His gaze slowly lifted toward the sky.
At first, Xingchen thought it was an illusion.
The stars above him seemed brighter.
Sharper.
As though an invisible veil that had always covered the heavens had suddenly become thinner.
He blinked.
The strange sensation remained.
The familiar night sky stretched endlessly overhead, yet something about it felt profoundly wrong. The constellations he had observed countless times during the past two weeks now seemed distant... not in space, but in meaning. As if they were no longer simple stars, but fragments of a greater truth hidden beyond mortal sight.
His heartbeat slowed.
The violent trembling in his body gradually subsided.
The pressure from the Dao Gate had vanished, leaving behind only exhaustion and a faint warmth deep within his chest.
The golden thread.
The key.
Instinctively, his hand drifted toward his palm.
Nothing.
No wound.
No mark.
Yet the moment his fingers touched the skin, a strange pulse echoed through his consciousness.
Faint.
Ancient.
Alive.
Xingchen's expression changed.
The sensation came again.
Like a distant heartbeat reverberating through the depths of his soul.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Each pulse resonated with something hidden far beyond the visible world.
His brows furrowed.
"What exactly did you give me...?"
The question disappeared into the silent night.
No answer came.
Yet the golden pulse continued.
Steady.
Patient.
Waiting.
Then—
Something answered.
The warmth within his chest surged violently.
The pulse echoed once.
Twice.
Three times.
The stars above him blurred.
Ancient runes ignited within the depths of his eyes.
And reality fractured.
The familiar stars faded as his pupils contracted, replaced by a sudden, brilliant flash of golden light. Within the depths of his eyes, ancient runes began to burn, spinning and rewriting themselves like a divine language. With a sharp click in his mind, the first seal unlocked.
Suddenly, reality fractured.
His vision did not just look at the sky; it exploded outward, enlarging and expanding at an impossible speed. In an instant, his consciousness tore through endless layers of the hidden void, bypassing time and space until he was looking at the true face of the cosmos.
There, scattered across the deep void of his universe, stood a myriad of divine gates.
Each gate was colossal, towering over the stars and looking as massive as the heavens themselves. They were jagged tears in reality, glowing with alien energy. Xingchen's breath caught in his throat as he looked closer. Through those titanic thresholds, endless streams of countless beings—alien civilizations, ancient cultivators, and armored machine legions—were pouring into his universe.
They were not just visiting. They were colonizing.
Like a swarm of cosmic locusts, these external worlds were rapidly building massive strongholds and anchoring their territories in the empty sectors of his cosmos. With ruthless efficiency, they plundered endless amounts of raw, primordial resources, dragging the wealth of his native universe back through the gates into their own realms.
The sheer scale of the vision was breathtaking, but for his current body, it was a death sentence.
Blood leaked from his nose and eyes. His fragile, mortal vessel shrieked under the pressure; his brain felt like it was being compressed by a collapsing star just from trying to process the cosmic data. If he were an ordinary human, his soul would have instantly shattered into dust.
But Xingchen was no ordinary mortal.
Deep within his consciousness, something stirred.
The shattered foundation of the Nascent Soul he had once forged through a century of bloodshed.
It was only a remnant.
Barely a shadow of its former glory.
Yet it was enough.
Xingchen seized it like a drowning man grasping driftwood and anchored his collapsing mind against the crushing torrent of cosmic information.
Then, the cosmic expanse began to collapse.
The vast, terrifying imagery fractured into a thousand pieces, and his vision violently contracted, snapping back through the deep layers of the void and slamming straight into his wide-open eyes.
"Hah… hah…!"
Xingchen collapsed forward, chest heaving as he dragged desperate, ragged breaths into his burning lungs. He was genuinely terrified. Gritting his teeth, he forced his body into a cross-legged position, frantically trying to regulate his chaotic breathing through meditation. But it was useless; his mind was a storm of absolute disarray.
"Is that… a cosmic invasion?" His thoughts raced, heavy with dread. "But if the universe is being hunted, why was I allowed to see this?"
He furrowed his brows tightly, desperately trying to mentally dissect the cosmic puzzle he had just witnessed. The golden rune in his mind hummed faintly, as if mocking his confusion.
"Is it possible… that this is a premonition? A vision of a future yet to come?" The thought struck him suddenly, sending a cold shiver down his spine.
"No, a premonition is impossible," he realized, his own logic cutting through the panic. In his past life, he knew the absolute laws of the upper realms. Even a grandmaster at the Nascent Soul realm—or even the legendary figures of the Ancient Divinity of Transformation realm far above it—could never receive a premonition this vivid, detailed, and terrifying. At most, those apex supreme beings would only feel a faint, passing premonition of danger, a subtle tremor in their senses. To see the actual movements of a multi-world colonization? It defied all cosmic laws.
A sudden shock ran through his mind as a new thought struck him.
"Could it be... that golden rune from before?"
He fell into a deep, heavy silence. The overwhelming cosmic visuals were completely gone, replaced by the mundane reality of Earth. The only sound left was the gentle, indifferent breeze teasing the grass, echoing softly across the empty field.
He shook his head, trying to clear the residual numbness from his mind, and slowly forced himself to stand. The moment he put weight on his feet, his knees buckled. His legs wobbled like paper, completely drained of strength. He needed to get back to the apartment; his brother was probably wondering where he had gone for the past few hours.
But as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone to check the time, his heart froze.
The screen blinked to life, but the date displayed was completely wrong. Two days. Two entire days had passed while his consciousness had been drowning in that cosmic vision. To him, it had felt like a single, breathless moment, but the mortal world had kept spinning for forty-eight hours.
Panic, sharp and real, pierced through his grandmaster calm. His brother.
The journey back was an agonizing crawl. Every step felt like walking through deep mud as the night chill bit into his skin. As he left the secluded field and entered the edges of the city, the mundane sights—the flickering streetlights, the distant hum of traffic, the smell of exhaust—felt jarringly surreal. He had just witnessed the slaughter of star systems,the collapse of worlds, the rise and fall of civilizations in the blink of an eye.
Planets shattered like clay.
Star cores extinguished without mercy. Mountains of corpses floated in silence. Blood rained across the void.
yet here, humanity was entirely oblivious,worried about rent, tomorrow's weather, and the trivial pursuits of a fleeting life.
Two realities. Countless worlds. One indifferent truth.
The universe trembled. But the world... kept spinning.
They laughed. They loved. They argued. They dreamed.
They did not know- and perhaps, it was better that they did not.
When he finally reached their small apartment complex, his chest was tight with dread. He pushed the door open, expecting a quiet house, but the interior was in absolute chaos.
The lights were blazing. His brother was pacing frantically around the living room, his eyes bloodshot and wide with panic as his hands trembled over a piece of paper. He had already gone to the local police station to file a missing person report, completely consumed by the terrifying despair that his only family was gone.
The sound of the door click made his brother freeze.
His head snapped toward the entrance, his eyes locking onto the doorway.
"Xingchen...?" his voice cracked, raw with pure terror. He rushed forward, crossing the room in an instant, his hands slamming firmly onto Xingchen's shoulders. "Where were you?! Where did you go?!"
Xingchen felt a profound wave of helplessness wash over him. Looking at the sheer panic on his brother's face, the ancient grandmaster felt a pang of guilt. He couldn't speak of the Nascent Soul realm, the golden rune, or the alien empires plundering the stars.
"I... I fainted in the field," Xingchen whispered, his voice raspy, completely stripped of its usual strength. "I lost consciousness out of nowhere. I only just woke up."
In the harsh glare of the living room overheads, his brother's gaze traced upward, his eyes widening in horror as he noticed the dark, crusted blood that had dried beneath Xingchen's nose and eyes. He took in how incredibly pale, icy, and weak the teenage frame had become. The panic turned into immediate medical urgency. Realizing how critical his sibling's condition was, he didn't care about the missing report anymore—he immediately grabbed his coat to take Xingchen straight to the hospital.
Xingchen didn't protest. In truth, he was utterly spent. His fragile mortal vessel had been completely worn down by the overwhelming pressure of the cosmic vision, and right now, he desperately needed medical care just to keep this body from collapsing entirely.