The rain had already started before dusk. By the time Li Changshen stepped out of the bookstore, the entire city had dissolved into blurred reflections—streetlights trembling inside puddles, headlights stretching across wet asphalt like pale rivers of light. He stood beneath the awning for a moment, one hand in his coat pocket, the other holding a plastic bag containing two books he had bought more out of habit than need.
There was no one waiting for him at home.
There never had been.
For many years, silence had become an ordinary part of his life, so familiar that he no longer resisted it. His parents had died long ago in a highway accident when he was still young. The memory remained clear even now: a winter night, a phone call, a stranger's voice, and then a world that suddenly became too quiet. There had been compensation money, insurance, and an apartment left behind, enough that survival never became difficult, but practical security and emotional warmth had never been the same thing.
No relatives came to take him in. No distant family appeared out of nowhere to offer comfort or belonging. Only paperwork arrived, followed by years of learning how to live alone. School, university, work—life had continued with mechanical regularity. Over time, he learned that loneliness became easier when accepted rather than fought against. Perhaps because of that, he had never feared death very much. It was not that he hated life, only that there was little tying him tightly to it.
At his neck, hidden beneath his shirt, hung a small pendant shaped like a closed black book. Its surface was smooth from years of contact, edges worn soft by time. It had belonged to his mother, who once told him it was a family heirloom passed down for generations, though no one seemed to know where it truly came from. It looked ordinary—old, dark, and without ornament, like something forgotten in a drawer rather than treasured across generations.
The pendant had only one unusual detail: on its tiny cover were two faint ancient characters so worn that most people would mistake them for scratches.
Eternal Dao Book.
Li Changshen had never paid much attention to them. To him, it had always been simply an old keepsake, the last object directly tied to his mother's hands.
The traffic light turned green. Li Changshen stepped into the crossing as rain intensified overhead.
Then came the horn.
Sharp, violent, tearing through the wet evening.
A truck had lost control at the intersection.
He barely had time to turn before blinding white headlights rushed toward him, filling his vision in an instant. The world seemed to slow strangely at that moment. Rain hung suspended in the air like countless tiny crystals. Somewhere nearby, someone shouted. Metal screamed against asphalt.
His first thought was unexpectedly calm.
So this is how it ends.
Then impact came like a collapsing mountain.
There was no clear pain, only overwhelming force followed by complete silence.
It was not ordinary darkness that followed. Darkness still implied eyes, distance, and shape. What Li Changshen entered was something deeper—absolute absence, where sound, direction, weight, and even time seemed stripped away. He could not tell whether moments passed or centuries. There was no body, no breath, no heartbeat, only a drifting awareness floating in an endless unknowable void.
Then, from somewhere impossible to locate, a pulse appeared.
It was not a sound but a rhythm directly perceived by consciousness itself—slow, ancient, immeasurably vast, like the heartbeat of something older than stars. Another pulse answered it, this time closer, surrounding him rather than reaching from afar.
Suddenly, perception exploded open.
He had no eyes, yet he could see.
Before him stretched an endless sea of primordial Chaos.
It was not empty space, nor was it darkness. Vast gray-black currents moved endlessly in every direction like cosmic storms made from raw existence itself. Some distant regions burned crimson like hidden furnaces, while others were pale and frozen beyond comprehension. Fragments of shattered worlds drifted silently through those currents—broken spheres, cracked continents, dead celestial remnants so enormous they dwarfed galaxies.
One ruined world floated not far away, split cleanly through its center, half of its surface glowing faintly with dying law fragments. Farther still, something enormous and indistinct passed through Chaos currents, swallowing another weak world whole before vanishing again into endless gray.
There were no stars here.
No sky.
Only Chaos.
Ancient, indifferent, endless.
A question rose instinctively inside him.
What am I?
At that exact moment, warmth spread through his awareness, and something familiar emerged before him.
The pendant.
Except it was no longer small enough to hang from a neck. Suspended before him now floated an enormous black book, ancient beyond measure, its cover vast and dark like condensed void itself.
The two ancient characters upon its surface had become clear now:
Eternal Dao Book
The moment he perceived the name, a second layer of meaning surfaced naturally from somewhere deeper, like an identity hidden behind identity:
I Am Formless.
The black book opened on its own.
Its pages were blank, yet the blankness itself seemed to contain endless meaning. Information flowed directly into him—not language, not words, but complete understanding.
His soul had not been reincarnated in the ordinary sense.
It had fused.
Merged into something newborn.
Something beneath him.
He turned awareness downward and saw a tiny sphere suspended within Chaos.
It was small, gray, incomplete, barely formed. No atmosphere surrounded it. No light touched it. No life existed upon it. The surface looked barren and silent, little more than primitive matter wrapped around a fragile core.
Yet he felt every part of it perfectly.
Every fluctuation in its shell, every unstable current within its center, every fragment of forming matter.
Because that sphere was him.
Or more precisely, he had become its consciousness.
Changshen World.
A newborn Micro World.
The realization did not come with panic. Instead, an astonishing sense of connection spread naturally through him. Beneath the shell of the tiny world, deep within its center, there existed something radiant—an immense pool of colorless brilliance flowing like liquid while remaining conceptual.
Again, understanding arrived through the black book.
This was World Origin.
The fundamental substance granted by Great Dao to every newborn world at birth.
The beginning of everything.
Matter, law, time, life, Dao, destiny—all things within a world could ultimately be traced back to World Origin. If atoms formed the foundation of physical existence, then World Origin formed the foundation of cosmic existence itself.
He extended awareness toward it carefully.
The moment his consciousness touched the radiant pool, countless possibilities unfolded. World Origin could create matter, accelerate time, establish laws, form continents, give birth to life, and eventually even support Dao structures. But every use consumed it. Every action carried cost.
That immediately gave him relief.
Power without limits was dangerous. Limits meant order.
His world's origin pool was small—truly small compared to what must exist in higher worlds—but unusually pure. Likely because the Eternal Dao Book had stabilized his soul during fusion.
Then another realization came.
Outside his tiny world, Chaos currents occasionally swept dangerously near. A newborn world this fragile should have been destroyed already.
Yet the black book moved again.
A faint black veil spread outward from its pages, silent and invisible. Instantly, Changshen World disappeared from surrounding perception. Even Li Changshen himself felt its external presence fade beneath the concealment.
The first revealed function of the treasure had activated automatically.
Concealment.
Only now did he understand why he had survived.
He returned focus inward.
The world was empty. No life, no sky, no order. Every first decision mattered.
He organized his thoughts calmly. Years of living alone had taught him patience, and patience now became invaluable. Life could not be created before stable matter existed. Stable matter required primitive law support. Primitive law required space stability.
So he began with the smallest possible act.
A thread of World Origin flowed outward from the core under his guidance.
The world trembled.
The primitive shell thickened as deeper layers condensed. A core began forming inside the tiny sphere. Another pulse followed, strengthening internal structure.
He chose deliberately not to imitate mythological square worlds or endless floating continents. Such structures held symbolic grandeur, but he wanted balance and future scalability.
He chose a planet.
A true planetary world.
Core, mantle, crust—expandable with each future advancement.
Simple, stable, efficient.
More World Origin flowed. Slowly, the barren sphere grew.
When he measured instinctively through world perception, its diameter had reached roughly three hundred kilometers.
Tiny by cosmic standards.
Yet it was real.
His first true world-body.
At that moment, the pages of the Eternal Dao Book trembled again.
A new understanding surfaced:
Gather wisdom. Organize wisdom. Return wisdom.
The second core function.
No living beings existed yet, so this power remained dormant for now, but its meaning was profound enough to make him pause. This treasure could collect living comprehension without death, something that directly defied natural world evolution.
But that belonged to the future.
Now creation came first.
Li Changshen looked upon the silent gray sphere that was now his world and found himself unexpectedly calm. Earth already felt distant, almost unreal. No family remained there. No unfinished attachment called him back.
Ahead lay only silence—and possibility.
He directed another stream of World Origin upward.
Far above the planet, matter ignited.
A small burning sphere slowly formed, unstable but brilliant, radiating primitive heat and light.
A newborn sun.
Its first light spread across the barren surface of Changshen World.
For the first time since his birth into Chaos, dawn arrived.
Hidden beneath the veil of the Eternal Dao Book, deep within endless primordial darkness, Li Changshen silently watched the first sunrise of his own world.