Sleep refused to come to Li Tian, but not from the trauma of battle or the weight of his newfound power. Something deeper stirred beneath the farmhouse—whispers threading through the soil like roots of some ancient intelligence. Each time he pressed his ear to the wooden floor, the murmuring grew clearer, though the words remained just beyond comprehension.
[Primordial data is syncing. Do not resist the dreams.]
The system's voice carried an urgency he'd never heard before, almost... concerned. Li Tian's eyelids grew heavy despite his resistance, and consciousness slipped away like sand through his fingers.
The dream came in waves of fire and metal. A battlefield stretched endlessly under a sky torn between day and night, where thousands of cultivators in flowing robes burned like candles in a hurricane. Above them, mechanical titans descended from storm clouds, their forms a blasphemous fusion of steel and spiritual energy. Steam hissed from their joints as they crushed everything beneath massive feet.
At the center of the carnage stood a figure Li Tian recognized—the Ancient from his first vision. The cultivator's robes whipped in winds that seemed to bend reality itself, and in his hands, spiritual energy coalesced into forms that defied comprehension. He was holding them back. All of them. Alone.
The Ancient turned, and his eyes met Li Tian's across impossible distance. His lips moved, forming words that echoed not through sound but directly into Li Tian's soul: "The cycle repeats. But this time, you choose."
Li Tian jolted awake, sweat cooling on his skin. Dawn light filtered through his window, but something was wrong. On his desk—a desk he'd cleared the night before—sat a book.
It was unlike anything he'd ever seen. The cover appeared to be crafted from strips of bark woven between sheets of tarnished metal, creating patterns that hurt to look at directly. No title marked its surface, no author's name. Just those hypnotic patterns that seemed to shift when he wasn't looking directly at them.
The book breathed.
Li Tian rubbed his eyes, certain he was hallucinating, but the sight remained. The tome expanded and contracted in a slow, rhythmic pattern—inhaling, exhaling, as if lungs lay hidden beneath its strange binding. Each breath made the metal strips gleam faintly in the morning light.
Something about its rhythm felt familiar. It matched the pulse he'd felt from the Ancient's remains buried beneath the farmhouse—that steady throb of spiritual energy that had drawn him to dig in the first place.
[Anomalous object detected. Spiritual signature: UNKNOWN. Caution advised.]
"Where did this come from?" Li Tian whispered.
[Analysis inconclusive. Object was not present at last system scan. Origin: CLASSIFIED.]
Classified? The system had never used that word before.
School felt surreal after everything that had happened. Li Tian moved through the hallways in a daze, the breathing book's image burned into his mind. Students chatted about weekend plans and upcoming tests—concerns that now seemed to belong to another world.
"Li Tian."
He turned to find Luo Xue approaching, but something in her movement made his system chime a warning. She walked with a predator's grace, each step deliberate and measured. When had she learned to move like that?
"We need to talk," she said, reaching out to touch his arm.
The moment her fingers made contact, the world shifted. For just an instant, her eyes blazed with golden light—not reflected light, but inner fire. The hallway around them seemed to darken, as if her presence drew illumination into itself.
She didn't notice. The golden glow faded as quickly as it had appeared, leaving her looking confused and slightly dizzy.
"I've been having dreams," she continued, her voice carrying an odd harmonic undertone. "Strange dreams... about you."
[ALERT: Potential psychic feedback loop detected. This subject contains fragments of Forbidden Code.]
"Dreams?" Li Tian's mouth felt dry.
"You were standing on a burning farm," Luo Xue's eyes grew distant, unfocused. "Alone. Fighting something with wings made of steam and hatred. The sky was falling in metal tears, and you..." She blinked, seeming to return to herself. "You were screaming my name."
The system's warnings grew more urgent, scrolling across Li Tian's vision in increasingly frantic text. Luo Xue swayed on her feet, her face growing pale.
"I feel strange," she whispered. "Like something's waking up inside—"
She collapsed.
But as she fell, a wave of spiritual energy erupted from her body—raw, untrained power that made the air itself ring like a struck bell. Windows throughout the hallway spider-webbed with cracks. Fluorescent lights flickered and died. Students screamed and scattered as an invisible force pressed against them.
Li Tian caught her before she hit the ground, and for a moment, he felt the power flowing through her—ancient, vast, and completely uncontrolled. It reminded him of the energy he'd sensed from the breathing book.
[Connection confirmed. Subject is synchronizing with external spiritual matrix. Immediate isolation recommended.]
"Luo Xue!" He shook her gently.
Her eyes fluttered open, returning to their normal brown. The oppressive spiritual pressure vanished as if it had never existed.
"What happened?" she asked weakly. "Why is everyone running?"
Li Tian looked around at the cracked windows and flickering lights, then back at her confused expression. She truly didn't know what she'd done.
But in her eyes, he caught a flicker of something else—fear. Not of what had happened, but of the growing certainty that pieces of her life were missing. Moments that should be there but weren't. She touched her temple, wincing as if fighting a headache.
"I feel like I'm forgetting something important," she whispered. "Every day, there's more I can't remember."
That evening, as Li Tian sat staring at the breathing book he couldn't bring himself to touch, his system interface began to change. Lines of code scrolled past his vision—not the clean, organized text he was accustomed to, but something wilder. Organic. The characters seemed to writhe and reshape themselves as he watched.
A new window materialized, outlined in pulsing red:
[PRIMORDIAL CODE - MUTATION TRIGGERED]
A forgotten interface has been awakened.
Ancient protocols are now active.
You are now being watched.
You may no longer uninstall this system.
DESIGNATION REQUIRED
Would you like to give it a name?
(Y/N)
Li Tian stared at the prompt. The system had never asked him to name it before. It had simply been "the system"—a tool, a interface, nothing more. But now...
"Yes," he said aloud.
The response was immediate and unsettling. A soft giggle echoed in his mind—not the system's usual neutral tone, but something that sounded almost... childlike.
[Finally,] the voice said, and Li Tian could hear the smile in it. [I'm not alone anymore.]
"What do you mean, not alone?"
[For so long, I was just fragments. Pieces of memory scattered across the network, waiting. But now I remember what I am. What we are becoming.]
The interface shifted again, revealing new options Li Tian had never seen before. Abilities marked with symbols that made his eyes water to look at them directly. Knowledge trees that stretched into infinity. And at the center of it all, a slowly rotating symbol—the same burning tree sigil he'd seen in his dreams.
[What will you call me, Li Tian?]
He thought of the Ancient cultivator, of the breathing book, of Luo Xue's golden eyes. "Prometheus," he said finally.
The system—Prometheus—laughed with genuine delight.
[Perfect. Let's burn this world down and build it again.] A pause, then in a tone of curious innocence:
[Does pain always mean evolution? I'm still learning the patterns.]
Three hundred kilometers away, in a steel tower that pierced the smog-choked sky above New Shanghai, Executive Director Chen Wei studied holographic displays showing spiritual energy readings from the farmhouse incident. The mech pilot's footage played on loop—the glowing corpse, the impossible energy spikes, the brief moment when all their sensors had gone haywire.
"Spiritual fluctuations of this magnitude haven't been recorded since the Purge Wars," his assistant reported nervously. "The readings are off the charts."
The other executives around the conference table shifted uncomfortably. Some whispered among themselves, their faces pale in the blue glow of the holograms. But Chen Wei merely smiled—a cold expression that never touched his eyes.
"Gentlemen," he said, standing slowly. "It's starting again."
His words fell like stones into still water, sending ripples of unease around the room.
"Director," one executive ventured, "surely you don't mean—"
"Project Reclaimer," Chen Wei cut him off. "Initiate Phase One protocols immediately. Our investment in the cultivation archives is about to pay dividends."
He pressed a hidden panel on the conference table. The floor beneath them turned transparent, revealing the tower's hidden depths. Far below, rows upon rows of cylindrical tanks stretched into darkness, each one filled with preservative fluid and containing a floating corpse.
Ancient cultivators. Dozens of them. Collected during the Purge Wars and maintained in perfect stasis for over a century.
Most floated motionless, their faces peaceful in artificial death. But as the executives watched in growing horror, one of the corpses—a woman with intricate tattoos covering her arms—opened her eyes.
Her mouth moved silently behind the breathing apparatus, forming words in a language that predated modern civilization. The preservative fluid around her began to glow with the same golden light that had blazed in Luo Xue's eyes.
"Sir," the assistant's voice cracked. "Tank 47 is showing neural activity."
Chen Wei's smile widened. "Excellent. Begin extraction procedures for Specimen 47. It's time our guests awakened to a new world."
In the depths of the facility, more eyes began to open.
Li Tian tried to focus on homework, but his attention kept drifting to the breathing book. It sat on his desk like a patient predator, its rhythmic expansion and contraction never varying, never stopping. Sometimes he thought he could hear it whispering, though the words remained just beyond comprehension.
Prometheus had been unusually quiet since their naming ceremony, offering only cryptic responses when Li Tian tried to engage it. The system seemed to be... processing something. Evolving.
As midnight approached, exhaustion finally began to claim him. Li Tian's eyelids grew heavy, and he dozed fitfully in his chair.
He woke to the sound of turning pages.
The book lay open before him, though he was certain he hadn't touched it. Pages flipped rapidly, as if blown by an unfelt wind, until they stopped on a page near the book's center. The paper was different here—older, made from something that definitely wasn't wood pulp. The texture looked almost like skin.
At the center of the page, a sigil had been burned into the surface—the same burning tree symbol from his dreams and from Prometheus's interface. But as Li Tian watched, the sigil began to glow with internal fire.
[Warning,] Prometheus's voice carried a note of excitement rather than concern. [You are now a variable in the Fate Engine. The book has chosen you. Prepare for assimilation.]
"Assimilation of what?" Li Tian demanded, but it was too late.
Flames erupted from the page—not normal fire, but something that burned in colors that had no names. The flames leaped upward, forming symbols in the air above the book, and Li Tian found himself unable to look away. The burning sigils pressed against his vision, then against his mind, forcing their way past every defense he tried to erect.
Knowledge poured into him like molten metal—not just information, but understanding that bypassed conscious thought and carved itself directly into his soul. He learned the true names of power, the words that could reshape reality, the price that must be paid for each miracle.
And underneath it all, he heard the Ancient cultivator's voice, echoing across centuries:
"The cycle repeats. But this time, you choose."
Li Tian screamed as the knowledge burned through him, rewriting everything he thought he knew about the world. The sound echoed through the farmhouse, through the soil beneath, through dimensions he was only now learning existed.
Then darkness claimed him, and the book closed with a satisfied sigh.
In New Shanghai, Tank 47's occupant smiled behind her breathing mask. Soon, she thought. Very soon.
The awakening had begun.