It began with a quake.

  A faint tremble beneath the sect grounds. Most disciples didn’t notice. But those at the higher stages—elders, formation masters—froze.

  Because that tremble didn’t come from the mountain.

  It came from below.

  From something sealed.

  Two hours later, Li Fan was summoned to the Grand Hall.

  He arrived to find Yue Xian standing at the foot of the central altar, where a ring of ancient cultivators meditated in silence. Elders. Sect founders. Their eyes, long closed, had not opened in a hundred years.

  Until now.

  The central figure—Elder Zhenmu—opened one eye.

  “The seal stirred the moment you emerged from the Silent Tower,” he said.

  “And the ancient array beneath our Pavilion pulsed for the first time in a millennium.”

  He raised a gnarled hand and pointed to Li Fan.

  “You are the catalyst.”

  Deep beneath the Pavilion, hidden behind layers of spatial formations and soul seals, was a voidroot formation—a relic from the Heaven Encompassing Era, built to contain a fragment of something that should never have existed.

  A Divine Root.

  Not a treasure.

  Not a tree.

  But a root of Origin.

  A sliver of the first consciousness born from chaos.

  “It feeds on will,” Yue Xian explained, walking beside Li Fan as they descended.

  “And it grants glimpses of the truth… in exchange for everything you are.”

  Only those who had passed the Three Trials could even approach it.

  Only those with true stars could awaken it.

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  And Li Fan…

  Now bore eight stars.

  The path to the Divine Root was not a staircase or tunnel.

  It was a bridge through empty space, wrapped in silver threads that wept starlight.

  Each step made the world blur.

  Each breath brought memories that weren’t his.

  He saw a woman weeping over a burning city.

  He saw stars falling like rain.

  He saw himself—older, crueler—standing over a broken heaven.

  Am I seeing the past? he wondered.

  Or the future?

  At the center of the chamber… it pulsed.

  A single root, glowing faintly, suspended in an orb of obsidian light.

  When Li Fan stepped forward, the orb shattered silently.

  The root reached toward him like a curious tendril.

  And it touched his chest.

  For an instant—Li Fan became everything.

  He saw the heavens when they were young.

  He saw the Dao not as law—but as wound.

  He saw the truth of cultivation:

  The gods were never born.

  They were forged—by those who remembered the beginning.

  And within that vision, a name echoed—

  Xinghua. The Starsever Emperor.

  His forgotten name.

  His true self.

  Li Fan stumbled back, gasping.

  The Divine Root withered instantly—its purpose fulfilled.

  But something had changed.

  Now… he knew.

  He wasn’t born talentless.

  He had been sealed.

  His soul had been fragmented and cast down, to sleep as punishment for defying the last heaven.

  But something—or someone—had given him a second chance.

  And now the world would remember him.

  Storms gathered across the Five Great Realms.

  An ancient oracle woke from her coma.

  And far across the void, a Golden Immortal Demon Emperor felt a twinge in his severed horn.

  “He lives again,” the demon whispered.

  “The Starsever returns.”