"My life?"
Shen Xuan's smirk was a ghost of a shadow in the flickering lantern light.
He leaned forward, his gray eyes pinning her with the terrifying stillness of an ancient predator.
The air in the hut did not just thin, it curdled, as if the local Laws were bowing to his presence.
"Tell me first," he whispered, "how much of my conversation with the wolf did you steal?"
Panic flared in Ying Shuang's gaze.
She felt the weight of a thousand unspoken taboos pressing against her ribs, threatening to collapse her lungs.
Under that gaze, a lie was not just impossible, it was a sin.
She nodded, her movement small, brittle, and desperate.
"I... I heard almost all of it," she breathed.
"Good." He was not angry with her.
"Then you know I was born into the Era of the Five. We were not merely clans; we were the true sovereigns of the primordial Chaos. Tell me, Miss Ying, does the geography of your cage still make sense to you? Or have you realized yet that you are living in the ruins of a much larger house?"
She shook her head, her voice lost to the cold. "Only fragments... the legends say the sky was once whole."
"The sky was a map of our ambition," Shen Xuan said, his voice dropping into a register that made the floorboards vibrate like a struck bell.
"The Great Chaos, the Chaos Sea, is carved into seventy-two domains. Before the fall of the era, fifty of them belonged to us. Each of the Five Clans anchored nine domains as their personal footstool, ruling from the very spine of existence."
His eyes grew distant, reflecting the memory of a light that had long since gone out.
"The remaining twenty-two were the Wastes, the neutral zones, and the Forbidden Depths. Places so ancient and venomous that even a Chaos Dao Origin expert would not dare leave a footprint in their soil. In truth..." A flicker of irony, sharp as a needle, crossed his face.
"Even I did not venture into a single one of them. There are things in the dark that even my father feared."
"I did not ask for a map of the universe," Ying Shuang interrupted.
Her voice was a fragile melody of defiance. Emboldened by the darkness, she reached out and pressed her hand to his shoulder, a daring, human touch that bridged the gap between a mortal and a god.
"I want to hear about you. Not the domains, not the wars. Tell me about the boy who watched it all burn."
Shen Xuan stilled. He looked down at her hand, his gaze following the line of her fingers as if they were a foreign species.
She was so close now that her breath stirred the air near his throat.
"I was born into the Shen Clan," he began, and the room grew so quiet that even the sound of rain outside seemed to stop.
"The first among the five. The clan that held the leash of the Heavens. I was born at a time when the Shen Clan was at its peak."
"I was not born alone," Shen Xuan continued, his voice a low, rhythmic pulse in the dark. "I was born a twin, alongside my sister. And we did not enter this world as crying infants or weak mortals. We were born already standing within the Chaos Dao Realm."
He paused, shifting his gaze to catch her reaction.
Ying Shuang's hand slid from his shoulder as if burned. Her breath hitched, and the silence of the hut suddenly felt deafening.
In the modern era, cultivators spent ten thousand years of blood and meditation just to catch a glimpse of that realm, and he claimed to have been born into it.
"The moment we took our first breath," he said, staring into the flickering amber flame, "there were no auspicious visions. No lotuses fell from the sky; no dragons roared in the clouds. It was a silence so eerie it felt like the universe itself had forgotten how to speak. It was as if the Heavens were holding their breath, terrified of the two souls that had just forced their way into existence."
His eyes narrowed, the gray depths clouding with the haze of a billion years.
"I was a baby then; much of that day is a fractured mirror in my mind. Some memories are just echoes of shadows, impossible to piece together, yet the chill of that silence remains."
"But... that is impossible," Ying Shuang whispered, her voice trembling with a mix of awe and growing doubt. She pulled back slightly, her eyes searching his face for a flicker of a joke, a lie, or a delusion.
"No one is born into the Chaos Dao Realm. The Laws of the Great Dao dictate that every soul must climb the ladder from the dust. To be born at the peak... it would violate every fundamental logic of the universe. Shen Xuan, are you... are you lying to me?"
Shen Xuan did not blink. He turned his head slowly, his gaze locking onto hers with a weight that felt like a mountain settling onto her soul.
"The 'Laws' you speak of are the rules written by the losers of the last era," he said, his voice as sharp as a ritual blade.
"You call it impossible because your sky is small. In the Shen Clan, we did not follow the Dao. We were the Dao. If the universe found our birth impossible, it was the universe that was wrong, not us."
"My sister and I were not a blessing," he murmured, turning back to the ceiling. "We were a declaration of war." He paused and laughed softly.
"Do you truly wish to hear the rest?"
His expression was a mask of unnatural peace, a stillness so deep it felt like the eye of a hurricane.
Ying Shuang found herself leaning closer, drawn into his orbit as if his very words carried gravity.
For Shen Xuan, this was a rare, quiet resonance, a moment of reprieve he had not tasted since breaking the seals of his long slumber.
"Yes," she whispered, her ocean-blue eyes wide.
"You have only spoken of your birth. But what follows? Are you a reincarnation? A soul from beyond, housed in this vessel?"
Shen Xuan let out a breath that sounded like a sigh from the beginning of time.
"The years that followed were, in a sense, a tedious perfection," he murmured.
"By the age of three, I had already mastered the arts of existence, language, history, and the fundamental structures of reality. Then, my true cultivation began."
He turned his gaze to her, the gray in his eyes swirling like a storm.
"You must understand a terrifying truth about my birth. Though I was born into the Chaos Dao Realm, that power was not truly mine. It was a gift, a poisoned crown placed upon my head by the Heavenly Dao. My cultivation, my strength, and even the physique I carry... they were all external blessings."
He reached out, his hand hovering near hers, as the air between them began to hum with a strange harmonic frequency.
"This is the reason your Yin-Yang Dao Embryo resonates with me so violently," he said, his voice dropping to a jagged whisper.
"My physique was crafted by the Heavens to be the ultimate vessel, the perfect anchor for the Dao itself. But a gift from the Heavens is never free. It is a leash. They did not want a master of Chaos; they wanted a puppet to wear its skin."
Ying Shuang trembled, the resonance between their bodies intensifying until her skin felt as though it were glowing. The peace she felt was not just comfort, it was recognition. Two souls bound by the same celestial architect.
"By the time I was seven," Shen Xuan continued, "I realized that if I did not break the gift the Heavens gave me, I would never truly be free. I decided to do the unthinkable. I decided to unmake myself."
"But the unmaking was postponed," Shen Xuan said, his voice softening with a rare, fragile warmth.
"My aunt intervened. She looked at a seven-year-old boy ready to tear his own soul apart and told me, 'Not yet. Wait a few more years. Live a little longer as the Heavens' darling before you become their enemy.'"
He paused, his gaze drifting away from Ying Shuang.
A faint, uncharacteristic crimson tint crept into his cheeks, a ghost of the boy he had once been.
"Since she was the person I held closest to my heart, I obeyed. I listened to every word she spoke, and perhaps..." He trailed off, the embarrassment of childhood devotion making him look, for a fleeting second, like the fifteen-year-old youth his body claimed to be.
"I did not have the courage to tell her otherwise."
He cleared his throat, the mask of the cold Sovereign sliding back into place.
"So, from the age of seven to nine, I traded my killing intent for scholarly arts. I spent my days submerged in the logic of formations and the volatile chemistry of alchemy, guided by the twin lights of my life, my aunt and my mother."
"By the time I turned nine," he continued,
"the Shen Clan deemed my foundation unshakable. I was sent away from the ancestral peaks to the Yuanhuang Academy. It was the gathering place for the scions of the seventy-two domains, a crucible where the future masters of Chaos were forged."
His eyes darkened, a specific memory surfacing like a wreck from the deep sea.
"It was there, amidst the jade halls and the arrogance of a thousand geniuses, that I first met her. My fiancée. The woman the Heavens had decided was the only soul worthy of standing beside the 'Perfect Vessel' of the Shen Clan."
He looked at Ying Shuang, his gaze sharp and questioning. "But as you know, Miss Ying, the Heavens are poor matchmakers. They only pair power with power. They never consider the cost of two suns trying to share the same sky."
"Yuanhuang Academy?" Ying Shuang squinted in confusion as she looked at Shen Xuan.