After three hundred years as a legendary grandmaster in a glorious cultivation world, Zhung Hang dies peacefully in his death bed, only to awaken in a modern hospital bed.  
Doctors smile kindly and tell him it was nothing but a coma-induced dream.

Stripped of every achievement, every bond, every shred of meaning, he returns to a life where no one ever truly wanted him.  
Parents who saw him as a burden.  
A little brother who died forgotten.  
Love that was never love.  
On a rainy night, he slits his throat and makes one final vow:

“If reality is crueler than any dream, I will carve the next one with my own hands, even if I have to become something neither demon nor saint.”

Death refuses him.

He awakens again, reborn as an eight-year-old boy named Zhung in a third, far crueler world.  
Here, there is no qi, no spiritual roots, no merciful heaven.  
Power is measured by the **Nine Refinements of Will**, a brutal path where mortals must drink the fresh blood of divine or demonic beasts to tear open an **Aperture** inside their flesh.  
One wrong drop can leave you a conscious vegetable feeling eternal agony.  
One deep wound can strip a lifetime of progress in seconds.  
The final realm, Diamond, is called impossible for a reason.

In this world, Zhung has only one light: his mother Zheng Han, the third and person in three lifetimes who has ever loved him without condition.

For eight years he remains powerless, hiding behind a gentle smile while secretly feeding travellers to a beast in the forest cave, waiting for the day its blood will let him begin.

He does not walk the righteous path.  
He does not walk the demonic path.  
He walks the **Broken Path**, a third road forged from the refusal to ever again be heaven’s tragic puppet.

A dark, slow-burn xianxia of cosmic betrayal, quiet maternal love, and a soul that will gamble everything just to protect the one person who never asked him to be anything more than her son.

The heavens wrote the first two tragedies.  
The third one will be his.

   A flawless white-jade continent floating far above the clouds.  


   Home to Rank-9 Platinum cultivators and heaven's pet.  


   Invisible and unreachable to anyone below that rank.  


   Time flows ten times slower than below.


Only 10 Rank-9 Platinum only ascended or forced to ascend.


   The middle world. One super-continent split by ancient catastrophes into six vast regions.  


   This is where humans live, fight, and bleed.


   A shattered mirror-world deep beneath the crust, connected by random rifts and forbidden cracks.  


   Birthplace of the oldest divine and demonic beasts.  


   Laws are unstable; space folds; a single breath there can contain a thousand drops of blood.


#### The Six Regions of the Mortal Realm


   Golden fields, jade rivers, towering cities, and the nine great human empires and great 13 sects.  


   Highest population, strongest sects, most Tin-to-Gold cultivators.  


   Politics, tournaments, and arrogance run thicker than blood.


   A land of black glass trees and perpetual grey dusk.  


   Once the greatest forest on the continent; turned to ash by an ancient Platinum war.  


   Rich in mutated beasts, blood crystals, and rogue cultivators who refine in secret.


   Endless glaciers beneath dancing auroras.  


   Cold enough to freeze Will itself.  


   Divine beasts roam more freely here, but no one "specialises" in ice; power depends entirely on the user's own imagination and control.


   Scorching deserts and chains of active volcanoes.  


   Light so bright it burns the eyes.  


   Divine blood beasts are more common, yet every cultivator's expression of power remains unique to their soul.


   Lawless red canyons, bottomless gorges, and endless dust storms.  


   Exiles, demonic path walkers, beast tamers, and mercenary groups fight for territory.  


   The Black Frontier is a forgotten speck on its eastern edge.


   Primordial jungle that swallows maps and memories.  


   Nascent Realm rifts open without warning. Beasts of Steel rank and above treat it as their garden.


#### Important Note on Power Expression


The Aperture has no element, no attribute, no "ice path" or "fire path."  


Its form, colour, and abilities are shaped solely by the user's Will, imagination, and personality.  


Two cultivators at the exact same rank who opened their Aperture in the exact same location can manifest completely opposite powers, one might birth wings of starlight, another might birth chains of shadow, because the Aperture is nothing more than a mirror of the soul that holds the blood.


The continent may influence what beasts you hunt and what blood you drink, but it never decides how you wield it.


That choice belongs only to you… and to the boy who has not yet taken his first drop.


One mortal who was never meant to survive any of them.


The World of Wills