Chapter 2 Death and awakening
Lu Tian laughed softly, though blood rose with the sound.
“You think they will spare you?” he asked, his voice hoarse but steady.
Elder Mo’s eyes flickered, just once. “We have secured our future.”
“Your future?” Lu Tian’s gaze shifted to the sky, where the golden formation lines shattered one by one. “Or theirs?”
“You have done well,” the stranger said. His voice echoed with a resonance that bent the air. “The bloodlines of this realm are indeed pure.”
Below, the first screams rose from the outer districts as Upper Realm cultivators began their descent. Spiritual nets spread across the land, capturing cultivators whose bloodlines glowed with rare potential. Villages ignited in pillars of flame.
Harvesting. That was what this was. Their Small World was not an enemy to be conquered. It was a resource to be exploited.
Rage surged through Lu Tian’s broken meridians. He seized the sword fragment still embedded in his chest and snapped it with a surge of spiritual force that cost him dearly. Blood poured freely now, but he did not fall.
Instead, he extended his senses downward, connecting with the core of the Heaven-Sealing Formation buried beneath Azure Pillar Peak.
“If I fall today,” he said slowly, his voice carrying across the storm-wracked summit, “then none of you will leave this mountain alive.”
The forbidden ignition sequence answered his will. Golden light flared beneath the mountain, formation arrays activating in violent resonance.
The elders’ composure finally cracked. “Stop him!”
But they were too late. Energy surged upward, the peak trembling as though the mountain itself roared in defiance.
The Upper Realm cultivator frowned faintly. With a casual flick of his fingers, space distorted. The ignition stalled and the array was destroyed. A power crashed on Lu Tian, his bones fracturedand his meridians ruptured entirely as he dropped to one knee.
The man descended until he stood only a few paces away, studying Lu Tian with mild curiosity.
“A commendable will,” he said. “You would have made fine material.”
Material. The word struck Lu Tian harshly. He felt like a failure as the Azure Sect that had stood as the best sect among the four sects was being destroyed under his reign as Sect Master. The signs were always there but he missed them in his goal to grow stronger to be able to protect the same sect. The strength he spent efforts and resources to build was useless in the face of this betrayal and invasion
Lu Tian’s vision dimmed. He looked at the elders who stood behind the Upper Realm cultivator, silent and small, their earlier confidence evaporating in the face of true power.
He understood then, they had not sold the sect for partnership. They had sold it for scraps.
Forty years of struggle, forty years of climbing from obscurity to leadership and forty years of protecting disciples who now screamed below as invaders harvested them like crops.
If only I had seen this sooner. If only I had acted sooner and purged the cancer from the sect.
Darkness swallowed him before regret could finish forming.
Lu Tian woke to the smell of crushed spirit herbs and damp wood. For several long moments, Lu Tian did not move. He stared at the wooden beams above him, watching dust drift lazily through a shaft of afternoon sunlight. There was no oppressive aura, no fractured sky, no screams. Instead, faint laughter drifted through an open window of young disciples sparring in the courtyard below.
His breath froze.
Slowly, he lifted his hand before his face. The skin was smooth, unscarred and youthful. His body felt… smaller.
When he tried to sit up, a sharp pain exploded in his abdomen. His hand flew instinctively to his abdomen. He closed his eyes and examined himself inwardly. The sight that greeted him was his dantian, covered in many cracks.
His meridians were shattered beyond repair. His dantian was cracked and leaking, incapable of holding spiritual energy. The foundation of his cultivation was completely ruined.
Then a quiet breath escaped his lips. “I returned…”
He felt a sharp pain in his head and memory fragments poured in fast aligning with reality and he remembered that he was this injured when he was fifteen.
He remembered the years of cultivation. His rise as the Sect Master of the Azure Cloud Sect. The slow discovery of strange disturbances within the spirit veins beneath the mountain. The countless preparations he had made to defend against the calamity he believed would arrive in the distant future. Then finally, the betrayal. His hands clenched slowly at his sides.
“So, it was real,” he murmured.
The cracked sky, the invading force from beyond the heavens. The elders who had sabotaged the sect from within.
Every moment remained as vivid as though it had happened only minutes ago. Yet here he was, alive and returned to a time long before the catastrophe.
But this time, as he lay in that narrow bed, something unexpected surfaced. He felt relief. Forty years earlier, forty years before betrayal, forty years before the Heaven-Sealing Formation collapsed. A quiet laugh escaped him, soft but genuine.
His body was ruined but he still held hope for his new goal for strength.
“This time,” he said softly, “I will not fail.”
But the moment the words left his lips, a sharp pain suddenly erupted inside his body.
It was as though a thousand needles had been driven into his meridians at once.
Lu Tian staggered backward, one hand gripping the edge of the table as the pain spread through his chest.
“What…”
He immediately tried to circulate his spiritual energy.
Nothing happened.
The familiar flow of qi that every cultivator relied upon refused to respond to his will.
Instead, the energy scattered chaotically the moment it entered his meridians, dissolving into painful turbulence that threatened to tear his body apart from within.
Lu Tian’s expression darkened.
“I remember now…”
He remembered the sect mission to eliminate rogue cultivators near the northern ridge. The ambush during the mission and the strike he had intercepted to protect his junior brothers. The backlash that had torn through his meridians.
In his previous life, this had been the beginning of despair. He was declared a cripple, pitied and forgotten. He had clawed his way back over decades through relentless discipline and orthodox reconstruction methods.
When he returned from the mission to the Azure Cloud Sect in this lifetime, he had been labeled a disappointment almost immediately. While other disciples advanced steadily through the early stages of cultivation, Lu Tian had struggled even to maintain the most basic circulation of spiritual energy.
His meridians were destroyed and unstable. Every attempt at cultivation resulted in intense pain and minimal progress. It had taken him years of perseverance before he had finally overcome those limitations in his previous life. Now he had returned to the very beginning.
