Darkness.
Gu Chuan's eyes snapped open to a world stripped bare of light, sound, and form. Everywhere he looked was the same endless gray — a boundless void without sky or earth, without direction or anchor. There was no up or down, no horizon, no air to breathe. He hung suspended in a place where even time seemed uncertain, as if the universe itself had yet to take shape.
A chill surged through him. Am I… floating in nothingness?
The thought barely formed before something deeper stirred — a vast current of memory, ancient and heavy, flooding into his mind. He knew this place. This was no dream. No illusion. This was chaos itself — the womb of existence, the raw origin from which all creation would one day emerge.
And he… he was one of its children.
A shiver of realization coursed through him. His body no longer felt human. He glanced down — and froze.
A colossal form stretched endlessly beneath him, scales glimmering in waves of dark-gold light. A serpent. A serpent so vast that even his coils vanished into the distance, ten thousand kilometers of sinew and light adrift in the void. The weight of it should have been crushing, but here, in this formless chaos, he was as small as a spark in the sea.
He remembered, suddenly. The screech of tires. The flash of a sports car spinning out of control. The sickening jolt of impact. Then nothing. Death.
And yet here he was — reborn as a serpent in the beginning of chaos. The primordial ancient serpent.
For a moment panic threatened him. But before it could take root, a cold stillness welled up from deep within, seeping into every thought, every nerve. It was a strange, alien calm — absolute, unshakable. His fear was gone, his heart steady as stone.
Snakes are cold-blooded, he realized. Even my emotions have changed.
The realization chilled him more than the void itself. He was no longer merely Gu Chuan — he was a creature of chaos, shaped by it.
A sudden thought struck him. If this is truly the primordial chaos… then Pangu has not yet opened the heavens. Hongjun, Luohu, the Sanqing, even Nuwa — none of them exist yet.
The scale of it hit him like thunder. He was standing at the dawn before myth, at the very moment history itself had yet to be written.
But awe quickly gave way to dread. He remembered the stories — how the three thousand Chaos Demon Gods, born alongside him, would all perish when Pangu split heaven and earth. None had survived. Not one.
If I do nothing, if I remain weak… I'll vanish like the rest. Just another forgotten corpse in the tides of creation.
A memory surfaced unbidden — the Black Tortoise of the North Sea, who sought only to live quietly, harmlessly. Yet even he had been slaughtered, his limbs ripped away by Nuwa to mend the sky.
The lesson was mercilessly clear:
Weakness is the original sin.
The weak are prey, and the strong carve the laws of the world.
Resolve flared within him. "I must grow stronger. No matter what it takes… I refuse to die again."
His voice echoed strangely in the void, swallowed at once by the gray silence.
But determination alone meant nothing. He clenched his coils. Stronger… how? In his past life he had been an ordinary man. He knew nothing of cultivation, of Dao, of power. By the time of later generations, even the path itself had vanished — the era of Dharma ended, leaving mortals blind.
Then — a spark.
"The Tao Te Ching..."
His eyes widened. He had read it once, long ago. At the time, he thought he had forgotten most of it. But memory is not only in the mind — it is carved into the soul. And now, as if a veil had been lifted, every word surfaced with crystal clarity, etched in his being like scripture written in fire.
The Tao Te Ching, the essence of Dao as understood by the Saint Daode himself — not hoarded jealously, but offered to the world. A Saint's enlightenment laid bare, free for all, knowing only true talent could ever pierce its depths.
He trembled. I have it. A foundation. A path.
In the chaos, where even the laws had yet to be shaped, he began to recite silently.
"The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao..."
The void rippled faintly, as though the gray chaos itself had stirred in answer.
For the first time since awakening, Gu Chuan felt something other than dread. He felt possibility.