Chapter 1: The Splintering of Souls
Central Galaxy
Golden Yaoung floated in the endless void between galaxies, his divine essence flickering like a dying star. His body was ruined, his golden blood crystallizing in the cold vacuum of space.
Four other god-level cultivators surrounded him, their combined auras pressing against his fractured soul like a physical weight.
"Give up, Yaoung. Your soul is already broken," declared Tianwei, the man who had once knelt beside him and called him brother. "This meaningless struggle only hastens your end."
Yaoung's eyes blazed with the fury of a collapsing sun. "Meaningless? You speak of meaning after what you've done?" His voice carried the weight of eons, vibrating through the spiritual ether. "We were sworn brothers. We ascended together from the mortal realm. And you... all of you chose to betray me for the favor of the Celestial Court."
The ancient cultivator felt the cracks in his soul pulse with each heartbeat. He knew the truth: even gods were not immune to the hierarchies of power that governed the universe. Those who ruled from the supreme cultivation regions at the galaxy's center had long arms, longer memories, and an unquenchable thirst for control.
Betrayed at birth by fate, betrayed at death by family, he thought, the irony bitter as poison on his tongue. Perhaps this is justice after all.
But as his divine consciousness began to fray, one desire burned brighter than his pain—home.
He thought of that small blue world at the galaxy's edge where he had been born a slave and forged himself into a god. He thought of the forests where he first learned to cycle qi, and the mountains where he met Lian Yu, the woman whose death had driven him to godhood. If he was to die, let it be there. Not in this cold emptiness surrounded by traitors.
"I will not die here," Yaoung whispered, his god core pulsing with desperate resolve.
He activated Soul Steps, the forbidden technique that utilized one's own soul power instead of qi to traverse the cosmos.
His soul screamed as he tore through space itself. Each step fractured him further, divine essence bleeding into the void like golden tears. The image of that blue world filled his mind, anchoring him as his physical form disintegrated.
The final fracture came not from an enemy attack, but from the weight of remembrance.
His soul shattered like crystal. Ten thousand fragments of divine essence scattered across the cosmos, trailing fire and gold. His god core exploded, and the fragments rained down upon an unsuspecting world below—not his original destination, but a blue planet close enough to taste the irony.
Even in death, Golden Yaoung would not find the peace of home.
Earth – Japan
Tim stepped out of his cramped apartment into the cool mountain air, the plastic bag from the convenience store already waiting in his pocket.
At twenty-eight, he'd left everything behind—his marriage, his life in America, and his dignity. He had come to this small Japanese mountain town on a two-year contract to teach English at a struggling private university. It wasn't prestigious—most of the students were there because they couldn't get into schools in Tokyo or Osaka, a mix of eighteen-year-olds just skating by and twenty-somethings still trying to figure out their lives.
He began the walk down the winding concrete path that connected the faculty housing to the main road. The path was steep, flanked by dense bamboo forests that rustled like dry paper in the wind. In the distance, the cicadas were starting their evening chorus, a rhythmic, buzzing scream that vibrated in his teeth.
He paused under a flickering streetlamp to check his phone. A notification from his banking app stared back at him: Overdraft Fee Applied.
He swiped it away, his stomach tightening. It was the ultimate punchline to the joke his life had become. He remembered the day he found out—coming home early to find the unfamiliar SUV in the driveway and the bedroom door locked. But the betrayal of her cheating on him hadn't been the worst part. It was the divorce that followed.
Despite her infidelity, the court had been ruthless. She had a better lawyer, a better narrative, and a better poker face. She got the house. She got the savings. She even got the dog. Tim had walked away with nothing but debt and a suitcase full of clothes.
He would have drunk himself to death on a friend's couch in Seattle if it hadn't been for Mike.
"You're dying here, man," Mike had told him, practically shoving the plane ticket and the teaching contract into his chest one hungover Tuesday morning. "I have a contact in Nagano. A small, third-tier college in a quiet town. They need a native speaker, and they aren't picky. You need to be anywhere but here."
Mike had been right. Japan was a hard reset. A way to scrub the hard drive. But sometimes, the silence here was louder than the shouting back home.
Tim reached the bottom of the hill and looked out at the ocean spread far below, catching the last golden rays of sunlight. It was a view that never got old—the endless expanse of deep blue water, the light dancing across the surface like scattered diamonds. For the first time in months, Tim felt something approaching peace.
"Beautiful," he murmured. He reached into his pocket for a cigarette, then stopped. He'd given up smoking last week—part of his "new life, new habits" campaign.
He turned away from the view and made his way into the little shop, the electronic bell chiming a cheerful, synthesized melody that felt jarringly happy compared to his mood.
"Irasshaimase," Mr. Kato called out automatically, though his tone warmed when he looked up from the small TV on the counter. "Oh, hey Tim."
The shop smelled of fried chicken and antiseptic floor cleaner. It was a small haven of bright fluorescent light in the encroaching dark. Mr. Kato was wiping down the steaming bun case, his weathered face creasing into a familiar, welcoming smile.
"Evening, Mr. Kato," Tim replied, the routine settling over him like a warm blanket. In a world where everything had been stripped away, this transaction was his most significant human connection. "How's business today?"
"Slow, always slow," the old man said, leaning his elbows on the counter. "The students are all in the city for the weekend. It is just the ghosts and the old men tonight." He winked. "But I have my number one customer. You keep the lights on."
Tim forced a laugh, but he felt a flush of embarrassment heat his neck. He walked to the cooler, the hum of the refrigerator filling the silence. He stared at the rows of colorful cans. His drinking had increased since the divorce—a way to dim the noise in his head—though he kept telling himself it was just to unwind.
He grabbed a six-pack of his usual lager and a bag of spicy rice crackers. He hesitated, his hand hovering over a bottle of whiskey. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and grabbed a bottle of unsweetened green tea instead.
"Trying to cut back," he said, placing the items on the counter.
Mr. Kato scanned the items, his eyes lingering on the beer for a fraction of a second too long before flicking to Tim's face. The old man knew. In a town this small, everyone knew everything, but the Japanese politeness kept it unspoken.
"Good for you," Mr. Kato said softly. He placed the tea in the bag with care. "The mountain air is better for the soul than the bottle, I think. You look... tired, Tim-san."
"Just a long week," Tim lied. "Grading papers."
"Eat something proper tonight, okay? Not just crackers."
"I will," Tim agreed with a rueful smile, taking the bag. "See you tomorrow?"
"Probably," Mr. Kato laughed, though there was a hint of sadness in it. "You have nowhere else to be."
It was an innocent comment, but it stung because it was true. Tim nodded a goodbye and stepped back outside.
The walk back up the hill was harder. The plastic bag dug into his fingers, the weight of the beer cans swinging against his leg. The cicadas had stopped.
Tim paused. That was wrong. The cicadas never stopped this early.
The silence pressed against his ears, heavy and absolute. The wind had died. The bamboo stopped rustling.
Then, the shadows in front of him stretched.
He watched his own shadow on the pavement elongate, growing sharper and darker, reaching out ahead of him as if a spotlight had been turned on behind his back.
The twilight deepened in the wrong direction. The sky above him began to brighten, dawn breaking in reverse.
Tim squinted upward, turning around slowly. The familiar sensation of the mountain air usually grounded him, but now the hair on his arms stood up. The air tasted metallic, like licking a battery.
Streaks of light cut across the heavens—violent and jagged, not the gentle arcs of shooting stars. They were burning with a golden-white intensity that hurt his eyes.
It looked like a shotgun blast of meteors heading straight for the town. One, in particular, was separating from the cluster, growing larger with terrifying speed. It wasn't just falling; it felt like it was aiming.
"What the hell?" Tim breathed. Then, louder, as the roar of displaced air hit him: "Shit!"
He turned and ran. His beer cans clanked in the plastic bag, a pathetic soundtrack to his flight.
I'm not ready, he thought, his feet pounding against the steep pavement, his lungs burning. The divorce took everything, but I'm finally free. Mike got me out. I haven't even started to live yet.
Behind him, the whistling grew to a roar that vibrated in his chest cavity. The light became blinding, washing out the world in white. He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw the golden fragment, its trajectory locked onto him like a cosmic guided missile.
He didn't even have time to drop the bag.
He felt a blow to his back, hot and heavy, like the fist of a giant.
Then there was nothing.
The Soul Realm
When awareness returned, Tim existed as something else entirely. His body was gone, replaced by a basic outline of white light. He felt warm, luminous, and stripped of everything external.
Then came the pain.
The meteor fragment had buried itself deep within his soul, and it was transforming him.
His soul expanded rapidly. Alien sensations flooded his consciousness—emotions from a being that had lived for millennia, memories of star-spanning wars, and above all, a desperate, burning hunger to return to a home he had never known.
Tim tried to scream, but he had no mouth. He was pure consciousness floating in an ocean of agony.
The merger was violent. It felt like swallowing liquid fire. Once the foreign soul fragment had fully integrated, expanding his own soul far beyond the limits of a human, the real torment began.
His soul began to tear in half.
The division was excruciating—like every fiber of his existence was being split down an invisible seam.
One half of him remained tethered to Earth, anchored by twenty-eight years of human memories, regrets, and the small, stubborn desire to keep living his pitiful life.
The other half, infected with the ancient will of the god Yaoung, stretched toward a direction he couldn't comprehend.
Avenge me, whispered a voice that resonated through his very essence. They betrayed everything we built.
The thought wasn't his. It was the meteor fragment, driving him across the galaxy.
Tim felt himself being ripped apart. One part of him slammed back down toward Japan. The other part was flung into the galactic void, traveling past dying stars and nebulae until a new planet came into focus.
He sensed the planet teeming with souls—bright spots of life. But there were gaps. Dark spaces where light should have been. Empty vessels waiting to be filled.
The ancient will guided Tim toward one such absence—a freshly extinguished soul that had left behind a body with immense potential.
Tim felt himself being pulled toward the emptiness.
Everything went dark again.
Cultivation World
Lia of the Flowing Water Sect was more than just a talented girl; she was a miracle.
In this universe, power wasn't given; it was seized from the heavens. Cultivators absorbed Qi—the fundamental energy of the cosmos—to wash away the impurities of their mortal bodies. They tempered their bones like steel and refined their souls until they could ignore hunger, age, and eventually death itself. It was a brutal, endless ladder where those at the bottom were ants, and those at the top were literal Gods who could hold stars in their palms.
Most disciples spent their entire lives trapped in the first stage, Qi Refining, merely strengthening their bodies to live a little longer than a commoner. To break through to the next realm Foundation Establishment was to lay the spiritual groundwork for true immortality. It was a transformation that typically took seasoned masters fifty years of gruelling meditation to achieve.
Lia had done it at nineteen.
She was the "Ice Queen," the hope of her sect, the genius who would one day lead them to glory. But right now, the genius was dying.
She stumbled back against the weathered stone of the ancient ruins, clutching her chest. She had come here investigating a spatial rift—a shimmering crack in reality that shouldn't have existed. Her elders had taught that rifts were wounds in the world, often left behind by ancient battles or hidden treasuries of long-dead gods.
She had entered alone, driven by a desperate, crushing need for speed. Being a prodigy wasn't a gift; it was a debt. Her master needed her to be strong enough to deter their rivals. Her brother needed her protection. The entire sect looked at her and saw a weapon, not a girl. She needed the treasures inside this rift to advance faster, to stay ahead of the monsters nipping at her heels.
But instead of treasure, she had found an ambush.
Robed figures materialized from the purple shadows. The Corpse Cleansing Sect.
"I can't die here," she gasped, channeling qi to her hands. The blue light flickered weakly. "I tried so hard... I did everything right..."
The attackers didn't strike her body. They struck her soul.
Cultivators fought on two fronts: the physical and the spiritual. While Lia's body was reinforced by her Foundation stage power, her soul was still young and vulnerable. The dark streaks of malevolent energy tore through her physical defenses like smoke, bypassing her flesh to hammer directly against her spirit.
She turned to flee, drawing on every ounce of her supernatural speed, but a final soul-piercing blow struck her from behind. It felt like an invisible spear driving through her heart, severing the tether between her soul and her body.
Lia's soul shattered like cracked glass.
Her body, perfect and unmarked, collapsed onto the ancient stones. The light in her purple eyes faded, the decades of potential snuffing out in a single, terrified second.
The vessel was empty.
The Transition
In the moment Lia's soul scattered to the winds, Tim's split consciousness slammed into the vacuum she left behind.
The merger was violent and fundamentally wrong.
Tim's awareness crashed into flesh that wasn't his. Neural pathways fired in completely alien patterns. Cold seeped through every fiber of his being as his modern human mind struggled to interface with the cultivation-forged body.
His consciousness returned not with a gasp, but with the gritty taste of ash and copper against his tongue.
He was lying face down in the dirt.
The ground beneath him was cold—unnaturally so—and vibrated with a low, menacing hum. He tried to push himself up, but his arms felt rubbery and strange, the leverage all wrong. He spat out the metallic-tasting dust and rolled onto his back, gasping for air.
"Huuuuuuh."
The massive breath echoed strangely. The voice that emerged wasn't his baritone grunt. It was a high, soft sound—musical, terrified, and completely alien to his ears.
Tim blinked, trying to clear his vision.
Above him, the sky was a bruised, endless black, devoid of stars. It churned violently, a roiling ocean of darkness torn apart every few seconds by arcs of jagged purple lightning. The thunder didn't roll; it cracked like a whip, illuminating the nightmare landscape in strobe-light flashes of violet and obsidian.
Ruined stone spires jutted from the gloom like the ribs of a dead giant, and the fading backs of robed figures disappeared into the shadows.
Panic flooded his system. Get up, he told himself. Move.
He struggled to sit up, his movements jerky and uncoordinated. Something heavy and silky slid off his shoulder.
A curtain of hair—midnight black and impossibly long—spilled forward, pooling in his lap and brushing against his cheeks. Tim stared at it, confused. He reached up to brush it away, and his breath hitched.
He was staring at his hands.
They weren't his. The square, callous-roughened hands of a twenty-eight-year-old teacher were gone. In their place were slender, porcelain-pale fingers. They were elegant, delicate, and trembling.
"What..."
He looked down at himself, and the world seemed to tilt on its axis.
He was dressed in elaborate robes of deep crimson and stark white, the fabric shimmering even in the low light. The wide sleeves hung loose around his thin wrists, and a thick red sash was tied tightly around a waist that felt terrifyingly narrow.
His eyes traveled lower. The robes crossed over his chest, but they couldn't hide the undeniable truth. He saw the soft swell of breasts pushing against the silk, the curve of hips that flared beneath the sash, the exposed skin of a pale leg visible through a high slit in the skirt.
This wasn't just a different body. It was a masterpiece of feminine beauty, and he was trapped inside it.
His breathing quickened to a hyperventilating rhythm. He reached up to touch his face with those alien, slender fingers. He felt smooth, flawless skin where his stubble should be. High, sharp cheekbones. A jawline that felt fragile and tapered under his fingertips. He felt the weight of gold ornaments engaging his ears and hair, chiming softly as he shook his head in denial.
"Where... where am I?"
The voice was undeniable now. Soft. Bell-like. Female.
He looked down at his chest again, at the curve of the silky red robes, and beneath them, a body that was undeniably female. He grabbed the fabric, bunching it in his fist, hoping to wake up.
"NO, no no no," he muttered, the panic surging fresh through his brain. "Please just let this be some kind of weird dream."
But the cold stone under his bare legs was real. The smell of old blood and ozone was real. The purple lightning reflected on his pale skin was real.
And the lingering ache in his soul told him that his life as Tim Jones was over.
He was someone else now. And he was all alone in hell.
A crack of thunder shattered the air directly above him, the purple flash so bright it left afterimages burning in his retinas. The ground shook, and the instinct for self-preservation finally overrode the panic. He couldn't stay out in the open.
He tried to stand, but his legs felt like they belonged to a stranger. They were too light, the center of gravity completely wrong. His knees buckled immediately, sending him sprawling back into the grit.
"Move," he hissed, the soft, bell-like voice gritting out the command.
Gritting his teeth, he dug his delicate, pale fingers into the dirt and began to crawl. He half-dragged his new body across the broken ground, the expensive red silk of his robes tearing on sharp stones and staining with mud. Every inch was a battle. His coordination was scrambled, his brain sending signals that the limbs received on a delay.
He spotted a small rocky alcove carved into a nearby hillside—a shallow cave that offered the only shelter from the nightmare sky.
He pulled himself toward it, gasping for air. But as he moved, a new, deeper agony flared in his chest. It wasn't physical pain; it was something far worse. It felt like his very essence was being stretched and stapled to the inside of this new skin. The foreign soul fragment from the meteor was vibrating, forcing his consciousness to mold into the empty vessel.
The distortion was excruciating. It felt like his mind was being compressed, his memories of Earth grinding against the muscle memory of the cultivator named Lia.
He reached the alcove and collapsed inside the rocky shelter, out of the rain of purple light. He tried to turn over, but the energy left him completely.
A wave of vertigo washed over him, more violent than before. The world spun—purple sky, gray stone, red silk—blurring into a singular, nauseating smear. The sensation of his soul forcefully locking into the neural pathways of this female body was too much for his mind to process.
His vision tunneled. The last thing he felt was the cold stone against his cheek and the terrifying, alien rhythm of a heart that wasn't his own slowing down to a resting beat.
Everything went dark again.