream once again.
"I accept," he said, after a moment of thought.