Chapter 3: The Collapse of Stars, the Breaking of Faith
The air was thick with char and silence. The aftermath of the war with Malek'tor left the skies blistered and the land wounded. The five cultivators, Jian, Frostveil, Shi Ruan, Xue Bian, and Lan Kuang, stood amid the broken stones of the academy's sacred grounds. The god was defeated, his Worship Dao shattered, but the price had been steep. Thousands were dead. Cities had crumbled. Faith itself trembled.
Jian's sword hummed in its sheath. Frostveil, her eyes still cold and distant from invoking the soul-layered destruction that obliterated Malek'tor's essence, sat in meditation, her soul power slowly restoring the students whose spirits could be saved.
But in the cold north, beyond the remnants of the shattered city, a quiet tremor cracked the sky.
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Tian Shen had arrived.
To most, Tian Shen was one of the strongest cultivators born of mortal soil—a man whose aura alone once bent royal sect leaders to their knees. But now, as he walked the ruined plains toward Qin Lanyue, an elder healer known for her spiritual kindness and devotion to balance, it was revealed: Tian Shen had never been mortal.
He had been a hidden god, waiting. Watching.
A divine remnant from the first war of the heavens.
Qin Lanyue turned to him, sensing something unnatural. "Tian... there's something wrong with your Dao. It's not bound to earth. It sings too loud."
He smiled, but it was cruel and hollow. "Because I no longer walk the earth, Lanyue. I walk the pressure of a thousand stars."
Before she could react, his Gravity Dao unfolded.
It came not as a wave, but as a collapse.
The atmosphere bent. Trees flattened. Air screamed. The continent twisted beneath his feet. And in the span of a breath, his presence expanded to that of a god reborn.
The Gravitational Pressure he released equaled that of 1,000 suns, compacted into a singularity hovering at his side. It dragged at the fabric of space, warping time, cracking the barrier between realms.
Qin Lanyue raised her hands, invoking the Wind Dao to escape—but the pressure was infinite.
In a moment of lightless silence, her body folded in upon itself. Then dust.
Then nothing.
The scream of her passing carried across the oceans.
And then he unleashed the true form of his Dao.
He whispered, "Let the cosmos know my weight."
The skies turned black. An aurora of inverted stars coiled above as Tian Shen focused his energy outward. He clutched the heavens as if they were cloth and tore.
Fifteen thousand stars across the linked divine constellations of the universe died.
Planets collapsed into void. Galaxies dimmed. Sect temples across worlds shattered under the pressure of Tian Shen's wrath.
The continent—once home to three great nations—imploded. Mountains cracked and oceans bled upward. Craters miles wide yawned into the abyss.
Jian and the others, far to the west, felt it. Not just in power, but in gravity itself—pulled, rattled, unbalanced.
Frostveil's eyes widened. "He's returned."
Jian's fingers clenched his blade. His voice was quiet.
"Tian Shen. A god wearing mortal flesh. The heavens never ended. They waited."
The war wasn't over.
It had only just begun.
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To be continued.