The night wind whispered through the pines, carrying the clean scent of dew and cold stone. Moonlight draped the lonely spring in silver, turning its surface into a still mirror. A 17-year-old black-haired youth sat cross-legged at the water's edge. His reflection stared back — pale skin like carved jade, gold light flickering faintly behind his half-closed eyes.
Lin Xian inhaled slowly. The body he now inhabited was pitiful — meridians fractured, dantian sluggish, impurities choking his veins. But his soul… his soul was the Monarch Assassin of Nirvana, whose shadow once made immortals bow.
"No technique in this realm can bear my will," he murmured. "So I will rebuild heaven from its ashes."
He pressed a hand over his heart. A faint symbol — a circle split into three rings — pulsed beneath his skin. The seal of his supreme scripture: "Cycle of the Broken Heaven," the Heaven-Slaughter Nirvana Scripture, the Lost Scripture of Nirvana.
Long ago, before he became Monarch Assassin, he died nine times and lived ten. From those deaths, he forged a cultivation scripture that didn't draw from the world — it devoured the limits of its wielder. Seven verses. Seven truths of existence. Each verse a death. Each verse a rebirth. He had mastered six. The seventh… remained beyond heaven itself.
Now reborn, Lin Xian began again—from the First Verse.
The spring shivered violently around him. A stream of golden qi surged into his body without warning. There was no gentleness, no smooth flow—only a brutal force that tore straight through his ruined meridians.
Pain exploded through him. He tasted blood immediately.
"Good. Pain means it's working."
His muscles seized. His ribs bent until they cracked. Every damaged pathway in his body felt like it was being scraped open with burning iron. He clutched the ground to stay upright as the qi forced its way deeper.
"Cycle of the Broken Heaven—First Verse… Shatter the Flesh!"
His voice trembled from the strain.
Golden light burst from his skin, but it wasn't beautiful. It flickered like a wildfire fighting to stay alive. The air thickened under the pressure, distorting as the energy inside him thrashed wildly.
His dantian—the broken, useless core of this body—twisted painfully. For a moment, he thought it would rupture completely. Darkness closed in at the edges of his vision.
"No. Not again. I did not fall to this world just to faint from a cracked mortal core."
He forced his eyes open. The qi slammed into it again.
Agony tore through his gut so sharply he nearly blacked out. His nails dug into the soil. His vision blurred. His breath came in sharp, uneven gasps. Repair it… or die again.
He gritted his teeth as another wave of golden qi struck the cracked dantian. The broken core groaned like fractured glass under pressure. The spring water behind him surged upward, pulled by the unstable qi. Mist whipped into a spiraling column around him as his body convulsed from the impact.
A wet crack sounded inside him. Then another. His meridians tore open—only to be forcefully pieced back together as the violent qi hammered through them in relentless cycles. Every tear, every burn, every crack was followed by a painfully slow rebuilding.
"Break me. Tear me apart. Crush every flaw I inherited from this weakling body. I will rebuild it. I will shape a perfect dantian myself—even if I crawl through death a third time."
Seconds stretched into minutes. His forehead dripped sweat. Blood seeped from the corner of his lips. His heartbeat shook his entire frame. Endure. Repair. Endure again.
The golden qi gathered once more—denser, hotter, sharper. It hurled itself into his dantian like a battering ram. A deafening internal snap echoed through his body.
Then—silence.
The pressure vanished. A warm pulse spread outward—slow, steady, alive. His breathing eased as golden light wrapped gently around his core. The fractured dantian no longer resisted. It drank in the remaining qi like parched earth drinking rain.
The mist around him collapsed into the spring with a metallic chime. The water settled. The air cleared. The pain receded like a tide pulling back into the ocean.
For several seconds after the breakthrough, Lin Xian remained seated. The forest was silent. The violent qi that had nearly torn him apart was gone. In its place, a steady current flowed through his body—controlled, precise.
He inhaled. No obstruction. The meridians that had been cracked and clogged now felt wide and reinforced, like newly forged steel channels. Qi moved cleanly through them without resistance. Each circulation strengthened his limbs instead of damaging them.
He focused inward. His dantian no longer felt hollow or fractured. It was whole. Compact. Stable. Dense with golden light. When it pulsed, the energy did not leak or tremble—it expanded outward in a smooth, powerful wave before returning to its center. Efficient. Refined. A foundation rebuilt from ruin.
«"Mortal Origin Realm… Initial Minor Stage."»
He slowly pushed himself to his feet. The motion was effortless. His muscles responded instantly, balanced and controlled. Even the small injuries left from the earlier strain had vanished.
A strand of hair slid over his shoulder. He noticed the color first. It wasn't black anymore. He reached up and caught it between his fingers. Silver. Not dull, not aged—pure silver-white, like cold steel under moonlight.
More strands shifted as he stood fully upright. Within moments, the last traces of black faded, replaced entirely by pale white hair that fell past his shoulders. The transformation wasn't dramatic. It was quiet.
He lifted his head. His reflection in the spring water sharpened as the ripples calm. The face was still young—seventeen at most. But the eyes were not. The silver irises were clearer now. Sharper. Focused in a way that didn't belong to someone his age. There was no confusion in them. No hesitation. Only calculation. Only memory. Only experience that had lived far longer than this body ever had.
He blinked once. A faint pressure rolled outward from him—subtle, but enough to stir the leaves around his feet. The nearby branches swayed slightly despite the absence of wind. His presence had changed. Before, he had been broken, unstable, forcing power into a damaged vessel. Now—the vessel could hold it.
Lin Xian studied his reflection for another moment. "The foundation is complete," he said calmly. The voice that left his mouth no longer sounded like a struggling youth. It sounded steady. Certain.
He turned from the spring as dawn light filtered through the trees, silver hair catching the first rays of sun. Behind him, the water remained still. As if it understood a monarch had just taken its first step back into the world.
---
The Injured Maiden
After days of quiet cultivation, Lin Xian walked along a moss-covered forest trail. The world was calm—until a violent shockwave rippled through the trees.
Steel clashed. Qi roared. Someone was fighting up ahead. He moved silently toward the disturbance.
Two figures tore through the clearing—a young woman in white and a black-robed man. Their speed shattered branches, their qi pressure far beyond the Mortal Realm.
Lin Xian's gaze sharpened when he saw her. Familiar. A feeling he couldn't explain.
The duel spiraled out of control. Blades flashed, spiritual force collided, and both combatants crashed to the ground almost at the same time—exhausted, bleeding, barely holding consciousness.
But the girl… She was worse. A black vein pulsed beneath her skin, spreading fast.
The man lay a few meters away, coughing blood—yet laughing. "Poison… hah… you're done for," he wheezed. "I'll survive. You won't. That's your fate."
The girl's expression tightened, her eyes darkening with despair. She tried to crawl away—but her limbs failed her. The man kept laughing.
Until a shadow fell over him. He blinked—once. Lin Xian appeared behind him like a phantom, cold and precise. A single motion.
Shhk—
The man's head separated from his neck. His dying eyes never understood what happened. Silence returned to the forest. The girl stiffened, alarm flickering in her gaze.
Lin Xian turned toward her. Her white robes were torn and soaked crimson, silk clinging to the curves of her body where blood had dampened the fabric. The ruined cloth traced the slender line of her waist and the graceful rise of her chest, outlining a figure both supple and toned—clearly trained, not fragile.
Ink-black hair spilled across the broken earth, framing a delicate, jade-like face—smooth, refined, almost serene at first glance.
But the serenity was a lie.
Her green-emerald eyes were cold and steady, sharp with killing intent even as poison crawled beneath her skin
Lin Xian knelt beside her. She tried to raise her dagger, but her hand trembled violently. "D-don't… come closer…"
"If I wanted you dead," he said, voice steady, "you'd already be dead."
Her dagger slipped from her fingers. Blood poured from her shoulder as her body collapsed. Lin Xian caught her before she hit the ground.
She was too light. Cold. The poison eating through her qi like fire on paper. "Corruption energy," he muttered. "A composite venom—refined through poison mastery and infused with death element. Someone wanted you dead beyond any chance of recovery. A Poison Grandmaster's work."
He placed his hand above the wound. Golden soul-essence flared from his palm. She winced, weakly pushing at him. "W-what… are you—"
"Saving you."
The black veins writhed and burned away under the golden light. Fading… shrinking… and then gone. The black veins burned away until there was nothing left, just tiny bits of golden light floating in the air.
Her breathing steadied. Lin Xian withdrew his hand. "You'll live," he said. "Move too much and you'll die again."
Her eyes opened fully now—still cautious, still guarded. "You… you're not from Azure Cloud City, are you?"
He tilted his head. "Does it matter?"
She studied him—white hair, divine-silver eyes, simple robes that somehow made the world dim around him. "You look…" she whispered, "like someone who shouldn't exist here."
A faint smile touched his lips. "Then perhaps we're alike."
Pain twisted her expression. He steadied her wrist gently. "Don't talk. You lost too much blood."
"I… I can't stay. They're chasing me…"
"Who?"
"Azure Cloud Sect enforcers… They want what I stole…"
Lin Xian's brows lifted slightly. "And what did you steal?"
With shaky fingers, she revealed a silver-jade fragment etched with a spiral. Lin Xian's golden eyes hardened instantly. A fragment of the Heavenly Cycle Seal. A relic tied to his Nirvana Scripture.
Fate is… moving again.
He closed her fingers around it. "Hide it. Don't let anyone see it."
She asked"Why… help me?" Lin Xian's voice was calm. "Because you owe me a debt."
"What debt…?" "The debt of living."
Then, shouts echoed from the forest. Lin Xian's expression turned grave. "We have to move now. People are already searching for you." Without waiting for her reply, he swept her into his arms and vanished, leaving only a few scattered leaves spiraling where they had stood.
When the enforcers arrived, the clearing was empty. High above, two figures drifted among the branches — one white-haired and ethereal, the other wrapped in his cloak, asleep against his shoulder.
---
A Lonely Cabin
Night fell. In an abandoned hunter's hut, Lin Xian laid the woman on a straw bed. Firelight warmed her sleeping face. He watched her quietly.
"Fate has a weird sense of humor," he murmured.
As he turned to leave, her eyes fluttered open. "Wait…" Her voice was soft. "I haven't told you… my name."
Lin Xian paused. "Then tell me."
She breathed weakly. "Mu Yanyue."
The name struck him like a blade. His breath froze. The world dimmed.
Mu Yanyue. Envy of Nirvana.
His third disciple. A prodigy—graceful, dangerous and brilliant. Dead for years. He remembered her last smile in the dream-realm battlefield, the moment the Voidborn devoured her domain.
"Impossible," he whispered. "You died in the Upper Realm…"
A tremor rippled through his golden irises.
The Eye of Samsara… So his final technique had reached further than he guessed.
"If she is here," he murmured, "then what of the others…?"
The fire dimmed. The fragment at her chest pulsed softly, answering fate's rhythm.
"Death couldn't bind Nirvana's Sins," he said quietly. "So what happened after I fell…?"
For the first time since his rebirth, he lost his composure. If fate had returned her… the heavens were already moving.
A faint, almost sorrowful smile crossed his lips.
"Rest, Yanyue. When you remember who you are… the heavens will tremble again."
---