Rebirth

Douluo Continent, Sun Moon Empire, within a hidden realm in the Evil Eye Forest.

The hidden realm in the forest had already crumbled by more than half, and the power of its laws roared and twisted like a dying beast.

Tang San's divine consciousness still hovered in midair, shrouded in the brilliant radiance of the Sea God Divine Armor. At the tip of the Trident gathered destructive energy potent enough to change the course of mountains and rivers.

Yet now, for the first time, an emotion called "astonishment" appeared on that solemn, divine face.

Below him, Huo Yuhao knelt on one knee. Blood seeped from his seven orifices, carving shocking trails down his pale cheeks.

His Spirit Eye Martial Soul had dimmed. The powers bestowed on him by the Ice Empress and Sky Dream Ice Silkworm were nearly exhausted, and even his connection to the Undead Semi-Plane had grown faint.

But he raised his head. In those eyes, once as clear as a starry lake, surged a hatred as blazing as molten lava.

"Tang San—" His voice was hoarse, as if wrenched from shattered lungs. "You think you control everything? You think fate should follow the script you wrote?"

Tang San's divine consciousness furrowed his brow slightly and turned the Trident with a light touch. An invisible divine might pressed down like a mountain. "You refuse to see reason.

"Your very existence is a mistake. You disrupt cause and effect. If you surrender and let me plant a seal of divine consciousness in you, I can bring your mother back to life and promise my daughter's hand to you!"

"A mistake?" Huo Yuhao suddenly laughed, his laughter drenched in blood and madness. "Then let this mistake burn to the ground!"

Before the words had even left his mouth, an invisible flame rose around him.

It was no flame. His Martial Soul Origin was disintegrating, his Soul Core boiling, his spiritual power evaporating—he had set fire to every foundation of his existence.

The Ice Jade Empress Scorpion's phantom wailed and shattered in the flames. The crown of the Holy Necromancer turned to ashes. Even his eyes, which had seen through fate, began to shed molten-gold tears of blood.

"Better to shatter like jade than survive like a broken tile—" Huo Yuhao roared. He stamped down, shattering the ground beneath his feet, and shot forward like a meteor trailing a long tail of light. "Tang San, let's die together!"

Tang San's divine consciousness paled. The Sea God Trident erupted with unprecedented brilliance in an attempt to stop him.

But it was too late.

Burning everything, Huo Yuhao had already broken through the seal of divine might. Like a crimson comet flying against the heavens, he slammed into Tang San's divine consciousness.

Two utterly opposed yet equally vast powers crashed together—

There was no sound.

Or rather, the sound was devoured by a higher order of annihilation the instant it was born.

The hidden realm began collapsing inward from the center of the collision. Space peeled away in fragments like a shattered mirror, while the flow of time grew chaotic and broken.

Before his final consciousness faded, Huo Yuhao saw the disbelief on Tang San's face, then the light as everything around them turned pure white.

Then came a long, dreamless darkness.

Damp cold.

That was the first sensation Huo Yuhao felt as consciousness returned.

Next came smell—the scent of rotting leaves mixed with moist earth, mingled with the fresh fragrance of plants at dawn.

Then hearing: birdsong faintly echoing in the distance, a nearby stream burbling along, and leaves rustling in the wind.

He jerked his eyes open.

He saw neither the shattered hidden realm nor the apocalyptic scene of divine light interwoven with darkness. Instead, a canopy made up of countless shades of green stretched above him—the interlaced treetops, through which strands of pale golden dawn light filtered.

He lay on the ground, on soft, damp moss and fallen leaves. Dew had soaked through his thin clothes, bringing a very real chill.

Huo Yuhao sprang to his feet almost by instinct and leaned against a thick oak, warily scanning his surroundings.

The movement tugged at his whole body, yet the expected agony never came—no burning sensation from shattered organs, no hollowness from depleted Soul Power, not even the weakness of a soul dissolving after burning its origin.

Instead, he felt a strange... lightness.

No, it was a kind of weakness, but not the weakness of a grievous wound. It was more like... this body had never possessed any strength to begin with.

He lowered his head and looked at his hands.

They were a boy's hands, knuckles well-defined but lightly callused from long labor, skin pale from malnutrition. His fingers were slender, but they certainly did not belong to the Huo Yuhao who had cultivated to Limit Douluo and commanded several kinds of divine power. These hands were too small, too young.

His heartbeat suddenly quickened.

Huo Yuhao forced himself to calm down. The combat instincts of a Limit Douluo and the reason of a necromancer swiftly took control of his emotions.

First, he surveyed his surroundings: a typical scene on the outskirts of the Star Dou Great Forest. Most of the trees were less than a hundred years old, the Soul Beast auras were sparse and weak, and the concentration of Soul Power in the air was average.

There were no ambushes, no pursuers, and no sign that a divine sense had swept past.

Only then did he carefully examine himself.

He tried to look inward with his spiritual power. His mind was utterly empty. The Sea of Spirit that had once been as vast as the starry sky was gone, leaving only a shallow little "pool" with faint spiritual power rippling within it.

He tried to circulate his Soul Power. In his dantian, only a thread of energy so weak it was almost negligible wandered about. By a Soul Master's standards, he had only just reached level ten—the stage at which one prepared to obtain a first Soul Ring.

"What's going on..." he murmured, then froze at the sound of his own voice.

It was a clear child's voice that had not yet changed, tinged with a rasp from years of suppression, but it was certainly not the voice he knew.

An absurd, yet seemingly the only possible explanation pierced his consciousness like an icicle.

He stood up and staggered—the body he now occupied was much shorter and frailer than the one he had been accustomed to for decades.

Following the sound of water, he pushed aside the hanging vines and bushes and found a stream winding through the forest.

The water was crystal clear, reflecting the sky sliced apart by the tree canopy.

Huo Yuhao slowly knelt by the stream, took a deep breath, and looked down at the water.

The reflection showed a boy of about eleven.

His short black hair was a little messy from sleeping outdoors, though it was still clear that someone had kept it neatly groomed.

His features already hinted at the handsome young man he would become, but years of malnutrition had left him thin, with slightly prominent cheekbones and a pointed chin.

His gray cloth clothes had been washed until they were faded and patched, yet they were still spotless. Now soaked with dew, they clung to his slender shoulders.

But what made Huo Yuhao's breath catch was his eyes.

They were the eyes of a young Huo Yuhao, with a lovely shape and long lashes.

But the gaze was entirely different.

Deep in the eyes of eleven-year-old Huo Yuhao lay stubbornness, hatred, and fury at the injustice of fate, but more than anything, a trace of bewilderment and hope for the future.

In the eyes reflected in the water now, the initial confusion quickly faded, replaced by a darkness as unfathomable as the deep sea.

They were not the eyes of a boy.

They held the cold killing intent of someone who had fought for his life countless times and crawled out of mountains of corpses and seas of blood.

He raised a hand and gently touched the reflection. Ripples spread beneath his fingertips, distorting the familiar yet unfamiliar face.

"The outskirts of the Star Dou Great Forest... eleven years old... not long since I left the Duke's Mansion..." he murmured. Each word was like a cold stone dropped into his roiling heart. "I'm back... back at the beginning of it all?"