The sky over the Immortal Realm did not glow with its fabled golden radiance; it bled a bruised, sickly violet.
Liu Yang Wu stepped over the shattered remains of a jade archway, his boots crunching against the pulverized spirit-stones that once powered a thousand-year sect. Around him, the "Paradise of the Gods" was a graveyard of floating islands and burning palaces. The air, once thick with life-giving Qi, now tasted of ozone, ash, and the copper tang of divine blood.
He didn't look back at the horizon, where the Mortal Realm—his home—was nothing more than a flickering ember in the void. The Heavenly Ruler had demanded a tithe of a billions of souls to forge his Pill of Eternal Invincibility, and his "immortal" sycophants had been all too happy to play the butchers.
"Stop right there, mortal filth!"
A squadron of Golden-Armored Sentinels descended, their spears crackling with celestial lightning. These were the men who had razed cities for a tyrant's whim.
Liu Yang Wu didn't break his stride. He unsheathed a blade that hummed with a dark, vengeful resonance, its edge duller than a kitchen knife but heavy with the weight of a dying world.
"The heavens have gone deaf," Liu Yang Wu whispered, his voice cutting through the roar of the fires. "So I've stopped praying. I'm just here to settle the bill."
Despite being a mortal cultivator,his life had shaped him into someone capable of fighting an average low ranked immortal in equal terms,thus he didn't hesitate and lunged forward
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The air smelled of ozone and scorched copper. Liu Yang Wu stood amidst a graveyard of shattered divinity. Around him lay three Golden Armored Sentinels—warriors who had lived for millennia, now reduced to heaps of dented metal and fading spirit essence.
Liu Yang Wu spit a mouthful of blood onto the white jade tiles of the Heavenly Pavilion. His "Mortal Aperture" thrummed with a violent, jagged rhythm. It wasn't the smoother, flowing Qi of the immortals; it was the raw, desperate friction of a man who refused to die.
The remaining five sentinels hesitated, their halberds trembling. To them, he was an impossibility—a flicker of candlelight that refused to be extinguished by a hurricane.
"Is this the best the Heavens have to offer?" Liu Yang Wu rasped, his voice a dry grind of gravel. "Your 'immortality' seems remarkably fragile."
But then suddenly,
The sky didn't darken; it turned a blinding, oppressive gold. The pressure hit the ground like a falling mountain, instantly crushing the remaining sentinels to their knees.
The Vile Heavenly Ruler did not descend from a portal. He simply was. One moment the space was empty; the next, a figure draped in robes of stitched starlight stood ten paces from Liu Yang Wu. He didn't look angry. He looked... focused.
"Normally," the Ruler began, his voice vibrating in Liu Yang Wu's very marrow, "I would send a General. Then a High Priest. I would let you struggle, grow, and provide me with the entertainment of a 'hero's journey.'"
Liu Yang Wu tried to lift his sword, but his muscles felt as though they were being fused to his bones by the sheer weight of the Ruler's gaze.
"But I have peered into the Great River of Time and observed Fate," the Ruler continued, stepping closer. "In ten thousand iterations of the future, I saw a thousand deaths. But in every single version where I fall... it is your hand on the blade. You are the only variable I cannot control."
Liu Yang Wu roared, a sound of pure mortal defiance, forcing his body to move against the divine pressure. He lunged, his blade glowing with the dull, hot red of a dying star.
The Ruler didn't flinch. He didn't even raise a hand.
"I do not gamble with destiny," the Ruler whispered.
He reached out and tapped Liu Yang Wu's chest with a single finger.
[Heavenly Art: Absolute Erasure]
There was no explosion. No spray of blood. Where the Ruler's finger touched, reality simply ceased to be. A void blossomed within Liu Yang Wu's chest, spreading with cold, mathematical precision. His sword disintegrated into ash before it could connect. His memories, his Qi, and his very soul were unmade in a heartbeat.
The Ruler watched until the last speck of Liu Yang Wu's existence vanished into the wind. He stood alone in the silence of the pavilion, his expression unreadable.
"Prophecy has been averted," he murmured to the empty air as he laughed manically "Let the chronicles reflect that the mortal died of a sudden, natural end."
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The pain didn't fade; it simply ceased to have a medium to travel through.
Liu Yang Wu felt himself unraveling—his bones turning to mist, his thoughts dissolving like ink in a rushing river. He expected the dark, cold embrace of the Underworld, or perhaps the total nothingness of the void.
Instead, there was The Silence.
It wasn't the silence of a quiet room, but a profound, absolute stillness that felt heavier than the Ruler's pressure. The void wasn't black; it was a boundless, shimmering expanse of pearlescent white. There was no floor, no sky, and for a moment, Liu Yang Wu realized he no longer had a body—he was merely a flicker of consciousness, a stubborn spark in an ocean of light.
But right then,from the brilliance, a shape coalesced. It didn't walk; it simply manifested. The figure was humanoid, carved from a light so pure it made the Heavenly Ruler's "divinity" look like a flickering candle. It lacked a face, yet Liu Yang Wu felt its gaze—a gaze that had watched the birth of stars and the cooling of worlds.
"Liu Yang Wu," the figure spoke. The voice didn't come from ears; it vibrated within his very essence. It was the sound of wind through ancient trees and the grinding of tectonic plates.
"I am dead," Liu Yang Wu's consciousness vibrated back. "He erased me."
"He attempted to," the figure replied, its form undulating like solar flares. "But you cannot erase what the World refuses to let go. I am the Will of the Heavenly Dao—the breath in the lungs of existence."
The figure waved a hand of light, and the white void rippled. Images appeared—not of glory, but of decay. He saw rivers turning to gray ash, spiritual veins in the earth shriveling like burnt parchment, and entire realms losing their color.
"The one you call the Ruler is a parasite," the Dao's Will stated with a cold, cosmic sorrow. "In his pursuit of 'Invincibility' and 'Eternal Life,' he has reached a point of stagnation. He no longer cultivates the breath of the world; he devours it."
The figure stepped closer, the weight of its presence both terrifying and oddly comforting.
"He has locked the cycle of reincarnation. He has halted the flow of entropy. To make himself eternal, he is making the world dead. He saw your fate and feared it because you are the 'Mortal Variable'—the only thing his divine calculations couldn't account for."
Liu Yang Wu felt a surge of spectral indignation. "Then why let him kill me? Why wait until I was ash?"
"Because to kill a god who has stolen the world's life, one must first exist outside the world's laws," the figure explained. "By 'erasing' you, he unwittingly freed you from his reach. Now, Liu Yang Wu... do you wish to remain a memory, or will you become the edge of the blade the Heavens use to prune a rotting branch?"
Liu Yang Wu's consciousness flickered like a dying candle. "What do you mean, 'outside the world's laws'?" he asked, his voice echoing in the white expanse. "How can I stop him if I don't even exist anymore?"
The manifestation of the Dao tilted its head. "Precisely because you do not exist, Liu Yang Wu. The Heavenly Ruler uses the 'Great River of Time' as his map. He sees the ripples everyone makes. But you? Your erasure has turned you into a ghost. You are a pebble that makes no ripple, a wind that leaves no scent. You have been freed from the Ledger of Destiny."
The figure gestured, and a colossal, shimmering torrent appeared—the River of Time.
"I will send you back," the Will declared. "Back to the moment your spirit aperture first awakened. You will retain your memories, but more importantly, you will possess the 'Eye of the Variable.' You will be able to see the threads of fate binding others—and you will be able to cut them."
"The Ruler... he is too strong," Liu Yang Wu whispered. "He commands the elements. He commands the very sky."
The White Light pulsated with a hint of cosmic disdain. "He commands branches, not the root. The paths you know—Water, Fire, Metal, Wind, Earth and others including the branches from the main paths —are mere offshoots of my essence. They are predictable. They follow the cycles of generation and inhibition. The Ruler has mastered these branches, but he has forgotten the trunk."
The figure placed a hand of pure light upon Liu Yang Wu's "chest."
"I grant you the foundation of a Path that has no name in your era. It is the Rule Path. It is the art of Sovereignty."
A flood of information, ancient and chaotic, surged into Liu Yang Wu's mind. It wasn't organized like a manual; it was a storm of concepts.
"All things began in Chaos," the Will explained. "Rules do not exist to suppress Chaos; they are born from it. The Rule Path does not control Fire or Water. It controls the Laws that allow Fire to burn and Water to flow. It is the direct counter to every path in existence. If a god throws a mountain at you, you do not break the mountain—you rewrite the Rule that says the mountain is heavy."
Liu Yang Wu gasped as a seed of gray, swirling energy took root where his heart used to be.
"I gave you the foundation. The rest, you must forge yourself through blood and effort. You are the sole practitioner of this path. Go now, Liu Yang Wu. Become the Rule that even the Heavens must obey."
The white void shattered. The River of Time roared in his ears, pulling him downward through centuries in a heartbeat.
Thump.
Liu Yang Wu's eyes snapped open. The air was thick and humid, smelling of old wood and incense. He wasn't in the Heavenly Pavilion. He was in the apertue awakening grounds of his clan where people awakened their aperture when they were 16 if they had any talent
In front of him stood an elderly man with a stone basin. "Liu Yang Wu! Focus! Your Aperture is about to awaken today.Dont waste your time!"
Liu Yang Wu looked at his young, calloused hands. He felt it—the tiny, budding space in his lower abdomen which was about to awaken today. But alongside the faint glimmer of a mortal aperture, there was a swirling vortex of gray chaos, invisible to the world, yet heavier than the stars.
He looked up at the Elder, and for a split second, he saw a glowing thread of gold tied to the old man's neck—the thread of his fate.
Liu Yang Wu smiled, and it was the smile of a man who knew exactly how the world was going to break.