The Great Void was silent, save for the hum of a billion stars dying and being reborn in the distance. It was a silence that Lu Youran had grown accustomed to a silence she had earned.
She stood on a platform made of pure, condensed starlight, floating in the center of the Harmony System's Central Hub.
To an observer, she might have looked like a young woman of perhaps twenty, clad in simple white robes that rippled without wind.
But to the System, the omnipotent artificial intelligence that governed the transmigration of countless souls across the multiverse, she was a monolith.
A colossal screen materialized before her, the blue light reflecting in her eyes. Her eyes were not the eyes of a young woman; they were deep, ancient wells that had seen empires rise from dust and burn back into nothingness. They were the eyes of someone who was very, very tired.
[CONGRATULATIONS, HOST NO. 001.]
The mechanical voice boomed, reverberating through her very soul.
It wasn't the cold, robotic voice she had heard eons ago when she was first recruited. It was respectful. Almost trembling.
[METRICS FINALIZED.]
[WORLDS CONQUERED: 3,000.]
[BEASTS TAMED: 9,999+.]
[CATASTROPHES AVERTED: UNCOUNTABLE.]
[CURRENT RANKING IN THE GREAT VOID: #1.]
Lu Youran didn't smile. She didn't pump her fist. She merely raised a hand and covered a yawn that threatened to crack her jaw.
"Is that it?" she asked, her voice raspy from disuse. "Can I go now? You promised me eternal slumber in the Void if I hit the quota. I hit the quota five hundred years ago, System."
[INDEED. YOUR PERFORMANCE HAS BEEN… UNPRECEDENTED. YOU ARE THE APEX PREDATOR OF THE MULTIVERSE. THE MOTHER OF CALAMITIES. THE SOVEREIGN OF—]
"Skip the titles," Youran waved her hand dismissively, summoning a spectral chair out of thin air to collapse into.
"I just want to sleep. No more saving princes. No more raising baby dragons that chew on my furniture. No more cultivation tournaments. Just me, darkness, and silence."
The System processed this for a moment. Lights flickered nervously across the infinite dashboard.
[HOST, THE HARMONY SYSTEM HAS DETERMINED THAT ETERNAL VOID SLUMBER IS... INSUFFICIENT REWARD FOR A BEING OF YOUR MAGNITUDE. ACCORDING TO CLAUSE 44-B OF THE SUPREME CONTRACT, TOP-RANKING HOSTS ARE ELIGIBLE FOR THE 'GRAND HOMECOMING' PACKAGE.]
Youran opened one eye. "Homecoming?"
[YOU WERE ORIGINALLY RECRUITED AT THE MOMENT OF YOUR DEATH, DRIVEN BY BETRAYAL AND FAMILY POLITICS. YOU HAD REGRETS. YOU HAD NOWHERE TO RETURN TO. BUT NOW, WITH YOUR KARMIC POINTS, WE CAN OVERWRITE REALITY.]
The screen changed, showing a hazy, sepia-toned image. A traditional courtyard. A weeping willow tree. A family crest of a Golden Heron.
Lu Youran stared at it. Memories, buried under layers of geological time, began to surface.
The Lu Family, the ridicules she faced, the poison in her tea, the cold snow of the winter she died. She felt a phantom ache in her chest, not from the betrayal, but from the sheer exhaustion of remembering it.
"I have no interest in revenge," she muttered, closing her eyes again. "That life was miserable. Why would I go back to being a punching bag?"
[YOU RETAIN YOUR SOUL. YOUR EXPERIENCE. AND A PORTION OF YOUR AUTHORITY. YOU WOULD NOT RETURN AS A VICTIM, BUT AS A... TOURIST. THINK OF IT AS A VACATION. LUXURY LIVING. SERVANTS. GOOD FOOD. NAP TIMES SCHEDULED BY YOU, NOT BY FATE.]
Youran paused. The word "vacation" hung in the air.
"Food?" she asked. "Real food? Not this spiritual energy pills nonsense?"
[ROAST DUCK. BRAISED PORK BELLY. SWEET RICE CAKES.]
Youran sat up straight. The apathy in her eyes cracked, just a fraction.
"And I don't have to save the world?"
[THE WORLD IS LOW-LEVEL. IT DOES NOT REQUIRE SAVING. YOU CAN BE, AS YOU PREFER, A 'SALTED FISH'.]
Lu Youran weighed the options. Eternal void was nice, but it was boring. A life of luxury, eating mortal food, sleeping in a real bed, and terrifying anyone who tried to make her work?
"Fine," she sighed, standing up. "Send me back. But if a single dragon tries to call me 'Mom', I'm destroying the planet."
[UNDERSTOOD. INITIATING TRANSFER. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE, SOVEREIGN.]
The world dissolved into white light.
***
Shenjing City, The Lu Manor.
The West Courtyard.
The transition was not gentle. It felt like trying to stuff a thunderstorm into a glass bottle.
Lu Youran gasped, her body convulsing as her soul, vast, dense, and heavy with the weight of three thousand lifetimes, slammed into the fragile vessel of a mortal body.
The wooden bed frame beneath her groaned, timber splintering with a sound like a gunshot.
Silence followed.
Dust motes danced in a shaft of pale morning sunlight that cut through the paper lattice of the window.
The smell of old sandalwood, medicinal herbs, and stale air filled her nose. It was a scent so nostalgic it was almost suffocating.
Lu Youran opened her eyes.
She stared at the ceiling. The wooden beams were dark with age, featuring a familiar water stain in the corner shaped vaguely like a rabbit.
She had stared at that stain for eighteen years in her previous life, praying for someone to save her.
Now, she stared at it with the impassive gaze of a predator looking at a dead leaf.
She lay still, letting her senses expand. Her cultivation was gone, sealed away by the laws of this fragile world.
Her meridians were narrow, clogged with the impurities of a sickly body. Her muscles were atrophied, weak as wet paper.
But her Soul Force... that remained.
Unintentionally, she let out a breath. That single breath carried the residual pressure of the Void Ranking's Number One Sovereign.
BOOM.
An invisible shockwave rippled out from her bed. The windows rattled violently in their frames. The porcelain vase on the table didn't break; it simply turned to dust, collapsing into a pile of fine white powder.