The Illusion of Heaven
After three hundred years as a legendary grandmaster in a glorious cultivation world, Zhung Hang dies peacefully in his death bed, only to awaken in a modern hospital bed.
Doctors smile kindly and tell him it was nothing but a coma-induced dream.
Stripped of every achievement, every bond, every shred of meaning, he returns to a life where no one ever truly wanted him.
Parents who saw him as a burden.
A little brother who died forgotten.
Love that was never love.
On a rainy night, he slits his throat and makes one final vow:
“If reality is crueler than any dream, I will carve the next one with my own hands, even if I have to become something neither demon nor saint.”
Death refuses him.
He awakens again, reborn as an eight-year-old boy named Zhung in a third, far crueler world.
Here, there is no qi, no spiritual roots, no merciful heaven.
Power is measured by the **Nine Refinements of Will**, a brutal path where mortals must drink the fresh blood of divine or demonic beasts to tear open an **Aperture** inside their flesh.
One wrong drop can leave you a conscious vegetable feeling eternal agony.
One deep wound can strip a lifetime of progress in seconds.
In this world, Zhung has only one light: his mother Zheng Han, the third and person in three lifetimes who has ever loved him without condition.
For eight years he remains powerless, hiding behind a gentle smile while secretly feeding travellers to a beast in the forest cave, waiting for the day its blood will let him begin.
He does not walk the righteous path.
He does not walk the demonic path.
He walks the **Broken Path**, a third road forged from the refusal to ever again be heaven’s tragic puppet.
A dark, slow-burn xianxia of cosmic betrayal, quiet maternal love, and a soul that will gamble everything just to protect the one person who never asked him to be anything more than her son.
The heavens wrote the first two tragedies.
The third one will be his.
