The sky was tearing apart. This wasn't a poetic exaggeration. Su Chen had torn through illusions, shattered domains, even split a moon or two. But this—this was something else.
The Void Realm itself, the final battlefield beyond karma and time, was fracturing like a cracked mirror. Every shard reflected a different version of him: dying, burning, triumphant… lost.
And at the center of it all, he stood alone.
His robes, once woven from the threads of celestial storms, were in tatters. His right arm had been vaporized by divine lightning five minutes ago. His spiritual sea was splintering. The Voidheart Ring on his finger pulsed weakly, as if still clinging to hope but there was no hope left.
He'd burned it all for this war.
"Damn..They really sent all nine," Su Chen muttered, raising his head slowly.
Above him hovered the Nine Execution Spears—Heaven's ultimate judgment. Each spear forged from a timeline that no longer existed. Each one meant for him.
A soft chuckle escaped his cracked lips. Not because it was funny. Because it was inevitable.
"You could've just let me die quietly, huh" he whispered. "But Heaven loves theatrics, doesn't it?"
A voice, ancient and emotionless, answered from the sky. "Su Chen of the Void Path. For crimes against Destiny, for warping Fate, for defiling the Cycle—you are sentenced to erasure across all timelines."
"Yeah, yeah. Get in line."
He looked around.
Corpses littered the battlefield—his allies, his enemies, his mistakes. The last remnants of the Sect of Second Chance were dust. The war had already been lost. This was just the cleanup.
He checked the system interface one last time.
[Reset Anchor Slots: 0/1]
[Cooldown Remaining: 999,999s]
[Final Reset: Locked]
[System Core Stability: 11%]
"What a shitty fate" said Su Chen.
He'd spent his final anchor three days ago—just to kill three Heaven's Chosen. Worth it, at the time. Not so much now.
"System," he muttered, swallowing blood, "you got anything left in that corrupted little heart of yours?"
For the first time in days, the interface blinked.
[Contingency Protocol: Rebirth Rewind – 1 Sliver of Fate Detected]
[Warning: Protocol is untested. Rewind will be imperfect.]
[Proceed?]
Su Chen blinked. He couldn't even laugh anymore and his chest hurt too much.
"Imperfect?" he coughed. "That's the story of my life."
His fingers moved through the shattered air, tapping the invisible interface.
[Confirmed. Rewinding… Consciousness only.]
[Anchor Thread Found: Temporal Thread – 'Sixteen-Year-Old Outer Sect Disciple']
[Executing Memory Collapse...]
He closed his eyes and the Void Realm exploded.
Darkness.
Then pain.
A rock jabbed into his back. His mouth tasted like iron and dirt. Someone was yelling and his stomach growled. Su Chen's eyes snapped open. It took seven seconds for him to realize he wasn't dead.
The sky above was soft blue. The air smelled of wet moss and... unwashed disciples. He was lying in a cracked courtyard surrounded by rotting bamboo fencing. The ground was uneven. The walls were moldy.
And his body—Thin. Weak. Unscarred.
He looked down at his hands. No calluses. No rings. No lightning scars.
Sixteen.
He was sixteen year old again.
"…You really did it," he whispered.
The system pinged softly in his mind, like an old friend pretending it hadn't just left him for dead.
[Reset System Booting… Core Fragmented]
[Current Anchor Slots: 0/1]
[Anchor Opportunity: Pending]
[Reset Cooldown: 72 hours]
[Warning: All prior functions locked until re-acquisition.]
He laughed. Quietly at first. Then harder. It wasn't joy. It was that broken, half-hysterical laughter that came after surviving the end of everything.
"Su Chen! You damn brat!"
A shrill voice cut through the courtyard like a blade. He turned his head slowly.
There she was. Granny Zhao. Outer Sect caretaker. Hater of slackers. Secretly trained in pressure point techniques. Once a punchline. Later, one of the first casualties of the Heavenly Poison Scheme.
She stormed toward him, wrinkled face flushed with rage, waving a broom like a divine weapon.
"You're supposed to be gathering herbs! Not napping like some pampered prince!"
Su Chen blinked.
"I'm… alive," he said blankly.
"Not for long if I have anything to say about it!" said Granny Zhao
She swung the broom and he caught it mid-swing with one hand.
Granny Zhao froze.
So did he.
He hadn't meant to react. But instinct—tempered by twenty years of betrayal and death—moved before thought.
Her eyes narrowed. "Hmph. Been secretly training, huh?"
"…Something like that." said Su Chen.
She grunted. "Well, get your training backside to the Pavilion before Elder Shen puts you on waste duty again."
The Pavilion.
Right. This was the week they'd send him to the Broken Meridian Pavilion—a 'punishment' that was really a setup. Poisoned Qi pools. Faulty cultivation manuals. An 'accidental' fire that nearly killed him.
He remembered dying there the first time. After, he remembered worse the second.
This time?
No.
Not again.
[Anchor Opportunity Detected]
[Anchor Candidate: "The Dog That Barked in a Past Life"]
[Do you wish to anchor current moment?]
That name. That stupid mutt had barked right before Elder Shen gave him the assignment—some karmic echo, a minor thing he'd ignored. Later, he realized that was the exact instant his fate had diverged.
An Anchor Point.
He exhaled slowly.
"…Set Anchor," he whispered.
[Anchor Set.]
[Reset Cooldown: 72 hours remaining.]
One anchor and One chance. That was all he had.
He rose to his feet, brushed off the dirt, and looked toward the eastern slope where the Pavilion waited.
Weak? Yes.
Unknown? For now.
But he had memories of an entire ruined future carved into his soul.
He knew the schemes that were coming. The traitors hiding behind smiles. The girls they called untouchable. The pills they said were useless. The manuals buried in cobwebbed storage halls.
They thought he was just another Outer Sect ant.
"Let them think that for now because I am not going to follow the same path again."
"I will create a new path and walk on it. This time, the ones who want me dead... will face worse than hell. Worse than anything." said Su Chen
Suddenly, there was a bark—The exact moment everything had gone wrong last time