Pain. Endless, soul-ripping pain.
He had felt death before—on battlefields soaked in blood, in duels where heaven-defying cultivators clashed, even in the silent moments when the weight of immortality became unbearable. But this… this was different.
Lightning tore through the sky, searing his flesh and fracturing his golden core. His meridians, once tempered by countless years of cultivation, cracked like brittle glass. The Heavenly Tribulation was relentless, a punishment not just for his sins, but for his very existence.
This is not how I fall.
Yet, even as his body disintegrated, even as his soul was dragged into the abyss, a voice—ancient and unfathomable—whispered from the void.
"Cast away by the heavens… forgotten by the gods… Do you seek vengeance, child of the forsaken path?"
He should have ignored it. He should have let oblivion take him.
But something inside him—the defiant will that had led him to defy heaven itself—refused to bow.
"Yes."
Darkness swallowed him whole.
When he awoke, it was not in the celestial realm, nor the spirit world. His body was tired and had lost its strength as he lay on the moist,cold soil.
His sect's limitless alpine summits were vanished. The disciples who had knelt before him were no more. The world he knew was gone.
A strange sky spread above him, with twin moons illuminating the ruins of an abandon temple. His lungs were filled with the smell of rooting wood and damp stone. His world was not this.
And then the voice came back, clearer and louder, from the recesses of the consciousness.
"My disciple, rise...for our war with the heavens has only began".