Darkness.
The soil stirred—damp, cold, heavy with silence. From beneath the roots of an ancient, twisted tree, the ground cracked open. A pale hand clawed its way out first—bloodied, trembling, alive. Then came the body, crawling like a corpse that had forgotten how to die.
His first breath sounded like a sob. Or maybe... a laugh.
He didn't know his name. But the gravestone beside him did.
"Li Zhen — Died for the world, lived for a mistake."
The sky above was not blue.
He looked up and saw it: the heavens fractured like shattered glass, leaking violet light. Beautiful. But wrong.
That was not the light of this world—That was a Fragment, fallen from the day the sky itself had broken.
They once called it Qi—the life-force, the breath of heaven and earth. But Qi was no longer flowing. It resonated, echoed, and sometimes… it chose.
The world had changed since that day. The old sects, the sacred paths of balance and harmony, all crumbled. Cultivation, as it was… was dead.
What remained was chaos. And those mad enough to fuse themselves with the Qi Fragments.
They did not cultivate power. They were inhabited by it. And power, now, was never free.
"Li Zhen"—if that truly was his name—opened his eyes wide.
And in his eyes… a shadow. A figure watching him from afar. Same face. Same sword. But a grin made of malice.
"If I've come back to life… then who still lives as me?"
In the distance, a crow cawed. It landed on the half-broken gravestone and spoke.
"Welcome back, swordsman who died yesterday."
Li Zhen's goal was simple: To find out who he was.
But the path ahead would lead him to war—against himself, against false gods rewriting reality, and against the temptation to become one.
For in a world that had lost its sky, the only path to freedom… was to shatter the First Heaven.