Chen Guan stood before a mural. The paintings were very old, so old it felt like they belonged to a time before the figures became legends, back when they still lived as ordinary people.
At the end of the stone steps was a circular hall.
The view suddenly opened up.
The hall was astonishingly tall; the dome was hidden in darkness, its end invisible.
The floor was paved with black-and-white stone tiles, and at the center lay a dry, circular pool.
Every wall was covered in murals, each one massive, and each one contained the Lord of Nothingness.
But here, the face of the Lord of Nothingness was no longer left blank. Instead, it was covered in deep scratches carved by later visitors with sharp tools, the features completely gouged out.
Those scratches were chaotic and interlaced, pressed into the stone wall.
Chen Guan moved closer to one of the murals.
In the painting, the Lord of Nothingness stood with a child on a mountaintop. In the distance, a city burned. The child clutched a book, and the Lord of Nothingness looked down at him.
His face was destroyed, leaving only his robes and posture to reveal his identity.
Chen Guan walked to the next mural.
The two sat by a river. The child washed his hands in the water, while the Lord of Nothingness sat nearby, holding a branch and writing something on the ground.
Next mural.
The child had grown a little taller. He no longer always hid behind the Lord of Nothingness; now he walked shoulder to shoulder with him.
They crossed icy plains, walked the ocean floor, and climbed barren mountains hung with bones.
Every mural was quiet.
No worshipers.
No war.
No throne.
Just two figures moving forward endlessly.
Guan Jinyue stood beside Chen Guan, her gaze sweeping over the murals.
“This doesn’t feel like a god’s biography,” she said.
Chen Guan looked up at the scratches on the wall.
“It feels more like someone remembering another person.”
Guan Jinyue said nothing. She saw the final ring of murals, where the scratches were densest.
The figure of the Lord of Nothingness grew fainter in each painting, while the child’s figure became clearer.
The second-to-last mural:
The Lord of Nothingness stood before a door. Beyond the door was a vast blankness.
The child stood behind him, gripping the hem of his robe with both hands.
The Lord of Nothingness bent down, his posture as if he were speaking to the child.
The last mural:
The Lord of Nothingness had vanished.
Before the empty door knelt the child, now half-grown.
He covered his face with both hands, his shoulders and back slumped down.
No one else was around. Only the door stood open, with nothing behind it.
Chen Guan stood before the last mural, unmoving for a long time.
Baal finally won the Black House game; his voice rang out: “Kid.”
“What?”
Baal’s tone turned serious.
“This isn’t the story after he became a god.”
Chen Guan stared at the half-grown child in the mural. “I know.”
“This is the story of when he was still human,” Baal said, then paused, his tone growing uncertain. “But who is this kid? I’ve never seen…”
Before he could finish, the dry circular pool at the center of the hall suddenly lit up with a faint silver-blue glow.
Chen Guan spun around. The dust at the bottom of the pool parted on its own, revealing a line of ancient characters buried for a long time.
Guan Jinyue stepped closer, her gaze lowering to examine them. She frowned. “What kind of script is this?”
Even the local know-it-all didn’t recognize it. As an outsider, Chen Guan certainly didn’t.
He took out his phone, planning to snap a photo to show Su Yuehe, who had been studying ancient scripts recently.
And that turtle—he couldn’t forget that, either.
There was no signal here, but taking a photo was still fine.
Chen Guan pressed the shutter. Click. On the screen, the ancient characters were frozen in the frame.
The next moment, the screen went dark.
The screen was pitch black, but silver-blue lines crept inward from the edges, like living veins, crawling along the lens and burrowing into the device’s body.
Chen Guan looked down at his phone. Guan Jinyue looked too.
“Broken?”
“Looks like it, for now.”
Chen Guan flipped the phone over. The metal backplate had already formed a thin layer of frost.
He didn’t bother pressing the power button again. He simply tossed the phone into his storage ring.
Now the phone was a brick, completely dead.
After Chen Guan tossed the phone into the storage ring, the silver-blue ancient characters at the bottom of the pool didn’t disappear.
Gray-white dust was pushed aside by an invisible force, sweeping smoothly across the pool floor.
The characters, which had only been half exposed, slowly revealed themselves in full. Silver-blue threads crawled out from the subtle grooves, spreading up the dry basin walls.
The lingering cold mist at the edges of Chen Guan’s robe flowed toward the pool.
Guan Jinyue stepped back half a pace. Silver light flickered from her sleeve, only to be suppressed again by the rules of the surroundings.
Her gaze shifted from the pool to the murals around them.
The Lord of Nothingness, his face scratched away, stood on the walls, his long robes falling, his posture peaceful. But the defaced visages, slashed by sharp tools, stood out harshly in the ghostly blue light.
Guan Jinyue said quietly, “This place is different from outside. Be careful.”
Chen Guan raised his right hand. The black imprint on his palm felt cold and hard, radiating no heat. His mind was filled with fragmented static—Baal, never reliable, seemed to have disconnected again.
The silver-blue patterns on the basin walls climbed halfway up, then stopped. All the light focused on Chen Guan, hanging there in stillness, disturbingly eerie.
Chen Guan tried moving closer to the pool from the side. Guan Jinyue stayed half a step beside him.
The closer he got to the pool, the quieter the murals seemed.
The mutilated faces on the walls appeared to lower slightly, watching everything.
Chen Guan stood at the edge of the pool. The silver-blue ancient characters came into full view.
He still couldn’t read them.
But, the next moment.
Chen Guan saw a snowfield.
White snow covered his ankles, and the world was reduced to gray and white.
A child in a tattered cloak walked ahead, gripping a corner of a robe in his hand.
The robe belonged to a faceless, long-robed figure.
The figure walked slowly, pausing every few steps to wait for the child.
On the child’s back was a pack larger than his own body. The straps cut into his shoulders, but he didn’t let go.
At the edge of the snowfield stood a row of black tree shadows.
The child suddenly turned back. His face was blurry, features indistinguishable.
Yet Chen Guan inexplicably felt the child was looking at him.
Not at someone in the mural—but at him.
His gaze seemed to pierce through the wind and snow in front of him, locking onto Chen Guan, this outsider.
The stone tiles beneath Chen Guan’s feet had completely vanished.
Yet he was oblivious, standing in the snow. The cold crept up his shins. In the distance, the long robe’s hem slipped from the child’s grip.
The child opened his mouth.
Chen Guan heard no sound and couldn’t read the lip movement.
He tried to take a step forward, to get closer.
Just then, his wrist was suddenly seized, followed by a powerful wrench.
Guan Jinyue yanked him back to her side.
The wind and snow vanished instantly. The stone tiles reappeared beneath his feet.
The circular hall pressed back into view: the dim blue stone lamps, the dry circular pool, the murals with their defaced faces—all returned.
Chen Guan looked down at the ground. The footprints still on the floor already told the story: he had just been half a step from the bottom of the pool.
One more step and he would have stepped into the center of those silver-blue patterns.
Only now did a belated wave of fear rise within him.
end. Thus one must continue to cultivate, and become a saint or great emperor, in order to prolong one's life. Chen Xia, however, completely reversed this. Since his transmigration, he has gained immortality, and also a system that awards him with attribute points for every year he lives. Thus between the myriad worlds, the legend of an unparalleled senior appeared. "A gentleman takes revenge; it is never too late even after ten thousand years." "When you were at your peak I yielded, now in your old age I shall trample on you." - Chen Xia
s + Rent Collection Wealth】 At the start, he inherited a rundown house in the urban village from his grandfather. The house had no tenants, but the moment he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, a self-proclaimed empress from the Tianxuan Continent arrived as his first tenant. Ye Chuan soon discovered that with every new tenant moving in, not only did he receive massive daily payments, but he also obtained unique items related to their backgrounds. 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Tiger Strength Pill—dramatically enhances physical power!】 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Deer Blood Pill—significantly boosts vitality!】 …… From that day on, all sorts of bizarre tenants began appearing in the house: the empress from Tianxuan Continent, an apocalyptic sorceress from the Magic Realm, a mysterious scientific girl who fell through a spacetime rift… Every single day, he received strange, powerful items and endless money. Then one day, he suddenly realized—he had become invincible. Enough, enough! Stop giving me more!
he colors of other people’s emotions. Light red meant anxiety. Gray meant exhaustion. Orange meant excitement. Yellow... meant repression. At the same time, he could gain unlimited control over one of those colors. Pale cyan: relaxation. Using this ability, he started offering “two-yuan hugs,” spending an afternoon exchanging emotional-color experiences with others. Then came his final female customer of the day— a girl whose emotional color was pure black... —— A week later, Xu Chuan had become skilled at using pale cyan—Relaxation—treating it like a bottle of menthol balm whenever he needed it. That was when he discovered he had unlocked another unlimited emotional color: Purple, the color of fear. So these emotional colors refresh every week? Fine, I take it back—I’ll never call you useless again... —— Much later, after Xu Chuan had accumulated countless emotional abilities, one night, he suddenly found himself inside someone else’s dream. There, he could use the emotional colors he possessed to paint. And in her dream, he painted her a shower of pink shooting stars, spreading across the depths of the night sky...
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
