Origin Shard

On the wilderness outside Nuoding City, a cold wind howled, carrying the pungent, fishy scent of damp earth.

The sky had turned completely dark; thick clouds obscured the stars and moon, leaving the surroundings pitch black.

In this desolate, uninhabited wasteland, a hunched, withered figure was struggling to crawl forward through a massive, muddy pit.

Yu Xiaogang's current state was miserable beyond description.

His once-fitting black robe had long since been shredded into rags, soaked through with murky sludge and foul-smelling stagnant water.

His gray, brittle hair was plastered to his scalp by the mud, and his entire face resembled a crumpled piece of waste paper, etched with deep, cavernous wrinkles.

He gasped for air in ragged gulps, each breath sounding like a broken bellows, his throat emitting a hideous, rattling wheeze.

He felt his lungs filling with icy mud, and every cough brought up mouthfuls of dark, crimson blood.

I cannot die here... I am Grandmaster... I still have a brilliant future ahead of me... Yu Xiaogang mumbled incoherently in the mud.

His voice was as raspy as sandpaper rubbing together, filled with unwillingness and venom.

He desperately stretched out his skeletal arms, his ten fingers digging fiercely into the hard soil ahead, attempting to drag his heavy body forward.

But he was too old, too weak.

The system's punishment had drained his vitality, transforming him from a prime soul master into a decrepit wretch with one foot in the grave.

He no longer had the strength to even crawl out of this mud pit.

Just then, the system punishment that made him wish for death flared up once more.

A nameless fire ignited without warning from his dantian, instantly surging wildly along his withered meridians.

This was no ordinary flame; it was like red-hot steel blades slicing and churning through his flesh and bone marrow.

"Ah!"

Yu Xiaogang jerked his head back, his throat emitting a wail more wretched than that of a dying beast.

His body convulsed violently in the mud pit, like a loach thrown onto a searing iron plate.

He writhed in the filthy water in agony, his hands clawing uncontrollably at the mud beneath him.

His fingernails split and peeled back to the quick, blood instantly gushing out to mix with the black sludge.

Yet, as if he could no longer feel the pain in his fingers, he desperately clawed deep, bloody furrows into the earth, trying to use this method to distract himself from the soul-tearing agony within.

System! Save me! Stop this! Yu Xiaogang roared in his mind in despair.

He struggled to open his clouded eyes, looking up above his head.

The dark red

System Panel

, visible only to him, was currently floating in mid-air.

But this panel, which had once granted him infinite hope, had now become a death warrant.

The surface of the once-smooth light screen was now covered in dense, spiderweb-like cracks, spreading from the center to the edges, exuding an aura of decay that suggested it could shatter at any moment.

The red light on the panel flickered erratically, like a candle in the wind.

Even more terrifyingly, the data displayed on the panel had become completely corrupted.

The clear task list and luck value progress bar were gone, replaced by a waterfall of frantically refreshing garbled code.

<strong>[Error Code 0x77F... Underlying logic tampered with... Unable to repair...]</strong>

<strong>[Core command conflict... Luck plunder module failed...]</strong>

<strong>[Energy severely depleted... Self-destruct sequence forced to initiate...]</strong>

The cold, mechanical system prompt echoed in Yu Xiaogang's mind, but the voice was stuttering violently, laced with harsh static like a broken radio on the verge of total failure.

Yu Xiaogang stared at the frantically flashing garbled code, the fear in his eyes reaching its peak.

He finally understood that the system he was so proud of—the very crutch that gave him the confidence to plunder the luck of the Son of the Plane—had completely fallen into an unrecoverable logic crash.

"No! This is impossible! My luck system is invincible! How could it break!" Yu Xiaogang shrieked in despair.

A scene suddenly flashed through his mind.

It was in his office at Nuoding Academy, where a six-year-old boy named Su Yu sat in a chair, looking at him with the eyes one might use to look at trash.

Golden light flickered in that boy's eyes, and then, with a light swipe through the void, his system tasks had been completely rewritten.

It was him... that brat! What kind of monster is he! Yu Xiaogang's heart gave a violent spasm, and a bone-chilling cold instantly overwhelmed the pain in his body.

He finally realized that he had provoked a terrifying existence he could never hope to challenge.

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

In front of that boy, he, a transmigrator with a system, was nothing more than a clown wielding a wooden stick against a god.

Tears of regret mixed with mud slid from the corners of Yu Xiaogang's eyes.

If he were given another chance, he would rather beg on the streets than ever provoke the girl named Tang Wu or that devilish boy.

But it was all too late.

Accompanied by a crisp "crack," the cracks on the dark red

System Panel

floating in mid-air instantly widened.

Immediately, the sound of invisible glass shattering exploded deep within the soul of Yu Xiaogang.

The Luck Plunder System, which had accompanied him for so long and fueled his beautiful dreams of dominating the Douluo Continent, collapsed completely at this very moment.

The entire System Panel shattered into countless fragments, transforming into blood-red specks of light that dissipated rapidly in the frigid air, leaving not a single trace behind.

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

Yu Xiaogang's body stiffened abruptly, his eyes widening in an instant.

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

The black blood was mixed with numerous shattered pieces of internal organs, creating a shocking sight as it splattered into the mud.

Every ounce of strength was drained from his body in that instant, his eyes rolling back powerlessly to reveal large, cloudy whites.

His withered frame crashed heavily into a muddy pit in the wilderness, splashing up black sludge as he fell completely unconscious, his life hanging in the balance.

Just as the system collapsed and the red light faded, a strange phenomenon occurred.

At the location where the core of the System Panel had once been, a fragment the size of a fingernail quietly dropped out.

This fragment had no physical form, composed entirely of pure energy, its surface radiating a peculiar grey-gold glow.

This light was not blinding, yet it exuded an arcane aura that transcended all things in the world, as if it were a product of a dimension beyond this one.

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

The grey-gold fragment hovered in mid-air for a mere half-second.

The next moment, as if drawn by the intense pull of a higher-dimensional rule, the energy within the fragment shuddered violently.

"Whoosh!"

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

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

The speed of this streak was unimaginably fast; it crossed the distance of space, wove through the clouds, and locked onto a direction, hurtling toward the location of the Soul Hunting Forest.