The first lesson humanity learned during the Calamity was simple.
Gods could bleed.
No prophecy announced it.
No scripture recorded it.
No divine trumpet warned the heavens.
It happened quietly—on the outskirts of a ruined city whose name history would later erase.
A lesser god descended to "stabilize the region."
And a human killed it with a broken spear and a dying curse.
That moment fractured more than the sky.
It fractured belief.
In the early days of the Calamity, humanity waited.
They waited for gods to intervene.
For Heaven to descend in radiant order.
For salvation to arrive with rules and structure.
Instead, Heaven observed.
The High Sons argued.
The Elder Celestials debated risk versus loss.
The Heavenly Dao calculated acceptable extinction thresholds.
Entire continents burned while Heaven adjusted its ledgers.
This was not cruelty.
It was procedure.
And mortals felt it.
Faith didn't shatter instantly—it rotted.
Priests kept preaching while cities collapsed behind them.
Temples became refugee camps, then mass graves.
Divine blessings arrived late, diluted, conditional.
Humanity realized something horrifying:
Heaven did not love them.
Heaven managed them.
Power erupted chaotically.
Not bestowed—triggered.
Men awakened gravity in their bones.
Women bent sound into blades.
Children burned with concepts they couldn't name.
There was no cultivation system yet.
No manuals.
No divine oversight.
Only instinct.
Those who survived long enough learned to repeat what worked.
Trial.
Failure.
Mutation.
Cultivation was born not from enlightenment—but desperation.
And desperation is a far better teacher.
Lucien watched all of this from the margins.
He did not preach.
He did not lead.
He did not claim destiny.
He fought.
Where monsters breached, he was there.
Where settlements fell, he arrived late—and stayed until nothing moved.
People began whispering about him.
Not as a savior.
As a constant.
It happened near the shattered ruins of Halcyon Reach.
A god calling itself Tharos, Warden of Cycles descended—furious not at the monsters, but at humanity.
They had begun forming independent power structures.
They had begun ignoring divine commandments.
They had begun killing monsters too efficiently.
Tharos came to "reassert order."
He arrived in light and judgment.
Lucien was already there.
Not challenging.
Not kneeling.
Watching.
Tharos spoke of balance.
Of necessity.
Of acceptable losses.
Then he struck a human cultivator who refused to bow.
Lucien moved.
He didn't attack Tharos directly.
He stepped between.
The god struck again.
And felt resistance.
That moment—brief, infinitesimal—was enough.
A dying human woman screamed and hurled a spear forged from monster bone, infused with every scrap of hatred she had left.
The spear pierced Tharos' throat.
God-blood spilled.
And something in the universe hesitated.
Lucien didn't celebrate.
He looked at the god choking on disbelief and said only:
"You shouldn't have come."
Tharos died screaming—not in pain.
In confusion.
Heaven reacted swiftly.
Too swiftly.
The High Sons declared Tharos' death an anomaly.
The Elder Celestials labeled it containable.
The Heavenly Dao adjusted divine thresholds upward.
More gods descended.
Stronger ones.
And humanity learned a second lesson.
Gods could die louder.
Divine corpses poisoned landscapes.
Heavenly laws collapsed locally.
Reality warped around fallen divinity.
But every time a god fell, something happened.
Humans adapted.
They learned to:
•Anchor attacks to causality fractures
•Exploit divine arrogance
•Target conceptual weaknesses rather than raw power
Gods were powerful.
They were not experienced.
Mortals were.
Lucien refused titles.
He rejected banners.
He didn't form factions.
But he remembered everything.
Every god's mistake.
Every failed law.
Every pattern in divine behavior.
The White watched him learn.
Not intervene.
Not assist.
Just watch.
Lucien never prayed.
When asked why, he answered once:
"I don't like beings who demand belief while hiding."
That sentence spread faster than any sermon.
It was during the height of the Calamity—when gods and monsters clashed openly—that Lucien saw her again.
Not his mother.
A version of her.
Void-touched.
Timeline-burned.
Barely holding form.
She appeared on a battlefield frozen mid-collapse.
She told him:
•Humanity was never meant to survive this era
•The Creator had already lost control
•Heaven was panicking
•And Lucien was becoming visible to things far above gods
She begged him—not to stop.
But to end it properly.
Before she faded, she warned him:
"If Heaven realizes what you are before you wake fully…
they will erase the world just to deny you."
Lucien asked her one thing:
"Did we ever win?"
She smiled.
"Not like this."
Then she vanished forever.
By the end of the Calamity's first phase:
•Entire pantheons had been wiped out
•Human-led sects rivaled divine domains
•Heaven retreated behind restrictions and distance
The world was no longer ruled by gods.
It was contested.
Lucien stood at the center of that shift—not as a king, but as a pivot.
And somewhere beyond reality—
The Creator noticed.
The Calamity was never just an invasion.
It was a stress test.
A corrupted Creator pushing reality to see what broke first.
Heaven failed.
Gods failed.
Narrative failed.
Humanity didn't win.
But it refused to disappear.
And Lucien—
Lucien learned the most important lesson of all:
Creation does not reward virtue.
It rewards adaptation.