Yi Xu was an outer disciple of the Serene Cloud Sect, a minor power living beneath the shadow of the colossal Celestial Sword Sect. While his peers struggled to master techniques and curry favor with elders, he had a peculiar habit: he slipped away to the decaying libraries of the mortal city.
He was not looking for cultivation manuals.He was looking for stories.
Specifically, the stories no one wanted to tell.
On a scroll so old it crumbled at the touch, he found a recorded account:
"When the Gilded Silver Sword attempted to crown itself with the 'Nine,' the heavens did not thunder. The world simply… forgot. At dawn, there was no sect. There were no ruins. There was only an empty plain and the smell of ozone."
A chill ran through Yi Xu. This was not poetry. It was a record.
He lifted his head. The air inside the library was still, heavy.
That was when the screams began outside.
Chaos flooded the streets. Merchants slammed their shops shut. Low-level cultivators ran with pale faces. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
A bandit, taking advantage of the panic, snatched a young woman's purse and bolted. Yi Xu, almost on reflex, stuck out his foot. The man fell. Before he could rise, Yi Xu planted his foot on the man's neck and picked up a butcher's knife that had fallen to the ground.
"What's going on?" His voice was calmer than he expected.
"Let me go, damn you! The tribulation is coming!"
"Tribulation? On whom?"
The bandit laughed, a desperate sound. "On everyone! The Sword Sect has gone mad! They declared themselves the Thirty-Three Celestial Sword Sect! The heavens will kill us all!"
Thirty-Three.
The words from the scroll echoed in Yi Xu's mind. The world simply forgot.
"Blessings," the bandit babbled in terror. "They said there would be blessings! That disciples would awaken! That their swords would sing with new insights! Lies! All lies! It's all going to end!"
Yi Xu saw the hatred and terror in the man's eyes. He saw the knife in the bandit's hand rise.
He didn't think.
His own blade moved—fast and clean.
The throat was opened. The warmth of blood splashed across his face.
He stood there, watching life drain onto the stone floor. His hand did not tremble. Instead of nausea or remorse, a strange, cold understanding surfaced.
He tried to kill me. I killed him. This is balance. This is natural.
A primordial roar tore through the world.
It wasn't a sound. It was reality being ripped apart.
On the distant horizon, above the sacred mountains of the Celestial Sword Sect, the sky split open. Purple and black lightning descended—not like thunderbolts, but like gigantic claws. The pressure arrived before the sound, flattening houses and crushing bodies.
Yi Xu was flung like a rag doll through a wall and crashed amid rubble.
Pain. Sharp and deep.
His right arm was broken, hanging by tendons. A splinter of wood had pierced his abdomen. He struggled to breathe, coughing up blood.
Lying twisted among stone and timber, he had a clear view of the sky.
And he saw it.
He saw the Sword God, legendary progenitor of the sect, awakening from a millennial slumber. His aura was a hurricane of cutting intent, so powerful that Yi Xu, even from hundreds of li away, felt his skin being finely sliced.
The Sword God raised his blade, and a slash capable of separating worlds flew toward the lightning.
And it worked.
The lightning dissipated. The sect's disciples roared in triumph. Hope—arrogant and foolish—blossomed.
From other sects, from distant corners of the world, Yi Xu felt powerful consciousnesses drawing near—hesitant at first, then filled with sudden fear.
They too had seen it.They knew what it meant.
A voice echoed, not to the ears, but directly into the soul:
"SIN."
And everything stopped.
The wind.The sound.Light itself.
All frozen.
Except Yi Xu.
His mind, shattered and hovering on the brink of death, still turned.
This isn't a heavenly tribulation. This is an execution.
From the tear in the sky, something descended.
It was not a hand, but the idea of a hand—a contour formed of absence and law. It lowered itself over the sacred mountains, slow and inevitable.
The Sword God roared. His roar carried eras of pride, ambition, and a hidden design.
In his near-death haze, Yi Xu glimpsed other forces rising around the Sword God—ninety-nine other presences, each monstrous, each ancient.
They planned this. They tried to force it. They thought they were ready.
The hand closed.
There was no explosion.
There was only a profound silence, followed by a flash of pure white light.
When Yi Xu's vision returned, the world had changed.
The sacred mountains were gone.
In their place lay a vast lake of something like boiling liquid silver. The blood of the Sword God, and of his ninety-nine allies, did not splash.
It spread.
It became rain, rivers, shimmering mist.
Droplets of divine essence fell nearby. Where they touched, common stone bloomed into blade-sharp crystals. Plants of steel grew in seconds. The air itself gained a metallic, cutting taste.
A new law was being born.
An implacable law of sword.
Elsewhere, other colors fell.
A black, devouring rain birthed deserts of shifting sand that swallowed sound. A green mist formed forests where trees whispered poisonous secrets.
The world was being redrawn, fertilized by the deaths of the hundred most powerful beings to ever exist.
Creation born from forced sacrifice.
The hand vanished.
The tear in the sky closed.
Time resumed.
Pain struck Yi Xu like a hammer. His senses dimmed. He knew he was dying. His mortal body could not survive these wounds, nor the radiation of newborn laws.
In his final seconds of consciousness, before darkness could claim him, he saw something strange.
Where his blood soaked into the ground, mingling with the dust of ancient books from the destroyed library, numbers began to form.
Fleeting.Unstable.Like shadows on water.
11…22…33…
And then, it was not darkness that swallowed him.
It was a soft, heatless light.
He fell, but not into death.
He fell through concepts.Through layers of meaning.Through order itself.
When his feet touched the ground again, there was no pain.
No wounds.
He stood upon an infinite, silent plain beneath a sky of undefined color.
Before him, etched into the air like fixed stars, were the numbers.
And they were watching him.