"Wu Dao, you beast! The world lies in ruins, civilization teeters on the brink—do you feel no guilt at all?"
"Without you, demon, this war would never have happened. You deserve to be hacked to pieces!"
"Humanity doesn't need the Stealing Heavenly Secrets Breathing Technique! Eradicate the supernatural, destroy the source of all evil! The world belongs to ordinary people, and justice will never perish!"
"This entire city is filled with the latest super poison gas. Even if you unleash 100% of your potential, your bones and muscles will turn to jelly!"
"Blame your own arrogance. You wouldn't let the Stealing Heaven Alliance interfere, and walked right into this trap all by yourself!"
"In one more minute, the Biological Gene Annihilation Bomb will arrive. Savor the rage of ordinary people!"
At the heart of a city ruin shrouded in green toxic fog.
Wu Dao lay on a shattered plaza. The all-pervasive chemical gas ate away at his flesh, melting it like snow beneath the scorching sun. The sight was hideous and horrifying.
Cold scolding, judgment, and jeering voices—processed through modern machinery—rang out beside him...
Beneath the slanting, dusky rays of the setting sun, it was a bleak picture of a fallen warlord.
And yet.
His heart was strangely calm. He felt no fear, not even the sorrow of a flame about to gutter out.
He simply gazed at the crimson sky, his two blood-red eyeballs exposed outside their sockets.
Sixty years of life, rushing by like a stream.
Every kind of scenery had passed through his mind.
As a child, he had gazed up at the boundless Star Sea, tiny as an ant. Unwilling to live an ordinary life, he had vowed to transcend the mundane, ascend to the highest heavens, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the heroes of myth.
In his youth, he had studied and trained tirelessly, tempered his body, strengthened his physique, and made a name for himself at home and abroad.
But.
The world was too ordinary, and the human body had its limits.
Natural disasters, human calamities, the ravages of time, illness, and suffering could still snatch away a life with ease. The myths of immortals and gods remained forever out of reach.
Frustrated, he went mad.
For ten years, he roamed the world. For ten years, he immersed himself in books, past and present.
At forty, he had a sudden epiphany!
He created the Stealing Heaven's Secret technique, unlocked the body's potential, shattered the shackles of human limits, and led human civilization into a new supernatural age.
But there was no helping it.
Even before Stealing Heaven's Secret was born,
the gap between the world's classes had already reached a dangerous point. Then the technique appeared, a gold-devouring behemoth, and the conflict grew even more intense—
The wealthy grew stronger and stronger, while the poor grew weaker and weaker!
When the conflict between New Humans and Old Humanity became irreconcilable,
the world-spanning conflagration of war erupted right on schedule when he was fifty. Lives were laid waste, and civilization teetered on the brink.
But...
Wu Dao felt no remorse.
Nor any pity.
The ever-growing power of the inhuman
had long since lifted his thoughts and his gaze upon all things in the world to ever-greater heights. Without realizing it, he had changed.
The root of civilization was order, and the essence of order was class...
You could argue it to the heavens, reason it through from every angle.
Accept it or run from it.
In the end, it remained the one truth of nature none could escape—
Survival of the fittest, the strong outlasting the weak!
And all the more so for humanity, that agglomeration of desire that had never known equality.
The strong enjoyed ample material and spiritual sustenance.
The weak wasted their lives in mediocrity.
From ancient times to the present, the gap between the superior and inferior classes, born of competition within human society, had never vanished!
War and peace, death and rebirth.
They, too, cycled endlessly.
Who would be the one wielding the blade?
And who would be the dragon-slaying hero?
There were too many possibilities.
In the evolutionary flood of natural selection, the weak howled in anger, while the strong reveled in their ugly glory.
To Wu Dao, none of it meant anything.
To him,
the true meaning of life was to surpass himself without end, evolve to adapt to every environment, and keep climbing until he reached the top of the food chain!
Even if the path ahead was pitch-black!
Even if there was no light!
He would burn everything he had to illuminate the darkness!
He would die in the light!
He would never stop and sink into ruin!
For this,
he had waited five years.
He had kept silent for five years.
Would he be a moth flying into the flames, or a fish leaping through the Dragon Gate?
It all came down to today!
Rumble!
The Bio-Destruction Bomb streaked across the sky, trailing a radiant wake like a Judgment Spear hurled by a heavenly god. Its long trail ripped through the crimson sky, while a deafening, sustained sonic boom shattered the silence of dusk.
Whoosh—
He exhaled a long breath of stale air.
Under the gaze of billions around the world,
the source of all evil, the one who had nearly doomed all human civilization, slowly rose to his feet.
Blackened blood poured down.
Dissolving flesh fell like rain.
"You think I walked into this trap because I was arrogant?"
His hoarse, calm murmur was transmitted through surveillance devices and broadcast across the world.
Thump, thump, thump!
His heartbeat hammered fiercely and proudly, like war drums beaten by a god of battle.
Under countless horrified and fearful gazes,
Wu Dao's ugly body, its flesh and bones already eaten away by the poison gas, began impossibly to grow flesh over bone. New blood replaced the old, and in an instant, his towering, steel-forged figure stood whole again!
He spread his arms wide, embracing the world!
"The essence of Stealing Heaven's Secret is to tear apart the shackles and excavate one's potential amid the ultimate tempering of life and death, constantly breaking the limits of the human body.
"Five years ago, I had already unlocked 100% of my potential. But no matter how I pushed myself, I couldn't advance another inch. There was nowhere left to go!"
"Otherwise, would I have let you grow stronger?
"Would I have let you develop a Biological Gene Annihilation Bomb specifically designed to target New Humans?!"
His fierce, thunderous voice rolled across the world like Heavenly Thunder, rumbling on and on.
There was not a trace of mockery in it!
Only boundless anticipation, excitement, and madness—so intense that his voice trembled.
"Only the true, overwhelming terror between life and death can shatter the shackles again!!
"Thank you for forging me a key!
"After today!
"If I survive, I'll show you a True God!"
Boom!!
As his words fell, the ruined plaza seemed to be struck by a meteor from beyond the heavens, trampled by a primordial savage beast!
Power erupted. The city center cracked and collapsed with a roar, the earth heaved like a writhing dragon, and rocks and rubble surged in waves, crashing outward across the entire city.
Boom!
A fierce sonic boom tore through the sky.
Beneath the crimson light of dusk, his towering figure, like an ancient creator god splitting open the heavens, like Mount Buzhou propping up the sky, streaked across the horizon. He neither dodged nor flinched, charging headlong into the ultimate weapon of biological technology—
With brutal force!
"Madman!!"
Fear, shock, disbelief.
Roars of every kind rang out across the world.
Under the fixed, stunned gazes of all who watched,
two figures raced toward each other through the fiery sky, one above and one below, representing the limits of modern technology and biological evolution, each trailing a long wake of air.
Until, at last,
they collided!
Boom!
An endless blaze of light and heat filled the heavens and earth in an instant. An explosion that seemed to split heaven and earth roared into the highest skies, while a surging shock wave of destruction razed the ruins utterly flat.
At the most dazzling heart of the sky, a deep, genetic-level annihilation crushed all resistance.
Time fell silent; all things dissolved...
Only a world-shaking roar, brimming with boundless pride, drowned out the sonic boom in the vault of heaven and lingered in the air—
"I was born wild and unbound; heaven and earth may cage me, but never make me true. Today my dream awakes, and I ascend to heaven. In another life, I'll overturn the seas and remake the world! Hahaha! I'm off!"
He would rather die than stop and sink into ruin?
No cheers. No jeers.
An indescribable shock of the soul left everyone gazing at that stretch of sky dazed for a long, long time.
Da Li, Year 644. Xuanwu Era, Year 74.
Within Guangqing Prefecture, Southern Frontier.
Deep in the Black Stone Desert, starlight poured down like a waterfall, bright as day.
Red Fire Mine!
The laborers, numb with exhaustion after a day's work, lay in low, filthy shacks, their lifeless eyes fixed on the brilliant river of stars—vacant, dead, devoid of vitality.
In a dark corner,
a bone-chilling whisper rose.
"Is he dead? I can't wait much longer."
"Almost. At this rate, he's got just a few breaths left."
"Shame he's so skinny."
Cold!
Hunger!
Darkness!
Chaos!
His head throbbed as if it would split apart!
His body and soul seemed trapped in a bottomless abyss where darkness and fire mingled. The feeble light of life could go out at any moment.
His instinct to survive drove Wu Dao to seize the last glimmer of light and struggle upward from the abyss. His chest heaved as he gulped down mouthfuls of fresh air.
"This... is this a deathbed rally?"
"Doesn't look like it. I think he's coming back to life."
"Strangle him!!"
A filthy, shriveled black hand squeezed down without mercy, cutting off the flow of fresh air. The youth in the corner immediately thrashed like a fish hauled onto shore.
"Hhk... hhk..."
Amid his ragged gasps, the inhuman will tempered through countless brushes with death blazed with an even brighter light. In an instant, it shattered the darkness and smashed through the chaos.
His eyes snapped open!
Swish!
His right hand, skin stretched tight over bone, shot out like an eagle snatching at the heavens. Brutally precise, it crossed the space between them and locked around the throat of the attacker lurking in the dark.
"Urk... cough, cough..."
The tables had turned!
"I ask. You answer!"
Wu Dao's heavy breathing gradually settled into a strange rhythm. Three fingers locked around the throat of the man before him like iron hooks, and his voice was cold as shards of ice.
Gulp...
The sound of people swallowing nervously rose all around, but no one dared move again.
The fierce aura nurtured by sixty years of wind and rain was like a primordial savage beast opening its eyes, turning the air around them to a swamp. The stench of urine filled the place.
"I... cough, cough... I'll answer..."
"Phew... What country is this?"
"D-Da Li. Guangqing Prefecture, in the Black Stone Desert."
"Da Li? What year is it?"
"I-I can't remember clearly. It should be the seventy-fourth year of the Xuanwu Era."
"..."
Silence.
"Where am I, and what's my situation?"
"The Red Fire Mine... Like us, you're a mining slave. The Four Seas Gang tricked and abducted us."
Da Li, the Xuanwu Era, the Four Seas Gang, mining slaves...
Another world?
Transmigration?
Possession?
Phew...
He let out a long breath of stale air.
After grasping his current situation,
Wu Dao's heaving chest finally settled. The pain in his head, as if it were about to split apart, eased somewhat as the Stealing Heavenly Secrets Breathing Technique brought clarity back to his muddled thoughts.
"One last question. If someone is killed in the mine, does the Four Seas Gang not care?"
"N-No... They don't care. They don't treat us like people. When someone dies, someone new takes their place right away."
"Thank you."
Crack!
The sound of cartilage being crushed rang out.
Thump!
"Ghh... gurgle..."
In the darkness, a shadow collapsed, followed by desperate, wheezing breaths like a bellows.
A short while later,
the struggling stopped, and the air filled with a thick smell of blood.
No one cried out.
Inside the low, filthy shack, apart from a few people who were uneasy with fear, there were only dull, vacant stares, dead with numbness.
Exhaustion flooded Wu Dao after he had pushed his body past its limits. Squinting, he gazed up at the roof of the shack and watched the stars in this unfamiliar world through the gaps.
"A show of force? I can hardly wait."
The corner of his mouth curled into a faintly excited smile. His expression was eager and ravenous, and he paid no heed to the eyes watching him from the darkness.
Promoting positive energy! This book isn't dark fantasy (doge).
Please favorite and add it to your bookshelf.
Following along during a new book's launch period is really important, so please don't wait to binge it later if you can help it. Give me some motivation.
Before you continue