The Heavens are Impure
The universe is not a unified creation. It is a structure of cruelty, a grand Matryoshka doll of suffering.
We, who crawl upon the dirt of the Mortal Plane, look up at the stars and dream of immortality. We cultivate Qi, tempering our fragile bones, foolishly believing that "Ascension" is salvation. We are told that if we break through our mortal shackles, we will join the Gods in the Spirit Realm.
What a pathetic delusion.
The truth is a secret that rots the minds of those who learn it: The Heavens themselves are Impure.
The World Energy we absorb? It is tainted, laced with the spiritual decay of billions who died before us. The higher you ascend, the more filth you ingest, until your very "Divine Soul" is nothing more than refined spiritual sewage. The "Gods" of the upper realms are simply bigger parasites, trapped in a slightly cleaner cage, desperately consuming the energy of the worlds beneath them to delay their own inevitable decay.
There is no True Immortality. There is only a ladder made of skulls, leading up to a peak that is eternally collapsing.
But on this day, in a forgotten corner of the lower world, within a dying sect that cannot even afford basic medical pills, a variable has emerged. A standard, mortal youth, possessing "trash" talent and a crippled meridian structure, found something.
It was not a legendary sword. It was not an ancient manual.
It was a shard of something that existed before the Heavens became corrupt. A remnant of the Primordial Void. It has no power to kill, no energy to absorb. It has only one, singular, terrifying function:
It Refines.
It can strip the rot from the air, the impurity from the pill, and the decay from the soul.
The universe demands that everything must decay. This youth, holding a cracked piece of prehistoric iron, is about to demand that the universe give back what it stole.
The Heavens are Impure. Today, the cleansing begins.