There was no light in the Abyssal Pit. There hadn't been for ten thousand years.To the elders of the Blood Lotus Sect living in the sunlit peaks above, the Pit was a garbage disposal. It was where they threw the failures. The weak newborns with no spiritual roots. The crippled. The assassinated. They threw them into the dark to feed the slumbering god below, hoping to earn a fraction of its ancient blessing.They didn't know the god was already dead.More accurately, it had been digested.A boy stood in the pitch-black cavern, his bare feet resting in a puddle of fresh, warm blood. He had no name. He had never needed one. For sixteen years, his only reality was the suffocating dark, the shrieks of dying monsters, and the cold, mechanical calculus of survival.He looked down at the corpse at his feet.It was a boy around his age, wearing the grey robes of an Outer Court disciple. His throat had been cleanly slit—an assassin's work—before he was tossed down the chasm to hide the eviden

The deeper they walked into the alley, the thicker the shadows became. The ambient glow of the Sect's lanterns faded behind them, swallowed by the damp brick walls."Alright, rat, this is far enough," the bulky youth said, crossing his arms. He sneered, his spiritual aura flaring slightly—a pathetic display of the third level of Qi Condensation. "Where are the stones? If you make me dig through the mud for them, I'm going to break three of your fingers instead of one."Dver stopped walking. He stood with his back to them, perfectly still."Did you hear me, trash?" The bulky youth took a heavy step forward, reaching out to grab Dver's shoulder.In the span of a single heartbeat, the cowering, trembling boy ceased to exist.Dver didn't turn around. He simply pivoted on his heel, dropping his center of gravity. As the bulky youth's hand reached out, Dver's hand shot up, his fingers clamping around the boy's wrist like an iron vice.Before the bully could even register the movement, Dver

The Discipline Hall of the Outer Sect smelled of sulfur and dried blood.Deacon Shen sat behind a heavy ironwood desk, his thick fingers rhythmically tapping against the wood. Laid out on a straw mat before him was Ma Chen, unconscious, his face pale and covered in cold sweat. The Pavilion Elder stood nearby, shaking his head."His inner thigh nerve cluster is completely pulverized," the Elder said dryly. "He will never walk straight again, let alone cultivate martial arts. He said he tripped after pushing the Dver boy."Shen stopped tapping his fingers. His jaw tightened, the rusted-iron color of his eyes darkening with absolute malice."Tripped," Shen repeated. The word tasted like ash in his mouth.First, Zhao and Lin vanish without a trace. Then, the rat Dver cowers in the dirt before three thousand disciples, swearing he hid in the latrines all night, making Shen look like a fool for even questioning him. And now, less than four hours later, a top-500 disciple is permanently crip

The journey back to the Blood Lotus Sect was different. Dver wasn't just walking; he was containing.Inside his core, the lifeforce of three high-level Enforcers was swirling like a trapped hurricane. The Void had digested their flesh, but the raw, spiritual energy was too much for a Rank-98,412 Outer Court vessel to hold quietly. Every step Dver took left a faint, frost-bitten footprint in the mud. His skin felt unnaturally cold, his pulse slow and heavy as a mountain's heartbeat."You are overflowing, Vessel," the Void God rumbled, its voice vibrating in Dver's very marrow. "If you do not break the seal, your stolen heart will burst. Give in. Let the world see what you are.""Not yet," Dver whispered, his jaw locked. "If I break through now, the tremors will reach the Inner Peaks. I need to be inside the Sect's defensive array. The ambient Qi there will mask the surge."He arrived at the Sect gates just as the morning mist began to lift. He looked like a wreck—his robes were torn by

The labyrinth narrowed into a corridor of polished obsidian—the Hall of Reflective Truth."Don't look at the walls, Dver!" Ren hissed, her voice cracking with exhaustion. Her robes were shredded, stained with the blood of the six disciples she had cut down to protect him. "They show your inner demons. If you look, you'll lose your mind!"Dver stumbled behind her, the purple censer still billowing thick, suffocating smoke. He looked like a wreck. "I'm scared, Sister Ren! The walls... they're whispering!"They weren't whispering. They were screaming. As Ren passed, her reflection shifted into the mangled, charred corpses of her family, their ghostly hands reaching out to pull her into the glass. She screamed, closing her eyes and swinging her sword blindly to keep the visions at bay.But Dver looked.In the obsidian, there was no boy. There was only a towering, infinite tear in reality—a colossal shadow with a thousand unblinking eyes. The mirrors began to crack. The obsidian couldn't c