Worldline Leap: Tang San's Arrival Ten Thousand Years After Becoming a God

Within the Firmament's spacetime, Fasinuo Province.

As the last trace of light peeled away, that figure vanished completely into the darkened night sky.

The light faded.

The Firmament's month-long miracle came to an end.

But outside the Firmament, in the real spacetime, on the wasteland near Tack Town in Fasinuo Province...

The downpour ceased, and the night wind wailed.

The thirty-meter-tall steel Blast Furnace, which had turned from illusion into reality, still roared loud enough to deafen!

Thousands upon thousands of slaves, blacksmiths, and rebels knelt in the mud, staring at the empty night sky, unable to rise for a long time.

But the despair and panic that had first filled their eyes were gone.

Divine authority was dead; truth endured.

The history of young Yu Xiaogang's old timeline had, at this moment, officially ended in an irreversible tide!

Meanwhile.

Inside the pure-white system settlement space.

"Damn... that recoil was way too realistic. Nearly knocked my shoulder out of its socket."

Lin Fan, still wearing his striking black military uniform, rubbed his aching right shoulder.

He looked at the boundless white void around him, then at the golden settlement panel cascading down before him like a waterfall. He could not stop the grin spreading across his face.

[Ding! Evaluation settlement for the first instance, Yu Xiaogang, complete!]

[Overall rating: SSS! Congratulations, Host, on a perfect clear!]

[1,000,000 system points credited! The All-Heavens God-Tier System Shop is now open! A God-Tier Guaranteed Draw Ticket has been issued!]

"Beautiful! Made a killing on that first run."

Lin Fan casually opened the system shop and glanced through it. The outrageous items inside—[Planet-Destroying Warship Blueprints], [Two-Dimensional Foil Fragment], [Concept-Level Causality Weapon]—were so dazzling that he itched to get his hands on them.

"But now's not the time to spend. Good steel belongs on the blade's edge."

Lin Fan rubbed his hands together and gave the system an order, brimming with confidence. "System, quit dragging your feet! Start the second character-instance draw! I played through a heavy industrial revolution in the first stage. Next time, give me someone even more outrageous. Let's see how badly I can break this game!"

[Command confirmed.]

[Consuming God-Tier Guaranteed Draw Ticket... Opening the second instance's character pool!]

Hum—!

Countless streams of light gathered in the void.

A god-tier card glowing dark gold slowly appeared before Lin Fan, then turned over!

On the card was the shadowy figure of a blue-haired young man holding the Sea God Trident, wearing the Asura God's blood-red cloak, with the Sea God Mark on his forehead!

[Ding! Second instance draw successful!]

[Character to portray: Sea God/Asura God—Tang San!]

[Current objective: Correct this character's negative historical reputation and achieve a 100% perfect, positive saintly image to clear the instance!]

"What the hell? Tang San?!"

Lin Fan stared at the blue-haired figure on the card. His smile froze, then he rolled his eyes dramatically and launched straight into a veteran keyboard warrior's tirade.

"System, what's wrong with you? You want me to play this hypocrite?!"

Lin Fan pointed at the card, his face full of contempt. "This guy never shuts up about humanity and all living things, but what did he actually do? Once he became a god, he kept everything for himself and monopolized resources! He called Spirit Hall evil every chance he got, but the Tang Sect he built was even more overbearing!"

"He used his God King status to treat the fortunes of the entire Douluo Continent like his private garden! When his daughter descended to the mortal world for training, she had to drain other people's luck dry, and he tormented his son-in-law like a dog! He treated the Hidden Weapons and internal cultivation techniques as sect treasures and strictly forbade anyone from sharing them! He hoarded every Immortal Herb in the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well, leaving the continent not so much as a single root hair!"

"He's a hypocritical vampire through and through—double standards his entire life, selfish to the extreme! You want me to play him? And build a perfect saintly image?!"

Lin Fan paced back and forth through the white space. The more he thought about it, the more disgusted he felt.

But soon he stopped, and a mischievous gleam flashed in his eyes.

"Fine! If the system wants me to play him and build a perfectly positive image, then in the next stage I'll be a saint as pure as a white lotus, without the tiniest flaw!"

Lin Fan slapped his thigh and muttered with a cold laugh, his mind racing as he devised his cheating strategy for clearing the instance:

"He likes hoarding everything? Then I'll be absolutely selfless!"

"He treats the Mysterious Heaven Treasure Record and Hidden Weapons like his lifeblood? I'll go straight to a printing house at the start and print ten million copies of the Mysterious Heaven Treasure Record! Scatter them across the continent from hot-air balloons! Hand them out free to every beggar and ordinary person! Shout that everyone deserves a cultivation technique!"

"He hoards the Immortal Herbs? Then I'll turn the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well into a public botanical garden for the whole continent! I'll teach classes myself, show ordinary people everywhere how to refine pills, and get everyone strong and healthy!"

"He treats Soul Beasts like Soul Ring cash machines? Then I'll establish the Humans and Soul Beasts Peaceful Coexistence Zone and teach Soul Beasts to cultivate into human form!"

The more Lin Fan talked, the more excited he became. His eyes burned with a zeal for stirring up trouble. "In this single-player game, I'm going to play a real savior—so selfless it makes people's scalps tingle, without a single fault anyone can pick at! I want to see just how embarrassing that hoarding hypocrite from the original story looks when I take all this to the absolute limit!!"

From Lin Fan's perspective, this was nothing more than an "unconventional, crooked speedrun strategy" he had devised to earn a high score.

He was convinced he was simply amusing himself inside an isolated game instance.

He had no idea.

The Firmament had never been single-player!

And the keyboard warrior tirade he had let loose without restraint inside the system space was about to trigger, in an entirely separate parallel spacetime, a cataclysmic avalanche of shattered faith that would overturn the entire Divine Realm!

[Ding! Loading spacetime for the second character instance...]

[Target spacetime locked!]

[Spacetime leap—ten thousand years!!!]

Rumble—!!!

As the system notification sounded, the pure-white settlement space shattered!

Violent currents of spacetime swept through everything like the Big Bang.

Meanwhile.

In another, entirely parallel worldline, whose timeline lay a full ten thousand years further ahead!

This was a world where Tang San had ascended to godhood ten thousand years ago.

This was the era of the Peerless Tang Sect.

It was a spacetime ten thousand years later, where God King Tang San sat high above the clouds, using heaven and earth as his chessboard, fishing at will in the mortal world and manipulating the fortunes of the realm below!

By this era, Spirit Hall had long since turned to dust.

The Tang Sect and Shrek Academy loomed over every living creature on the continent like two mountains no one could cross.

They controlled the most crucial cultivation resources and monopolized the finest paths to education.

Class oppression and the rigid belief in bloodlines weighed more heavily than they had in any era ten thousand years before!

Ordinary people were still treated like weeds.

Low-ranking Soul Masters were still stepping stones for the powerful.

And Tang San, that lofty God King who held both the Sea God's and Asura God's godhood, sat on the supreme God King Throne in the Divine Realm. He looked down on the mortal world as though it were his private property, proclaimed himself righteous for all eternity, and basked in the incense offerings and worship of ordinary people.

Yet on this very night.

In the imperial palaces of Douluo Continent, the Sun Moon Empire's Illustrious Virtue Hall, Shrek Academy's Sea God Pavilion... even among the Divine Palaces shining with endless divine radiance above the Divine Realm!

Every transcendent giant who stood at the pinnacle of this age, along with Sea God Tang San himself upon the God King Throne...

At that moment, all raised their heads at once in utter horror!

Without the slightest warning.

The sky, peaceful for ten thousand years and sealed tight by the laws of the Divine Realm, was suddenly covered by the boundless Firmament!

It covered not only the mortal world but, without a shred of regard for its defenses, the entire sky of the Divine Realm!

"What kind of power is this?! How dare it ignore the Divine Realm's barriers?!"

Within the God Realm Committee, the God of Destruction, the Goddess of Life, and the God of Evil rose in fury at the same time, horror written across their faces.

Tang San, seated high on the God King Throne, felt his pupils contract sharply.

The hand with which he held the Sea God Trident began to tremble uncontrollably.

For he had discovered that, even with his God King cultivation, he could not decipher the slightest trace of the Firmament's laws!

Before the transcendent giants and deities of this age could react...

At the very heart of the Firmament, golden characters radiating boundless sanctity slowly appeared, like the first ray of light at the birth of the universe!

With them came the original sound of Lin Fan's contemptuous tirade from the system space.

His voice became the opening's devastating blow, resounding throughout the Divine Realm and the mortal world ten thousand years later:

[Tang San? That hypocrite who spent his whole life applying double standards and keeping everything for himself?!]

[Using divine authority to farm the continent's fortunes and treating all humanity like his private garden?]

[If I were Tang San, I'd go straight to a printing house at the start, print ten million copies of the Tang Sect Secret Arts' Mysterious Heaven Treasure Record, and airdrop them to all humanity for free!]

[Immortal Herbs for everyone! Publish every Hidden Weapon blueprint!]

[I'll carve the words "selfless saint" into heaven and earth so deeply that this hypocritical, bloodsucking Divine Realm has nowhere to hide its shame!!!]

BOOM—!!!!

If the Firmament in the first volume had been a physical attack from a higher dimension...

Then these opening lines of the second volume were the ultimate ideological nuclear blast against the entire worldview ten thousand years later—and against Tang San's divinity!

The Divine Realm shook violently! The river of stars turned upside down!

In the mortal world ten thousand years later, the commoners exploited by Shrek and the Tang Sect, the unaffiliated Soul Masters squeezed so hard they could barely breathe, all shuddered at this deafening, outrageously bold declaration!

They raised their heads and stared at the Firmament in disbelief.

On the screen, the scene had loaded into Holy Soul Village.

A young "Tang San" (played by Lin Fan) was carrying a sackful of Mysterious Heaven Treasure Record manuscripts he had just written from memory, racing through the night toward a printing house in Nuoding City!

He really meant to print the Tang Sect's greatest secret and give it away to the whole world!

The ordinary people ten thousand years later watched that young figure in the Firmament, ready to make the secret arts public.

Then they turned to the Tang Sect and Shrek Academy in the real world—those monuments to the monopoly on knowledge, which guarded the Mysterious Heaven Skill as forbidden property and would never let an outsider touch even half a line of it...

A towering wave called "the collapse of faith" began to swell wildly through the mortal world ten thousand years later!

And in the Divine Realm.

Inside the Sea God Temple.

Tang San stared at the "himself" in the Firmament, preparing to hand out the Mysterious Heaven Treasure Record like leaflets.

He listened to the words "hypocrite who kept everything for himself" and "hypocritical, bloodsucking Divine Realm."

His face, usually mild behind its mask of hypocrisy, twisted into a ghastly, liver-dark shade.

The shame and fury of being stripped bare in public, of having the most selfish, filthiest part of himself exposed beneath his mask of righteousness for the whole universe to see, surged straight to the crown of his head!

"How dare you!!! Stop!!!"

Tang San roared like a madman. The Sea God Trident in his hand erupted with world-destroying blue light as he tried to smash the Firmament apart.

"Crack—!!!"

Yet when the final word of this chapter fell...

Beneath the brutal contrast between "absolute selflessness" and "absolute selfishness"! Beneath the karmic backlash from the collapse of faith among every living being on the continent ten thousand years later!

The God King Throne beneath Sea God Tang San—the symbol of supreme authority in the Divine Realm—let out a mournful cry. Then, without warning... an irreparable, terrifying crack split across it!!!

The assault on his very soul had only just begun.