The cavern was a hollow tooth in the jaw of a dead mountain range, a place where the world's breath had long since turned to dust.
For seven agonizing months, Yang Xiao had existed as little more than a shadow fused to the stone floor.
His body was a starved husk, his skin caked in the grey mineral grit of the deep earth, but his internal focus was a raging, concentrated sun.
Before his chest, suspended in a pocket of distorted air, his masterpiece was screaming.
This was not a gift from the heavens. It was a Composite Shard, a jagged sliver of forbidden logic.
In a world where cultivators were mere scavengers—searching for shards in the hearts of beasts or following the trails of ancestors—Yang Xiao had spent his entire six-hundred-year life perfecting the art of Refinement.
He was not a "Genius" blessed by fate; he was a man who had simply refused to die until he solved the puzzle of existence to erase his past mistakes.
Through trial and error that would have broken a thousand lesser men, he had dismantled thirteen disparate Law-fragments.
He had stitched them together using the silver-threads of his own lifespan as the needle.
He had reached a level of attainment where the impossible became mere mathematics. He was the first in history to successfully refine the Samsara Shard.
Snap.
The sound wasn't physical; it was the sound of the universe's laws being forced into a shape they were never meant to take.
The colorless Shard finally stabilized, sinking into his chest and anchoring to the center of his Soul Well—the spiritual reservoir of a Rank 6 Master.
The moment the anchor set, Yang Xiao's eyes snapped open. He had succeeded.
But the world's balance had been tipped.
High above the mountain, the sky fractured. A colorless ripple expanded for thousands of leagues, announcing that a new, unnatural Law had been birthed.
"The wolves are at the door," Yang Xiao rasped, his voice a dry ghost of a sound.
He could feel them.
The Sovereigns of the Great Sects—men who had hoarded the world's natural shards for millennia—were tearing through the atmosphere.
They didn't know what he had created, but they knew it was a treasure that could topple their thrones.
Yang Xiao stood up, his joints popping like dry twigs.
He was a lone master against an army of kings.
He had failed many times in his six hundred years, but today, he would gamble it all on a single, final stroke.
He looked at the sky with a gaze that held no fear, only a terrifying, cold pragmatism.
"You hoard the shards the world gave you! You are nothing but scavengers of the past!" he roared. "I refined the one that will take it all back!"
He didn't defend.
He gripped the Samsara Shard and triggered a deliberate Well-Collapse.
He flooded the fragment with every drop of his Rank 6 essence, forcing the Shard's unique Law to trigger its one-time fail-safe.
"Samsara... INVERT!"
The world's color bled into a grainy, monochromatic blur.
Yang Xiao felt his consciousness being pulled through a needle-thin crack in reality.
The Shard, his masterpiece, began to char. It was burning its very concept to fuel the rewind, its surface turning into a dull, ashy gray stone.
THUD.
Yang Xiao's mind hit his younger body with the force of a falling mountain.
"Next! Yang Xiao, step forward!"
The voice was sharp, arrogant, and irritatingly familiar.
Yang Xiao opened his eyes. He was standing on a sun-drenched stone plaza.
The air smelled of cheap incense and the nervous sweat of a hundred teenagers.
He looked at his hands—smooth, small, and weak.
He immediately reached inward to his soul.
The Samsara Shard was there, buried in the center of his Soul Well.
But it was a "husk"—a dead, gray stone riddled with microscopic cracks.
It was a Rank 6 item in a Rank 1 body. He couldn't use it, and its mere presence occupied ninety percent of his Well's capacity.
It displaced his essence, making him look like a talentless cripple to anyone watching.
"Yang Xiao! Stop daydreaming! Place your hand on the Resonance Stone!"
He stepped forward.
As he passed his peers, he felt their gazes—some filled with pity, others with the predatory glee of the strong looking at the weak.
How small, he thought.
To him, their mockery was not an insult; it was a data point.
He analyzed the posture of the youth next to him, noting the imbalance in his stance that would lead to a shattered knee in a real fight.
He looked at the Elder's judgmental sneer and saw only a minor obstacle whose lifespan was already sixty percent complete.
Their emotions were white noise, as irrelevant to him as the opinions of insects.
He touched the obsidian Resonance Stone.
It stayed dark, eventually flickering with a dim, pathetic Gray light.
"Yang Xiao," the Elder announced with bored disdain. "Low-Grade Resonance. Potential: Rank 1 Initial Stage. Pathetic. Move along."
The crowd erupted in laughter.
Yang Xiao withdrew his hand, his expression as flat as a stagnant pond.
He didn't feel the sting of humiliation. He didn't feel the urge to roar his hidden potential to the heavens.
Such things were for children.
Instead, he simply adjusted his internal calculations, noting that his "crippled" reputation would provide an excellent veil of invisibility for his initial movements.
He turned and walked off the platform, his eyes scanning the Vault of Whispers atop the middle-class clan estate.
The Vault was more than a building; it was the clan's beating heart.
A monolithic structure of black basalt, it was inscribed with ancient suppression runes.
For a middle-class sect like the Yang Clan, this treasury was a library of meager power, containing only Rank 1,Rank 2 and some countable Rank 3 and Rank 4 shards meant for the foundation of beginners.
To a Rank 6 Grandmaster, these were the equivalent of blunt sticks, yet they were all he had to work with.
"A man must choose an offensive shard at the start," he mused internally, his gaze cold and mechanical as he moved through the crowd.
"Utility without the power to protect it is merely a gift for one's enemies. In the beginning, the only thing that matters is the ability to kill."
"A utility shard cannot stand alone in a world where the strong feast upon the weak."
He looked past the elders and the mocking youths, his ambition stretching far beyond this tiny estate.
He had not burned through the fabric of reality to simply live again.
He had returned to soar through the nine heavens and shatter the firmament, to reach a height where no sovereign or law could ever reach his shadow.
He joined the queue, a 600-year-old monster in the shell of a boy.
His mind began to scan the memories of the Vault's meager inventory.
"So, what shall I choose for the beginning of this journey?"