The King of Creation!
The figure before them was not his true body, but a wisp of will left behind for untold billions of years.
Perhaps it dated all the way back to when the Heavenly Ladder was first built, hundreds of billions of years ago!
Yet that single wisp of will made all fourteen from the Human Realm feel an oppression unlike anything they had ever known.
It was not a difference in strength, but something far more fundamental.
Like mortals gazing up at the stars, or mayflies facing the boundless sea!
Currents of Chaos surged beneath their feet, and scene after scene burst open before the eyes of the fourteen prodigies from the Human Realm!
Then they saw it.
An age untouched even by the River of Time!
An ancient world never recorded in any chronicle!
In that age, the Myriad Races stood in force, and kings fought for supremacy!
True Dragons struck across the nine heavens, Divine Phoenixes burned the sky and boiled the seas, ancient giants shattered the firmament with a palm, and the Immortal Imperial Dynasty ruled lands stretching hundreds of millions of miles!
Amid that Golden Age of warring races, a young boy emerged from the humblest dust.
He was a boy born in a mortal village.
He had no heaven-defying bloodline, no ancient inheritance, no master to guide him—not even the qualifications to cultivate immortality.
The scene shifted.
Sect after sect shut the boy out, and disciples of lofty immortal sects trampled him underfoot.
He did not argue. He simply climbed to his feet, wiped the blood from his mouth, and walked step by step toward the next immortal sect.
Again and again.
Year after year.
He had knelt before more sect gates than the roads he had traveled!
He had endured more