The sky was crying a distorted light.
The wind screamed, sweeping the shadows of the mountains into an endless abyss.
On top of Tianluo Mountain, in the midst of a battle that will be told in forgotten legends, Fang Yi stood.
His shattered body could barely hold the burning flame of his consciousness.
In front of him, space split open, and a black portal rose up, pulsing with an energy not of this world.
A portal that belonged to neither life nor death.
He stood still, blood dripping from his forehead, his eyes unblinking.
Everything inside him was burning... Bones, veins, even the echo of his last breath.
(If I go through this gate... I will never be the same.)
He smiled a small, stubborn smile that defied the wind and death itself.
He took one step.
When he touched the border of the portal, he was swept away by the energy of nothingness.
In a flash, not only was his body shattered, but his existence was erased as if it had never existed.
No cry.
No trace.
His bones turned into ashes of black light, vanishing into the silent wind.
Fang Yi... died.
But in his death, he began the journey towards the inexplicable.
Farther away, atop the wounded mountain, everyone witnessed the unbelievable scene.
The one-eyed man, who had spent a lifetime guarding secrets, shuddered as he stared into space.
He whispered:
"He... "He disappeared... But he's not dead."
Next to him, the old jailer who had held the keys to the prisons for centuries murmured with a shudder:
"He opened the forbidden door..."
Far away, above the misty towers of dawn, the wise men sensed something deeper than life had been broken.
An invisible thread of the fabric of the world had snapped.
It was a faint echo, but it would grow, opening wounds in the laws of the universe.
Nothingness.
A place without walls, without time, without hope.
In this white void that kills all feeling, Fang Yi's consciousness awakened.
There was no body.
Not even the sound of his breath.
Just a tiny dot of existence, vibrating in a still sea.
(Where am I?)
His consciousness whispered into nothingness.
No answer.
No echo.
From deep within, a faint thread of light emerged - a golden thread, pale, about to be extinguished.
The desire for life.
With nonexistent fingers, Fang Yi began to gather the lost atoms.
Weaving threads, he formed the first contours of a body of pure will.
But nothingness gives nothing away for free.
From the edges of the stillness, hungry shadows crawled out.
Formless, featureless beings, made only of ruthless hunger.
They rushed towards him.
They tore at the threads he was weaving.
They tried to devour the new light before it was complete.
But he resisted.
With every ounce of desire left in him.
He fought with his teeth, with his soul, with his refusal to be erased.
Whenever a shadow tried to swallow him, he responded with an explosion of will, drawing halos of light that burned in the stillness of nothingness.
When the shadows were about to suffocate him,
a golden light, unlike any other, exploded within him.
A volcano of life swept through the void, tearing through the shadows, burning the black arms of hunger, and pushing nothingness itself backwards.
At the center of this explosion, Fang Yi's new body was taking shape.
Transparent at first.
Then more cohesive with each pulse of his raging will.
But he was not alone.
In the depths of the abyssal nothingness,
where even time forgets to pass...
Something very old - something dead but not dead -
opened his eyes for the first time in thousands and thousands of years.
Eyes as wide as galaxies, as black as the gaps of eternity, fixed their hungry gaze on the new point of light that had shattered the stillness.
Fang Yi was no longer just an ordinary young man.
He had awakened something that should have remained asleep forever.
End of Chapter Three.