Ten days.
That's how long the body had lain still beneath the trees, in the heart of the forest where even the beasts did not prowl. Ten days without breath strong enough to stir a leaf. Ten days where life clung to him only by the thinnest strand, yet it hadn't let him go.
Li Qiong was dreaming, stranded in a dark space. There was nothing but stillness. He floated, his eyes closed.
Suddenly, it was like thousands of needles pierced him all over. A sharp pain surged from the depths of his mind.
Li Qiong remembered.
He had always remembered.
Not in the way others did.
Even from the moment he began to form, when his body was still a breath in the womb, he had known.
He had felt the loathing.
Not directed at him alone—but at all three sons.
His mother had hated them, not out of anger or grief, but because her heart had long since crumbled into ruin. She was not a woman of love. She was a cage of bitterness and silence, and her womb was a tomb where three lives grew beneath her contempt.
Even then, the warmth of blood she passed to them had been cold.
Li Qiong remembered it. He remembered floating there beside his brothers, Li Hongye and Li Wuji, feeling that loathing without words. It filled him before breath did. Long before he ever cried, before he ever opened his eyes, he understood: they were hated and unwanted.
But when they were born, the world began to change its tune.
Li Hongye was born with a divine root. So was Li Wuji. They shaped qi at five.
And Li Qiong... said nothing. Did nothing. He was the stillness of an ocean without a wave.
So the scorn settled.
On him.
Not because he had done anything. Not because he was worse. But because he was easiest.
A blank page to paint blame upon. A still stone that wouldn't roll away.
They simply didn't call him anything at all.
"Dead wood." "Waste." "Cursed child." "Why was he even born?" "Walking shame."
He heard them all. Heard them more than his own name.
Life didn't offer him torment as a twist of fate—it gave it as a destiny.
Every step he took was a struggle. Every moment, a trial.
He remembered his thirteenth birthday most vividly.
The day the world opened before him.
He had awakened with a blazing sun in his eyes—heat like fire, breath like thunder. And when his eyes opened that morning, the sky was no longer sky. The clouds bore laws. The mountains told secrets. The rivers shimmered with qi.
He had awakened something rare, something unique and divine.
The Eyes of Truth.
And in that single moment, for the first time in his life, Li Qiong felt joy.
He could see everything. The truth behind heaven. The patterns that bound the world.
He had seen the origin of flow, of form, of force.
He'd rushed to her—his mother—his heart pounding.
"Mother! Mother! Your son is not useless! I've awakened talent. I can see the truth of the world!"
Her eyes hadn't softened. Her lips hadn't trembled.
She only looked at him and said: "Even trash is useful."
The next moment, they came.
They bound him to a pillar, tied his hands, and gouged out his eyes.
Blood spilled. Li Qiong screamed in agony.
They divided his eyes—one for Wuji, one for Hongye.
They were taught how to refine them, engrave them, and set them into their own sockets.
The whole clan cheered as the brothers opened their new eyes.
With them, his brothers saw heaven. While Li Qiong was cast back into the dark.
They said: "A dead tree doesn't need spring." "Better for the green wood to blossom than for rot to cling to life." "Consider it karma."
Heartbroken, he was cast aside. He crawled the floor like a dog, lived the life of a beggar.
He fell walking down clean paths—because others dug pits to watch him drop. He stumbled over stones that weren't there an hour before—because they planted them for fun. They whispered to him when he passed by, and laughed when he turned his head toward nothing.
He could no longer see. So they made a game of it.
They changed his room every week. They shifted walls. They stole his staff. They threw nails on the floor. Sometimes they poured oil. They whispered lies in his ear—guiding him to thorns, to wells, to dirt.
He once fell into a latrine pit, and no one pulled him out until dusk. They found it funny.
And when he fell? They cheered. When he bled? They stepped over him.
He'd been blind for years now.
But the world had never blinded him as the Li Clan did.
It did not end there.
The disciples practiced like usual, but this time he no longer felt anything. The sound of breaking bones filled the yard, but not an ounce of scream.
He no longer cried. He no longer screamed. He simply stood there, even when his mother poured boiling oil over his scalp in the name of "cleansing disgrace."
His skin melted. He didn't flinch.
He had already gone numb.
He couldn't feel the heat.
His nerves, shattered by torture, no longer worked. His mind dulled to protect itself.
He lived like a corpse.
He was forbidden from attending the banquets. Forbidden from speaking with others. Forbidden from even walking through the streets.
They gave him a wife—no, They forced him to marry a woman from a brothel—a girl Li Wuji liked but could not take in, lest it taint his reputation.
A paper ceremony. A locked room.
He had never seen her. She had never seen him.
They made her his wife in name, but she never even looked at him. Even their wedding night—she was with Li Wuji.
All laughed.
And every night, he heard the moans through the walls. His brothers took turns accompanying her.
They used him as a cover.
Even in bed, he was a joke.
He was just a tool. A name. A mask. A lie.
His blood boiled.
How could they do this to me? What have I done wrong? Was it me who disgraced the family? Was it me who asked to be born in this family? Was it me, the one to be blamed for all?
Why? Why?
Why couldn't it be someone else? What do they want from me? More?
They lived to see this day because of my sacrifice. It was me who sacrificed everything.
Heaven, why have you forsaken me? Was it not enough, the despair and injustice I've gone through?
Why? What did I do wrong for all this to happen to me?
Is it my fate to endure all and die a rat's death, without seeing the sun?
Why?
Thunder split a tree.
The Li Clan was vast—
It had vassal families under its wings,
And there was no place for Li Qiong.
The clan's structure made sure of it.
Core Bloodline Disciples – Those born of direct lineage, with high talent, like Li Hongye and Li Wuji.
Elite Outer Disciples – Talented but distant relatives.
Common Disciples – Average aptitude.
Servant Lineage – Descendants of those who married into the clan.
And those below... were not even human.
Li Qiong belonged to no tier.
Born from the same womb. Yet he alone had no place.
His brothers were praised daily—prodigies, cultivators, walking legends.
But Li Qiong?
He was assigned chores. Made to clean after beasts. Forbidden from learning manuals. Given no access to qi stones, no cultivation pills, no instruction.
He once asked if he could go outside.
It was rejected.
No one betrayed him—because no one ever pretended to be kind.
He'd never been offered anything to begin with.
They said he didn't need to know anything to sweep latrines.
And when they finally cast him out— Tossed him into the lake with broken bones and torn skin—to his death...
He crawled back with his remaining strength.
Half-dead.
His screams of agony filled the air. He shouted: Why? Why? Why was this injustice done to me? What made me suffer?
He finally realized—
It was power. Strength.
The injustices were done to him because he was powerless.
And it was then, a shadow found him. A man cloaked in black qi, with eyes like dying stars.
"A worm?" the man had laughed. "No... a seed. Rotten and cast one."
A demonic cultivator.
He took Li Qiong not as a student, But as a tool.
And in the pits of agony— His cultivation began.
Years of memories flooded one by one, Until the final stand.
Now, on the tenth day, in that dense stillness beneath towering boughs—
Li Qiong opened his eyes.
They were the same ones he had lost.
Yes.
These eyes that see truth.
They had become something more.
A divine vision. One eye for truth. One eye for law.
The air trembled. The world paused. A ripple passed through the Primeval Sea within him, deep as the stars.
His body ached, burned. Every scar throbbed.
He gasped once. Not from exhaustion.
But from pain.
All of it. The sounds. The smells. The sensitivity. Everything reached the next realm.
And when he rose, a wave of will swept through the trees like a storm.
The forest bent.
The roots curled.
The sky dimmed.
It was no rebirth. It was no revenge. It was revelation.
Li Qiong did not rise to defy heaven.
He rose because heaven had never acknowledged him in the first place.
And now... the true beginning had come.