Yes.
Among all the sovereigns of the celestial vaults, there was one who became the most famous laughingstock across the three layers of existence.
Legend has it that eight hundred years ago, there was an ancient kingdom nestled in the heart of the verdant plains called the Kingdom of Vaelune.
The Kingdom of Vaelune was a vast and bountiful land. There were four treasures within it: abundant and breathtaking beauties, vibrant song and marvelous verse, gold and luminous gemstones, and their one infamous crown prince.
What would be the best way to describe this crown prince? Well, he was a singular man.
He was beloved by the king and the queen, and they doted upon him without restraint. They would often say with pride, "My son will become a great ruler in the future, and his name will be sung down through the ages!"
However, the crown prince was not interested in imperial power or worldly wealth in the mortal realm at all.
What he was interested in, in his own words, was:
"I want to save the common people!"
When he was young, the crown prince devoted himself solely to his cultivation, and there were two short tales that spread widely of his time on that path.
The first tale took place when he was seventeen years old.
That year, a grand Seravun Celestial Procession took place in the Kingdom of Vaelune.
Although the custom of conducting these divine ceremonies had fallen out of fashion for centuries, it was still possible to deduce what a magnificent and jubilant occasion it must have been from the remnants of ancient texts and oral tradition.
The wondrous Seravun Festival, upon the Grand Avenue of Eternal Light.
Seas of people gathered on either side of the grand street, with royals and nobles laughing in easy merriment atop the high viewing platforms. The glorious royal warriors bedecked in ceremonial armor opened the paths, while maidens danced with elegance, their pale hands scattering flower petals into the air. Who could say whether the flowers or the maidens were more beautiful? From within the gilded carriage came marvelous music that drifted across the entire imperial city like smoke. And at the rear of the procession was a grand stage drawn by sixteen pale horses dressed in bridles of hammered gold.
Upon this towering stage stood the Celestial Offering Warrior, the focal point of every watching eye.
At the Celestial Procession, the Offering Warrior wore a mask of pure gold. Dressed in resplendent attire with a sacred sword in hand, he played the role of the subduer of all evil, embodying the number one martial sovereign of the past thousand years: the Vaultlord, Seren Vao.
It was the greatest of honors to be chosen for the role of the Celestial Offering Warrior, which was why the selection criteria were exceedingly strict. The one chosen that year was the crown prince himself. The people across the kingdom believed he would give the most thrilling performance the ceremony had ever seen.
However, an accident happened that day.
During the third procession through the city, the grand stage passed beneath a city wall that rose hundreds of meters into the sky. At that moment, the warrior upon the stage was just about to strike the demon effigy down. It was the climax of the performance, and the crowds on either side of the avenue had reached the height of excitement. The top of the city wall swarmed with onlookers pushing and jostling each other for a better view.
At that moment, a small child fell from the edge of the wall.
The screams of the crowd tore upward to the heavens. Just when everyone thought this child would stain the Grand Avenue of Eternal Light with blood, the crown prince looked up, leapt into flight, and caught the boy.
The people caught only a glimpse of a white silhouette soaring like a bird before the crown prince landed with that small child safe in his arms. The golden mask fell away, revealing the young and striking face beneath it.
In the next breath, cheers erupted.
The people were thrilled and overjoyed. But the state preceptors of the royal cultivation hall were deeply troubled.
They had never imagined such a grave mishap would occur.
This was ominous. The gravest of misfortunes!
Every circuit the grand stage completed around the imperial capital symbolized one year of peace and harmony within the kingdom. Now that it had been interrupted, did that not mean the invitation of disaster?
The state preceptors were so distressed they were losing hair as fast as rain fell. After much contemplation, they summoned the crown prince and spoke to him. In the gentlest manner possible, they requested: "Your Highness, might you be willing to face the wall in quiet reflection for a month? It does not truly need to be a month. The intention alone would suffice."
The crown prince smiled. "No."
This was what he said: "There is nothing wrong with saving people. Why would the heavens condemn me for doing what is right?"
Uh... but what if the heavens do condemn you?
"Then it is the heavens who are wrong. Why would I apologize to those who err?"
The state preceptors could not argue.
This crown prince was such a person.
He had never encountered anything he could not do, nor had he ever met anyone who did not love him. He was the living justice of the Mortal Realm, the very center of the world.
Although the state preceptors were quietly furious, it was not their place to press the matter further, and they did not dare. His Highness would not have listened regardless.
The second tale takes place in the same year, when the crown prince was still seventeen.
Legend has it that south of the Ashen River, there was a bridge called Irenfall.
Upon this bridge, a ghost had been lingering for years beyond counting.
This ghost was exceedingly fearsome: it was clad in broken armor, pale flame burned beneath its feet, and its body was covered in blood and pierced through by all manner of weapons. Every step it took left behind a print of ash and fire. Every few years it would suddenly appear in the night and wander back and forth at the head of the bridge, stopping travelers to ask three questions:
"What is this place?"
"Who am I?"
"What is to be done?"
The ghost would then devour whoever answered incorrectly. No one knew what the correct answers were. As years turned to decades, this ghost devoured countless travelers.
During his wandering cultivation, the crown prince caught word of this. So he went out and found Irenfall Bridge and stood guard there night after night. Until finally, one night, he met the haunting ghost.
When the ghost appeared, it was as horrifying as every legend had claimed. It asked the crown prince the first question, and he answered with a calm smile.
"This place is the human world."
The ghost replied, "This place is the abyss."
An inauspicious start. The first answer was already wrong.
Well, all three answers are going to be wrong regardless, the crown prince thought, so why should I wait until you are finished? And so he drew his weapon and lunged.
The fight was complete chaos. The crown prince was skilled in martial arts but the ghost was terrifying and utterly dauntless. Man and ghost fought so fiercely that the very stars seemed to tilt. In the end, the ghost was finally defeated.
After the ghost vanished, the crown prince planted a flowering tree at the head of the bridge. As he worked the soil, a cultivator happened to pass by and saw him sprinkle a handful of earth to consecrate the grave and send the spirit off.
"What is this?" the cultivator asked.
And so the crown prince replied with what would become his most remembered line: "Body in the abyss, heart in paradise."
When the cultivator heard this, he gave a slow smile. He then transformed into a divine warrior clad in white armor, with radiant clouds beneath his feet. He drew in the wind and rode off in holy light. Only then did the crown prince realize he had just encountered the Vaultlord himself, who had descended personally to the Mortal Realm to observe.
The celestial court had already taken notice of this extraordinary Offering Warrior since his time in the Seravun Procession. After the meeting at Irenfall Bridge, they asked the Vaultlord, "How does My Lord find this Royal Highness?"
The Vaultlord answered, "This child's future is without limit."
That night, a celestial phenomenon manifested above the palace and storms raged without warning.
Amidst the lightning and the rolling thunder, the crown prince ascended.
Whenever a mortal ascended, the Celestial Vault always trembled. When the crown prince ascended, the entire Vault shook with three times the ordinary force.
Achieving true cultivation was always far too difficult. It demanded talent, discipline, and the favor of fate. It was often a long road of a hundred years before a sovereign was born.
It was not that there were no fortunate souls who became celestial beings young. But the majority who tried would exhaust their entire lives, train for a hundred years, and still never draw a Heavenly Tribulation down upon themselves. Even those who did face a Tribulation could die from it, or be shattered even if they survived. Those who made the attempt were as numerous as grains of sand, yet most were simply ordinary mortals who would live and pass without ever finding their path.
Yet this Royal Highness was without question the darling of the celestial vaults.
Whatever he wanted, he received. Whatever he wanted to do, he achieved. He wanted to ascend and become a sovereign, so at the age of seventeen, he did precisely that.
He had always held the hearts of the people, and the king and queen loved and missed him fiercely. So to honor their son, the king ordered great temples and shrines built across the land, and statues of the crown prince erected and worshipped by all. The more believers gathered, the more temples were raised. The crown prince's life would grow longer and his spiritual power would grow vast. In a few short years, the Vaelune Shrine of the Crown Prince became incomparably glorious, and for a time its splendor reached its absolute peak.
Until three years later, when Vaelune fell into chaos.
The cause of the chaos was tyranny, with rebels rising in revolt across the land. But while the flames of war spread through the mortal world, the sovereigns of the Celestial Vault could not easily intervene. Their concern was with ghosts, monsters, and the encroaching darkness at the borders. Whatever fell outside those parameters had to be left to resolve itself.
Consider: conflicts filled every corner of the Mortal Realm, and every side believed itself justified. If any sovereign were to involve themselves, today one would champion a fallen kingdom, tomorrow another would avenge slaughtered descendants. Would there not always be sovereigns who wanted to fight each other, who would tumble into disgrace?
That was why the crown prince needed to keep his distance. But he did not care for that reasoning in the least.
He said to the Vaultlord, "I will save the common people."
The Vaultlord possessed a thousand years of divine power, and even he did not dare let those words sit so lightly off his own lips. When he heard them from the crown prince, it was easy to imagine how he felt. Yet he could not do anything to stop him.
So he said, "You cannot save everyone."
"I can," the crown prince declared.
And so he descended to the Mortal Realm without looking back.
Naturally, the whole nation of Vaelune rejoiced. However, since ancient times there had always been one truth the people of the human world knew well: there was never a good outcome when sovereigns descended to the Mortal Realm without permission.
And so, not only were the flames of war not extinguished, they blazed wilder.
It was not to say that the crown prince did not try. But it would have been better had he not intervened at all. The harder he worked, the greater the disaster grew. The people of Vaelune were devastatingly battered and crushed, the wounded and dead beyond counting, and in the end a plague swept through the entire imperial capital, and the rebel army broke through the palace gates and ended the war.
If it was said that Vaelune had originally been hanging by a thread, then the crown prince came and cut it himself.
After the kingdom fell, the people finally understood one thing: the crown prince they had worshipped as a celestial sovereign was never as perfect or as powerful as they had imagined.
To speak harshly: was he not simply useless, a man who could not do anything right?
With nowhere to pour the anguish of losing their homes and their families, the battered people furiously flooded the Shrines of the crown prince, toppled his sacred statues, and set fire to his temples. Eight thousand shrines burned for seven days and seven nights, burned until nothing remained. From that moment on, the martial sovereign who had protected peace and safety vanished, and a God of Ruin who invited catastrophe was born in his place.
When the people call you a sovereign, you are a sovereign. When they call you worthless, you are worthless. You are whatever they say you are. It had always been this way.
The crown prince could not accept this reality. He had an even harder time accepting the punishment handed down for his transgressions: banishment.
His spiritual powers were sealed, and he was cast back down into the Mortal Realm.
He had grown up endlessly coddled and protected. He had never tasted the suffering of the human world before, yet this punishment hurled him from the clouds directly into the mud. And in this mud, for the first time, he understood what hunger felt like, what poverty tasted like, what filth truly was. This was also the first time he did things he never thought he would willingly do. He stole. He robbed. He cursed loudly and gave up on himself entirely. He lost all dignity. No self-respect remained, and he was as unkempt as any forgotten beggar. Even his most loyal servants could not accept the change in him and chose to leave one by one.
"Body in the abyss, heart in paradise." This phrase had been engraved on stone monuments and plaques throughout Vaelune. If not for the war that had burned most of the kingdom to ash, and if the crown prince were to encounter the remnants of those words, he would probably be the first to rush forward and destroy what little was left.
The person who had spoken those words had personally proven that when the body was in the abyss, the heart could not be in paradise.
He had ascended swiftly, but his fall from grace was even faster. That awe-inspiring image at the Grand Avenue of Eternal Light, the spirit he had met at Irenfall Bridge, it all seemed as though it were only yesterday. The Celestial Vault sighed for a while, then let go of what had passed.
Until one day, many years later, a great rumble shook down from the sky.
This Royal Highness ascended for the second time.
Throughout all of history, celestial officials who had been banished either never reclaimed their glory or fell entirely into the Ghost Realm. It was rare beyond rare to turn over a new leaf after banishment. This second ascension was truly grand and spectacular.
What was even more spectacular was that after he ascended, he charged directly into the Celestial Vault and rampaged in full fury.
And so he had only been ascended for the span of one burning incense stick before he was knocked back down again.
One incense time. It could be considered the swiftest and shortest ascension in all of recorded history.
If the first ascension could be considered a beautiful tale, then the second ascension was a farce.