The Firmament Shattered, the Primordial One Awakened
In the southern reaches of the Balak Kingdom, within the Heaven Dou Empire, lay Suotuo City.
On a street just inside the city gates, a boy and a girl in their early teens were walking side by side.
"Brother, look over there! The shops here are several times bigger than the ones in Nuoding City, and the air is full of the smell of roast meat and candied fruit!"
Xiao Wu tugged excitedly at Tang San's sleeve, her large, bright eyes darting from one dazzling street stall to the next.
Watching Xiao Wu brimming with life, Tang San smiled indulgently.
He raised a hand to smooth the stray locks at her temples, which the evening breeze had tousled. "All right, whatever you want," he said gently. "But Suotuo City is a mixed bag of dragons and fish, and it has far more Soul Masters than Nuoding City. We should still keep as low a profile as possible when we're out."
"I know, I know! With you here, who would dare bully me?" Xiao Wu wrinkled her nose playfully, took Tang San by the arm, and pulled him toward the most brightly lit district in the city center.
Suddenly, the wildebeests pulling carts in the street began pawing the ground restlessly and whinnying in terror. A moment later, even the breeze in the air came to an eerie halt.
"What's going on?"
Tang San stopped dead. The internal force of the Mysterious Heaven Skill inside him had begun to tremble out of control. To his astonishment, the Soul Power of heaven and earth that had drifted gently through the surroundings turned violent and chaotic in an instant.
Before he could make sense of it, a terrifying, deafening rumble burst forth from the firmament!
"Rumble-!"
Shop windows on both sides of the street shattered in sheets. The bustling marketplace fell deathly silent, only for countless terrified screams to erupt from the civilians...
"Brother! Look at the sky!"
Xiao Wu's voice rose sharply. She instinctively clutched Tang San's arm, her rosy face turning deathly pale.
Tang San looked up in horror, pushing the Mysterious Heaven Skill within him to its limit and circulating the Purple Demon Eye at full speed without reservation. Purple light blazed in his eyes.
When he saw what lay in the night sky, he could not help drawing a sharp breath.
The deep, dark curtain of night overhead had split open like a glazed mirror struck hard by a heavy hammer. An immense chasm stretched across the sky for who knew how many tens of thousands of miles!
Brilliant golden divine light surged from the rift, staining most of the sky with a kaleidoscope of colors.
Through the Purple Demon Eye, Tang San saw to his horror that behind the heavenly rift was the vast and magnificent phantom of a continent from another world!
In the terrifying vortex where the two worlds collided and pressed against each other, countless fragments of enormous mountains, broken walls and ruins, and strange crystals shimmering with seven-colored light poured from the heavenly rift alongside streaks of light, like a river of stars bursting through a broken dam. Trailing long tails of light, they hurtled toward every corner of the Douluo Continent!
What kind of power is this... Could gods be fighting?
Tang San's heart pounded, and his palms were icy cold.
Streaks of light filled the sky like a swarm of shooting stars, tearing through the night.
At the same time, in a remote, secluded gorge on the outskirts of the Star Dou Great Forest, the entire gorge shook violently as the purple-gold chasm tore open in the sky. Countless hundred- and thousand-year-old Soul Beasts dwelling on the forest's outskirts roared in terror.
Inside a natural stone cave at the end of the gorge, a young man sat cross-legged on a flat bluestone.
His name was Chu Yuan. He wore a simple white robe patterned with gold, his inky black hair falling loose over his shoulders. His face was so handsome it was almost bewitching.
It had been a full six years since he came to this world called the Douluo Continent.
Six years ago, when he awoke at the edge of this forest, he had carried two entirely different sets of memories in his mind. One belonged to a transmigrator from Earth; the other belonged to Phanes, the "Primordial One," the first creator god of the Teyvat universe, who had defeated the seven dragon kings and established the order of heaven and earth.
Phanes had fought the war of creation against the seven dragon kings. Later, he waged the brutal "War of Funerary Flame" against the Second Throne, Vinster King Nibelung, who had returned bearing the "power of the Abyss."
Although Phanes won a pyrrhic victory, his divine body was grievously wounded and his authority shattered. He could only wrap Teyvat in the "False Sky" and cling to life.
Over thousands of years, the Ley Lines of Teyvat's Irminsul were gradually consumed by the Abyss. The False Sky was on the verge of complete collapse, and all of Teyvat faced the desperate prospect of being swallowed whole by the cosmic Abyss.
To save all living beings in Teyvat and restore his divine authority in full, the slumbering Phanes exhausted the last of his authority over prophecy. In the void of the multiverse, he found a thriving planet on the rise, whose structure of laws was relatively primitive: Douluo Star.
Six years ago, Phanes intercepted Chu Yuan, the soul of a transmigrator from Earth, in the void. He fused Chu Yuan with half of his own primordial essence of creation, turning him into a "Seed of Genesis" and sending him ahead to the outskirts of the Douluo Continent's Star Dou Great Forest to be nurtured.
The purpose was to let Chu Yuan grow a physical body adapted to the laws of Douluo Star, so that he could become the "world anchor" and the new ruler of the Heavenly Principles when the two worlds merged.
During those six years, because the two worlds had yet to connect, the primordial divine power within him had remained dormant under a self-imposed seal, waiting for the moment the barrier between worlds shattered.
And now, that moment had arrived.
"Boom-!"
The purple-gold chasm in the firmament burst fully open. The seven elemental powers of Teyvat and the laws of Soul Power of the Douluo Continent swept against and mingled with each other outside the atmosphere like two boundless oceans, in the most primal and violent fashion.
Amid the aftershocks of the laws crossing worlds, powerful enough to crush ordinary living beings to powder in an instant, the fetters that had lain dormant within Chu Yuan for six years shattered with a thunderous crash!
"Crack-"
A sound like a god's sigh, accompanied by the crisp snapping of shackles, suddenly echoed from the deepest reaches of Chu Yuan's soul.
Chu Yuan's eyes flew open. His once deep-black pupils transformed completely, becoming a dazzling blend of pale gold and brilliant silver-white.
The air throughout the cave froze in an instant, and loose stones on the walls slowly rose into the air.
Calm-faced, Chu Yuan slowly raised his right hand.
"Hum-"
With a clear, ringing chime, an illusory crown of light radiating the seven elements hovered quietly above his palm. Four diamond-shaped, winglike lights pulsed slowly on either side of the crown.
First Martial Soul, [Crown of Heavenly Principles]!
The moment the [Crown of Heavenly Principles] appeared, the Douluo Continent's ambient Soul Power of heaven and earth within the cave was forcibly drawn in, transformed into the purest primordial divine power, and poured into every part of his body.
Then Chu Yuan turned his left hand slightly and loosely curled his fingers. A tender green branch, as though carved entirely from glazed crystal, blossomed in his left palm.
Second Martial Soul, [Irminsul]!
The instant the branch appeared, Chu Yuan's consciousness seemed to rise infinitely high. It pierced straight through the rock above the cave and connected to the pulse of the earth deep beneath him in the Star Dou Great Forest, as well as to the fragments of Teyvat's landmass that were continually falling and merging high above.
Boom! The instant his Twin Martial Souls fully awakened, the power Chu Yuan had accumulated over six years erupted like a volcano.
Level ten, level twenty, level thirty!
With no bottlenecks whatsoever, his physical strength and spiritual sea underwent a metamorphosis under the baptism of primordial divine power, and finally settled firmly at level thirty!
The collision between the laws of the two worlds is even more violent than I expected... Has Teyvat's landmass been torn into countless fragments and fallen onto Douluo Star in batches ahead of time?
Chu Yuan slowly exhaled a breath of stale air. The golden and silver divine light in his eyes gradually receded, returning them to a black as deep as an abyss.
He looked down at the [Irminsul] trembling faintly in his left palm. Countless pieces of complex information flooded into his mind through the crystalline branch's connection to the Ley Lines.
Through the feedback from Irminsul, he clearly perceived the cruel law governing the current fusion of the two worlds: Douluo Star's native plane consciousness was instinctively rejecting outsiders.
The Teyvat girls who had been swept onto the Douluo Continent along with the fragments of land had lost the protection of Celestia's Statues of the Seven and been cut off from their native elemental Ley Lines. The Visions and elemental power within them were being fiercely suppressed and eroded by the Douluo Continent's laws of Soul Power.
Without timely intervention, not only would their strength be greatly diminished, but their elemental power would also run dry and go berserk for lack of a Ley Line cycle. At best, they would fall into a prolonged coma; at worst, their origin would be damaged, and their fragrant lives would be snuffed out.
"Hum, hum-!"
Irminsul suddenly gave an urgent, faint hum. A dazzling purple light flared on the glazed leaf at its very tip, pointing northeast of the gorge.
Chu Yuan raised an eyebrow slightly, and his divine sense instantly spread out along Irminsul's guidance.
Within his field of perception, on a treacherous, rocky hill less than five li from the secluded gorge, a purple-gold meteor wreathed in fierce lightning had just fallen.
This violet lightning intent, honed like a sword...
A beautiful figure instantly appeared in his mind: a girl with purple hair in twin tails, dressed in a lavish purple-and-black formal dress, who acted with the swiftness of thunder.
The Yuheng of the Liyue Qixing, Keqing? I didn't expect the first Teyvat girl to fall near me to be this proud Lady Yuheng.
With a thought, Chu Yuan dispersed the two Martial Souls in his palms and became an afterimage that tore through the night, racing toward the rocky hill five li away.