The library of the Eternal Gu Clan did not house books in the way a commoner might understand them. It was a repository of "Memory Jades" and "Skin-Scrolls," stored within a mountain carved into the shape of a sleeping dragon. The air here was thin, ancient, and tasted of the copper-sweet tang of old blood. It was a place of silence, yet to those with ears to hear, the walls whispered with the failed dreams of ten thousand ancestors.
At the center of this silent tomb sat Gu Xian.
He was fifteen years old, an age where most disciples were drunk on the newfound power of their Qi-Condensation or lost in the hormonal fires of youth. But Gu Xian's eyes—dark, still, and unnervingly focused—held none of that heat. He was looking at a Memory Jade, but he wasn't "reading" it. He was analyzing the decay rate of the energy stored within.
"Observation 412," he thought, his mental voice as dry as the scrolls surrounding him. "The efficiency of Qi absorption in the standard 'Heavenly Flow' technique is approximately 14%. The remaining 86% is lost to atmospheric dissipation or internal friction within the meridian walls. Conclusion: The traditional path of immortality is a mathematical absurdity. It is a slow death disguised as progress."
Gu Xian was what the clan called a "Discard." His Spirit Root was a turbid, grey thing—a "C-Grade" vessel. In the cruel hierarchy of the Nine Heavens, he was destined to be a servant to the "Golden" geniuses, a stepping stone for their inevitable ascent. He had watched them his entire life: the arrogant young masters who stumbled into ancient caves and found miraculous pills; the "lucky" orphans who possessed bloodlines that defied the laws of biology.
He had watched the Great Algorithm of the Heavens at work.
To the world, it was "Fate" or "Providence." To Gu Xian, it was a scripted governance system. He had realized, with a cold and mounting clarity, that the universe was not a wild, natural thing. It was an optimized engine. It favored certain "Variables"—the Protagonists—and it deleted others. He was a variable scheduled for deletion.
"I refuse to be a rounding error," he whispered.
He stood up and walked toward the deepest, most forbidden section of the library: the Archive of the Unstable. Here lay the techniques that drove men mad, the "Broken Paths" that the Elders deemed too dangerous to study. He pulled a scroll made of the skin of a Void-Ray, a creature that lived between the folds of reality.
It was the Rite of the Threefold Void.
The technique was simple in theory, but impossible in practice. It required the practitioner to manually partition their own soul—not into "clones," but into separate, independent cognitive units—and send them into the "Great Beyond" to grow in different environments before pulling them back into a single vessel.
To the cultivators of the Nine Heavens, the soul was a singular, sacred flame. To break it was to die.
But Gu Xian saw the soul differently. Through his years of obsessive study, he had deduced that the soul was a high-density information matrix. It wasn't a flame; it was a code. And code could be sharded.
"If a single processor cannot handle the throughput of the Heavens," Gu Xian reasoned, his fingers tracing the jagged characters on the ray-skin, "then I must create a distributed network."
The Preparation: The Geometry of Defiance
For three months, Gu Xian did not eat. He did not sleep. He used his meager allowance of Spirit Stones not to cultivate, but to purchase rare minerals: pulverized cinnabar, powdered lead, and the gall of a subterranean serpent.
He transformed his private quarters into a laboratory of geometric heresy. He didn't draw the standard "Eight-Trigram" arrays. Instead, he drew non-Euclidean shapes—patterns that seemed to fold in on themselves, challenging the viewer's depth perception.
The Scientific Basis: Gu Xian had realized that the "Soul" occupied a specific dimensional frequency. To shard it, he needed to create a Resonance Chamber that would vibrate at a frequency high enough to overcome the "Strong Force" that bound the spiritual particles of his consciousness together. In his mind, he wasn't performing a ritual; he was conducting a Metaphysical Fission.
On the night of the New Moon, the air in the Sun-Severing Peak became unnaturally still. The "Watchers"—the celestial bodies that acted as the Heavens' sensory nodes—were obscured by heavy clouds. It was the only window of opportunity.
Gu Xian sat in the center of his array. He was emaciated, his ribs pressing against his skin like the bars of a cage. He held a ritual knife made of obsidian—a material that possessed a "Zero-Point" Qi conductivity. It would not interfere with the electrical impulses of his soul.
"Three shards," he murmured. "Three lives. Three realities."
He closed his eyes. In the darkness of his mind, he visualized his soul. It wasn't a light; it was a complex, interlocking sphere of blue energy, pulsing with the rhythm of his heartbeat.
He didn't pray. He didn't seek the blessing of ancestors. He simply began the Code-Severance.
The Execution: The Shattering
The first cut was not physical.
Gu Xian focused his entire Will into a single, sharp point and drove it into the center of his own "Chi."
The pain was not a sensation; it was a cataclysm. It was as if every nerve in his body was being replaced with molten lead. His nervous system, unaccustomed to the partitioning of its own seat of consciousness, sent a cascade of electrical impulses to his brain. His heart stopped. His lungs seized.
"Shard One," he commanded, his mind screaming through the static. "Detach."
The first fragment of his soul—the part of him that governed Logic and Analysis—was ripped away. It was sucked into a vortex created by the non-Euclidean array, a wormhole of "Information-Potential."
Destination: Earth. Objective: To live a life where magic is impossible, where only the hard, cold laws of matter and energy exist. To master the math that the Heavens try to hide.
Gu Xian's body convulsed. A third of his "Inner Light" vanished. He felt a profound, chilling emptiness, a hole in his very being that threatened to collapse his remaining sanity. But he did not stop. He couldn't. A partial shard meant certain death.
"Shard Two. Detach."
This was the part of him that governed Aggression and Kinetic Intent. It was the "Warrior's Will."
Destination: The Murim of the Broken Moon. Objective: To exist in a realm of pure combat, where every breath is a struggle for survival and every movement is a lethal calculation. To master the intent that can cut through the laws of the world.
Another scream, this one silent, tore through his spirit. His vision went white. His body was now a hollow vessel, held together only by the final, most dangerous fragment: the Shard of the Void.
This shard would not leave. It would stay behind to maintain the "Hardware"—his physical body—while the others were away. It would act as the Anchor, the "Background Process" that would keep his heart beating and his lungs breathing in a state of deep, vegetative hibernation.
But there was a third fragment—the Shadow Shard.
"Shard Three. Detach."
This was his Perception, the part that felt fear, awe, and horror.
Destination: The Outer Veils. Objective: To stare into the Eldritch Truths that exist outside the Great Algorithm. To understand the 'Insanity' that powers the universe.
With a final, sickening wrench, the ritual was complete.
The Fall
The array flared with a blinding, ultraviolet light, then died instantly. The room was plunged into a silence so absolute it felt like a physical weight.
Gu Xian slumped forward. His obsidian knife clattered to the floor, the sound echoing through the empty pagoda. His eyes remained open, but they were no longer seeing the room. They were staring into a vast, dark sea of data-points.
His body entered a state of Total Metabolic Suppression.
To any healer who would find him, he would appear to be a victim of a "Qi-Collapse"—a tragic, mediocre boy who tried to reach too far and broke his own mind. He would be mocked. He would be forgotten. He would be a "Sleeping Fool."
But in the dark, the "Anchor" began its work.
The subconscious of Gu Xian, now stripped of emotion and ego, began to slowly, meticulously reconstruct the "Bios" of his physical form. It used the ambient Qi not to cultivate, but to Maintain. It was a silent gardener, waiting for the seeds he had scattered across the myriad worlds to grow, ripen, and return.
Outside, on the Sun-Severing Peak, the wind began to howl. In the sky, one of the stars—a "Watcher" assigned to the Gu Clan—flickered for a brief, imperceptible second. A "Logic Error" had been recorded in the Great Algorithm.
A variable had gone missing.
Gu Xian was no longer a person. He was a Hibernating Calculation.
And when he finally woke up, the Nine Heavens would realize that the "Sleeping Fool" had not been dreaming. He had been preparing the world for its own liquidation.