Sovereign of the Shattered cycle
In a universe governed by a lie, one man can see the truth.
Murdered on the verge of a breakthrough that threatened to redefine reality, Dr. Alistair Kane expected oblivion. Instead, he wakes up as Li Fan, the weakest scion of the decaying Li Clan, in a world where power is derived from the rigid, sacrosanct laws of the Celestial Mandate. Here, cultivators follow pre-ordained paths to immortality, blissfully unaware they are following the programming of a cosmic dictatorship designed to harvest their potential and cull their ambition in cyclical Annihilations.
Li Fan’s advantage is not a divine treasure or a legacy memory. It is a fundamental incompatibility. His soul, fractured by quantum death, is misaligned with the world’s innate operating system. This grants him Fracture Sight—the terrifying ability to perceive the flaws, contradictions, and seams in the fabric of reality. Where others see inviolable natural law, he sees exploitable glitches.
But every exploit has a cost. Using his sight risks Soul Glitches: eroding his memories, corrupting his identity, and drawing the attention of the Heavenly Dao’s bureaucratic immune system. To survive, he must apply the scientific method to a world of mysticism: hypothesize, experiment, and iterate his own, heretical path to power.
His journey begins in the treacherous politics of his clan, where he must use logic and perception to outmaneuver brutish rivals and uncover deadly conspiracies. It leads him to the orthodox Cloudy Sword Sect, where he must pretend to follow their "flawless" teachings while secretly compiling evidence of the system's inherent brokenness. There, he meets Su Lian, an outcast disciple whose soul is a celestial anomaly—a living rebellion that disrupts his senses and attracts Heaven’s wrath. Together with Jin Mao, a lazy, ancient spirit-cat whose memory holds fragments of the world before the Mandate, they form a trio of cosmic irregularities.
As Li Fan’s understanding deepens, so does the scale of his conflict. He graduates from fixing flawed pill recipes to temporarily muting fundamental laws. He moves from clan tournaments to wars against sects, and from the Mortal Realm to the ascended Heavens themselves, not by passing tribulations, but by punching holes through the planar barriers.
Pursued by fanatical cultivators, ruthless Celestial Inspectors, and the mysterious Karmic Weaver—the entity that maintains the script of fate—Li Fan must answer the ultimate questions: Can you free a world that doesn’t know it’s enslaved? Can you win a war against the architects of reality without becoming a tyrant yourself? And what is the price of rewriting the code of creation?
AUTHOR: This story is also being released on ROYAL ROAD under the penname, Pigyyyyyguy.
