The origin of the Source Ring

The Source Ring was neither a magical treasure naturally nurtured by heaven and earth nor an artifact smelted and forged by some ancient mighty being over endless ages. It was born in the depths of the Silent Abyss, at the boundary between existence and nothingness. At the primordial beginning, before all things had taken shape and before the Great Dao had unfolded, it slowly formed from the most fundamental proposition of existence, drawing upon the origin power of annihilation and negation. Through a long evolution, it gradually differentiated into five ring orders, utterly distinct yet sharing a single lineage: the Gray Ring, the Azure Ring, the Blue Ring, the Purple Ring, and, at the very pinnacle, the Black Gold Ring, which wielded primordial authority.

Across the endless ages, countless universes rose and fell within reincarnation, mired in ceaseless slaughter and conquest. Life and death stood forever opposed, the threads of cause and effect tangled together, and the laws of the various Great Daos clashed and collided. Every conflict throughout the ages was rooted in the same underlying premise: enemies could arise in the world, living beings could mount resistance, and two warring sides could be divided into victor and vanquished. This unchanging framework of opposition trapped generation after generation of cultivators. However high the cultivation of the strong, however ruthless their methods, they could never escape the cycle of slaughter, injury, and death. The Source Ring was born to tear apart this established framework that shackled the myriad worlds. Its power built upward layer by layer, each ring advancing toward a deeper origin.

The Gray Ring was the beginning of the entire system of annihilation arts, its power acting only upon souls and true spirits. Through the entangling, binding, and tearing of soul power, it targeted the foundations of living beings' souls, shattering consciousness and destroying spirits, striking solely at the level of the soul body. It excelled at covert assassination and small-scale skirmishes. Rather than destroying the flesh directly, it pierced the outer shell, stabbed straight into the Fate Soul, and unraveled the true spirit. Its various techniques might secretly stab at the soul's foundation with invisible blades, turn into gray mist that enveloped a host of enemies, or imprison true spirits with shadow chains. Every method had only one aim: to dismantle an opponent's fighting strength at the very root of the soul.

When that power advanced another step, it became the Azure Ring. The Azure Ring's power could pierce the barrier between the unreal and the real, interfere with spatial structures, the flow of reincarnation, and the trajectories of cause and effect, sever living beings' cognition and Dao foundations, and erase the various traces an individual had left in the world. Its power was no longer confined to the soul itself; it extended outward from the soul, stirring the course of the world itself. It could sever an enemy's cognition, tear apart the boundary between the unreal and the real, or establish a prison of reincarnation and drag an enemy's soul down into the cycle. It could even reverse the causality of an art, turning an opponent's own offensive back upon them. When the Azure Ring struck, it destroyed not only the enemy, but also the trajectories connecting that enemy to this world.

Higher still, the Blue Ring entered the realm of consciousness and logic. It dismantled the rule-based supports upon which existence depended and stripped away cross-dimensional anchors of existence, making its target fundamentally contradict the logic of its own existence and collapse on its own. Neither souls nor causality could stop the Blue Ring's power anymore; it directly shook the underlying logic that constituted the existence of all things. It erased self-awareness, severed chains of logic, devoured every projection of a soul across multidimensional spacetime, blocked causal connections, and shattered the roots of laws. Any living being that relied on rules and causality to sustain its existence would find the foundations of that existence teetering when faced with the Blue Ring.

The Purple Ring reached straight to the very root of life's origin. It directly denied living beings the right to be born, locked down time and space, sealed off every possibility of existence, and erased the legitimacy of its target's existence within the universe. At this ring, attacks had long since ceased to concern injuries, souls, or arts; it directly altered the universe's judgment of a life. It denied the right to creation, erased every causal trace, stripped away permission to command rules, and sealed off every cross-dimensional projection. Even the source of a living being's will to resist could be annihilated along with them. Once the Purple Ring's power descended, its target no longer had the right to a foothold anywhere within the entire universal system.

The Black Gold Ring was the endpoint of the Source Ring. It had long since transcended the realm of attacks and slaughter and no longer needed to act to kill anyone. It merely rewrote the universe's most fundamental propositions, eliminating at the root the possibility of hostility and challenges arising, and wielded the primordial authority that defined all reality. When the Black Gold Ring stirred, it did not destroy a particular enemy; it rendered "opposition" itself meaningless. Every thought of mounting a challenge returned to annihilation before it could arise; every conception of surpassing or contending against this order would be erased directly by the underlying logic.

The power of the five rings rose layer upon layer. The Gray, Azure, Blue, and Purple Rings were all methods of erasure, working from outside inward, from flesh and soul bodies to the laws of the Great Dao, then to multidimensional spacetime, eliminating the target's existence bit by bit. When the Black Gold Ring manifested, it was another realm altogether. There was no need to strike or kill; no thought of mounting a challenge could take shape from the very outset.

The Source Ring had no fixed form, manifesting five-colored ring wheels in response to thought. It was not driven by Spiritual Qi or soul power; its power came from adjudicating the propositions of all things' existence. Its original purpose in being born was to end the unceasing warfare of the myriad worlds. Yet this authority was far too terrifying. A stir of a lower-order ring could erode souls and disrupt spiritual consciousness; when a higher-order ring emerged, memories vanished and causality was severed, capable of utterly erasing a life from all times and dimensions. When the Black Gold Ring appeared in the world, even the room for a thought of resistance to arise would return to nothingness.

It could hardly be called a weapon; it was more like a naturally formed order of annihilation. When the ring wheels manifested, annihilation swept across the myriad worlds; when the ring wheels withdrew, all returned to primordial chaos.