The Peak of Heaven's End was not silent. It was screaming.
Three thousand meters above the clouds, where the air was thin enough to suffocate a mortal in a single breath, the laws of physics were being rewritten. The sky, usually a tapestry of calm azure, had been torn open. Purple and black tribulation clouds churned like a bruised ocean, swirling around a single point. The pressure radiating from the heavens was so immense that the granite rocks of the mountain peak were cracking, turning into fine dust that floated in the anti-gravity field of the gathering storm.
At the center of this apocalyptic maelstrom sat a single man.
Li Ye.
He wore robes of midnight black, embroidered with crimson threads that seemed to flow like liquid blood. His hair, long and untamed, whipped around a face that was terrifyingly calm. He sat in the lotus position, his eyes closed, a faint blue light pulsating rhythmically against his skin.
To the historians of this world, he was the First Heavenly Demon. The scourge of the continent. The man who had united the chaotic, disparate bandit clans of the Unorthodox Path into a singular, efficient empire of dominance.
But inside Li Ye's mind, he was simply checking a spreadsheet.
'Soul integrity at 98%. Meridian capacity at peak overload. The Ninth Heavenly Tribulation has a survival probability of 42.6%. If I factor in the Void Barrier Formation, I can push that to 60%. Acceptable margins.'
Li Ye opened his eyes. They were not the eyes of a madman or a monster. They were the cold, calculating eyes of a man who had once been a Fortune 500 CEO on Earth. He viewed this world not as a mystical fantasy, but as a resource management simulation. Qi was capital. Sects were subsidiaries. War was a hostile takeover.
And today was the day he took the company public. Today, he would ascend to the Immortal Realm.
"Li Ye! The Heavens will not tolerate a demon like you ascending!"
The roar shattered his concentration. Li Ye sighed, a sound of genuine annoyance, like a manager interrupted during a crucial audit.
He looked down from his floating position. Below him, surrounding the peak in a massive, shimmering formation array, were ants. Thousands of them.
They wore the white robes of the Mount Hua Sect, the grey kasayas of the Shaolin Temple, the Daoist blues of Wudang, and the golden armor of the Imperial Family. The Murim Alliance. The so-called "Orthodox Path."
Leading them stood four figures, their auras blazing like miniature suns, pushing back the darkness of the tribulation clouds.
"Amitabha," the Head Abbott of Shaolin, Master Xuan Kong, chanted, his voice amplified by internal energy to boom across the mountain range. He held a golden staff that hummed with Buddhist light. "Benefactor Li, your hands are stained with the blood of millions. The cycle of karma has come for you. Put down the butcher's knife, and perhaps your soul can still be salvaged in the next life."
Next to him, the Sect Leader of Mount Hua, Yue Cang, drew his sword. The blade sang with a keen, high-pitched wail. "Spare us the sermons, Abbott! This demon burned the Seven Prefectures! He turned the Medicine Valley into a graveyard! Today, the Alliance acts as the executioner of Heaven!"
The Wudang First Venerable, an old man who looked like a dried prune but radiated terrifying sword intent, stroked his beard. "Li Ye. You disrupted the balance. You monopolized the spirit veins. You destroyed the established order. You... are a cancer."
Li Ye looked at them. He didn't stand up. He didn't summon a weapon. He simply rested his chin on his hand, looking bored.
"Balance?" Li Ye's voice was soft, yet it cut through the howling wind and reached the ears of every single cultivator present. "Order? Is that what you call it?"
He stood up, the air rippling around him.
"Before I arrived, the Unorthodox Path was a mess of rapists and chaotic murderers. I organized them. I gave them a code of conduct. I eliminated the uncontrollable elements. Under my rule, crime rates in the Demon Domain dropped by 85%. Trade routes were secured. The mortality rate of mortals decreased because I forbade the slaughter of 'resources.'"
Li Ye pointed a pale finger at the Mount Hua Leader.
"You, Yue Cang. Your sect charges protection fees to three hundred villages. If they don't pay, 'bandits' mysteriously appear to raid them. I undercut your prices. That is why you are here."
He shifted his finger to the Wudang Venerable.
"And you. You hoard 70% of the continent's Spirit Stone mines to artificially inflate the value of your pills. I synthesized a cultivation method that requires fewer stones, crashing your market. That is why you are here."
Li Ye's eyes flashed with a cold, mocking light.
"Do not speak to me of Justice, you hypocritical shareholders of a failing monopoly. You are here because I am a competitor you cannot buy out."
The silence that followed was heavy. The truth stung, but shame was a luxury the righteous could not afford.
"HERESY!" The Mount Hua Leader screamed, his face flushing red. "Kill him! Activate the Ten Thousand Sword Slaughter Formation! Do not let him endure the Tribulation!"
"Kill!"
"Purge the Demon!"
The roar of ten thousand cultivators shook the mountain. It was a magnificent sight. Countless flying swords rose into the air like a swarm of silver locusts. Buddhist palm prints, golden and massive, descended from the sky. Daoist talismans ignited, turning the air into a sea of fire and lightning.
It was enough firepower to erase a kingdom from the map.
Li Ye watched the incoming annihilation. He checked his internal clock.
'Tribulation lightning strikes in 45 seconds. I need to clear the board.'
"Inefficient," Li Ye muttered.
He took a single step forward.
[Heavenly Demon Art: First Form - Singularities of the Void]
Li Ye didn't scream the name of his attack. He simply raised his right hand and clenched his fist.
CRACK.
Space itself seemed to shatter. The atmospheric pressure around the attacking army suddenly inverted. The flying swords, the fireballs, the golden palm prints—they didn't hit him. They stopped, frozen in mid-air, caught in a gravity well of Li Ye's creation.
The cultivators' eyes widened in horror.
"Return," Li Ye whispered.
He flicked his wrist.
The gravity well reversed. The attacks were launched back at their casters with double the velocity.
BOOM!
It was a massacre. The front lines of the Mount Hua sect vaporized instantly, their bodies turning into a fine red mist before they could even scream. The golden barrier of the Shaolin monks cracked like glass, sending bald monks flying backward, coughing up pieces of their own lungs.
"Hold the formation!" The Wudang Venerable roared, spitting blood as he channeled his Qi to stabilize the array. "He is distracted! The Tribulation is coming!"
As if on cue, the sky tore open completely.
A bolt of purple lightning, thick as a palace pillar, crashed down. It wasn't aimed at the army. It was aimed directly at Li Ye.
This was the Ninth Heavenly Tribulation. The wrath of the laws of the universe.
Li Ye looked up. His defense was ready. He had calculated the voltage, the spirit density, the resistance of his body. He was going to catch it, refine it, and use it to shatter the void to ascend.
But just as the lightning touched the tip of his aura, the Abbot of Shaolin threw something.
It wasn't a weapon. It was a small, unassuming wooden bead.
[The Relic of the Fallen Buddha: Karmic Anchor]
The bead dissolved in the air, creating a golden chain that shot through the chaos and wrapped around Li Ye's ankle.
Li Ye frowned. 'Unexpected variable. Analysis?'
His internal sense screamed. The bead linked his soul to the souls of the ten thousand people he had just killed in self-defense.
The Tribulation Lightning didn't see one man anymore. It saw the "Sin" of a massacre.
The purple lightning turned black. The intensity multiplied by a factor of ten.
"You old fox," Li Ye whispered, looking at the Abbot.
The Abbot was bleeding from his eyes, his life force draining rapidly to sustain the artifact. He smiled a bloody, serene smile. "If we cannot kill you, Benefactor Li, we will ensure the Heavens do. We die together."
"Mutually Assured Destruction," Li Ye noted. "Bad business strategy."
The black lightning engulfed him.
Pain.
For the first time in two hundred years, Li Ye felt pain. His skin, tempered in dragon blood, carbonized instantly. His meridians, forged from star iron, shattered like glass. The sheer density of the energy was tearing his very dantian apart, atom by atom.
He could feel his consciousness fading. The darkness was closing in. The cries of the dying Orthodox cultivators faded away.
He... failed.
He, the genius of Earth, the Sovereign of the Unorthodox, had been dragged down by the sheer weight of numbers and fanaticism.
'Calculation error,' Li Ye thought as his body disintegrated into ash. 'I underestimated the lengths competitors will go to protect a failing market share.'
He felt his soul being pulled into the void, ready to be extinguished forever.
'If I get another chance...'
His final thought wasn't of regret. It wasn't of fear. It was a correction of his business plan.
'...I won't just be efficient. I will be absolute. No more "Unorthodox" or "Orthodox." I will monopolize the entire board.'
Darkness took him.
[System Booting...]
[Host Soul Integrity: Critical.]
[Karma System initializing...]
[Scanning for suitable vessel...]
[Vessel Found. Location: The Azure Cloud Empire. Status: Trash.]
[Time displacement: +3000 Years.]
[Download Complete.]
"Get up, trash!"
The voice was shrill, loud, and annoying.
Li Ye gasped, his eyes snapping open. He expected the void. He expected hell. He expected the searing heat of tribulation lightning.
Instead, he felt cold stone against his cheek. He smelled stale incense and... perfume?
He pushed himself up. His arms trembled. They were weak. Pathetically weak. No, not just weak—they were thin, lacking any muscle density, with blocked meridians that felt like sludge-filled pipes.
'What is this? Where is my cultivation? Where is my Demonic Body?'
He looked up.
Standing above him was a woman. She was breathtaking, in the way a storm or a drawn sword is breathtaking. She wore intricate red wedding robes embroidered with the golden phoenix of the Imperial family. Her skin was like jade, her eyes were like cold stars, and her expression was one of utter, undisguised loathing.
She kicked his leg. Not hard enough to break it, but hard enough to bruise.
"Are you deaf?" she hissed. "I said get up. The wedding ceremony is over. The guests are gone. You can stop pretending to be drunk."
Li Ye blinked. He looked at his hands. Pale. Callus-free. The hands of a scholar who had never held a sword.
He looked around. A bridal chamber. Red candles. Dragon and Phoenix quilt.
Memories that did not belong to him flooded his brain in a painful spike.
Li Ye. 19 years old. Third son of the fallen Li Noble House. Born with the "Severed Spirit Pulse." Known as the Capital's laughingstock. Married off today to Princess Jiang Linyue as a political shield because the Emperor didn't want to offend the Prime Minister's son, but the Princess refused to marry him... so they found a disposable husband.
Disposable.
Li Ye's lips curled up. It was a small, almost imperceptible smile.
He had survived.
"Hey! Are you listening to me?" The Princess crossed her arms, looking down at him with the arrogance of a goddess looking at a bug. "Let's get one thing clear. You sleep on the floor. I sleep on the bed. Do not look at me. Do not talk to me unless spoken to. And don't you dare think about touching me. I only married you to silence the Ministers."
She waited for him to cry. She waited for him to beg, or to apologize, just like the old Li Ye would have done.
Instead, the man on the floor dusted off his robes. He stood up. His movements were shaky due to the weak body, but his posture was perfectly straight.
He looked her in the eye. For a split second, the Princess felt a chill run down her spine, as if she were staring into a deep, dark abyss.
"Understood," Li Ye said. His voice was raspy, but steady. "Just to clarify—this means our assets and private lives are separate, correct?"
The Princess blinked, taken aback by the lack of tears. "Hah! As if a piece of trash like you has a 'private life.' Yes, do whatever you want. Just don't embarrass me."
"Deal," Li Ye said.
He turned around, grabbed a pillow from the chaise lounge, threw it on the floor, and lay down. He closed his eyes instantly.
"Wait..." The Princess frowned, confused by his indifference. "That's it? You're not going to... complain?"
"You set the terms. I accepted the contract. Transaction complete," Li Ye mumbled, already regulating his breathing. "Goodnight, Princess."
Jiang Linyue stood there, mouth slightly open. She had prepared a thousand insults. She had prepared to threaten him with her cultivation pressure. But he had just... turned himself off.
"Hmph! At least you know your place!" She stomped her foot, blew out the candles with a wave of her sleeve, and marched to the bed.
In the darkness of the floor, Li Ye's eyes opened. A translucent blue screen hovered before his retina.
[Welcome, Host.] [Karma System Activated.] [Current Karma Points: 0.] [Main Quest: Regain the Summit.]
Li Ye stared at the screen. A new game. A new board. And this time, he started with the ultimate camouflage: being a nobody.
'First order of business,' he analyzed, feeling the pathetic trickle of Qi in his blocked veins. 'I need energy. A lot of it. And this wife of mine is useless for that purpose.'
He closed his eyes.
'Time to find a new supplier.'