The world was nothing but fragments.
Tian Cang found himself falling. He fell through layers of grey clouds, falling through memories that drifted like corpses bobbing on a stagnant pool. Within that void, he saw another version of himself.
A warrior stood atop a mountain of corpses so high it stretched to the infinite horizon. The sky there was pitch black, interlaced with violet mana fissures that webbed across the firmament like cracks in a ceiling. That version of him bore wounds that would have felled any ordinary man at the first strike—one arm had mutated into something sharp and dark, and half of his face had been eroded by a type of void-matter, exposing the white bone beneath.
But those eyes were still his. Eyes that held a depth of solitude and utter ruthlessness.
"Is that... me?"
The entity atop the mountain of bone suddenly looked down. It stared directly at him, piercing through the veil of unreal space.
"You are dead."
The voice echoed from all sides, vibrating against his soul rather than his ears. Tian Cang clenched his illusory fist and roared:
"I am not—!"
"You are dead," the voice cut him off coldly, as sharp and cruel as a blade severing a thread. "Crushed by gravity. Erased from the Firmament Realm by the light of the Holy Kingdom."
A shard of memory shattered before his eyes. BOOM! He saw the white-cloaked man's punch again; saw the blinding light swallow his body; saw every cell dissolve into nothingness. A bitter sense of defeat overwhelmed his mind.
"...I lost."
Silence enveloped the white void. Then, the entity spoke again, this time with a strange vibration like the cracking of reality:
"The Firmament... does not accept this death. Your state of existence is a paradox. You exist beyond the judgment of both life and death."
"You are being... RETURNED."
CRACK!
GASP!
Tian Cang bolted upright like a coiled spring. His breath was ragged, and cold sweat poured off him like rain.
Before him was a cramped, dilapidated wooden room. The weak early morning sunlight filtered through the gaps in the rotting window frame, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. The silence was unnerving—the kind of quiet that only those accustomed to the roar of the battlefield find haunting.
Tian Cang panted, clutching his chest where his heart hammered a frantic rhythm.
"Still alive...?"
He looked down at his hands.
They were smaller. Fairer. They lacked the thick callouses of years of war, the scars from the Purification strike, and the rigid veins of one who had pushed the Blood Firmament to the point of collapse. These were the hands of a teenager. But they were trembling—a slight, persistent tremor that his will was powerless to stop.
He pulled back his sleeve. Beneath the pale skin of his wrist, a faint, dark-red fissure shimmered like a mutated vein. It lay there silently, occasionally throbbing with a sharp sting—a reminder from a previous life.
"It's still here. The Blood Firmament is sleeping."
He stood up. His body felt unnervingly light, as if he had been wearing heavy armor all his life and was suddenly stripped down to thin cloth. Mortal Firmament—the state of an ordinary person who had yet to awaken mana. Every sense was duller, every reflex slower; his strength was but a shadow of what he once possessed.
But the instincts of a man who had survived a thousand battles remained intact.
Tian Cang's gaze suddenly hardened. He tilted his head slightly, listening to the miniscule vibrations from the other side of the door.
Someone was there. Holding their breath.
SHLIK!
The wooden door was kicked open. A figure lunged in like an arrow, gripping a razor-sharp dagger aimed straight for Tian Cang's throat. A lethal strike, executed by someone who had done this before.
Tian Cang tilted his head ever so slightly.
The blade whistled past his neck, missing by a hair's breadth. The cold wind of the metal brushed against his skin. He didn't think; he didn't analyze—his body acted on what was etched into his marrow through hundreds of wars. His left hand shot out like a steel vice, clamping onto the opponent's wrist before twisting it in one ruthless rotation.
CRACK!
The sound of bone snapping was crisp. Before the assassin could even scream, Tian Cang closed the distance, grabbed the man's hair, and slammed his head into the wooden wall behind.
THUD!
The wall shuddered, and wood dust rained down. The attacker collapsed onto the floor, unconscious instantly. Everything returned to silence.
Tian Cang stood still, staring at his hand. It felt alien. His mind hadn't had time to process a single technique, yet his body "remembered" and executed every move perfectly, like a pre-programmed machine.
He knelt down and flipped the face of his attacker over.
A youth. No more than sixteen, roughly his current age. On the chest of the boy's tunic was a familiar burning emblem.
Blood Flame.
A shattered fragment of memory suddenly resurfaced. Screams, the clash of metal, blood-soaked training sessions under torrential rain. And this face—he had seen this face before.
"This is the Blood Flame Selection Camp."
A place dubbed the "Meat Grinder," where only the final survivors were recognized as official warriors. He had been here before; he had endured every blood-drenched round of elimination in this place.
But as he looked closely at the youth's face at his feet, a chill ran down Tian Cang's spine.
This boy should have died in the very first preliminary round.
In his memory, this youth had fallen on the third day, crushed by a stronger opponent before the official selection had even begun. He was on the list of names Tian Cang remembered for one reason only: he died early, and he died miserably.
Yet here he was, lying unconscious in Tian Cang's room with a dagger in his hand.
Tian Cang's eyes darkened.
"The future has deviated."
He stood straight, looking out the narrow window at the camp courtyard. Morning sun spilled over the empty dirt lot, where other trainees moved in small groups with the discipline of those accustomed to feigning normalcy while calculating their survival. He recognized a few faces—but their positions, the way they moved, and the way they looked toward his row of rooms were all wrong compared to his memory.
There would be no "knowing ahead" to prepare. This world had changed the moment he opened his eyes, changed in a way that rendered his old memories an obsolete weapon—still usable, but capable of killing him if he relied on them too much.
In the hallway outside, the sound of footsteps began to echo.
He recognized them immediately. Rhythmic, organized footsteps carrying the killing intent of those used to moving in formation before executing a specific mission. These were the steps of people coming to do a job, and their job was to end lives.
Tian Cang looked at the unconscious youth on the floor, then at the door, then down at the dark red fissure on his wrist, which throbbed as if asking a question.
"If I have been given this chance..."
He stepped into the center of the room, relaxed his shoulders, and took a slow, deep breath. This Mortal Firmament body was weak. His mana was almost non-existent. And out there were trained warriors of an organization that used a "Meat Grinder" as their first round.
But he was a man who had stood back up after having his arm erased by a Judge of the Holy Kingdom. He was a man who had roared beneath a Gravity Lock and stood tall, inch by inch.
The ones approaching Room 17 had never encountered anything like that.
"I won't die as pathetically as I did last time."
The red fissure beneath his skin throbbed once, as if in response. As if the thing sleeping in his blood had heard the oath and nodded in agreement.
A low voice rang out from just outside the door, authoritative and cold as a death sentence:
"Room 17. Orders from above: Eliminate all. Leave no seeds behind."
The corner of Tian Cang's mouth quirked upward.
This time, he was the one who was prepared.