Southern Border.
The sky darkened—unnaturally so.
Not with clouds, but with something heavier. Older.
A child tugged on his father's sleeve, eyes wide, finger trembling as he pointed upward.
"Father… look."
The man scowled, ready to scold the boy for interrupting his market errands—but then he looked.
His words caught in his throat.
Above them, the sky had fractured.Golden light spilled through cracks in the heavens, twisting with threads of purple-black lightning. The air was deathly still—no wind, no sound. Even the birds had vanished.
His instincts screamed.
"Tribulation…" he muttered, voice low with fear."Someone's… transcending tribulation?"
Then his eyes widened further.
"No—who the hell dares undergo tribulation this close to my wife's blessed land?!"
Without waiting, he scooped the child into his arms and turned, shouting in the distance.
"We're leaving—now!"
His wife didn't ask questions. She had already seen it—already felt the weight in the air. A pressure that didn't belong to this world.
Together, they fled—vanishing into the distance like leaves before a coming storm.
Behind them, far above, the sky continued to twist.
...
Central Continent.
Heavenly Court.
The halls shook.
Not from war.
Not from Gu.
But from something far older. Far higher.
In the skies above, the space trembled.
Thunderclouds surged—not over Heavenly Court alone, but across the entire Central Continent.
Black, gold, violet—colors that should never coexist spiraled across the heavens, crackling with apocalyptic force.
The very world held its breath.
Inside a jade pavilion, an old Rank 8 Gu Immortal stared upward, face pale.
"Heavenly Tribulation… Earthly Calamity…"
His voice cracked.
His heart pounded—not from strain, but from instinct. The space itself was being pulled, twisted, distorted by something unseen, and yet undeniable.
"What in the world… is happening?!"
Around him, attendants rushed about in panic, their voices drowned out by the distant roar of tribulation lightning hammering space itself.
"Not just here… it's everywhere!" one shouted.
"The entire Central Continent is under the tribulation clouds!"
The old man gritted his teeth, his aura erupting on instinct.
And yet, even at Rank 8, even as a pillar of Heavenly Court—he felt it.
Fear.
This was not a tribulation someone overcame.
This was a tribulation the world threw in desperation—to stop something that was never meant to rise.
"Wake the Ancestor," he growled.
"NOW!"
The servants vanished in streaks of light.
But deep inside, the old immortal already knew.
Even if their Ancestor rose…
This was not something they could stop.
...
Black Heaven Domain
Luck Suppression Heavenly Palace
A faint light flickered in the depths of the void.
Inside a cold, desolate palace carved from collapsed fate-path threads, a corpse stirred.
It sat up—slowly, like something long dead that remembered it once lived.
Its body bore no warmth, its soul flickering like a candle in a sealed jar.
But its eyes… they opened.
And stared.
"This..."
The Immortal Zombie's voice was hollow, dust-ridden, but beneath it was a tremor. Not of weakness.
Of comprehension.
He rose from his seat, eyes narrowing at the horizon beyond reality.
"This isn't a Heavenly Tribulation," he murmured.
"It's a Myriad Tribulation… no…"
The sky quaked.
Laws trembled.
Colors bled from the clouds above the world.
"This is a Chaotic Disaster."
His undead gaze turned, piercing layers of heaven and space until it locked onto the Eighty-Eight True Yang Building—the ancestral tower of his, now pulsing with impossible life.
And in its core—
A man.
One man, standing alone, reshaping the will of Heaven itself.
"He's… using my Luck Path methods… to ascend?"
The zombie's breath hitched. His thoughts raced.
"No... wait—second aperture? That's not an Immortal Aperture… that's a...!"
A long hiss escaped his dry lips.
"Yellow Apricot… Immortal Essence?"
He froze.
Then the realization hit him like a thunderbolt through the soul.
"He's alive…
A Living Venerable...!"
The dead don't gasp. But he did.
The Immortal Zombie's gaze darkened.
"But… the Fate Gu hasn't been destroyed.
And the Dream Venerable hasn't emerged.
This shouldn't be possible."
He reached deeper—past logic, into memory.
"It's him."
"The so-called inheritor of Red Lotus Demon Venerable..."
"An Otherworldly Demon…"
His voice cracked with fury.
"Damn you all!
Damn your false prophecy!
Damn your fate-bound lies!!"
He rose, hands trembling with undead rage, about to lash out across space—
But before his will could even form a move—
CRACK.
A bolt of chaotic tribulation lightning—shaped like a snake devouring its own tail—fell directly upon the Luck Suppression Heavenly Palace.
The walls buckled. Space shattered.
He screamed, not from pain—
But from realization.
"Even this… was within his calculations…"
And the palace vanished in a blinding explosion of light.
...
In the blistering dunes of Western Desert, tribulation clouds churned like sandstorms made of divine wrath.
In the endless depths of the Eastern Sea, lightning coiled beneath the waves, boiling the ocean from within.
In the frozen steppes of Northern Plains, dark thunder rolled across the heavens, shaking mountains and splitting glaciers in half.
Even the farthest reaches of the five regions could not escape the creeping, suffocating presence of the tribulation clouds.
The world itself was convulsing.
Heaven had identified its enemy.
Yet in the eye of this world-shattering storm… there was one place untouched.
The Eighty-Eight True Yang Building.
Its towering form remained suspended above the sacred palace—serene, unshaken, and untouched by the chaos that swallowed the continents.
Not a single tribulation cloud dared pass its threshold.
Not a single bolt of heaven's fury crossed its border.
...
A Few Moments Earlier.
Within the towering vastness of the Eighty-Eight True Yang Building, all was still.
Only the calm before an event that would shake the foundations of the world.
At its heart, Fang Yuan stood alone.
With his single thought, space rippled.
All others—experts, allies, enemies—were instantly expelled from the tower.
One moment, they were inside; the next, cast into the golden sky, blinking in confusion as their feet touched foreign ground.
"What… what happened?!"
"Why are we outside?!"
Panic and bewilderment spread.
But Inside, Fang Yuan raised his hand.
His eyes, devoid of emotion, stared inward—at the core of his being.
Then—
Crack.
His first aperture shattered.
Instantly, the world reacted.
Above the tower, the skies screamed.
Tribulation clouds surged into being, clawing across the firmament with terrifying speed.
But Fang Yuan… was already prepared.
He activated two Gu at once—
One glowed like the void between stars: Rank 9 Calamity Repelling Gu.
The other pulsed with invisible threads of fate: Fortune Dominating Heaven Gu.
And the impossible happened.
The storm—turned away.
The tribulation clouds, which had begun to spiral above the True Yang Building, suddenly changed direction.
They coiled outward, expanding in every direction—over the skies of the five regions, over seas, mountains, deserts, and forests.
A storm with no center.
But it wasn't over.
Fang Yuan stood once more in silence.
And then—he shattered his modified second aperture.