38 Billion Years Ago — A Point in the Cosmos
There was a silence that stretched across the eternal black.
And within that silence, far beyond the reach of any mortal perception, a battle unfolded—not of mortals, but of gods.
Three beings stood suspended in the void, robes flowing like liquid starlight, drawn from the grandeur of ancient dynasties.
Their garments bore the pattern—embroidered with constellations, weaved with the silk of dimensions.
But there was nothing noble in their eyes now—only fury, and the bitter sting of long-forgotten debts.
The first to strike was Chen Feng.
With a shout that sent tremors across unseen dimensions, he hurled his fist forward—
A beam of radiant energy exploded from his knuckles like a judgment. It tore through the dark, spiraling with deadly precision.
And then, half of a nearby galaxy vanished.
Stars blinked out like candles snuffed by wind. Entire solar systems shattered like glass under the weight of a single blow. Space itself groaned, bending unnaturally as deep fissures cracked across the very fabric of reality.
Chen Feng's voice echoed like thunder through the void.
"Tian Dao, scarm from here! This isn't your fight!"
But Tian Dao didn't move.
The second figure, sharp-eyed and composed even in chaos, raised a single palm.
With an effortless sweep, he deflected the ray—just enough to curve it away from himself.
It twisted off its course and continued, demolishing what little remained of the blasted galaxy behind them.
Tian Dao floated forward, expression unreadable.
"How could I not participate," he said, voice eerily calm. "When the two of you are so desperate to destroy each other?"
He glanced at Chen Feng, then toward the third figure.
"Whoever dies today... will return to me regardless. But that's not enough. I want more. I want both of you. I want everything returned."
A third presence cut through the tension like a blade drawn in a shrine.
A woman stepped forward—neither ally nor bystander. Her white hair flowed like a river as it cracked space, bound loosely behind her shoulders. In her hand, she held a katana—not forged, but manifested, its blade humming with condensed reality.
She was quiet, graceful... until she struck.
"Tian Dao," she said flatly, "you've gone too far."
With a single motion, she sliced the air.
An arc of pure energy burst forth from her blade—white and perfect, splitting the space in front of her like paper. The cut didn't just move through space; it cracked it, tore it, unraveled it.
It wasn't a sword strike—it was a cosmic wound.
Both Tian Dao and Chen Feng stood in its path.
Tian Dao reacted instantly. His hand flashed through a sigil, and behind him, a large hand of energy surged to life. It shot forward and, without hesitation, grabbed Chen Feng.
He pulled Chen Feng forward—into the path of the oncoming attack.
"Chen Feng," he said with a voice like ice, "die for me."
Chen Feng's eyes went wide.
There wasn't time to think—only enough to feel. Pain. Rage. And grief deep enough to crush galaxies.
As the blade's energy neared him, Chen Feng's lips trembled.
"I... I can't fulfill my wish. And now I'm dying like this..."
He closed his eyes for a moment, then whispered:
"I am... pathetic. Forgive me... my dear."
And then he opened them again.
Not with fear—but with purpose.
He clenched his fists and screamed into the void:
"IF I HAVE TO DIE TODAY—THEN I'LL TAKE YOU BOTH WITH ME!"
His body began to shake—then burn.
But it wasn't fire. It was his soul. His consciousness began to tear away from reality.
His very existence unraveled. Essence became energy. Thought became destruction.
He was self-destructing. Not as an act of desperation... but as a final curse.
The woman gasped. Her voice cracked with alarm.
"CHEN FENG! YOU MAD MAN!" she screamed. "You want to take the world down with us?!"
Tian Dao's face darkened, he summoned a massive energy shield—a dome forged from his highest techniques, formed from layers of reality, and pure defensive will.
It shimmered like an ancient gemstone, pulsing as it absorbed the incoming dread.
He clicked his tongue.
"Tch. MADMAN..."
Then it happened.
For a moment—just a moment—there was nothing.
No sound.
No movement.
Chen Feng collapsed into a point smaller than a speck—a point of infinty, black calm.
And then—The universe screamed.
A blast emerged from that point—not like an explosion, but like a truth too terrible to contain.
Light was shredded. Dimensions inverted. Every rule that bound reality—forgotten in an instant.
The blast expanded faster than light. Faster than thought. It did not explode—it erased.
And with it—
One-third of the known cosmos vanished.
Entire swathes of creation blinked out. Not destroyed—unwritten. Like they had never been there at all.
Chen Feng was gone.
But his vengeance remained, stitched into the scars of the universe.
--[PRESENT DAY]--
LU CONTINENT
The sun sat high in the clear blue sky, bathing the twin peaks of Mount Heng in a golden glow.
Birds chirped lazily in the trees, and the breeze carried the scent of pine and distant spring water.
It was, by all appearances, a fine and peaceful day.
But peace, as always, was fragile.
Perched on the lower of the two peaks—a flattened plateau surrounded by sharp cliff edges—stood a small, hand-built wooden hut. Crude but sturdy, it was the only sign of life on the mountain.
And from that hut stepped a young man, no more than twenty-two, carrying an old hatchet slung across his shoulder.
Han Chen—orphan, woodcutter, and child of the mountain.
His hands were rough from years of chopping and hauling, and his simple robes were patched in a dozen places.
He looked up at the sky and frowned. The blue had dimmed. Clouds, thick and swirling, gathered too quickly to be natural.
"Tch... is it gonna rain again?" he muttered, shielding his eyes with one hand. "Looks like I'll have to skip today."
And then—Something appeared.
Far above, high in the sky, a shadow formed. Round. Dense. Ominous.
Han Chen squinted.
At first, he thought it might be a cultivator descending from the heavens.
In the Lu Continent, ordinary mortals often called such beings immortals—figures who could fly through the sky and split mountains with a flick of their finger.
But this wasn't a person.
It was a ball.
A pitch-black sphere, darker than night, falling with unnatural speed and direction.
His heart sank.
"What... is that?" he whispered, eyes wide. "Is it... an immortal artifact?"
Before he could take another breath—
BOOM.
The sphere slammed into the topmost peak above him—the true summit of Twin Mountain.
The impact shook the very bones of the mountain range.
Birds scattered, the sky roared, and the wind screamed down from above. A rumble followed, long and low—like a beast awakening beneath the earth.
Han Chen staggered as the ground trembled.
And then he heard it.
Crack. Snap. THUNDERING RUMBLE.
He turned—eyes darting upward toward the higher peak.
Boulders the size of ox-carts broke free and began to tumble.
Chunks of shattered rock rolled down the cliffs. Earth cascaded like water. The whole upper peak was collapsing.
"Shit—!" Han Chen cursed and ran.
Behind him, stone crashed into stone. He darted across the clearing, his sandals scraping the rocky ground. His heart pounded in his chest like a war drum.
A sharp, splintering crack! rang out—
One of the support beams from his hut snapped loose under a flying rock and shot through the air like a spear. It slammed into his left shoulder, knocking him off balance.
"Aghh—!"
He gritted his teeth and kept moving, one hand clutching his bleeding arm.
A large rock crashed directly into his home, shattering it into debris and crushed timbers.
Han Chen turned just in time to see his house collapse. "DAMMN IT!!!.."
Another boulder bounced off the side of the peak, ricocheted, and struck the ground just meters from him. The shockwave sent him tumbling.
"Ugh—!" He rolled, gravel digging into his back, another shard of wood slicing across his ribs.
Blood now stained the front of his robes.
But he didn't stop.
He couldn't.
He knew this mountain. Knew every tree and every rock. And at the base of the clearing stood an ancient giant—a titanic tree with a trunk ten meters wide. A relic from an age long past.
Han Chen sprinted for it, lungs burning, vision blurring from pain and dust.
Another stone flew past him—grazing his leg and causing him to stumble, hard.
He crawled now, dragging himself the last few meters.
Just as another avalanche of debris roared down from above, he threw himself behind the tree.
He pressed his body flat against the bark, chest heaving.
The tree groaned under the pressure but held strong, shielding him from the worst of it.
Crashing rocks. Screams of the wind. Dust so thick he couldn't see past his own hands.
Ten minutes passed.
Then, silence.
Only the soft hiss of settling dust and the occasional clatter of dislodged pebbles remained.
Han Chen emerged slowly, blood dripping down his arm and leg.
He limped across what used to be his home—but now, the once-flat land was gone.
The two peaks had merged under layers of collapsed stone and soil. A single mountain remained.
But the summit—the place where the black sphere had fallen—was now eerily flat. Smooth.
As if something impossibly heavy had pressed it down.
He looked at the ruins of his hut—shattered beyond recognition, buried under the weight of falling earth.
Han Chen stared in silence. Then he clenched his fists, his breathing shaky.
"Damn it..." he muttered.
Han Chen stood amidst the rubble of what used to be his life, staring up at the peak that had once towered above him. But now… it was no longer a peak.
It was flat—like something divine had pressed its palm down on the mountain and crushed it smooth.
He couldn't look away.
There was a pull. just pure curiosity.
He took a breath, winced at the pain in his side, and began the long climb upward—step by aching step.
The terrain was strange—too smooth, too fresh. Almost unnatural.
Loose stones shifted underfoot as he crossed into what was now the new summit.
A thin mist lingered in the air, almost like the mountain hadn't finished exhaling yet.
Then he saw it.
The crater.
In the center, perfectly still amidst cracked and scorched stone, lay a pitch-black sphere.
It wasn't large—barely the size of a man's head—but its presence was... overwhelming. The air around it felt thicker.
Han Chen approached slowly, his breath caught in his chest.
"That thing fell from the sky," he thought, eyes wide. "And survived..."
He crouched near the edge of the crater, eyes locked on the orb. "Could it be... an immortal artifact?"
In the Lu Continent, treasures of the immortals were the stuff of legends. Mortals who found them either vanished into fortune—or madness.
His fingers itched.
"Should I touch it?"
"Or maybe… maybe I could turn it over to an immortal sect," he reasoned.
"Let them clean up the mountain for me as payment. That alone would be worth more than a lifetime of chopping firewood."
He reached out—cautious, slow.
The moment his fingertips brushed the surface of the sphere—
It moved.
The orb floated silently upward, lifting itself into the air without a sound. Han Chen staggered back, stunned.
Crack.
A thin white line appeared across the center of the sphere, like a fracture in glass.
The crack spread, widening smoothly as light began to pulse from within—an unearthly glow of deep violet, so bright it drowned out the surrounding black.
Then it opened.
The sphere unfolded like an ancient eye—silent, deliberate.
A single pupil revealed itself in the center, glowing with such intensity that the blackness around it became almost invisible.
A black eye with a violet pupil, now staring.
And it was looking at him.
The eye circled him slowly—floating around his body, examining, reading something far beneath the skin.
Han Chen's heart pounded. He didn't run. Couldn't.
All he could think was :
"This thing... this thing could buy me a whole lifetime of luxury."
"I could sell it, auction it, trade it to the sects. I'd never have to chop another tree in my life."
But the eye had other plans.
Before he could speak another thought, the eye stopped in front of him, locked onto his face—And surged forward.
"What the—!" Han Chen gasped—
The eye shot into his forehead.
A sharp pulse of heat slammed into his skull as if lightning had struck directly into his mind.
His eyes rolled back. He dropped to his knees.
A red circular seal—glowing with arcane symbols—blazed to life on his forehead, spinning silently.
For a moment, the air around him hummed with power, light, and unreadable whispers.
Then—
The seal flickered once, and disappeared.
Han Chen collapsed.
He clutched his forehead, groaning, pain flaring behind his eyes like fire.
His entire body trembled as if some foreign force had entered him—and started rearranging things from the inside out.
"Ahhh—!" he cried out, curling into himself. His breath came in shallow, rapid gasps.
And he fainted.
-----TO BE CONTINUED-----