Origin Fragment

In the wilderness outside Nuoding City, a cold wind howled past, carrying the pungent stench of damp earth.

Night had fallen completely. Dark clouds blanketed the stars and moon, and the darkness was so thick you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.

In this deserted wasteland, a hunched, emaciated figure struggled to crawl through a vast mud pit.

Yu Xiaogang looked more wretched than words could describe.

His once well-fitting black robe had long since been torn to rags, soaked in murky mud and foul-smelling water.

His grizzled, withered hair was plastered to his scalp with muck. His face looked like a crumpled sheet of wastepaper, furrowed with deep creases.

He gasped for breath, each inhale like the wheeze of a broken bellows. A rasping gurgle came from his throat.

He felt as though his lungs were filled with icy mud. Every cough brought up a few mouthfuls of dark-red froth.

"I can't die here... I'm the Grandmaster... I still have a bright future..." Yu Xiaogang mumbled incoherently in the muddy water.

His voice was as raspy as sandpaper, filled with bitterness and venom.

He desperately stretched out his skeletal arms, digging all ten fingers into the hard ground ahead as he tried to drag his heavy body forward.

But he was too old, too weak.

The system's punishment had drained away his life force, turning him from a strong Soul Master in his prime into a useless man with one foot in the grave.

He didn't even have the strength to crawl out of the mud pit.

Just then, the system's punishment—the torment that made him wish he were dead—struck again.

A nameless fire sprang up without warning from his dantian, racing wildly through his withered meridians.

This was no ordinary flame. It was like red-hot steel blades, hacking and twisting through his flesh and marrow.

"Ah!"

Yu Xiaogang jerked his head up, a howl of agony tearing from his throat, more wretched than the cry of a dying beast.

His body convulsed violently in the mud, like a loach thrown onto a red-hot iron plate.

He writhed frantically in the filthy water, both hands clawing uncontrollably at the mud beneath him.

His fingernails split and curled back, and blood welled up at once, mixing with the black muck.

But he seemed not to feel the pain in his fingers. He only clawed deep bloody gashes into the mud, desperately trying to distract himself from the agony of having his soul torn apart.

"System! Save me! Make it stop!" Yu Xiaogang roared in despair inside his mind.

With great effort, he opened his cloudy eyes and looked above his head.

The dark-red System Panel, visible only to him, was floating in midair.

But the panel that had once given him boundless hope had now become a death warrant.

Its once smooth, even surface was covered in countless cracks.

Like a spiderweb, they spread from the center of the panel to its edges, exuding an air of decay, as if it could shatter at any moment.

The panel's red glow flickered, like a candle guttering in the wind.

Worse still, the information displayed on the panel had become a complete jumble.

The clear mission list and Luck Value progress bar had vanished, replaced by a waterfall of rapidly refreshing garbled text.

[Error code 0x77F... underlying logic overwritten... unable to repair...]

[Core directive conflict... Luck Plunder module failed...]

[Energy critically depleted... self-destruct protocol forcibly initiated...]

The system's cold, mechanical prompt sounded in Yu Xiaogang's mind, but it kept stuttering, accompanied by a grating burst of static, like an old radio on its last legs.

Yu Xiaogang stared at the flashing gibberish, terror reaching its peak.

He finally understood that the system he had once taken such pride in, the support that had given him the nerve to plunder the luck of the Children of the Plane, had fallen into an irreparable state of logical failure.

"No! That's impossible! My Luck System is invincible! How could it break!" Yu Xiaogang screamed in despair.

An image suddenly flashed through his mind.

He was in his office at Nuoding Academy, where a six-year-old boy named Su Yu sat in a chair, looking at him as if he were trash.

Golden light had shimmered in the boy's eyes. Then he had made the slightest motion in the air, and Yu Xiaogang's system mission had been completely rewritten.

"It was him... that little brat! What kind of monster is he?" Yu Xiaogang's heart gave a violent spasm, and a bone-deep chill swept over him, momentarily eclipsing his physical pain.

At last, he realized he had provoked a terrifying presence he could never afford to offend.

That boy could not only see the system, but could even alter its underlying rules at will.

In front of that boy, he, a transmigrator with a system, was no more than a buffoon challenging a god with a wooden stick.

Tears of regret mingled with the muddy water and ran down Yu Xiaogang's cheeks.

If he had another chance, he would sooner beg for food in the street than ever provoke that girl named Tang Wu or that devilish boy.

But it was too late.

With a sharp crack, the fractures in the dark-red System Panel floating in midair suddenly spread wider.

Then an inaudible sound of breaking glass exploded deep within Yu Xiaogang's soul.

The Luck Plunder System that had been with him for so long, and had fed his dream of conquering the Douluo Continent, crumbled completely in that instant.

The entire panel shattered into countless fragments, becoming a sky full of blood-red sparks that quickly faded in the cold air, leaving not a trace.

The backlash from the system's collapse slammed into Yu Xiaogang's heart meridian.

His body stiffened violently, and his eyes flew wide open.

He opened his mouth and spat out a large mouthful of foul-smelling black blood.

Chunks of shattered organs were mixed in with it, a shocking sight in the muddy water.

All strength drained from his body in an instant. His eyes rolled back helplessly, revealing a wide expanse of cloudy white.

His withered body crashed into the mud pit in the wilderness, splashing black water everywhere. He lost consciousness completely, his fate unknown.

At the very moment the system collapsed and its red glow vanished, a strange scene unfolded.

From the spot where the core of the System Panel had been, a fragment no larger than a fingernail quietly fell.

It had no physical form, consisting entirely of pure energy. A strange gray-gold light shimmered across its surface.

The light wasn't blinding, yet it carried an esoteric aura that seemed to transcend all things in the world, as if it did not belong to this dimension.

It was the purest System Origin Fragment left behind after the system's collapse.

The gray-gold fragment floated in midair for only half a second.

In the next instant, as though drawn by some higher-dimensional law, the energy within the fragment shuddered.

"Whoosh!"

The gray-gold fragment became a brilliant streak of light and shot straight into the sky.

It tore through the darkness above the wilderness, trailing a long tail of light across the night sky.

The streak moved at an inconceivable speed, crossing the distance between spaces in an instant. It sped through the clouds, fixed on a destination, and hurtled toward the Soul Hunting Forest.