The First Sin Returns
The night wind whispered through the pines, carrying the clean scent of dew and cold stone.
Moonlight draped the lonely spring in silver, turning its surface into a still mirror.
A white-haired youth sat cross-legged at the water's edge.
His reflection stared back — pale skin like carved jade, gold light flickering faintly behind his half-closed eyes.
Lin Xian inhaled slowly.
The body he now inhabited was pitiful — meridians fractured, dantian sluggish, impurities choking his veins.
But his soul… his soul was the Monarch Assassin of Nirvana, whose shadow once made immortals bow.
> "No technique in this realm can bear my will," he murmured. "So I will rebuild heaven from its ashes."
He pressed a hand over his heart.
A faint symbol — a circle split into three rings — pulsed beneath his skin.
The seal of his supreme scripture:
"Cycle of the Broken Heaven"
The Heaven-Slaughter Nirvana Scripture
The Lost Scripture of Nirvana
Long ago, before he became Monarch Assassin, he died nine times and lived ten.
From those deaths, he forged a cultivation scripture that didn't draw from the world —
it devoured the limits of its wielder.
Seven verses.
Seven truths of existence.
Each verse a death.
Each verse a rebirth.
He had mastered six.
The seventh… remained beyond heaven itself.
Now reborn, Lin Xian began again—from the First Verse.
The spring shivered violently around him.
A stream of golden qi surged into his body without warning. There was no gentleness, no smooth flow—only a brutal force that tore straight through his ruined meridians.
Pain exploded through him.
He tasted blood immediately.
"Good. Pain means it's working."
His muscles seized.
His ribs bent until they cracked.
Every damaged pathway in his body felt like it was being scraped open with burning iron.
He clutched the ground to stay upright as the qi forced its way deeper.
«"Cycle of the Broken Heaven—First Verse… Shatter the Flesh!"»
His voice trembled from the strain.
Golden light burst from his skin, but it wasn't beautiful. It flickered like a wildfire fighting to stay alive. The air thickened under the pressure, distorting as the energy inside him thrashed wildly.
His dantian—the broken, useless core of this body—twisted painfully.
For a moment, he thought it would rupture completely.
Darkness closed in at the edges of his vision.
"No. Not again.
I did not fall to this world just to faint from a cracked mortal core"
He forced his eyes open.
The qi slammed into it again.
Agony tore through his gut so sharply he nearly blacked out.
His nails dug into the soil. His vision blurred. His breath came in sharp, uneven gasps.
Repair it… or die again.
He gritted his teeth as another wave of golden qi struck the cracked dantian. The broken core groaned like fractured glass under pressure.
The spring water behind him surged upward, pulled by the unstable qi. Mist whipped into a spiraling column around him as his body convulsed from the impact.
A wet crack sounded inside him.
Then another.
His meridians tore open—only to be forcefully pieced back together as the violent qi hammered through them in relentless cycles. Every tear, every burn, every crack was followed by a painfully slow rebuilding.
"Break me. Tear me apart. Crush every flaw I inherited from this weakling body.
I will rebuild it. I will shape a perfect dantian myself—even if I crawl through death a third time."
Seconds stretched into minutes.
His forehead dripped sweat.
Blood seeped from the corner of his lips.
His heartbeat shook his entire frame.
Endure. Repair. Endure again.
The golden qi gathered once more—denser, hotter, sharper.
It hurled itself into his dantian like a battering ram.
A deafening internal snap echoed through his body.
Then—silence.
The pressure vanished.
A warm pulse spread outward—slow, steady, alive.
His breathing eased as golden light wrapped gently around his core. The fractured dantian no longer resisted. It drank in the remaining qi like parched earth drinking rain.
The mist around him collapsed into the spring with a metallic chime.
The water settled.
The air cleared.
The pain receded like a tide pulling back into the ocean.
Lin Xian lifted his head.
The weakness was gone.
His muscles felt firm.
His meridians no longer screamed—they hummed with new strength.
His dantian pulsed with molten gold, steady and full.
«"Mortal Origin Realm… Initial Minor Stage."»
He flexed his fingers. A faint shock ran through the air with the movement. His senses sharpened instantly—every sound, every vibration around him grew clearer.
He exhaled once.
Light cracked through the canopy as dawn broke, washing over him like a fresh beginning.
A faint smile touched his lips.
"Finally… the foundation of this body is established.
Fragile—but no longer broken."
The first step was complete.
And the heavens felt just a little less distant.
He rose, the forest bending subtly around him.
---
The Injured Maiden
After days of quiet strengthening, Lin Xian walked along a mossy forest path.
The world felt unnaturally still —
until a faint whimper broke the silence.
He stopped.
A trail of blood glimmered beneath the roots of an ancient cedar, leading to a collapsed young woman.
Her robes, once the pure white of winter snow, were now torn and stained a vivid, wet crimson. The fabric clung to the gentle curve of her waist and the long line of her thigh, outlining a form of heartbreaking grace. Her unbound hair—a cascade of spilled ink—framed a face of porcelain perfection. Even in ruin, her beauty was a sharp, seductive thing, her parted lips and dark, knowing eyes hinting at a spirit too fierce to be broken by mere violence.
Lin Xian knelt beside her.
Her fingers trembled around a dagger.
> "D-don't come closer…"
Her eyes — amethyst with a ring of gold — glared up at him with stubborn defiance.
Impressive, for someone on death's door.
> "If I wanted you dead," he said calmly, "you would have been dead."
She tried to lift the dagger again —
and blood spurted from her shoulder.
Her body crumpled.
Lin Xian sighed and caught her before she hit the ground.
She was too light, her pulse fluttering like a dying flame.
A black vein pulsed under the skin of her arm, spreading fast.
> "Corruption energy," he muttered. "Not Voidborn… refined. Crafted."
He placed his hand above the wound.
She flinched weakly.
> "W-what are you—"
"Saving you."
Golden light bloomed from his palm — not qi, but soul-essence.
The black veins shrieked as they burned away.
Golden motes drifted through the clearing like falling starlight.
Her breathing steadied.
Her color returned.
Lin Xian withdrew his hand.
> "You'll live. Move too much and you'll die again."
Her eyes opened, soft but wary.
> "You… you're not from Azure Cloud City, are you?"
He tilted his head.
> "Does it matter?"
She studied him — the white hair, divine-silver eyes, simple robes that somehow made the forest feel dimmer around him.
> "You look…" she whispered, "like someone who shouldn't exist here."
A faint smile touched his lips.
> "Then perhaps we're alike."
Before she could respond, pain bent her expression.
He caught her wrist gently.
> "Don't speak. You've lost too much blood."
> "I… I can't stay. They're chasing me…"
> "Who?"
> "Azure Cloud Sect enforcers… They want what I stole."
Lin Xian's brows rose slightly.
> "And what did you steal?"
With trembling fingers, she produced a small silver-jade fragment etched with a spiral.
Lin Xian's gaze sharpened instantly.
A fragment of the Heavenly Cycle Seal.
A relic tied to his Nirvana Scripture.
Fate… acting early.
He closed her fingers around it.
> "Hide it. Don't let anyone touch you until I say so."
"Why… help me?"
He looked down at her — silver eyes calm as starlight.
> "Because I want you to owe me a debt."
> "What debt…?"
> "The debt of living."
Shouts echoed from the forest.
Lin Xian waved a hand.
Shadows rippled outward, swallowing sound and light.
When the enforcers arrived, the clearing was empty.
High above, two figures drifted among the branches —
one white-haired like a fallen star,
the other wrapped in his cloak, asleep against his shoulder.
---
A Lonely Cabin
Night fell.
In an abandoned hunter's hut, Lin Xian laid the woman on a straw bed.
Firelight warmed her sleeping face.
He watched her quietly.
The golden ring in her eyes.
The purity of her qi.
The pulse of the jade fragment.
> "Fate enjoys its jokes," he murmured.
As he turned to leave, she stirred.
"Wait…" Her voice was soft. "I haven't told you… my name."
Lin Xian paused.
> "Then tell me."
She breathed weakly.
> "Mu Yanyue."
The name struck him like a blade.
His breath froze.
The world dimmed.
Mu Yanyue.
Envy of Nirvana.
His third disciple.
Graceful, dangerous, brilliant —
and long dead.
He remembered her last smile in the dream-realm battlefield, the moment the Voidborn devoured her domain.
> "Impossible," he whispered. "You died in the Upper Realm…"
A tremor rippled through his silver irises.
The Eye of Samsara…
So his final technique had reached further than he guessed.
> "If she is here," he murmured, "then what of the others…?"
The fire dimmed.
The fragment at her chest pulsed softly, answering fate's rhythm.
Something cold and certain awakened in him.
> "Death couldn't bind Nirvana's sins," he said quietly. "So what happened after I fell…?"
He looked at her sleeping form — fragile, unaware.
For the first time since his rebirth, his calm cracked.
If fate had returned her…
the heavens were already moving.
A faint, almost sorrowful smile crossed his lips.
> "Rest, Yanyue. When you remember who you are… the heavens will tremble again."
Outside, far above mortal sight, a single golden eye opened in the sky.
Watching.