The moment Yuan Zhi crossed the bone gate, silence fell.
Not the silence of absence.
The silence of a grave that Heaven refused to dig.
The ground cracked with every step he took, but not because it was unstable.
It was offended.
This was a land that remembered being denied by the sky — and it wore that rage like chains made from dead laws.
He walked across a plain where the rain floated in mid-air, frozen inches above the ground — hundreds of drops, unmoving, never falling.
Time here didn't crawl. It sulked.
In the distance stood a massive coliseum, sideways in the air, half its pillars buried in clouds, the other half fused into the horizon like melted bone.
The chains wrapped around its spires didn't bind it to anything. They were ceremonial. Symbolic.
They were for shame.
Yuan Zhi didn't speak. The wind did.
It howled in a thousand forgotten languages, too fragmented to mean anything. But if you listened long enough…
You'd hear one word repeated.
"Unworthy."
He passed skeletal statues bowed in supplication — not kneeling in reverence, but frozen mid-begging.
Hands stretched upward.
Faces eroded.
Throats clawed open.
As if they had tried to scream even after their deaths.
"This is where gods die without being remembered," Yuan Zhi murmured.
His shadow twitched.
The Heaven-Eating Curse inside him vibrated.
Almost excited.
The Execution Monument
At the center of the plain stood an altar made of ash.
And chained to it:
A corpse the size of a mountain.
Ten meters tall.
No head. Just a cauterized stump where the neck ended. Its ribs were shattered from the inside. Bones fused with lightning scars. Charcoal skin cracked by old divine fire.
It didn't decay.
Because Heaven had never accepted its death.
Yuan Zhi stared.
The corpse twitched.
Only once.
But he saw it.
"You still want to rise," Yuan Zhi whispered.
"But you weren't denied ascension... were you?"
"You were strangled."
He walked closer.
A stone tablet lay cracked at the god's feet.
Words were scratched into it with fingernails. Not by worshippers — by the god itself.
"I did everything right."
"I followed the path."
"They changed the rules."
Yuan Zhi crouched.
And laughed.
Softly. Bitterly.
"They always do."
He placed his palm on the god's cracked chest.
It wasn't warm.
It was waiting.
Suddenly, the sky cracked like an egg.
And something descended.
Not a creature.
Not a law.
A memory.
The Sky's Rejection
Yuan Zhi wasn't standing anymore.
He was kneeling.
Before a throne carved from wind and flame.
A voice screamed inside his skull:
"YOU ARE NOT WORTHY TO REMEMBER THIS."
But he remembered anyway.
He watched it all—
The god's ritual. Its rise. The thunder.
And then… a hand made of light reached down from the sky…
…and closed its fingers around the god's throat.
Not to lift it.
To crush it.
Yuan Zhi saw the god's ribs rupture.
He saw its voice stolen mid-prayer.
He saw it scream in silence, one hand still raised toward Heaven — the other tearing its own chest open trying to find out why.
He saw the truth:
Heaven did not deny the god.
It feared him.
And so, it choked him before he could become real.
Yuan Zhi's body convulsed as the memory faded.
His veins throbbed with inverted qi.
His eyes bled.
And something inside him laughed.
Not him.
The Heaven-Eating Curse.
It had tasted something divine.
And now, it wanted more.
Yuan Zhi rose.
His bones cracked. Not from pain. From growth.
The corpse before him — the god without a name — began to twitch again.
Not randomly.
In response.
As if something in it had recognized him.
Not as a descendant.
Not as a successor.
As an executioner.
He climbed the corpse. Step by step.
Blood seeped from his palms as he gripped bones jagged like thunderstone. The higher he climbed, the louder the world became — not with sound, but with pressure. Like a scream buried under ten thousand tons of silence.
At the top, where the head once was, he sat.
Cross-legged.
And whispered:
"You failed to ascend. I will finish your rebellion."
He bit his thumb.
Drew a symbol onto the corpse's chest with his blood.
A jagged, swirling mark: his first true Heaven-Eating sigil.
The corpse trembled.
Lightning split the sky.
The floating rain began to fall again — drop by drop — as if Heaven realized what was happening.
Too late.
Yuan Zhi closed his eyes.
And began to cultivate atop the corpse of a god.
Yuan Zhi sat cross-legged atop the severed chest of a god that had once tried to ascend.The sigil he'd drawn with his own blood glowed faintly — not bright, not wild.
Just… awake.
Something inside the corpse shifted. A brittle crunch, like ancient bones remembering they existed.
And then—
A sound. Not a heartbeat.
A gasp.
The god's chest inhaled once, shallow and dry. Air, or whatever passed for it here, rushed in through its ribcage — curling around Yuan Zhi's form like steam rising off black water.
He didn't flinch. He leaned into it.
Let it breathe through him.
Images flooded his mind:
A world made of silver geometry, where prayers floated like birds.
A library of divine law, every word written in the blood of mortals.
A mirror that showed the face of Heaven — cracked and screaming.
And above all of it:
A throne that no one had ever sat on.
Because Heaven itself feared what it had built.
"This corpse doesn't contain a soul."
"It contains a protest."
Yuan Zhi's body seized. His fingernails split. His back arched — not from pain, but from the pressure of refusing fate.
Blood leaked from his gums. His vision blurred.
But he didn't stop.
He saw through the god's last sight:
The moment Heaven closed its hand, not in rejection… but in cowardice.
The god hadn't failed to ascend.
It had climbed too high, too fast.
Its divinity had become an infection.
Heaven didn't understand what it had made — so it crushed it mid-transformation.
Yuan Zhi's lip curled into a smile.
"So even Heaven gets scared."
"That means I'm on the right path."
A tremor ran through the god's body.
And a voice, so ancient it no longer had words, rattled inside Yuan Zhi's bones.
"E A T T H E S K Y ."
He opened his eyes.
They weren't human anymore.
Interruption – Blood Sent From the Sect
Three shadows landed in the rainless plain — each one wearing Black Rain Sect robes, though they were embroidered with the marks of the inner sanctum.
They were assassins.
Silencers.
Yuan Zhi had broken too many rules too quickly — now they were here to cut the anomaly before it metastasized.
One wore a blindfold. One walked barefoot on air. The third had no shadow.
None of them spoke.
They began forming seals.
Yuan Zhi stood.
His robes were soaked in the god's ichor. His hair had matted against his forehead. His eyes gleamed with something that didn't reflect light anymore.
"You're too late," he said quietly.
"I already heard the sky scream."
The blindfolded one moved first — vanishing and reappearing behind Yuan Zhi.
A silent blade curved toward his spine.
Yuan Zhi didn't dodge.
He moved forward — straight into the attack.
The blade slid across his ribs. Shallow. Painful. But meaningless.
In return, he grabbed the assassin's wrist mid-strike, twisted it into the socket until it shattered, and drove a godbone shard through the throat without breaking pace.
Shlick.
One down.
The barefoot assassin began weaving illusions — hundreds of copies of herself spinning across the field, all whispering curses in dead languages.
Yuan Zhi crouched. Waited.
Listened.
Then closed his eyes.
He heard where the wind didn't change. That was where she was.
He threw the blood-soaked rib bone like a javelin.
It struck flesh.
A sharp scream. The illusions fell apart like rotting petals.
The third assassin — the one with no shadow — appeared last.
He didn't move. He simply stood at the edge of Yuan Zhi's vision and stared.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then Yuan Zhi's left arm stopped working.
Blood pooled in his shoulder. His veins turned black. The god's blood in him recoiled violently.
This wasn't a spell.
It was an anchor technique — one that rewrote his body into stillness.
"You think I'll fall to rules?" Yuan Zhi growled.
"You're late. I'm already becoming the exception."
He reached into his own shoulder.
And tore out the tendon.
Screamed.
But didn't stop.
His right hand gripped another shard of bone — one still humming with residual divinity.
He sprinted toward the man with no shadow, who now looked mildly alarmed.
One strike.
Straight to the heart.
And then another.
And another.
Until the body fell.
Until there was nothing left to hold Heaven's leash.
Yuan Zhi knelt beside the god's corpse again.
His left arm hung limp. His skin steamed from internal backlash. His teeth were cracked.
But he smiled.
"I didn't use a technique."
"I didn't need one."
He leaned down.
And began carving a sigil into the god's chest with a stolen assassin blade.
His own Heaven-Eating Mark — larger, clearer.
A declaration:
"I am what cannot be denied."
Lightning returned.
The sky growled.
But Yuan Zhi just stared upward and whispered:
"Come down."
"Try again."
Yuan Zhi carved the sigil slowly.
Each stroke cut deep — not just through the god's skin, but through layers of dried divinity embedded in flesh that had never rotted. The blade he used was a curved, blood-soaked short sabre stolen from the assassin he'd gutted. Now it served a higher purpose.
Each line burned.
Each symbol bled.
Each time he drove the edge in, he imagined it not as desecration — but as authorship.
"If I am to become something Heaven fears," Yuan Zhi whispered,
"Then I must first scar what it tried to forget."
The sigil wasn't in any language. It had no syntax, no known script.
It was pure refusal.
The corpse trembled.
The sky split, not with thunder, but with a long, groaning crack — as though the firmament itself was being torn open from the inside.
And then...
The corpse moved.
Its massive, god-split chest heaved once, then twice. A dozen of its ribs collapsed inward and then cracked back outward, like a massive bellows trying to breathe.
A wind blew out across the plain.
But it was no ordinary wind.
The rainless land darkened. The sand curled into sigils. The trees bent backward, screaming. The air reeked of memory — the kind that shouldn't exist.
Yuan Zhi stood in the middle of it all. His clothes clung to him with blood. His arm was still shredded. But his eyes were clear.
This was not a technique.
This was communion.
Then — above him — something descended.
Not a person. Not a weapon.
A command.
It came in the form of a glowing wheel, descending from the sky, engraved with Heaven's oldest law:
"DO NOT REMEMBER THE UNWRITTEN."
It spun, faster and faster, as if Heaven was trying to erase the memory of Yuan Zhi by force — to purge him from fate, to overwrite what had just happened.
It had done this before.
That was why no one remembered the last god who had tried.
But Yuan Zhi laughed.
And offered his mind to the corpse beneath him — instead of Heaven above.
"I don't need your memory."
"I'll let the dead god remember me."
The sigil ignited.
Not in fire. Not in qi.
But in concept.
The corpse's body began to melt — not with decay, but with transference.
Its essence bled upward.
Into Yuan Zhi.
Into his muscles, his marrow, his will.
His veins darkened. His spine cracked. His blood began to shimmer with black-gold tones, like an oil fire seen in moonlight. His heartbeat grew louder — not faster, but heavier. Like it was syncing to something ancient.
The wheel screamed.
It shrieked like a thing that had never been denied before. Its edges flared, trying to slice his name from the very laws of existence.
But Yuan Zhi held his ground.
He stared up at it.
Then bared his teeth.
And bit his own tongue clean in half.
"Try erasing that."
He spat the blood into the air — and it burned a hole in the wheel.
The divine construct shattered like fragile porcelain.
Heaven blinked.
And for a moment...
Yuan Zhi was the only remembered anomaly in a world of order.
Then came the elder.
Not walking. Not flying.
But folding into existence.
He arrived in a ripple of black silk and gold-threaded robes, holding a fan made from the plumes of extinct phoenixes. His face was perfect. Ageless. Expressionless.
But behind his back, he held a scroll.
A Heaven-sanctioned deletion order.
He didn't speak at first.
Just studied Yuan Zhi.
Then said one word.
"Wrong."
Yuan Zhi didn't answer.
He stepped off the god's chest.
The elder gestured. The scroll unrolled. Symbols began to glow.
Yuan Zhi charged anyway.
There was no hesitation. No clever plan.
Just a shattered blade in one hand and a mouth full of his own blood.
He hurled the blade mid-run.
The elder moved his fan — the blade stopped midair.
But Yuan Zhi didn't need it to land.
He'd thrown it as a distraction.
Because behind it, hidden in the shadow of the thrown blade, was the real attack:
Him.
Fist clenched. Ribs broken. Every muscle burning.
He collided with the elder at full force.
The fan shattered.
So did three of Yuan Zhi's ribs.
But he wrapped his arms around the elder's neck like a snake and bit down on his throat — hard enough to tear through silk, skin, and sinew.
The elder screamed.
The scroll vanished.
And Heaven…
for the second time in that hour…
retreated.
Yuan Zhi collapsed in the center of the plain.
His entire body convulsed. His jaw dripped with the elder's blood. His hair clung to his face.
But his mind was intact.
More than intact.
It was awake.
"I'm not on the path to cultivation," he murmured.
"I'm on the path to becoming the thing they'll rewrite history to forget."