Void, there is no time. There is only the count.One billion, four hundred million, two hundred and six…He had stopped counting seconds centuries ago. He counted the pulses of his own fading consciousness. For a thousand years, he had been a flicker of thought in a sea of nothingness. No light. No sound. No touch. Just the crushing weight of an eternal, lonely silence that had ground his sanity into fine dust, then forged it back into something harder than diamond.He was a soul without a vessel, a memory without a name.Then, the Void cracked.It didn't shatter with a sound; it tore like old silk.
A blinding, violent light—the first color he had seen in an epoch—pierced his non-existent eyes. A roar of sensations rushed in: the smell of medicinal herbs, the biting cold of mountain air, and the agonizing weight of a physical body."Push! The child's aura is too strong, he is draining the ambient Qi!"The voice was muffled, like it was coming from underwater. He tried to speak, but his throat was filled with fluid. He tried to move, but his limbs were heavy and weak.Then, a pair of hands—warm, trembling, and calloused—held him."He is beautiful," a woman's voice whispered. She sounded exhausted, her breath rattling in her chest. "But his eyes... they look like they've seen the end of the world."He struggled to focus. He saw a flash of midnight-blue robes and a woman's face, pale and radiant, before a man's shadow obscured her.
The man placed a finger on the infant's forehead. A surge of golden energy rippled through the baby's new meridians, settling the chaotic Qi."He cannot stay here," the man said, his voice a low rumble of suppressed power and grief. "The Heavens are already searching for this ripple. If they find him, they find us.""Just one moment more," the woman pleaded."We have no moments left."A heavy jade pendant was pressed into the infant's swaddling clothes—a dragon coiled around a broken star. The warmth of the woman's kiss touched his brow, and then, the world blurred again.He felt himself being passed to a stranger. He felt the rush of wind as his parents—these two powerful, mysterious shadows—vanished into the mist of a world he did not yet understand.The infant did not cry.In the Void, he had learned that screaming changed nothing. He looked up at the sky of this new world—a sky thick with the energy of the stars and the path to immortality.He had survived a thousand years of nothingness. He would not just live in this world of cultivators. He would conquer it. He would find the authors of his abandonment, and he would become the sky that no one could look above.The count was over. The hunt had begun.