"No Dao is born in light.Mine was born in the Abyss—where only the dying breaths of forsaken souls remain."
Beneath the Altar – A Nameless Cavern
Lâm Mạc awakened for the second time.
But this time, he was no longer lying upon a bloodstained altar, nor drifting through a haze within his spiritual sea.He had fallen to a place far colder, darker, and deeper—damp walls pressed in around him, soaked in old, dried blood.The wind howled through cracks in the stone, whispering like weeping ghosts.
This was not a place for the living.
"The Abyssal Prison."An ancient name, long erased from the maps of the Southern Domain.
Once, it had been the exile ground of heretical cultivators—those condemned by the Heavenly Dao and cast out of the cycle of reincarnation by the myriad clans.No one had ever returned alive.
He had been thrown down from the altar—not spared, but buried alive in secret by the Lin Clan Patriarch, who hoped to suppress the awakening of the Thái Sơ phenomenon before it could ignite.
In his mind, gray-ash characters began to appear—ancient runes no one else could read.Yet to him, they were searing clear—carving themselves into his flesh and blood.
"The Path of Rebirth does not begin with life.It begins with Destruction—of everything you once feared."
Memories surged in a tidal wave:
The night his spiritual meridians were shattered.
The white-robed girl who let go of his hand amidst the fire.
The mocking jeers: "No spiritual root? What will you cultivate, trash?"
His mother's sobbing voice: "Mạc Nhi… don't live anymore…"
His body convulsed. Blood poured from his ears, eyes, and nose.
"I don't want to remember…"
"You don't need to.You only need… to destroy."
Suddenly, a crack tore open in his spiritual sea.
From within, a smoldering flame of gray ash ignited—morphing into a skeletal, emaciated hand.It was the Primordial Form of the Thái Sơ Heart—the sealed origin of a power older than gods.
"You have a choice:
Forget everything… and live forever as a cripple.
Or step into the abyss, never able to return."
Lâm Mạc gritted his teeth.
In the endless dark, his eyes suddenly gleamed.Ash began to rise from his body, merging with the stagnant air.
"I don't need to turn back."
The entire Abyssal Prison trembled.
A vortex of gray ash surged from beneath Lâm Mạc, spiraling around his body like the scales of an ancient deity.Every broken meridian in his body—once destroyed—was being reforged by a force not of Spiritual Energy, but of Will.
This was not a cultivation breakthrough.Not a leap in power.
It was something deeper:
His soul… was transforming.
Far away, deep within the lower layers of the Abyss, a pair of crimson eyes flickered open.
A woman clad in mourning robes, her face veiled in black, gazed into the shadows.On her forehead gleamed a strange mark—a reversed teardrop falling upwards.
"Thái Sơ… has opened once again," she whispered.Then vanished into the black mist.
"No spiritual root.No master.No Dao."
"But I possess something else—a will no longer bound by the form of man."
"If this Abyss has no exit, then I… shall tear the earth apart, and forge my own Dao to walk out."