Lin Xuan opened his eyes to a sky on fire.
The clouds were not the soft, endless white of his home realm. They were jagged and seared with streaks of molten orange, split by towering columns of smoke. The air was heavy with the metallic tang of blood and the acrid stench of burning concrete. He drew in a breath, tasting ash on his tongue, and for a heartbeat, he was back in the final moments of his previous life — standing on a shattered peak, his body breaking apart under the weight of his own Dao.
I… failed?
The memory was a knife twisting in his mind. The tribulation lightning, blacker than void, had pierced through his final defensive art. His Primordial Sea had collapsed. He remembered the laughter of the heavens, cruel and merciless, as if mocking his millennia of cultivation.
And then — nothing.
Until now.
He flexed his fingers. They trembled, not with weakness, but with unfamiliarity. The hands were smaller, paler than the ones he remembered — the hands of a youth barely out of adolescence, calloused from mundane labor, not from millennia of wielding immortal blades.
This isn't my body.
The thought came cold and precise. Lin Xuan closed his eyes, drawing his awareness inward. Beneath the thin flesh and fragile bones, he found a sea of vitality — weak, unrefined, and starved of energy. His meridians were narrow channels clogged with impurities. His dantian was practically nonexistent, a hollow shell compared to the vast cosmic ocean he once commanded.
Yet there was something… else. Faint, almost imperceptible. A thread of energy unlike anything he had touched before — raw, primal, and strangely familiar. He focused on it, and the fragment pulsed like the heartbeat of a slumbering giant.
A scream shattered his concentration.
Lin Xuan's eyes snapped open. The world around him came into sharp focus: a street choked with debris, overturned cars, and the scattered remains of what had once been a bustling city. People ran in blind panic, their faces twisted with terror. Behind them, shapes moved — hulking, scaled creatures with jaws lined in serrated teeth, their crimson eyes blazing with hunger.
One of the beasts — a horned lizard, two meters tall with forelimbs like cleavers — lunged at a fleeing woman. Lin Xuan moved before the thought fully formed, his body responding with an instinct honed across countless lifetimes. His foot struck cracked asphalt, propelling him forward with startling speed. His hand closed around a length of jagged rebar, yanking it free from the wreckage.
The creature turned at the last second, its maw opening in a roar. Lin Xuan's strike drove the rebar through its eye and deep into its skull, the force snapping the improvised weapon in half. The beast collapsed in a twitching heap.
The woman stared at him, shock overriding her terror. "Y-you…?"
Lin Xuan said nothing. He dropped the twisted metal, his gaze already scanning for the next threat. Three more beasts were bounding toward him, claws raking furrows into the asphalt.
Too weak, he noted dispassionately, feeling the sluggishness of this mortal body. But… still usable.
He drew in a breath and reached inward, seeking the strange thread of energy again. This time, it responded, a spark of ancient power blooming in his chest. He guided it through his meridians, ignoring the pain as the unrefined channels strained under the flow. Strength surged through his limbs, burning away the lethargy.
The first beast lunged. Lin Xuan sidestepped, pivoted, and slammed his palm against its neck. Bones cracked like brittle wood. A twist of his wrist sent the creature crumpling to the ground.
The second and third beasts hesitated, their predatory instincts faltering before the sudden predator in their midst. Lin Xuan took a single step forward, and they fled, claws scraping frantically against the pavement.
Around him, the survivors had frozen, staring at him with wide, disbelieving eyes. Lin Xuan ignored them. His gaze turned skyward, where streaks of fire — escape pods, meteors, he couldn't tell — carved burning trails through the atmosphere.
This isn't the cultivation realm. Where… am I?
A flicker of movement drew his attention downward. A shard of glass lay amid the rubble, reflecting his face. It was unfamiliar — a young man in his early twenties, black-haired, sharp-featured, with eyes that still held the echoes of his former self. He studied the reflection for a moment, then rose, his mind already assembling fragments of information from the memories of this body.
The name came unbidden: Lin Xuan, a college student from Shanghai. His family — gone, casualties of the chaos that had swept across the world. He had been trapped beneath rubble when the monsters first attacked.
And above all, a single phrase burned in those memories, repeated over and over by frantic newscasters and terrified survivors:
"The Great Nirvana has begun."
---
The hours that followed were a blur of movement and blood. Lin Xuan led a ragged band of survivors through the crumbling streets, his improvised weapon cleaving through beasts that should have torn them apart. Each battle drove home the frailty of his new body — every swing slower, every strike weaker than what he once commanded. And yet, with each fight, the thread of energy within him grew stronger, as if the carnage itself was awakening it.
By nightfall, they had reached the ruins of an old subway station, barricading the entrances with twisted steel and shattered concrete. The survivors huddled together, whispering prayers to gods that would never hear them.
Lin Xuan sat apart, his eyes closed, the faintest hint of a smirk on his lips.
Primordial Qi. That was what he had found — not the cultivated spiritual energy of his former world, nor the universal origin energy that true gods wielded, but something older, wilder. Even in this thin, polluted atmosphere, it existed in abundance, woven into the very fabric of this dying world.
He formed a hand seal, fingers moving through the ancient mudra of the Primordial Ascension Codex. The thread of energy surged in response, racing through his meridians like liquid fire. Pain lanced through his body as impurities burned away, his mortal flesh reshaping under the assault. Sweat poured down his back, hissing as it struck the cold floor.
When he opened his eyes, the dim light of the subway flickered, momentarily drowned by the faint silver glow radiating from his skin.
The heavens of my realm denied me ascension, Lin Xuan thought, the smirk widening into a feral grin. Very well. I shall shatter these heavens instead.
---
At dawn, Lin Xuan climbed to the surface. The city was silent, save for the distant roars of beasts. Smoke coiled into the bruised sky, and in the distance, an entire skyline lay in ruins.
A voice crackled from a nearby emergency broadcast unit, its signal barely holding:
> "…all survivors, gather at the regional shelters. Military evacuation underway. Do not engage beasts unless absolutely necessary…"
Lin Xuan ignored it. His gaze was fixed not on the ruins or the fleeing survivors, but on the horizon, where a massive shadow blotted out the rising sun — a beast larger than any he had faced yet, its jagged silhouette crawling with other, smaller monsters.
And beneath his feet, deep within the earth, he felt it again — that ancient, slumbering heartbeat.
Lin Xuan smiled, slow and predatory. "A fitting world for my second ascension."
---
End of Chapter 1.