chapter 1
Chapter 1: A Reader's Fury and a Book's Choice
The night over the city was silent, the kind of deep, heavy silence that only comes after midnight. In a small room on the second floor, the cold blue light of a mobile screen cut through the darkness, painting sharp shadows across the face of a young man. His name was Ayush, and right now every muscle in his jaw was clenched.
On the screen, the last paragraph of a Soul Land 2 fan‑translation disappeared as he scrolled. Huo Yuhao's story had ended—godhood, victory, peace—but Ayush's chest felt tight, like someone had punched a hole straight through his ribs and left it empty.[1][2]
"So that's it?" he whispered into the dark. "Tang San gets to be the great God King… and Yuhao lives his whole life on a leash?"[1][3]
He shut his eyes, but the images didn't leave. A father dissecting his own daughter's soul. Three fragments scattered: one kept by a god in the Divine Realm, one stuffed into a body, one forced into a spirit beast and then devoured together with its fate.[1][2]
Then the merge. Wang Dong'er, Wang Qiu'er, Tang Wutong—three girls folded into one existence, all under Tang San's divine seal. A daughter turned into a living puppet in the name of "love" and "protection".[1]
Ayush's hands trembled around the phone.
"And Huo Yuhao?" he hissed. "Dragged like a loyal dog from battlefield to battlefield, ordered who to save, who to abandon, who to lose… never once allowed to choose for himself."[1]
He thought of the first soul ring that should have been a miracle—a million‑year being sacrificing itself—for anyone else a path to freedom, but for Yuhao just one more chain Tang San could pull from above.[1][4]
He thought of Wang Qiu'er dying, of Tang San quietly rewriting the rules from the God Realm whenever the story didn't go the way he liked.
"This isn't fate," Ayush muttered. "This is rigged from the start."[1]
Outside, the city's thin blanket of clouds shifted. Far above them, beyond the breathable air and the flicker of airplanes, the sky turned into something else entirely—a true void, scattered with uncountable stars. Somewhere in that silent ocean, something moved that was not a star.
It looked like a book.
Not paper, not metal, not stone—a rectangular absence, a space where light went in but never came back out. Around it, starlight bent strangely, as if afraid to touch it. It drifted past burning giants like Surya, past the soft silver glow of a smaller moon, Chandra, and slowly descended toward a blue‑green world called Prithvi.[1][5]
On Prithvi it crossed over mountains, rivers, borders that meant everything to humans and nothing to it. Over India's crowded plains, over highways and sleeping towns, until it reached one particular city, one particular house, one particular roof where a young man sat alone, furious at a story.[1]
The book paused.
Inside Ayush's chest, something answered—a hot, wordless refusal. Refusal to accept that some people are born to write the rules and others are born only to suffer under them. Refusal to accept that "canon" pain is more important than a character's right to live and choose. That raw, stubborn anger rose like a flare in the dark.
The black book responded.
It thinned into a strip of shadow and slipped straight through concrete, steel, and brick, ignoring all matter as if it were smoke. It hovered for a heartbeat above Ayush's bowed head—then flowed down, like ink poured into water, vanishing into the center of his forehead.
Ayush jerked. A coldness bloomed at the back of his skull, then faded. For a second the screen blurred, comments and letters smearing together. He blinked hard.
"Too much screen time," he muttered, rubbing his eyes. "Great. Now even my brain's lagging."
From downstairs, his mother's voice rose, half‑sharp, half‑tired: "Ayush, khana thanda ho raha hai! Phone rakho, neeche aao!"
"Aa raha hoon!"
He locked the phone, stuffed it into his pocket, and pushed himself up. For one brief moment, as he stood, there was a sensation like standing on the edge of a cliff and leaning a little too far forward—weightless, off‑balance, wrong. Then his foot found the stair, the light from the tube‑bulb in the hall flooded over him, and the feeling vanished.
In the quiet space behind his thoughts, a new landscape opened.
A Sea of Consciousness, small and dim, hovered in the dark—a shallow pool compared to the vast oceans true cultivators possessed. Above that pond floated the black book, now solid again, its cover shut tight. No title. No symbol. No light. It simply existed, radiating the silent pressure of something that came from far beyond this world's sky.[1]
Ayush had no idea it was there.
He washed his hands at the sink, the cold water shocking the tension from his fingers, then sat at the small dining table. Dal, rice, simple sabzi, a steel glass of water—ordinary, warm, grounding. He answered his mother's questions on autopilot, nodded at his father's offhand comments about the news.
But every time his mind slipped, it fell back to the same images: Tang San high above, pulling invisible strings; Yuhao fighting, bleeding, obeying; a daughter whose soul was never allowed to be just her own.[1][2]
When he finally lay down in the dark again, the anger had cooled, but it hadn't gone out. It had settled deeper, like a coal pushed under ash—still hot, still waiting.
"If I ever got the chance," he thought, staring at the ceiling he could barely see, "I'd change that story. Not by begging the god to be kinder. By making sure the god can't do it again."[1]
Sleep took him mid‑sentence. His breathing slowed. His fist, half‑clenched on the bedsheet, relaxed.
At exactly midnight, the Sea of Consciousness stirred.
The black book, which had done nothing since entering him, finally moved. Its cover slid open by a fraction of an inch, and something like a breath escaped it—a whisper of rules older than the Douluo plane, older than the God Realm Ayush had just been reading about.[1][6]
A faint outline drifted up from Ayush's sleeping body, passing through skin and bone without resistance. It was a translucent shape, roughly his own, carrying memories like flickering lanterns: school corridors, exam stress, anime marathons, the taste of hot chai in winter, the sting of unfair teachers and unfair endings. At the very center, burning brighter than all the rest, was that single thought:
This is wrong. It should be different.
The book drank that light.
Not to erase it, but to preserve it. A new page appeared inside its endless dark, and Ayush's soul settled onto it, sleeping but intact, its anger, love, and stubbornness pressed into the fibers like ink.[1]
Far away, beyond even Prithvi's sky, threads of possibility twisted. One of them—a bright, complex line labeled "Huo Yuhao: Tragic God of Emotion"—shivered. A second, thinner thread, faintly tinted with the color of Ayush's world, brushed against it.
The book turned a page.
Somewhere in the Douluo plane's deep future, where a young man named Huo Yuhao had already lived, loved, died, and torn through the God Realm's lies, a broken, furious divine soul also stirred. But that tale, and the gifts he would send backward, belonged to the next step of the story.
For now, on one small world under one ordinary roof, a boy slept, unaware that the first and most important decision of his new fate had already been made for him:
He would not enter Huo Yuhao's life as a puppet, or a passenger, or a dog on anyone's leash.
He would enter as the crack in the script.
As the reader who refused to accept the author's ending.
And the book that had chosen him existed for one purpose only:
to make sure that refusal had the power to matter.
Citations:
[1] huo-yuhao-2-1.txt
[2] Huo Yuhao | Soul Land Wiki - Fandom
[3] Huo yuhao's development is trash as soul master. I find it that does ...
[4] Huo Yuhao/Abilities | Soul Land Wiki - Fandom
[5] NOVEL | translate English to Hindi - Cambridge Dictionary
[6] Soul Land Wiki - Fandom