Volume 1: Fragment of a Fallen Heaven
Chapter 1 – The Night the Sky Bled Soul
The outer slums of Black Lotus City smelled of wet charcoal and dying people.
Lin Zhao crouched beneath the broken eaves of what used to be a rice wine shop, palms pressed against cracked earth. His fingers were black with old blood and newer ash. Above him the night sky looked wrong—too red, too torn. Sect war had come to the lower districts tonight, and the heavens themselves seemed to be bleeding.
A streak of violet light smashed through three buildings two streets away. The shockwave flattened the shanties like paper houses. Screams rose, then abruptly stopped as though someone had simply turned off the sound.
Then came the real sound.
A low, bone-deep hum. The sound of a soul refusing to die.
Lin Zhao's heart stuttered. Every scavenger in the slums knew that noise. It meant something big had just died—or was about to. And when something that powerful died, pieces were left behind.
He moved before he could think better of it.
Dodging burning beams and people running the opposite direction, he reached the crater. What remained of the upper district's Jade Harmony Pavilion was now a smoking bowl fifty meters across. In its center floated a single figure—or what used to be one.
The Eternal Soul Sovereign.
Or rather, what the legends claimed was once a man who reached the absolute peak of the Ninth Soul Revolution before anyone alive was even born.
Now he looked more like cracked porcelain wrapped in fading starlight. One arm missing. Half his face gone. Yet his remaining eye still burned with cold violet flame.
The Sovereign's gaze swept once across the devastation… and landed directly on Lin Zhao.
Time slowed.
No words.
Just a tiny, almost amused twitch at the corner of the ruined mouth.
Then the Sovereign raised his remaining hand in a gesture Lin Zhao had seen only in sect propaganda paintings: the Soul Shatter Mudra.
The world screamed.
A sphere of pure violet-white light expanded from the Sovereign's palm—slowly at first, then violently. Every cultivator within three li who had been rushing toward the crater froze mid-step, mouths open in horror.
And then every single one of them exploded into motes of soul-light.
Not blood. Not flesh. Just glittering fragments of what had once been their cultivation base, their memories, their very selves.
The wave reached Lin Zhao last.
He didn't run.
There was nowhere to run.
Instead he did the only thing a street rat could do when death comes wearing the face of legend—he opened his arms wide, palms up, as though begging for alms.
The violet wave crashed into him.
Pain.
Then nothing.
Then—
something else.
A single mote, smaller than a grain of sand, slipped past every defensive instinct his malnourished body possessed and sank into the center of his forehead.
It burned like swallowing molten iron.
Lin Zhao screamed until his voice gave out.
When he woke, dawn was gray and cold and the crater was already being picked over by crows and more desperate humans than crows.
His head hurt worse than anything he'd ever felt, but he was… alive.
More than alive.
He could feel something foreign curled behind his eyes like a second heartbeat.
He lifted a trembling hand.
A tiny wisp of violet light danced between his fingers for half a heartbeat before vanishing.
Lin Zhao stared at his palm for a long time.
Then he started laughing—hoarse, cracked, ugly laughter that made the other scavengers edge away from him.
Because in that moment he understood one terrible, beautiful truth.
The greatest being in a thousand years had chosen not to give his power to any of the proud young masters, holy daughters, or hidden immortal descendants who had come running.
He had given it—at least one fragment of it—to the dirtiest, most worthless rat in the gutters.
And Lin Zhao intended to spend the rest of his life making sure the heavens regretted that decision.
Chapter 2 – First Taste
Three days later.
The Azure Fang Gang controlled the eastern refuse district. They were small-time, brutal, and very proud of the fact that their boss had reached the 4th layer of Soul Condensation at only twenty-nine.
Lin Zhao found their outer checkpoint at midnight.
Four thugs. Two at Qi Gathering, two at early Soul Condensation.
They laughed when they saw the filthy boy in rags step out of the fog.
"Oi little rat, wrong alley. Tribute day was yesterday."
Lin Zhao didn't answer.
He simply raised his right hand.
Nothing dramatic. No grand technique name. No glowing array beneath his feet.
Just a small, curious movement—like someone learning how to move a new limb.
The thug who spoke first suddenly gasped and clutched his chest.
A thin violet thread, almost invisible, stretched from Lin Zhao's palm to the center of the man's sternum.
The thug's eyes widened.
Then his cultivation base—seven years of brutal accumulation—began flowing backward, sucked clean out of his dantian like water through a straw.
He collapsed, already a dried husk.
The other three stared in stunned silence.
Then they attacked.
Lin Zhao didn't dodge.
He didn't need to.
Every time one of them struck him, every time a blade or fist connected, a tiny fragment of their soul would tear free and drift toward him.
He was learning.
Copying.
Not techniques.
Instincts. Muscle memory. The tiny habitual ways a person circulated qi when they were afraid.
By the time the fourth thug realized something was horribly wrong, Lin Zhao already knew three different ways to cycle the Azure Fang's signature Poison Fang Scripture.
He raised two fingers.
A sickly green qi blade—shallow, amateurish, but unmistakably theirs—formed at his fingertips.
He cut.
The last thug fell without a sound.
Lin Zhao stood amid four corpses, breathing hard.
He looked down at his hands.
They were shaking.
Not from fear.
From hunger.
Not for food.
For more.
He whispered to the empty night, voice barely audible:
"So this is what it feels like… to steal heaven's property."
Somewhere deep inside his sea of consciousness, that single violet fragment pulsed once—as though nodding in agreement.