Lin Feng sat on a snowy summit inspiring and expiring the essence of the world.

His breaths slowed down and sped up in a profound rhythm that echoed with the principles governing the plane.

As night and day took turns, his body seemed to integrate further and further into nature till he was indistinguishable from it.

Days passed, weeks passed, as did months and then years as his body grew more and more incorporeal.

One fateful day, when all that was left of him was a transparent outline, with the incisive sound of shattering glass, space started to crack around him.

The fissures grew in numbers and depth revealing glimpses of the dark void beyond.

It was then that he opened his eyes, his pupil and sclera dyed the colour of the void.

For a moment that stretched into eternity, the world froze as he phased into the void, leaving a gaping wound in the fabric of reality.

Noiselessly, the rent imploded, taking a huge chunk of the mountain with it.

The surrounding air rushed in to the vacuum, giving rise to strong gales that uprooted trees and blew loose soil into the crater.

Ripples from the implosion spread across the world, letting all strong enough to perceive it know that one of their ranks had stepped into the legendary Shattered Void realm.

The Grand Architectural Sect was especially joyous as it was their hegemon Lin Feng who had transcended the world.

…

In the infinite darkness of the Void, protected from its encroachment by a thin layer of his newly developed Void Force, Lin Feng floated in search of another world to explore.

The Grand Cultivation Continent was a mid-level plane of existence and as such, could not support Shattered Void Cultivators.

Thus, ascending inevitably meant bidding goodbye to one’s homeland.

 In the ten years he had spent touring the world, preparing for his breakthrough, he had put down his attachment to the soil which had birthed him.

In the last moments of his breakthrough, he had injected the majority of his nascent Void Force into the world to help it expand, resolving the last of his Karma.

So, he floated in the infinite darkness, searching for his new home.

…

A rip in the fabric of reality opened over a vast desert and out of it tumbled a naked man.

Large swathes of his skin had been corroded by something and sloughed off, leaving him in an extremely pitiful state.

As he flopped onto a sand dune, unmoving, the spatial crack winked out of existence.

The space around the body seemed to shimmer and warp as slowly, it sank into the sand.

After an hour, there were no traces of his presence.

…

Shin stealthily traversed the dunes as he kept tabs on the army of the tree-huggers with his sensory jutsu.

Today’s offensive was to be led by Jiraiya, his sagacious frogginess himself. Thus, the fourth Kazekage had prepared a nasty surprise for them.

He chuckled inwardly as he imagined the looks on their faces when they realized that they would have to fight the one-tails in the desert.

A wave of chakra rife with malice and oppression washed over him and he shuddered. It had begun.

Shin activated his sensory jutsu. The wind around him enlivening as it carried tidings from the battlefield to him.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

It was a massacre. While Jiraiya fought valiantly against the tailed beast, containing its rampage, Chiyo and her army of puppets laid into the Konoha army, cutting through them like a knife through butter.

Suddenly, the sand beside his feet trembled and a desiccated arm stretched out from it.

Startled, the shinobi leapt backwards to take some distance from the threat.

Another arm, followed by a head, a torso and then a pair of legs slowly emerged from the sand.

The state of the body was horrifying. Large amounts of skin had peeled off revealing the quivering muscle underneath.

An eyelid and a chunk of its right cheek was missing revealing the interior of its mouth which was leaked sand through the gap.

Only patches of its hair were left.

Despite being a toughened shinobi of the sand who had roamed the battlefield for much of his young life, Shin found it hard to keep his bile down.

Reflexively, he threw a kunai at the abomination.

The creature did not react as the sharpened piece of metal flew towards it.

Just as he ridiculed himself for his irrational fear of a weak opponent, Shin’s eyes widened in surprise.

The knife had stopped inches from the creature upon colliding with a shimmering field of force. It slowly distorted as it was twisted by the field into a metallic pretzel.

With a soft ‘thump’, the unrecognizable lump of metal dropped on the ground.

The creature turned its attention to him and he looked into its eyes.

They were a solid black, the darkness of the Void given form.

Then, he knew no more.

…

Absorbing the essence of the warrior… no shinobi, as they were called here, helped him repair some of the damage caused by his extended stay in the Void.

The memories he got from his soul told him where he was and what was going on in this realm.

Expanding his senses and attuning them to the frequency of this world’s energy, he could perceive every detail of what was going on for miles around him.

Not too far away, a battle was going on. One of many in the course of the Third Shinobi World War.

The key figures were a large sentient mass of world vitality… although the locals were under the misconception that it was made of chakra, the local equivalent of internal energy, facing off against a man fused with two toads who were helping him synchronize with the vitality of the world, albeit extremely crudely, causing him to partially turn into a toad.

Taking a deep breath, he could feel the strength of this world.

It was a low rank plane, not even strong enough to reject his entry into it from the void.

Although a lot of the reasons for his easy entry came from him cutting his Karma with his home world, leaving him unaffiliated.

A move which had also weakened him enough that he had almost died in the Void.

Also, it seemed that someone from a mid-rank plane had already visited this world and terra formed it once in order to harvest its strength and expand themselves so that they could impact the barrier of a high rank world.

He looked up at the moon. It seemed that they had failed.

It would be better to be more discreet.

But, for now, discretion could wait. He needed his first energy supplement in order to heal from his injuries and reach a suitable power level to move unhindered in this plane.

It seemed an opportunity was right in front of him.

Calling upon the last of his Void Force, and mixing it with the world vitality around him, he pinched his fingers in a law seal.

The space around him in a ten-metre radius converged into his palm and formed a small transparent globe.

The wind howled as it rushed in to take its place.

Lin Feng stepped forward, ignoring the intervening distance and appeared right behind the rampaging tailed beast and slammed the orb into its back.

For a moment, the world lost its colour as with a desperate howl, the soul of the tailed beast was extracted and locked into the spatial prison.

Its gigantic sand body collapsed revealing a monk in its forehead. The former host of the beast twitched and died in his sleep as the vast chakra was ripped from his body.

The sounds of battle stilled as everyone focused their attention on the walking corpse which had just sealed a tailed beast.

Both armies backed off from him as they maintained the highest state of alert.

Oblivious to their vision, Lin Feng swallowed the orb which now had golden soul smoke floating in it.

For a moment nothing happened and the only sounds except for the howling of the desert winds were the nervous gulps of the shinobi as they tried to assess what monster they would have to face.

Due to his impetuous nature and stemming from a confidence in his strength, Jiraiya jumped down from a large toad and made his way towards him.

He was on high alert as even at such close proximity, his sage mode could not detect the walking corpse. It was as if there was a gap in the very world.

Before he could make it halfway, an extremely strong pressure exploded out of the creature. Its wounds healed at a pace visible to the naked eye. Skin and hair regenerated leaving behind an extremely handsome man in the prime of his youth.

The changes didn’t stop there. His hair changed from black to a dull gold and blue patterns similar to the ones on the tailed beast proliferated all over his naked form.

And when he opened his eyes, in the canvas of darkness, was a golden iris with a diamond shaped pupil. The same eyes that had belonged to the tailed beast.

The man smiled and the desert seemed to smile along with him.

Lin Feng took a step back, merging into the world. His parting words seemed to come from every grain of sand in the desert.

“We shall meet again.”

…

After an extended period of silence, Jiraiya burst out with the question that had been plaguing everyone’s mind.

“What the fuck did he just say?”

It seems that in his hurry to make a dramatic exit, our hero had forgotten that to the natives, his mother tongue was a bunch of gibberish.

Personally, I’d say it was the difference in the number of vowels.