The universe was never meant to be silent.
In the higher planes, where the Great Dao flowed like an eternal, rhythmic current, existence was a symphony of absolute order. To the Sovereigns—ancient beings who had stitched their souls into the very fabric of stars and universal laws—the cosmos was a perfected mechanism. Every living soul was expected to possess a Dao Anchor, a tether that bound them to a fixed principle: Fire, Metal, Slaughter, or Endurance. To exist was to be defined; to be defined was to be controlled.
Nothing was allowed to exist without a name.
Nothing was allowed to exist without permission.
Yet, in the most decayed corner of the Cangyuan World, the Divine Script trembled.
Stone-Breath Village lay crushed beneath the jagged shadows of the Iron-Grip Mountains. The peaks resembled the skeletal fingers of a buried titan, clawing desperately at the sky, forever failing to reach the Heavens. In this place, sunlight was a weak, filtered memory, and hope was even scarcer. It was a village of rot and soot, where dreams died before they could even take shape.
At the heart of the village stood a forge.
It leaned like a crippled beast, built from blackened timber and packed mud. Its chimney exhaled a thick, grey smoke that never truly rose, as if the sky itself rejected the fumes of a lowly blacksmith.
Inside, Wei Chang swung his hammer.
Clang.
Clang.
Clang.
Each strike was heavy, precise, and carries the weight of a hidden desperation. Once, long ago, Wei Chang had been a man who shattered mountain ranges and marched through battlefields where the soil turned to mud from the blood of fallen kings. Now, his left leg ended in a crude wooden peg, and his hands, once used to sunder empires, forged farming tools for peasants who feared him.
Beside the anvil rested a cradle carved from scorched wood. Inside it lay a newborn.
The night of the child's birth had been... wrong.
The village elders still spoke of it in fearful whispers as the "Three Seconds of Absolute Dark." It wasn't merely the absence of light; it was the sudden, terrifying erasure of its very concept. For three heartbeats, flames froze, wind vanished, and even the stars seemed to forget how to shine. The world hadn't just gone dark—it had gone blank.
The child had not cried. He had only stared.
His eyes were a deep, unsettling indigo—an unnatural hue, like voids punched into reality itself.
"He has no Anchor," the midwife had whispered, her voice shaking with a terror she couldn't name. "No soul-thread. No resonance. Just… nothing."
In a world ruled by cultivation, such a child was considered worse than dead. A void-body was a waste of skin, a person who could never touch the Dao. But Wei Chang had not discarded him. He looked at the child and saw a mirror of his own silence.
He named the boy Wei Wuque.
Years passed in Stone-Breath Village, but Wuque did not grow like the other children. He did not play. He did not laugh. He did not dream. Instead, he sat in the deep shadows of the forge, watching.
He watched the iron bend under the heat.
He watched the sparks die as they hit the cold earth.
He watched cause and effect obey the invisible, suffocating rules of the world.
To the villagers, he was "Trash." Even the lowest beggar had worth because they resonated with the Dao of Hunger or Persistence. Wuque resonated with nothing. He was a zero in a world of infinite numbers.
And yet, within that nothingness, Wuque felt a secret, terrifying freedom.
At night, while his father's snores competed with the crackle of dying embers, Wuque listened. He didn't listen to the sounds of the night, but to the gap between those sounds. He realized a truth the Sovereigns had forgotten:
Fire consumed wood. Wood became ash. Ash scattered.
But the space where the fire burned remained unchanged. That space was older than the fire. It was more permanent than the wood.
One night, at seven years old, Wuque reached toward a dying ember in the hearth.
He did not draw Qi from the air. He did not invoke a sacred technique. He simply focused on that ember and withdrew the universe's permission for it to exist.
The ember vanished.
It wasn't extinguished. It wasn't destroyed. It was erased.
A tiny pocket of absolute nothingness replaced it, and for a split second, the laws of the world hesitated. The air around the hearth grew soul-chillingly cold.
A surge of ice-cold energy raced up Wuque's spine. This was not cultivation. This was Authority. This was the Primordial Void—the state of existence before the Heavens imposed their noisy, cluttered "Order."
High above, within jade palaces suspended in eternal daylight, a Celestial Overseer frowned.
A single name on the Eternal Records had blurred. Stone-Breath Village. The thread of destiny wasn't severed; it wasn't dead. It was simply... unwritten.
The Overseer searched, divined, and calculated until his eyes bled gold. But nothing appeared.
"You cannot record what does not exist," he murmured at last, his voice trembling with a hint of an ancient fear. He closed the scroll and told himself it was a glitch in the Dao.
Back in the forge, Wuque opened his eyes.
His small hands were trembling—not with fear, but with a primal, gnawing hunger. He looked at the world differently now. The Heavens were nothing but parasites, forcing shape onto a perfect void. They were the noise, and he was the silence.
He stood at the window, staring toward the distant, golden glow of Luo City on the horizon.
"They rule because they believe the stars burn forever," Wuque whispered, his voice as cold as the space between worlds.
"They forget… that all stars eventually die."
A faint, dangerous smile touched his lips.
"I will build my throne in the silence."
Outside, the shadows lengthened, curling around his feet like loyal hounds. The Divine Script had cracked, and the world—in its arrogance—had not yet realized that its end had already been born.