The sky above Shanghai bled. It was not the familiar crimson of a sunset, but the sickening, bruised purple-black of an open wound in reality itself. Below, the city was a graveyard of broken skyscrapers and burning ruins, the smoking skeleton of a civilization laid bare beneath the indifferent gaze of a wounded cosmos. Amidst that desolation, atop a mountain of corpses—both human and Abyssal—knelt Wei Heng.
He was an A-Rank Hunter, one of the last standing pillars of the shattered China Alliance. His once-gleaming combat armor was now a mosaic of cracked and scorched metal. His body was a map of agony, bones broken and muscles torn, yet his grip on his titanium-alloy spear was unyielding. Every breath was a searing, ragged struggle, a sharp pain in his smoke-filled lungs.
They had been fools. The Alliance, the great guilds, all the remaining powers of the world. They had launched a final counter-offensive, a desperate, glorious gamble to push back the Abyssal tide and reclaim their world. But they had miscalculated, not in terms of power, but in the very nature of their enemy. They had prepared to fight an army, but what they faced was an existence. A singular, overwhelming entity that bent the laws of physics with its mere presence.
Wei Heng had witnessed it. He had seen the S-Rank Hunters, heroes whose names were whispered with reverence, erased from existence as if they were children. He saw a pyromancer's ultimate attack, a firestorm that could incinerate a city block, transform into a harmless shower of cherry blossom petals before dissipating. He saw a teleporter, a master of space, age to dust in an instant as the entity casually warped time around him. It wasn't a battle; it was a slaughter, a cosmic correction.
'Futile,' he thought, the bitter taste of ash and failure coating his tongue. 'All the training, all the sacrifice... for what?' He thought of his family. His mother's face, smiling wearily as she served him a bowl of hot noodles. His father's calloused hand, clapping him on the shoulder with pride. The promise he had made to them, a whisper in the night before he left for this final battle: "I'll be back. I'll protect you."
A lie. The greatest lie of his short, violent life.
He channeled the pathetic dregs of his life force into his spear. This was a final, desperate blow, a last act of defiance against a universe that had abandoned him. He was a genius of his generation, a warrior who had reached the apex of what was possible for an A-Rank Hunter. But even a genius has limits. With a roar that tore his bleeding throat, he unleashed his ultimate technique, [Meteor Lance]. The spear blazed with a blinding white light, a pure beam of kinetic energy that lanced across the battlefield and vaporized a swathe of the Abyssal horde. It was a magnificent, beautiful, and utterly meaningless gesture. The entity did not even flinch.
As his life faded, as darkness crept in at the edges of his vision, his limp hand brushed against something buried amidst the rubble and the dead. A book. Bound in a material that felt like neither leather nor stone, it was ancient and cold to the touch, absorbing the last of the warmth from his fingertips. A deep gash on his arm wept blood, and a single, crimson drop fell onto the cover.
The blood sizzled, not like liquid on a hot surface, but like water falling onto a parched sponge. The book flared with a light no one else could see, a light that burned directly into his soul. And as death claimed him, his spirit was viciously torn from his dying body, pulled into the endless, silent abyss within the book.
Ten thousand years.
To a human mind, it was an unimaginable span of time. To Wei Heng, it was his new reality. He did not awaken in an afterlife, but in a new world—a world of cultivation. Reborn into the healthy body of an infant with a heaven-shaking innate talent, he experienced a bewildering reawakening. Power here was not a limited, singular ability, but a boundless ocean of energy called Qi, waiting to be conquered.
He soared through the realms with a speed that shattered records and defied common sense. Qi Condensation, Foundation Establishment, Golden Core—stages that took ordinary geniuses decades, he surpassed in mere months. He became a legend, a reclusive grandmaster whose name was spoken only in whispers. The book, now a part of his soul, revealed its name: the
Inheritance of 100,000 Peak Powerhouses.
For ten millennia, he completed its trials. These were not simple tasks. To earn the legacy of a "Sword Saint," he had to spend a century in isolated meditation, contemplating the essence of the blade until he could sever moonlight itself. To inherit the knowledge of an "Alchemist God," he had to memorize and comprehend an encyclopedia of a hundred million divine herbs, a task that drove him to the brink of madness for five hundred years before he finally achieved enlightenment. He inherited the lives, the skills, and the crushing loneliness of 99,999 legendary beings.
Loneliness was the steepest price. He outlived dynasties, watching the stars themselves shift in the heavens. He made friends, took disciples, even fell in love, only to watch them all age and turn to dust while he remained unchanged. Each loss was a chisel that chipped away at his humanity, turning him into something more ancient, more detached. He learned not to get attached. He learned to see people not as individuals, but as variables, as pieces on a cosmic chessboard. It was the only way to survive the unending pain.
At the end of his ten-thousand-year lifespan, at the absolute peak of the Tribulation Realm, poised to transcend mortality, he faced the final trial. The 100,000th inheritance. The condition was simple, yet impossible: Resolve your deepest regret.
His mind, tempered by millennia of solitude, instantly returned to that burning city. To the sight of his mother and father, consumed by Abyssal flames while he was pinned beneath rubble, powerless to do anything but scream in silence. That failure was the foundation of his soul, the regret that had fueled his ten-thousand-year obsession with power. But it was a regret that could never be undone.
"So, this is the end," Wei Heng murmured, his ancient body beginning to crumble to dust under the pressure of his fading life force. He looked up at the heavens of the cultivation world, a realm he had all but conquered. The irony was so bitter it nearly choked him. Ten thousand years of struggle to gain the power to fix the past, only to be told the only way to take the final step was to do that very impossible thing. "A pointless joke."
He closed his eyes and accepted his second death.
But as his consciousness dissolved, the book in his soul pulsed with a blinding light. The 100,000th condition had not been a trial to be completed, but a catalyst. His death, filled with that absolute, unresolvable regret, was the key. It was the fuel the book required.
The universe twisted. Time folded in on itself. His ancient, powerful soul was pulled across space and time, a comet of consciousness streaking back to its point of origin.
And Wei Heng opened his eyes.