Pain was not a foreign concept to Lu Chen, but this was a different breed of agony entirely.
It was not the sharp, searing bite of a sword strike, nor the exhausting burn of over-drafting World Essence. This was a hollow, echoing torment. It felt as though a localized black hole had been implanted in his lower abdomen, constantly feeding on his nerve endings.
He opened his eyes.
Total, suffocating darkness greeted him, accompanied by the distinct, coppery stench of old blood and rot. The air was heavy, practically sludgy, coating his throat with a toxic residue every time he dared to draw a breath.
I am alive, Lu Chen thought, the realization ringing hollow in his mind.
He lay on a bed of jagged, obsidian-like gravel. Slowly, agonizingly, he dragged his right hand toward his center. His fingers met tattered silk, crusted stiff with dried blood, and then dipped into the concave ruin of his dantian.
The Innate Spirit Root was gone.
Memory crashed over him like a tidal wave. The summit of the Azure Cloud Sect. The paralyzing poison slipped into his tea by Lin Muxue, the woman who had sworn a Dao oath to stand by his side. The triumphant, mocking smile of Fang Tianyou as the Sect Senior drove a ritual dagger into Lu Chen's core.
"Your providence belongs to the Azure Cloud Sect now, junior brother," Fang Tianyou's voice echoed in his memory, dripping with false pity. "The Age of Fading Providence demands sacrifice. With your Innate Spirit Root, I shall become the child the Heavens desire. Do not worry. History will not remember your failure."
And then, the plummet. Cast into the Abyss of Despair, the bottomless scar at the center of the Great Azure Realm where failed cultivators and forgotten gods went to rot.
Lu Chen gritted his teeth, a feral sound escaping his parched throat. His fingers curled into fists, scraping against the sharp stones beneath him. He had cultivated like a madman, bled for the Azure Cloud Sect, and loved Lin Muxue with every ounce of his soul. All of it—his talent, his luck, his future—harvested like common wheat.
As he clenched his fist, something sharp pierced his palm.
Lu Chen shifted his weight, suppressing a groan as his shattered meridians protested. He blindly felt the object beneath him. It was cold, unnaturally so, leaching the meager warmth from his skin. Pulling it close to his face, he strained his eyes in the gloom.
It was a mirror, roughly the size of his palm, framed in jagged, rusted metal that resembled intertwined skeletal fingers. The glass itself was pitch-black, reflecting absolutely nothing.
It was the artifact he had collided with during his descent, the debris that had somehow broken his fall before he hit the absolute bottom of the Abyss.
A drop of fresh blood from his freshly pierced palm slid down his skin and dripped onto the black glass.
Drip.
The sound was impossibly loud. The moment the blood touched the surface, the Abyss of Despair seemed to hold its breath. The oppressive miasma surrounding him abruptly stilled.
The black glass rippled like a disturbed pond. A violent, searing heat exploded from the mirror, shooting up Lu Chen's arm and directly into his mind.
Lu Chen screamed, his back arching off the ground.
Images, ancient and terrible, flooded his consciousness. He saw a primordial war. He saw the Heavens themselves cracking open, raining golden blood upon the earth—the Great Celestial Sunder. He saw the world's luck, once an infinite, flowing river, shatter into millions of finite, stagnant fragments.
And then, a voice. It wasn't spoken; it was a weight, an ancient intent impressing itself upon his soul.
Host identified. Meridian network: Shattered. Dantian: Destroyed. Innate Providence: Zero. Status: The Void.
Binding complete. The Luck-Binding Mirror awakens.
Lu Chen collapsed back onto the gravel, gasping for air. His eyes snapped open, but the darkness of the Abyss was gone.
The world had transformed. The physical landscape remained a jagged wasteland, but layered over it was a spectrum of grayscale. The rocks, the toxic fog, his own ruined body—all of it was a dull, lifeless ash-gray.
But there was color here.
Lu Chen slowly pushed himself onto his elbows, ignoring the screaming protests of his muscles. He turned his head to the left.
Less than ten paces away loomed a structure he had initially mistaken for a small mountain range. Now, with his altered vision, he recognized it for what it truly was: a ribcage. The bones were impossibly massive, jutting dozens of feet into the air.
But that wasn't what held Lu Chen's attention.
Clinging to the base of the massive sternum was a faint, pulsating aura of brilliant gold. It was a majesty that defied the rot of the Abyss. It felt like destiny. It felt like the favor of the Heavens.
Qi Yun, the mirror's intent whispered in his mind. Providence. The residual luck of a fallen deity. Forsaken. Wasting.
Lu Chen stared at his own hands. Ash-gray. Void. Fang Tianyou had taken everything, leaving him as an empty vessel. But the mirror had recognized that emptiness not as a flaw, but as a prerequisite. A cup cannot be filled if it is already full. By stripping him of his own meager luck, Fang Tianyou had unwittingly made him the perfect host for the Luck-Binding Mirror.
He was the Sovereign of the Void. He had no luck of his own, which meant he could hold the luck of the world.
"Mine," Lu Chen croaked, his voice cracking. He dragged his broken body forward. Inch by agonizing inch, he crawled over the sharp stones toward the golden glow.
Every movement was a battle against his own ruined physiology. Without a Spirit Root to process World Essence, he was weaker than a mortal. But the hatred burning in his chest was a furnace that demanded fuel. He thought of Lin Muxue's cold, indifferent eyes as she watched him fall.
I will crawl out of this hell, Lu Chen vowed, his bloodied fingers hooking onto the base of the massive bone. And I will take everything from you.
He pressed his palm against the ancient, fossilized bone, right over the pulsing golden aura. He didn't know the technique. He didn't know the incantation. He only knew the ravenous hunger the mirror had awakened within him.
"Plunder," Lu Chen commanded.
The Luck-Binding Mirror, resting in his robes, pulsed with an abyssal hum.
The golden aura shrieked. It was an ethereal sound, the dying echo of a god's pride resisting a mortal's touch. But the pull of the mirror was absolute. The Void demanded to be filled.
The golden mist peeled away from the bone and slammed into Lu Chen's palm.
Instantly, the heat returned, but this time, it was a terrifying, constructive fire. The golden Qi Yun flooded into his arm, tearing through the dead, gray flesh. It hit his shattered meridians and didn't just repair them; it violently welded them back together, reforging the pathways with raw, unadulterated providence.
Lu Chen roared as the golden energy crashed into the ruined cavern of his dantian. The void where his Innate Spirit Root used to reside acted like a whirlpool, sucking the golden luck into its center. The Qi Yun compressed, spun, and crystallized.
It wasn't forming a new Spirit Root. It was forming something else. A foundation built not of natural talent, but of stolen destiny. A Void Root.
The entire process took less than a dozen breaths, but to Lu Chen, it felt like centuries of torture and rebirth.
When the golden light finally faded from his vision, the massive skeletal structure beside him crumbled. Without the residual providence holding it together against the Abyss's decay, the god's bones dissolved into a mountain of fine, gray dust.
Lu Chen lay panting on the ground. Slowly, he pushed himself up.
He stood.
His legs were shaky, his robes were in tatters, and he was covered in his own dried blood. But the agonizing void in his center was gone. In its place was a thrumming, dark vortex of energy. He clenched his fist. He could feel it—the faintest whisper of World Essence answering his call. He was back in Qi Refinement. It was a meager fraction of his former power, but it was a start.
He had stolen his way back to life.
Lu Chen laughed. It started as a low, raspy chuckle and escalated into a cold, echoing sound that bounced off the unseen walls of the Abyss.
Fang Tianyou. Azure Cloud Sect. You wanted to hoard the world's luck? Good. Keep it warm for me.
Crack.
The laughter died in his throat. Lu Chen pivoted, his senses heightened by his newly forged meridians.
From the shadows of the gray dust cloud left by the fallen deity, a shape emerged. It was the size of a warhorse, walking on six segmented, scythe-like legs. Its body was a mass of dark, leathery muscle, but its head was a nightmare—a smooth, eyeless dome split by a vertical maw lined with hundreds of needle-thin teeth.
A Nether-Gouger. A scavenger beast of the Abyss, warped by the toxic miasma and the fading providence of the world. The shift in Qi Yun had drawn it here.
Lu Chen had no sword. He had no martial techniques he could presently use without blowing out his fragile, newly-formed Void Root. He was entirely unarmed against a beast that routinely feasted on the corpses of Golden Core cultivators who fell from the surface.
But as the beast hissed, releasing a spray of acidic saliva, Lu Chen's vision shifted.
Through the lens of the Luck-Binding Mirror, the terrifying monster turned gray. And right at the center of its chest, pulsing with a faint, dirty-yellow light, was a thread of Qi Yun. It was small, likely absorbed from the marrow of lucky cultivators it had devoured over the centuries.
It was weak. But it was *luck.
The Nether-Gouger shrieked, its powerful back legs coiling like springs. It launched itself through the air, its scythe-like claws aiming to cleave Lu Chen in two.
Lu Chen didn't step back. He didn't flinch. He raised his bare, bloodstained hand, his eyes locked on the shimmering yellow thread of destiny within the beast's chest.
More,
Lu Chen smiled.
Plunder.