Signed In for 100,000 Years: I Came Out as a Great Emperor!

One hundred thousand years. Three trillion six hundred fifty billion heartbeats, give or take. He had counted them all.

By the time Xiao Chen walked out of the Gods’ Bier Abyss, ten years had passed outside. Ten. The woman who had broken the engagement in front of his whole Clan was running a sect now, and running it well. The Clan that had laughed at him for a useless cripple was one bad season from being wiped off the map. Heavenly demons from beyond the domain were loose in the countryside, and nobody had the strength to argue with them.

He lifted his hand. One finger, and the Heavenly Demon Emperor was ground to dust.

“In the mortal world I have no equal—” His voice held no heat. “If I do not war with Heaven, with whom shall I war?”

None of this did he know. He was nothing but livestock, penned and fattened by the Upper Realm. And the Lord of that Upper Realm, the one whose hand had been on the gate his whole life, had been a hundred thousand years ago nothing more than a willow tree in a courtyard, asleep until one careless touch woke it up. His touch.

Xiao Chen opened his eyes on his back, at the bottom of something with no bottom in it and no light either. All he had to thank for his life, just then, was having been born into a Clan at all, which in the abyss was worth nothing.

Everything around him was black as ink, and empty. No sun, no moon, no stars. Under his back, no earth, no river, no mountain. Only chaos, tide on tide of it, turning and turning, with nothing anywhere that could be called a sky, and his last memory before any of it a chair, a deadline, a rented room at three in the morning. Then his heart stopped. Then here.

“Ding! God-tier sign-in system bound successfully!”

“Host is standing inside the forbidden ground, ’Gods’ Bier Abyss’. Sign-in conditions met. First sign-in: yes or no?”

Then the joy hit all at once, as it does when you have read this scene a hundred times and never once expected to be inside it. Transmigration. A system. A forbidden ground. The standard opening, exactly as the web novels ran it, and he knew what came next: follow the steps, take the rewards, and by and by the heavens would have to make room.

“Sign in!”

“Congratulations, host. God-tier cultivation technique obtained: the Chaos Heavenly Emperor Scripture!”

Information poured in, a sea of it, roaring, so far above this world that this world had no shelf to put it on. Xiao Chen shook from head to foot. He saw the whole future laid out. Great Emperor was only the start. Undying divine dynasty. All the heavens, on their knees.

Then the next chime froze the blood in his veins.

“Main mission issued: sign in within the Gods’ Bier Abyss for a full hundred thousand years before you may leave. Leaving early counts as mission failure. The system will self-destruct. The host’s cultivation base will be destroyed.”

“Current time-flow ratio with the outside world: 1:10000. Here, a hundred thousand years. There, ten.”

“Friendly reminder: the Gods’ Bier Abyss is a ruin of an ancient battlefield. Unknown dangers present. The host is requested, politely, to stay alive.”

The smile died on Xiao Chen’s face.

A hundred thousand years. The figure sat there in the dark and would not get smaller.

He was going to sit in this hole, alone, for a hundred thousand years, with nobody to talk to and nothing to look at and no reason to believe the hole would ever get any bigger than it was at that exact moment.

No sound. No light. No company. Not an ant, not one blade of wild grass. Only the dark, and the quiet, and the being-alone, all three of them without end.

“System.” His voice shook. “You’re joking, right?”

“This system does not joke.”

Xiao Chen sat down in the void and held his head in both hands. Not ten thousand. Not fifty thousand. A hundred thousand. How long was that, even? Human civilization had not lasted a tenth of it. And he was meant to spend it here? He would go mad. There was no other ending.

But the system gave him no choice.

“Daily sign-in reward has refreshed. It would be wise for the host to keep the habit of signing in, accumulate strength, and prepare for emergence after a hundred thousand years.”

Up came his head. Something went hard behind his eyes.

Fine. No way back. Then he would walk it to the end.

His goal changed. It had been “become a Great Emperor.” Now it was the simplest thing and the hardest. Stay alive, sign in for a hundred thousand years, then get out.

For that, he would endure anything.

The first year was the worst of it, and the worst of the first year was the middle of the night, when there was nothing to do but lie in the dark and count what he had lost.

Xiao Chen tried everything to kill the hours. He cultivated the Chaos Heavenly Emperor Scripture. No spiritual qi down here, so his progress crawled. He talked to the void, out loud, to himself. Then screaming, until his throat tore and the screaming came out as air, and after the air there were still a hundred thousand years to get through, one heartbeat at a time. Sleep. He tried it. A cultivator’s vitality ran too hot for sleep. One nap could swallow months, and when he woke, barely any time had passed.

He began counting his heartbeats. Around a hundred thousand a day. A hundred thousand days to the year, near enough, and that came to three hundred and sixty-five billion beats of the heart. He gave up at one million, somewhere inside the first year of thirty six billion five hundred million heartbeats. Counting only made the length of the time clearer.

On the last day of the first year, the system chimed.

“Congratulations, host. One full year of consecutive sign-ins. Special reward granted: Chaos Constitution!”

His bones began going translucent as crystal, and the blood in him turned gold, and under his skin every inch of it was packing itself full of force that had nowhere to go yet. The Chaos Constitution, first among the supreme constitutions in legend, and for once the legend had not exaggerated. Master it and the Physical Body itself would turn saint, and a saint’s flesh could crush ten thousand ages flat without ever lifting a hand.

Sweet, that. The first taste he had had of the sweet side of signing in.

“So that’s how it works…” Fire lit in Xiao Chen’s eyes. “Every day’s sign-in is accumulation. The yearly special reward is the real leap.”

He began to look forward. Year ten. Year one hundred. Year one thousand. What would come next?

The tenth year’s reward was the “Innate Chaos Sword Embryo,” a Life-Bound Treasure, a Magic Treasure that could grow into an emperor-level weapon.

The hundredth year’s reward was a “Time Law Fragment,” which gave him his first grasp of the power of time.

The thousandth year’s reward was an “Undying Body.” Destroy his flesh, and it would reassemble in an instant.

The ten-thousandth year’s reward was the “Immortal King Inheritance,” a Cultivation Technique, a Divine Ability, and comprehension at the Immortal King level.

The time stopped weighing on Xiao Chen. He sank into the pleasure of it, the sheer animal joy of getting stronger. Every day a small gain. Every year a jump in quality. He began taking the treasures the system gave him apart, one by one, and wringing out every drop of power in them.

In the thirty-thousandth year he comprehended the three thousand Great Daos all at once and created the Heavenly Emperor Fist, and the abyss lit up from end to end and then went dark again. One punch could shatter stars.

In the fifty-thousandth year his Chaos Constitution reached mastery. His Physical Body was as tough as an emperor-level weapon. He could tear the void apart with his bare hands.

In the eighty-thousandth year he merged with the Immortal King Inheritance. His realm had long since passed the “Great Emperor” limit of this world and come out at the legendary state of the True Immortal.

Outside, eight years. That was all.

Three thousand laws went in slow circles around him. Any one strand of his hair could have taken a world apart, and he was strong past anything he could have imagined at the start, and the mission was still not over, and the mission had been running for longer than most civilizations manage to last.

“Twenty thousand years left…” he murmured. No weariness in his eyes. Only anticipation.

The rewards kept climbing, that was why. Ten thousand years had brought an Immortal King Inheritance. What came at fifty thousand? At a hundred thousand? An Immortal Emperor Inheritance, maybe. Something with no name in any language he knew.

Here it was, then. The chance he had been sitting in the dark for: a hundred thousand years of solitude, paid out once for strength that nothing in this world or the one above it could stand against.

He would seize it. Every reward, every sign-in, until he became… beyond everything.

In the eighty-five-thousandth year, Xiao Chen met his first real obstacle.

From deep in the Gods’ Bier Abyss came a sigh.

Old, and rotten. A sound come down through endless ages, carrying death on its back, enough to make a soul shiver where it sat. Xiao Chen came awake standing, every hair on him upright. Eighty thousand years and more, and he had walked every single li of this place, and could have drawn it from memory with his eyes shut and one hand tied behind him. Not one living thing, until now.

“To think… there is still a living man…”

A translucent figure rose from the bottom of the abyss and hung there, an old man in shattered battle armor with dead qi coiling off him like smoke off wet wood, and in his eyes a light brighter than any star, a light that had no business being in a dead thing.

“Who are you?” His guard did not come down. This old man was deadly. True Immortal, and the man still made him feel his own life ending.

“Me?” He smiled, and there was nothing left in the smile but ruin. “I am a residual soul of the last epoch. A failure who tried to break the ’pasture.’ One who was erased by the Upper Realm… a rebel immortal.”

“Pasture? Rebel immortal?” Xiao Chen frowned.

“You don’t know?” Surprise, then understanding. “No. You are caged. Nobody tells a caged man the truth. What this is, is a pasture for the Upper Realm. Every living thing in it is penned. Great Emperor? True Immortal? Fatter cattle. Fatter sheep.”

Something jolted in Xiao Chen’s chest.

He went on. “A prodigy, in my day. Hundred thousand years of it, and I stood at True Immortal. So I tried the barrier, and I tried to take the fight up to them. The result.” He looked down at his own translucent hands. “One finger. That was all the Lord of the Upper Realm needed. This wisp of soul was what was left, sealed here, never to be reborn.”

“There is something strange about the qi on you…” The old man stared at Xiao Chen. “You have a system too?”

No answer. His eyes did it for him.

The laugh that came out of him was bitter from the throat to the gut, and it went on too long, as a laugh does when the man laughing has had nothing else to do for a very long while. “Of course. Of course. Every epoch the Upper Realm drops down a ’system,’ picks out the promising ’seeds,’ raises them strong, and reaps them, and the luck you think you found is a snare somebody else set for you. A hundred thousand years of sign-ins is nothing but fattening up before the slaughter, and you have been at it since the first day.”

“Shut up!” Xiao Chen barked. He threw a punch, and the force of the Heavenly Emperor Fist shook the whole abyss.

He made no move to defend himself. The fist wind went straight through the phantom of him. “You don’t believe me? Open your system. Look for a ’final mission’ telling you to break the world’s barrier and make the Ascension.”

He froze mid-motion.

He opened the system panel. At the very bottom of the mission list, gray and dead: [Final Mission: make the Ascension and meet the Lord of the Upper Realm.]

“So what if it is?” Xiao Chen’s voice went cold. “Even if this is a trap, I am strong enough to break anything, and I carry a Magic Treasure grown from the Chaos Sword Embryo that has never failed me. The Lord, though. Once I am out, who chops whom is nobody’s settled question.”

“Naive…” He shook his head, and there was no contempt in it, only the tiredness of a man who had watched this same scene play out for eighty thousand years. “The one who rules up there is stronger than you can imagine, and I have watched you for eighty thousand years: the strongest ’seed’ I ever saw, and not enough. If you want to break fate itself, you need…”

The figure began to dissolve. With the last of his strength he pushed a stream of information into Xiao Chen’s mind.

The truth about the “system.” The conspiracy of the Upper Realm. And how to… reverse the killing, and cut down the player.

“In the hundred-thousandth year, the system will force the final mission open. Before that, you must… surpass the system’s limits…”

The voice thinned out and was gone, and the Gods’ Bier Abyss fell silent again.

He stood in the void a long while and said nothing.

His obstacle had never been a hundred thousand years of loneliness; it was a fate fixed on the first day, before he had done anything at all. He was a piece on a board. Cattle. Fruit in someone else’s orchard.

“Very well…” He raised his head. There was something new in his eyes, and it was not warm. “You want to reap me? Then let us see who the hunter is!”

From that day on he hunted for holes in the system. Where it was loose. Where it could be bent without waking the mission. He had one deadline, one target. By the hundred-thousandth year he meant to be holding the power to kill a god.

From the eighty-five-thousandth year to the hundred-thousandth, Xiao Chen trained like a madman.

Daily rewards were not enough anymore. He went looking. Every corner of the Gods’ Bier Abyss, every crack in it, and the deeper he went the more the place opened for him, as an old battlefield will for a man patient enough to sit in the dust and listen. Wreckage of shattered emperor-level Magic Treasures, and he pulled the essence out of them to temper the Chaos Sword Embryo in. Dao bones of fallen True Immortals, and he sat down with them and read the law fragments inside the marrow. Inheritances the Upper Realm had erased, which he stitched into his own Great Dao as a careful tailor stitches a coat, going over every seam twice, until nothing in it rattled.

In the eighty-eight-thousandth year he fused the three thousand Great Daos into one and wrote the closing chapter of the “Heavenly Emperor Scripture.” He titled it “Above All Under Heaven.”

In the ninety-thousandth year the sign-in reward was “Primal Purple Qi,” the first breath the world ever took. Xiao Chen pulled it into himself, and his Cultivation Base broke through again, and kept breaking through, and stopped only at the “Immortal King” realm.

In the ninety-five-thousandth year he began trying to refine the Gods’ Bier Abyss itself. This forbidden ground was a “cage” the Upper Realm had left behind, holding the supreme Law of The Heavenly Dao that sealed heaven and earth. If he could refine it…

In the ninety-nine-thousandth year, he succeeded.

The Gods’ Bier Abyss folded down to a black bead and hung in his dantian. No prisoner now. Owner. When it happened, the system’s voice changed, the flat mechanical drone thinning out into something that almost sounded human. Almost surprised.

“Host behavior anomaly detected… re-evaluating…”

Xiao Chen made a thin sound in his throat. “Evaluate all you like. Whoever stands behind you, you cannot stop me.”

In the 99,900th year of it, ninety-nine thousand nine hundred exactly, he began preparing his last breakthrough. The information the old man left behind said the system’s core was a supreme law called the “Heavenly Dao Chains,” which bound every host’s soul and made sure each grew along a preset path, to be reaped on schedule.

To break it, at the instant the mission activated, he would need power beyond Immortal King to cut those chains, and the system would be watching for exactly that, and the system did not sleep.

In the 99,909th year of it, Xiao Chen brought his condition to its peak. The very edge of Immortal Emperor was where his Cultivation Base had been driven, and there is not much room at the edge of anything. His Chaos Constitution had evolved into a “Primal Dao Body,” his life-bound treasure had birthed a complete emperor spirit, and one thought from him could create or annihilate worlds.

The last day.

Cross-legged in the void he sat, chaos churning around him like a tide. Everything that had happened in those years went past behind his eyes, all of it, at once: first the fear, the loneliness, the nights he thought his mind was going; then the hunger for the next reward, and the wild joy of it. Then the truth, and the cold anger that came after the truth.

“Sign in.”

“Congratulations, host, on completing a hundred thousand years of sign-ins. Ultimate reward granted: Immortal Emperor Inheritance!”

Vast power poured into him. Xiao Chen felt his soul rising, transforming. Almost at the same instant, the system’s voice turned sharp:

“Final mission activated: ascend to the Upper Realm and meet the Lord of the Upper Realm! Forced teleportation beginning!”

“Heavenly Dao Chains—bind!”

Golden chains erupted from the void, hundreds of them, coiling for his soul. The system’s core. The last instrument it had for keeping its hosts on the leash.

“This is the moment I have been waiting for!” Xiao Chen roared. “Break!”

He threw everything he had into it. The Primal Dao Body blazed, light going out across ten thousand ages, and the Chaos Sword Embryo turned itself into the first light there ever was, and cut.

Crack!

The first chain snapped.

Crack! Crack!

More and more chains shattered. Over that, an alarm cut in, shrill: “Warning! Warning! Host has broken control! Self-destruct sequence initiated!”

“Self-destruct?” Xiao Chen did not even slow down. “Too late!”

He grabbed the system’s core—a golden orb. According to the information the old man had left, this was the “Heavenly Dao Seed,” the key by which the Upper Realm controlled the lower realm.

“Refine!”

With Immortal King power, Xiao Chen forcibly erased the control seal inside and merged the orb into his own soul, so that in that moment he was both host and master of the system.

“Now,” he rose, and stepped out of the Gods’ Bier Abyss, “I should go pay a visit to that Lord of the Upper Realm.”

Outside, the ten years had passed.

Then he stepped out, and stopped dead.

He had expected the usual fantasy. Immortal mist. Spirit beasts wheeling overhead. Cultivators in sword flight, whetting the wind. What he got was a ruin.

The sky was cracked open. A fissure ran the whole width of it, and black demonic qi poured out of the seam. The ground was on fire. City walls lay in rubble, and things were screaming all over the smoke, in numbers nobody could count. Far off, a demon shadow ten thousand zhang tall was walking through what used to be farmland. Every blow it struck brought a mountain down.

“Outside-realm heavenly demons?”

One sweep of divine sense, and the ten years made sense, all of it, as a page of blurred writing makes sense once someone tells you what it says. The Xiao Clan he had landed in was a cultivation family of the East Barren Domain, and he had been its Young Lord, born with a ruined meridian and unable to cultivate at all.

Ten years ago his fiancée had broken the engagement in front of the whole domain, and after that humiliation he had fallen into the Gods’ Bier Abyss, where the system had grabbed him. As far as anyone outside knew, he had simply vanished. Ten years.

His fiancée, Lin Qingxue, had awakened the “Mystic Yin Sacred Constitution” and entered the Jade Pool Holy Land. She had not stumbled once. Now she was the Jade Pool Holy Lord, and a whole region bent when she spoke.

The Xiao Clan, having lost its Young Lord and crossed the faction behind Lin Qingxue, had been ground down year after year. It stood on the lip of extinction now.

Worse still. Three years ago the outside-realm heavenly demons had torn the barrier and come through. The Great Emperors of this world were dead, or maimed past saving, and it was the last age of anything.

“Interesting…” The corner of Xiao Chen’s mouth curved.

One step, and he stood in front of that shadow ten thousand zhang tall, and it was a Heavenly Demon Emperor, equal to a human True Immortal, which made it invincible in a world that had run out of True Immortals.

The Heavenly Demon Emperor spotted Xiao Chen and let out a roar that shook the sky: “A human? An ant! Scram!”

It brought a palm down, blotting out the sky, demonic qi flooding everywhere.

One finger, lifted.

“Die.”

No blast. No light show, no ornate divine ability. One word, spoken flat. The shadow ten thousand zhang tall, and the hundred thousand demons crowding behind it, went to dust and smoke. All of it. At once.

The whole world went quiet.

Far off, the cultivators who had been locked in bitter battle with the demons a breath ago simply stopped, weapons half-raised, and stared. Above the Jade Pool Holy Land, a figure in white gazed at that point in the sky and could not make her hands move, and her beautiful eyes were full of a disbelief she had no intention of hiding.

That was Lin Qingxue. His fiancée of ten years ago. Now the Jade Pool Holy Lord.

Her he did not go to. He went to the Xiao Clan. What had been a great house of the East Barren Domain was now broken walls and fallen beams. A few hundred clansmen huddled in the ruins, barely breathing.

“Young… Young Lord?”

An old voice. The old steward of the Xiao Clan, the one man who had been kind to Xiao Chen back then. He knew the face, even though the bearing had been turned upside down; the shape of the brows and eyes was the same as the boy of ten years ago.

“It’s me.” His voice came in low. He waved a hand, and the Law of Life surged. Every wound in the Xiao Clan healed in an instant.

“Young Lord! It really is the Young Lord! The Young Lord is back!”

A roar of joy went up from the ruins. Countless people wept.

He did not know a single one of those faces, and every one of them was turned up to him and wet. Something in his chest pulled two ways at once. Ten thousand decades of nothing had rubbed his sense of Clan thin as water rubs a stone, and yet these strangers were weeping for him, and a little warmth got through anyway, unwanted and welcome.

“Young Lord, you must go!” The old steward’s face went through three expressions in as many heartbeats. “Lin Qingxue… no, the Jade Pool Holy Lord will not let you live! She will hunt you across every li of this land, I swear it, and the whole sect marches with her.”

“I know.” He cut the old man off, eyes already on the distance. “She’s here.”

A figure in white came across the sky at a pace that said she had all the time in the world, and behind her a crowd of Jade Pool Holy Land Elders. Lin Qingxue was beautiful as a cold morning is beautiful, and she wore it like a wall. Then she looked at Xiao Chen, and the wall was gone, and what was left on her face had no name.

“Xiao Chen…” Her voice shook. “You… you’re alive?”

“Sorry to disappoint you?” Xiao Chen’s face gave away nothing.

Lin Qingxue went pale. “No. That is not what I meant. What happened back then, I—”

“No need to explain.” Xiao Chen lifted a hand. “You broke the engagement. Nothing wrong with that. I was born with a ruined meridian. I was not fit for a Mystic Yin Sacred Constitution like yours. But your Lin family, and the Jade Pool Holy Land behind you, have ground the Xiao Clan down for ten years and nearly wiped my people out. That debt…”

He stopped. His eyes went flat, like a coin on a table. “So. How do you propose to settle it?”

A Jade Pool Elder gave a cold snort. “Arrogant! So what if you’re alive? The Holy Lord is now the first under the Great Emperor. You—”

She never finished.

Xiao Chen glanced at her. The Elder turned to flying ash, too fast even for a scream.

Dead silence.

Lin Qingxue was shaking. She could not read his cultivation at all. Not a layer, not a hint. A sage had just turned to ash in front of her because he glanced at her, and she had no frame that could hold it.

“What… what realm are you in?”

No answer. Instead he looked up at the vault of heaven. In the rift up there, stronger presences were closing in.

“The Heavenly Demon Emperor is dead, but the invasion is not over.” His tone stayed flat. “Interesting. There is more to this world than I had priced in.”

He stepped into the sky, up to the rift. Past the crack: the demon host packed solid, and behind them three more Heavenly Demon Emperors, each one heavier than the one he had already killed.

“Human, you killed my kin. What is your crime?” the lead demon emperor roared, his qi unmistakably at the peak of True Immortal.

Xiao Chen grinned. “Good timing. I needed something to test my hand on.”

He raised his hand. For the first time, the Heavenly Emperor Fist showed itself in this world.

One punch. Heaven cracked, earth split.

Three Heavenly Demon Emperors, a million demons—all of them, under that one punch… annihilated.

By then he was no longer a man who needed to be located. The Great Dao turned wherever he happened to stand.

“In the mortal world I have no equal.” He let the words drop one at a time, into a silence that had gone very wide. “Heaven is the only thing left worth the trouble. Who else is there to fight?”

In that moment, the whole world was stunned.

Xiao Chen’s sudden rise remade the shape of this world, and the old shape was not coming back.

The invasion was put down. Holy lands came in, one after another, to pledge themselves and get a hand on that leg. Lin Qingxue came to his door herself and offered him the Jade Pool Holy Land outright, and asked nothing back but forgiveness. Old enemies shook in their halls. The cripple of ten years ago was now something with no equal.

None of it went to his head.

He had not forgotten the old man’s warning. Or the truth about the system, and about whoever stood behind the Reapers. Or that so-called “Upper Realm.” With the demon chaos settled and the survivors beginning to bury what was left of their dead, he started pulling this world apart to see what was inside it.

He had felt it back then, mid-refine, breaking the Forbidden Ground down: the laws of this world were cut short, on purpose, as a man might dock a dog’s tail. A Cultivation Base amputated at the ankle, and nobody had told the ones living inside it. The ceiling was Great Emperor, and True Immortal was a story old men told to frighten children, and above that nothing existed, and the nothing had been installed.

This was not natural evolution. A seal, then, and put there by hand.

With Immortal King-level divine sense, Xiao Chen scanned the whole world, inch by inch. Three months of it. At the world’s end, he found a “wall.”

A barrier built of the Laws of The Heavenly Dao, held shut from the outside. Runes covered every span of it, thick as writing on a page, and each separate rune carried more qi than this world had been built to hold at once.

“The gate of the pasture…” Xiao Chen breathed out through his nose, and smiled with no humor in it at all.

He threw a punch. The barrier shuddered and split, and through the split he saw it. The truth, all of it.

A sky bigger than any sky. Immortal qi so thick it had gone solid, hanging in slabs. Divine mountains floating free of any ground. Immortal birds, beasts with no name, more of them than anyone could count and none of them in the least surprised to see him. That was the Upper Realm. The real one. Next to it, his “lower realm” was a pond beside an ocean.

The splendor was not what tightened his pupils.

Bubbles. Thousands of them, hanging in the void like spawn in a jar, each one a world, each sealed with the same barrier he had just cracked, and every one with a “system” down inside, sifting patiently for seeds. When a seed ripened, the barrier would open and the seed would come up to the Upper Realm, and be glad of it. To be reaped.

This world really was a pasture. And so-called Ascension was only cattle becoming… a finer cut of meat.

“Good. Very good.” Xiao Chen’s rage turned into laughter.

The plan had been simple: wait, build, then go up when he was strong enough. He dropped it.

“If you like penning things up so much, then I will… tear this pasture down!”

That day he left the barrier standing. He went back down. Time was the thing he needed, and time was the one thing out of all of it that nobody had ever been able to take away from him, not the system, not the Upper Realm, not the hundred thousand years already gone. This world had potential left in it. He meant to wring out every drop.

So he taught. Immortal King-level Cultivation Techniques, handed to any cultivator with the spine to take them, while they Breakthrough the sealed realms, one layer at a time. He used his Spiritual Power to reshape the laws of heaven and earth by hand. Spiritual qi in the lower realm came up a hundredfold. He built the Heavenly Emperor Palace over the three thousand domains, then hammered it flat.

Ten years later, the lower realm produced its first native True Immortal.

A hundred years after that, there were more than a hundred of them. One of them became an Immortal King.

A thousand years later, the lower realm was stronger than the Upper Realm had budgeted for, and the Upper Realm’s accountants were starting to notice the shortfall. The barrier began to buckle.

His own cultivation ran up with it, and did not stop, and the system’s core inside him had given him an appetite for other “Heavenly Dao Seeds,” an appetite with no bottom. Every “Reaper” the Upper Realm sent down to collect found the collection waiting for him, and every one of them was killed, eaten, and burned as fuel.

In the one thousand and first year, Xiao Chen judged the time ripe.

He stood before the barrier. At his back: a hundred thousand True Immortals. A million Great Emperors. Everything the lower realm had put by across a thousand years.

“Today,” his voice was low, and it carried across both worlds, “I will teach the Upper Realm that cattle… can eat men too!”

One punch. The barrier shattered.

Upper Realm. Here I come.

When the news reached the Lord of the Upper Realm, he was in his “garden” working his way through a pot of Middle Grade tea and finding nothing wrong with it, which was as close to pleasure as he had come in nine hundred years.

The garden was peculiar. Every “plant” in it was a grown world, every fruit a reaped Immortal King, and the whole thing smelled of rain. He liked the feel of it in his hand, as a man likes a well-kept ledger, and he liked sitting here of an afternoon, watching the lower realms swell inside their systems until they were ripe.

“A rebellion in a lower-realm pasture?” One brow went up. Surprised, but not concerned.

A few rebellions an epoch, on average. Sooner or later the “seeds” always found out the truth, and always thought, poor fools, that knowing bought them a way out. Every one of them he had crushed himself, because some things a man does not delegate, and their souls went into the garden. What was left went to the World Tree, which is always hungry and never complained, not in all the epochs he had counted.

“Send the reaping squad. Tell them to keep the souls intact. That one called Xiao Chen seems to have been fattened well.”

He gave the order and went back to his tea.

The next report came quickly. The reaping squad had been wiped out. The lower realm’s army was his, and the third heaven had already fallen.

That got his attention. He set the cup down and swept the battlefield with his divine sense. Then he sat very still.

The lower-realm cultivator was fighting at Immortal Emperor strength. That alone should not have been possible. Worse, his power was wrong. It ate the Heavenly Dao itself. Everywhere he stepped, the Reincarnation of the Upper Realm’s laws came undone like wet paper.

“Interesting…” He stood. “I will go myself.”

Through the nine heavens, Xiao Chen cut a straight line.

His Chaos Sword Embryo had grown into the “Primal Emperor Sword.” Every cut took a star down with it. The Heavenly Emperor Fist had swallowed the three thousand Great Daos whole, and one punch could end a world. Underneath it all his “system” had been eating, quiet as a worm in timber, till it had swallowed enough Heavenly Dao Seeds to be nothing the Upper Realm had a name for.

“High-energy reaction detected. Identity suspected: the Lord of the Upper Realm approaching in person.” In his head, the system spoke.

He stopped. Looked up.

The void split. Someone came down through it without hurrying. A middle-aged man. An ordinary face, the kind you forget on the road, with qi that bent time out of shape just by being there. This was the true master of this heaven and earth, come down in person, which he had not done in a long while. Every epoch had been counted by him first. To everyone below he was simply the Lord of the Upper Realm.

“So you are Xiao Chen.” The Lord looked him up and down, and something like approval moved behind his eyes. “Not bad. Finest seed in a very long time. I mean it. I have grown a great many. Kneel, and I will set you over the Upper Realm I have kept tidy all these epochs. One below me, ten thousand above. Even a seed may keep a garden of its own, if it behaves.”

“Seed?” Xiao Chen laughed. “You think I am still a seed you can control?”

He drove the system hard. A terrifying devouring force erupted and swept toward the Lord of the Upper Realm.

The Lord’s face shifted. He felt his “authority over the Heavenly Dao” trembling in his hands, as a man’s grip trembles when the thing he is holding turns out to be alive and has opinions about being held.

“What have you done?!”

“Nothing much.” Xiao Chen closed in, one step at a time. “I only turned your pasture… into my hunting ground!”

Then the fight started, and having started it would not stop, not for a long while yet, not until one of them had been taken apart down to the last law holding him together.

Nobody had ever fought like this inside the cosmos that contained them. Two Immortal Emperors, and the nine heavens coming down one after another as collateral, and Xiao Chen getting stronger the longer it went on, which his enemy had not planned for, feeding the system whatever the Lord threw and keeping the difference. The Lord had nothing to hit back with. Nothing that mattered, anyway.

“No. I have planned for countless epochs. I do not lose to a seed.” The Lord’s voice cracked. Then he reached for the thing he had never wanted to reach for. “World Tree. Come.”

Down it came out of the black between worlds, branches lashing the void, and every leaf on it was a weeping soul.

Up his eyes went, to those leaves. Something in the face above the armor softened for half a breath. Then it closed over.

“Today I avenge all of you. And more than that… I end this cycle!”

He burned his whole Cultivation Base for it, poured every year of it into the system and forced the thing into its final shape: the “Heavenly Dao Furnace.” It opened. Every sin of every epoch, every turn of the wheel, went into the fire and came out clean.

He had found it in the Gods’ Bier Abyss, the night he refined a forbidden ground down to a bead. Turn yourself into the furnace. Melt every law of the Heavenly Dao in it, and be changed in the melting. The World Tree went in. The Lord went in after it.

When the light was gone, Xiao Chen was still standing. Hollowed out. Nothing left in him but the eyes, and the eyes had never been brighter in all the hundred thousand years anyone had known him.

The Lord: dead.

The World Tree. Withered.

The Reincarnation machine that had shadowed countless epochs… collapsed.

Xiao Chen had won. The price was steep.

From Immortal Emperor down to True Immortal: that was the drop. The system came apart in that last fight and thinned out into raw Heavenly Dao law that soaked into the cosmos and was gone. He was not the invincible thing any more, and nothing left in this cosmos could make him one again. Free.

He stood at the peak of what had been the Upper Realm and looked down. The world was breathing again. Barriers broken. Lower and upper realms bled into each other, spiritual qi moving both ways with nothing left to bar it, nobody left to charge a toll, nobody left to say which side of the line a man belonged on. The penned “cattle and sheep” were cultivators now. Real ones.

“It’s over…” The words barely left him.

“Not yet.”

An old voice, behind him, sounding exactly as it had in the dark. Xiao Chen turned. There he was. The one who had come apart into motes in the Gods’ Bier Abyss, who had no business standing anywhere ever again, standing there with a smile on his face like he had merely stepped out for a cup of something hot.

“You… you’re not dead?”

“Dead, and not dead.” A laugh came out of him, dry as old leaves. “I am the rebel immortal of the last epoch. And I am… this cosmos’s first ’system.’”

Xiao Chen’s pupils contracted. “What does that mean?”

A sigh, and then a secret older than the one before it.

Epochs ago, when the cosmos was young and had not yet been divided into floors, there was no upper and no lower. Just one sky. Then the things from “beyond the bounds” came down. They reaped worlds. They penned creatures. They built the pasture. He fought them. He built the first “system” to raise fighters who could stand against them. It was not enough, and every epoch since has paid for it.

He failed. The Lord of the Upper Realm suppressed him, and his remnant soul was sealed in the Gods’ Bier Abyss.

“You thought the Lord of the Upper Realm was the hand?” He shook his head. “He was a dog. Somebody beyond the bounds was holding the leash. That is where the enemy is. Outside. Beyond all of this.”

Silence, long enough to be a kind of answer. Then he laughed. “So I have to keep fighting.”

“You are allowed to rest,” the old man told him, and meant it. “You have done enough. Once the cosmos settles, new powers will rise. They will take up your burden.”

“But you will go, won’t you?” Xiao Chen was looking at him now.

A nod, slow, as a tired man nods. “I must. Until the threat beyond the bounds is gone, everything will happen again.”

Xiao Chen looked past the vault of heaven, out into the chaos nobody had ever seen through, not even an Immortal Emperor, and stood there a while without saying anything. Alone, for a hundred thousand years. Every fight since. Every face that had trusted him, and followed him, and been right to.

“I will go with you.”

“Your cultivation…”

“It will come back.” Xiao Chen smiled. The smile on him was the smile of a boy who had not yet learned to be careful. “And who says a fight needs high cultivation? I was unmatched below Heaven, and now I find myself curious about whatever lies outside.”

That stopped him. He blinked twice. Then he roared with laughter. “Good! Good, Xiao Chen!”

The two stood shoulder to shoulder and looked out past the bounds.

Behind them, in the new cosmos, a blue planet turned. On it, in a place called “Earth,” a boy sat at a screen and felt his heart jump, once, for no reason at all.

“Strange. Why do I suddenly want to write a novel…” he muttered, opened a document, and typed the title—

Xiao Chen’s story was over. The legend went on.

They say two figures are often seen in the chaos at the edge of the cosmos, back to back, fighting. One in white like snow, one in a gray robe that snaps in the wind, and where they pass the dark beyond the bounds pulls back and new worlds come up in the space it leaves.

Others say that in some lower realm a boy came across a broken “sign-in system,” and his own legend started there. Deep in the core of it, older than the system itself, older than the man who built it, one line waits somewhere in the dark.

“If one day you stand at the peak, remember to look beyond the bounds. Someone is fighting there for you.”

“Nobody under Heaven can stand against me. If I do not fight Heaven, then who?”

Those words became a legend that crossed countless epochs.