Rebirth

Within a secret realm in the Evil Eye Forest of the Sun Moon Empire, on the Douluo Continent.

The secret realm within the forest had already crumbled by more than half, the power of its laws roaring and twisting like a dying behemoth.

Suspended in mid-air, the divine consciousness of Tang San remained shrouded in the brilliant radiance of the Sea God Divine Armor, the tip of his Trident condensing a destructive energy capable of shifting mountains and diverting rivers.

Yet at this moment, that solemn, divine face displayed an emotion called "astonishment" for the very first time.

Below, Huo Yuhao knelt on one knee, the blood seeping from his seven orifices tracing shocking trails across his pale cheeks.

His Spirit Eye martial soul had already dimmed, the power bestowed by the Ice Empress and the Sky Dream Ice Silkworm was nearly exhausted, and even the connection to his Undead Semi-Plane had become faint and flickering.

But he raised his head, and those eyes, once as clear as the Star Lake, now surged with a hatred as scorching as magma.

"Tang San—" His voice was so hoarse it sounded as if it were being squeezed from shattered lungs. "Do you think you control everything? Do you think fate must follow the script you wrote?"

Tang San's divine consciousness furrowed his brows, the Trident turning slightly, an invisible divine might pressing down like a mountain: "Stubborn and unrepentant."

"Your very existence is a mistake, a disruption of causality. If you are willing to surrender and let Me plant a mark of divine consciousness, I can resurrect your mother and even betroth My daughter to you!"

"A mistake?" Huo Yuhao suddenly laughed, that laughter filled with blood and madness. "Then let this mistake burn everything to the ground!"

Before the words had even faded, a layer of invisible flames rose from his body.

These were not flames; it was his martial soul origin disintegrating, his Soul Core boiling, his spiritual power evaporating—he was igniting the very foundations of his existence.

The phantom of the Ice Jade Empress Scorpion wailed and shattered within the flames, the crown of the Holy Necromancer turned to ash, and even those eyes that had seen through fate began to shed tears of molten gold.

"Better to be shattered jade than an intact tile—" Huo Yuhao roared, his feet violently shattering the ground as he transformed into a meteor trailing a long tail of light. "Tang San, let's die together!"

Tang San's divine consciousness saw his expression change abruptly, the Sea God Trident erupting with unprecedented radiance in an attempt to block him.

But it was too late.

Huo Yuhao, burning with everything he had, broke through the blockade of divine might, like a retrograde crimson comet, slamming fiercely into the chest of Tang San's divine consciousness.

Two diametrically opposed yet equally majestic forces collided with a roar at that moment—

There was no sound.

Or rather, the sound was swallowed by a higher form of annihilation the instant it was born.

The secret realm began to collapse inward from the center of the collision, space peeling away like a shattered mirror, the flow of time becoming chaotic and fragmented.

Before his final consciousness dissipated, what Huo Yuhao saw was the look of disbelief on the face of Tang San's divine consciousness, and the light that reduced everything around them to pure white.

Then, came the long, dreamless darkness.

Damp and cold.

This was the first sensation Huo Yuhao felt after regaining consciousness.

Immediately followed by his sense of smell—the scent of rotting leaves and moist soil, mixed with the unique freshness of morning vegetation.

Then came his sense of hearing: the faint chirping of birds in the distance, the gurgling of a nearby stream, and the rustling of wind through the leaves.

He snapped his eyes open.

What met his gaze was not the crumbling secret realm, nor the apocalyptic scene of divine light intertwined with darkness, but a canopy composed of varying shades of green—interlaced treetops, through which leaked strands of pale golden morning light.

He lay on the ground, beneath him the soft, damp moss and fallen leaves, the dew soaking through his thin clothes and bringing a very real chill.

Huo Yuhao sprang up almost instinctively, backing against a thick oak tree, scanning his surroundings with vigilance.

The movement pulled at his entire body, yet there was no expected sharp pain—no burning sensation of shattered internal organs, no emptiness of exhausted soul power, not even the weakness of a soul dissipating after burning one's origin.

In its place was a strange... sense of lightness?

No, it was a kind of weakness, but different from the weakness of a severe injury; it was more like... this body had never possessed power to begin with.

He lowered his head to look at his own hands.

They were the hands of a young boy, the knuckles distinct but calloused from long-term labor, the skin a malnourished pale, the fingers slender but belonging in no way to the Huo Yuhao who had reached the limit of a Titled Douluo and mastered multiple god-level powers. These hands were too small, too immature.

His heartbeat accelerated suddenly.

Huo Yuhao forced himself to calm down, the combat instincts of a Limit Douluo and the rationality of a necromancer quickly taking control of his emotions.

He first confirmed his surroundings: a typical scene on the outskirts of the Star Dou Great Forest, the trees mostly under a hundred years old, the aura of soul beasts thin and weak, the concentration of soul power in the air average.

No ambush, no pursuit, no traces of divine sense sweeping the area.

Only then did he carefully examine himself.

He attempted to look inward with his spiritual power—his mind was a vast emptiness, the spiritual sea that had once been as vast as the starry sky was gone, leaving only a small, shallow "pool" with weak spiritual power slowly fluctuating within it.

He attempted to circulate his soul power—at his dantian, there was only a wisp of airflow so weak it was almost negligible. By the standards of a soul master, he had barely reached level ten? The level of someone preparing to obtain their first soul ring?

"What is going on..." he muttered to himself, and the moment the sound left his lips, he froze.

It was a clear, youthful voice that had not yet broken, carrying a hint of hoarseness from long-term suppression, but it was absolutely not the voice he was familiar with.

An absurd yet singular possibility pierced his consciousness like an ice pick.

He stood up and stumbled—this body 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 shrubs and found a small stream winding through the forest.

The stream was clear enough to see the bottom, reflecting the sky as it was sliced into fragments by the canopy above.

Huo Yuhao knelt slowly by the stream, took a deep breath, and lowered his head to look at the water's surface.

The reflection in the water was that of a boy roughly eleven years of age.

His short black hair was somewhat disheveled from sleeping in the wild, yet it was still evident that it had been kept very neat previously.

The contours of his face already held the embryonic form of future handsomeness, but at this moment, he appeared gaunt due to long-term malnutrition, with prominent cheekbones and a sharp, thin chin.

His grey cloth garment, washed until it had faded to white, was covered in patches but had been laundered spotlessly clean; now, dampened by dew, it clung tightly to his thin shoulders.

However, what caused Huo Yuhao's breath to hitch was those eyes.

They were the eyes belonging to the young Huo Yuhao, beautifully shaped with long, slender lashes.

But the gaze within them was completely different.

In the depths of the eleven-year-old Huo Yuhao's eyes, there had been hidden stubbornness, hatred, and fury at the unfairness of fate, but more than that, a trace of bewilderment and expectation for the future.

Yet, in the eyes of the reflection now, once the initial confusion rapidly faded, what settled in its place was a bottomless, profound darkness.

That was not a gaze a youth should possess.

It was a cold, murderous intent born from countless life-and-death struggles, the kind that crawled out from a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood.

He raised his hand and gently touched the reflection in the water; his fingertips sent ripples spreading outward, distorting that face which was both familiar and strange.

"The outskirts of the Star Dou Great Forest... eleven years old... having just left the Duke's Mansion not long ago..." he whispered to himself, every word like a cold stone dropped into his churning heart, "I have returned... returned to the starting point of it all?"