“Weakness is the highest sin.”

-Wei An Wei, the Realmbreaker

1

The Betrayal

The world was burning, and all Young Master Wei An Wei could do was watch.

The skies over his sect were coming asunder, tearing as if paper. The sun and clouds were banished from sight, and in their place spread vast rifts for more demons to spill through. Fire flooded down upon the earth, hammering against cracking defensive arrays projected over the sect in haste.

Beyond the peeling of existence loomed a gargantuan, vague structure drawing closer every second.

None had been prepared for this moment—it should have been an impossibility. The protections woven over their world should have exorcized all demons that dared enter their atmosphere, thanks to vast and sprawling branches of their Everblossoms. Such was the reason their world was called Evernest, for the awakened trees shrouded them from the peering eyes and slavering fangs of heaven. But here and now the hells spilled forth, spawning their hordes directly upon the mountain fortress of the Drowned Sky Sect.

The heart from which the Everblossoms flourished.

Cultivators fought alone and in formation, directing animated weapons to spear through swarms of screaming insects, obliterating demonic leviathans trying to squeeze through the tightness of the rifts. Even unprepared, a cultivator remained a cultivator; they were already set upon defying the laws of heaven, what dread did they hold for the legions of hell?

But where valor and virtue shone bright, the honest fact of the matter was that they were but a sinking island trying to fight off an encroaching sea. Cultivators fought, holding their pockets of resistance until the swarms swept over them, and then deliberately invoked tribulation by reaching beyond the expanse of this world—nakedly tried to steal might from the heavens one final time.

Primordial lightning lashed through existence, carving swaths of reality away into nothingness.

The demons kept coming.

Wei fled toward his home, pushing past fleeing disciples and families. He escaped into the deepest rungs of the mountain hold as cultivation-forged symbols went out one after another as the final layer of protections crumbled away. The linked houses here belonged to the hundred-names—the Pathless mortals that have served their sect faithfully for centuries.

He needed to get home. He needed to get to his parents. They would know what to do. Or at least they could die together as a family.

Already, Wei could see stalking shadows hunting them, laughing shapes made from the fabric of shadows pulling people off into the darkness. Between the streets, the spiritually awakened Everblossom trees were burning—screaming—their radiant petals of violet and red vanishing, consumed by fire and made ash. The sprawling channels passing between each home ran still, but flowed as blood rather than water.

Each witnessed defilement bade a sickness to rise within Wei. But he faced the world that was, he accepted the horror as a cultivator should. He pressed on.

He became a blur of violence and urgency, smashing through walls and leaping over collapsed bridges. Only one goal ruled his mind: he needed to reach the mansion.

With each passing second, his heart ached with thirst. His cultivation was running dry. He would need to meditate and center himself when he reached the mansion. As he passed the final layer of houses, leaving fleeing mortals and shattered demons in his wake, his heart swelled with relief as he laid eyes upon his home.

The joy in him faded, however, as along the pearl-inlaid pathway leading to his home, he watched hellish dogs tear into an old man. The man’s robes were soaked through with blood, and his face was savaged. Wei barely recognized him as he gasped and shuddered, kicking at the three hellhounds digging their snouts into his guts.

It was his beard that Wei recognized. Flowing and white, with a fashionable curl at the end. “Master Mou Ze!”

He tore across the open path leading to his home, and the dogs froze—pulled their bloodied faces from Mou Ze’s eviscerated body. His eyes fell upon Wei, and he swallowed a mouthful of blood as he managed a final grin. Essence rose from his body. Rose high like a cerulean tower reaching through the mountain, reaching past the arrays, the nest, past even the open rift looming above them.

He reached, and Wei sensed what he was doing. “No!”

The dogs managed their first step toward Wei when a sudden shudder pulsed down Mou Ze’s Spirit, disrupting the essence that composed his being. He had touched something far beyond. He had reached beyond the confines of this realm and alerted something that existed within the ascended realm.

A bolt of energy shaped from monochrome lanced down from a place unseen. Wei felt even before it arrived. It speared into his senses like an impossible weight, and pierced clean through the mountain as if the stone wasn’t even there. As lightning colored from shifting resplendence and shadow struck Mou Ze, the hellhounds caught in its wake as well, consuming all four of their forms in a flash of brilliance.

A shockwave of force swept out across the sect. Gone was Master Mou Ze. Gone were the hounds devouring him. Gone was a good few meters of ground beneath where they were.

To invoke tribulation was to be unmade by the heavens. All cultivators knew this. All cultivators knew, and Mou Ze chose nothingness rather than risk Wei. The young master stared at the hollow depression dotting the ground for a heartbeat and repressed the tearing inside of him.

Grief was a weakness he had neither time nor want to indulge.

Springrise Mansion was named so because of its composition. Created by Wei Jing Quan, Matriarch of the Drowned Sky Sect, some seven centuries ago, it resembled the joining of several Everblossom trees molded together, forming walls and rooms with their trunks while branches continued to climb, spearing through even the stone of their mountain stronghold itself. Upon the wood burned scripts infused with the essence of cultivation, and they invoked commands directly upon one’s will.

A creeping question gnawed at Wei, then. Why hadn’t his parents reacted if their home was still intact? He could still sense the essence rippling from the Everblossoms, flowing across their sect. Why hadn’t they shrunken the perimeter’s defenses before expanding it once more to banish the scourge?

The moment he plunged into the inner courtyard, he knew something was wrong. The mansion was silent and empty. Wei never remembered it being so. He thought about calling out, but thought better of it. He didn’t know what threats might be lurking, despite how intact it seemed. Taking a moment to center himself, he planted a hand against a passing branch of wood and exhaled.

All cultivators knew how to meditate. Such was how one centered themselves in the turbulent sea that was the world, drew in the currents of discord before refining it, nourished their spirits by purifying chaos into order. Though but a youth of fifteen years, Wei’s highest blessing by birthright and training had been focus. Unshakable focus.

His mind emptied with a thought, and he found himself hovering in a miasma of chaos. Streams of flowing essence washed through the Everblossoms around him, and their voluminous puissance made the gray haze that colored his spirit seem little more than contaminated swill.

His masters often told him that he was a gifted—a generational talent. Though such was what they said, he didn’t know how that could be true when his mother and father were capable of producing such purity through their cultivation. Though his spirit thirsted, he controlled himself, and internalized the essence into his Nascent Spirit.

Moments of calm presented instances of greatest danger to a cultivator, for they were the refiners of existence. Many a disciple had reached beyond the expanse of this realm before they were ready, sought to steal spiritual essence from the world beyond—a world where the ascended, gods, and titans lurked.

Time and time again, Wei felt lured to claim more than he should. Time and time again, he resisted it.

Where most disciples his age were two stages behind, struggling to set their foundations, Wei had awakened his Nascent Spirit just two days prior to the invasion—and taken his first true step on the climb to ascension.

It was supposed to be a cause worth celebrating. His mother even granted him one of her rare smiles. Now, he would settle for getting out of this mess alive.

Drawing essence from the Everbloom, he ignored the feeling of guilt as the complexities of his parents’ spirits dissolved upon greeting his, colors vanishing into a dull blue. Filled, he exhaled and returned to the world.

The mansion was still silent, still empty. A string was pulling up at his guts, and a drum of dread hammered in his chest.

He strode forth through the courtyard. The wings to his left and right had their door closed. Wei frowned as he wondered where the animated constructs were, but pressed forward, seeking the central quarters where he and his parents spent their nights.

Yet, the main house’s door was halfway ajar, its brass, ring-shaped handle twisted slightly as if released mid-pull. Gathering his courage, Wei pushed the door open and stepped forth.

And stopped dead with a single step.

Before him on the ground lay a severed head, its eyes still open, the irises bright green, the mouth slightly ajar. Its hair remained tied in neat tassels, with a crystalline hairpin holding it in place—something his father had gifted his mother during their courtship.

Seconds passed, and Wei stared on, mind unable to process the scene before him. Somewhere deep inside, he knew he was staring at his mother’s decapitated head, and a trail of blood led but a few strides beyond where her body lay unmoving. Over it stood his father, one of the man’s palms pressed against the trunk of a sprawling tree, channeling the will of his spirit through its branches.

In his other hand shimmered a Shapeless Blade, only made visible because of the blood coating its length.

Blood.

His mother’s blood.

Reality slammed down upon Wei like a hammer greeting an anvil, breaking him from his fugue. He broke into motion, taking his mother’s face into his shaking hands. Absurd as it was, he reached into her using his spirit, yearning to find something there.

A shade of color.

A semblance of life.

Nothing.

Just emptiness.

Just death.

A noise escaped Wei before he could stop it. There was no coherence to the note, no meaning besides pain. His mother would never watch him train again, instruct him, smile at him, chide him for bullying the outer court disciples, or slap his hand for forgetting decorum when they ate together.

His mother was gone.

His mother was gone.

His mother was gone.

And his father killed her.

Something inside Wei shattered. What was a cry of grief broke into a note of incomprehensible rage. “Why?” he said, barely whispering the word. “Why?”

He watched his father’s reel back from the tree, spinning to bring his blade to bear. The man froze as he faced Wei, his face an ashen mask of misery, eyes red from weeping.

For a passing heartbeat, they stood there, the father with a technique pointed at his son, the son holding the remains of his mother for the last time.

People often said he resembled his father more than his mother. Aside from inheriting the hue of her eyes, father and son shared most other features—strong jaw, pronounced bones, wild, flowing hair. Somehow, that made this all hurt infinitely worse.

“Why?” Wei managed again, a growl seeping into his voice this time.

The man before him sagged with exhaustion as he looked upward and away from Wei. “I did all that you asked… not him too. You said you would—I did as you asked!” The shout that erupted from Yu Wu Wen was uncharacteristic of him. He was a figure defined by calmness and focus. But the creature before Wei was nothing but weariness and fury. With words spoken, his father crumbled in on himself and sighed. “You said I wouldn’t need to make this choice. You said he would never lay eyes on me again.”

It took Wei a second to realize his father was speaking to him. “What? What are you talking about? Why did you—”

“There was no choice,” Yu Wu Wen repeated, all expression vanishing from his face, focus reasserting itself. “This was a moment demanded by a will beyond our own. I am sorry, Wei. I did not want this. But it matters so little what we want.”

Wei’s confusion only grew with each passing word. He didn’t even realize that he had placed his mother’s head down on the ground as he staggered close to his father. His head was spinning, red was creeping in the corner of his vision, his fists clenched and unclenched, tightening in pace to the thundering in his heart.

Stolen story; please report.

“I will not make you suffer,” Yu Wu Wen said, stifling a quiver. “I will not. That is all I can give you. I didn’t—”

But Wei was on him first, a son seeking the life of his father to avenge his mother; a Nascent Spirited boy facing a master on the verge of true ascendancy—the eighth and final step before one became an immortal proper.

In the end, it was as if a worm trying to claim the life of a hawk.

Wei blurred, channeling every bit of his essence into his speed. He strode and pivoted right, sought to provoke his father into missing a strike. But Yu Wu Wen was no outer disciple fool, and skill was the smallest gulf between father and son. Wei might as well have been standing still when his father drove his Shapeless Blade through his heart.

The boy lurched. His mouth filled with copper, and his heart—the muscle containing his Nascent Spirit—shrieked as it struggled to beat. His father’s face contorted in repressed horror as he banished his blade, stumbling back as he took in his deed. Blood welled out from Wei’s chest, painting the whites of his broad and gushing down his body. He coughed a spray of crimson phlegm, mortally wounded, mind dangling at the precipice of madness, spirit punctured and leaking essence.

“I’m sorry,” Yu Wu Wen muttered, offering worthless apology after worthless apology.

In that moment, Wei learned what it truly meant to hate someone. He didn’t know if it was emotion or the last bits of his ruptured spirit that gave him the force to keep standing, to take another step toward the man. All he knew was that he needed to kill the man.

If it was the last thing he did.

And on the verge of insanity, a plan formed in his mind. A desperate plan that would see their family reunited in death.

Wei cast a glance at his mother’s head one final time. Forgive me, mother, for what I am about to do to your Everblossoms. What I will do to our world.

It was a ridiculous thing to do, but with mind drifting, one final acknowledgment of his filial piety seemed right to him.

Clenching a fist, he strode forward, ostensibly seeking to land a blow on his father. The man just sighed as he dodged, reaching out as Wei crumbled with a choked gasp, embracing his son one final time. “It will be over soon. It will be calm soon. Go. Go be with your mother. She should not depart alone.”

Wei spat blood over his father’s shoulder and gripped the back of the man’s neck with his left hand. Pulling feebly, he forced his father to meet his gaze, hatred matching sorrow as he spoke: “I will kill you for this… no matter how many lives it takes… no matter how far you flee… no matter how high you ascend… I will find you… I will kill you… I will turn all you love to ash…”

And with each word of loathing he spat, his father broke, his expression wilting further and further until he was on the brink of tears once more. And as the man was distracted by his own torment, Wei reached with his other hand and pressed his palm against the trunk of the Everblossom just behind his father.

For one last time, Wei mastered himself—against all odds, he quieted his mind.

No more did his mother’s death matter.

No more did his impending end concern him.

All there was in existence was his wounded spirit spilling free into the Everblossom, and the siren call of tribulation beyond.

This time, unlike all the times before, Wei didn’t resist. Instead, he reached, groped deeper as he ignored all there was to refine himself in this realm, and sank his will into the heavens beyond.

Faintly, he heard a rising cry of alarm someplace distant. But that mattered no more. Deeper still he rose, deeper still he drank, deeper, until he felt another presence reach back and seize him. And then they struck.

Wei felt the blow coming before it arrived—a strike that made all existence shudder, that traveled countless leagues to grant him desired ruin. He opened his eyes, and grinned wide as he beheld his father’s disbelieving gaze. He clenched the back of the man’s neck tighter. “A Patriarch,” Wei began, “should not leave his family. Come with us.”

And just before a bolt of falling tribulation split through the demonic rift and cleaved the mountain fortress of the Drowned Sky Sect in twain, the space around the twosome tore open as a force pulled them both through.

Wei was torn from his father’s embrace, but never once did he release his hold on the Everblossoms.

Roiling chaos enveloped them both, monochromatic essence bleeding into their Spirits, dissolving them utterly. Wei felt himself unravel but managed a grin of vicious triumph as he beheld the same fate claiming his father.

The emotion was short-lived.

Though the brightness that composed his father’s Spirit withered from existence, the man did not die, nor did he even seem particularly affected. Worse yet, the monochrome only consumed him in Spirit but not flesh, while Wei found himself devoured in totality.

Adrift in this miasma—this sea of chaos, Wei strained and struggled, tried to resist the end. His father merely gazed at him, eyes burning with despair. He reached out for Wei, but then pulled his hand back, mouthing something, some kind of apology, some kind of request.

It didn’t matter. It was worthless. Wei didn’t want to hear the words, he wanted to watch the man die. Why had the heavens protected the man even now? Why were they denying Wei even this? His final vengeance.

Just then, the monochromatic ocean parted behind Yu Wu Wen, and Wei glimpsed a flare of the sun along the corner of his right eye. A cleft of atmosphere suddenly manifested in the chaotic expanse, and a shape of looming obsidian, glass, and bronze drifted close from behind a veil of crimson haze. Its four edges were lined with wicked spikes and arches, and the glass paneling along its surface depicted humans nested within demonic horrors.

The tower was an art piece of nightmares, and from it spewed monsters unfathomable.

As it swept closer, Wei tasted fire, brimstone, and sulfur. Heard a chorus of laughter. Saw swarms of demons swirling the skies, massive leviathans coiling around the structure while small nightmares festered around it as bees of a hive. They were thousands. Millions. And they came spilling forth from the many gateways that lined the sides of the tower, some slipping out from painted glass as well.

The tower was immense, so large it possessed its own pull. As Wei and his father were drawn close, they turned in space, and the young master gazed down to where the tower made its descent, and his heart clenched with pain once more. The edifice was plunged through breaking arrays, splitting clean through the grand branches coiled around a burning world.

Evernest. Home. Wei’s home. The tower was plunging deeper and deeper into his crust. Fissures parting continents spread wide, and essence began to well forth from the planetary realm like blood from an arterial spray.

A crackling noise pulled Wei’s attention back to his father, and he saw two shapes approaching the man from the backdrop of the tower. Twin figures of hellish array-scrawled armor approached, their helmeted skulls spewing plumes of fire in the shape of an inverted cross. Their weapons were blades of slick, wet flesh, and their plating formed from bone and blackened steel while six wings spread wide behind them like clouds of ash.

They reached out and took Yu Wu Wen under the arms, and began to carry him him back toward the tower, back into the haze of red.

Wei cried out, fighting his weightlessness to reach the man, howling for any to heed his cries, offering all oaths to see vengeance done.

But there was nothing he could do to reach his father. The crevice parting the monochrome was crashing inward like waves crashing down into a valley, and Wei’s heart burned with incomprehensible rage.

Somehow, for whatever reason, his father had been spared the touch of the monochromatic taint, had been spared of tribulation, had been saved by a force residing in the heavens.

All this, while Wei was condemned to die. All this, while his mother was dead. All this while his realm burned.

Vengeance was undone, and shadow and light began to crawl over Wei’s eyes. His mind was fading, and his Nascent Spirit was almost entirely gone. There was nothing left. Nothing but acceptance and peace.

…

No.

No.

No.

A fury ignited in Wei, a desperate, vicious anger that was beyond thought, beyond enduring. It was a fundamental truth that reigned within him, a hate that needed to be fulfilled.

In his fist was a branch of the Everblossom, still clutched, still filled with essence. Reaching in, he drew from it, refined using his bitter loathing alone as focus. It was all he could do to stop the monochrome from eating what remained of him, but even then, it seemed to do little good.

His body was near blended with the surrounding chaos. In seconds, he would no longer be able to tell where he began, and it ended. There, in wrestling against the havoc of chaos, Wei remembered laying in his mother’s embrace, watching her paint the world outside using a brush as she told him what it meant to strive for immortality.

“It is our nature to ascend, to yearn for the heavens, to rise in defiance of titans and gods. If the price for failure was destruction, then what was lost? When death is fated, then the act of seeking immortality can only be a reward. So. Seek the stars, my son. Know the limitations of the heavens, and rise in spite of them. And above all, let your virtues shine, though tribulations fall.”

And as the chaos pushed inward to his Spirit one final time, Wei reached back out in a final act of defiance. Reaching as far and vast as he could through whatever remained of the Everblossoms. Reaching to seek a proper end befitting a cultivator.

Then, another presence reached out to him. Reached out across the Everblossoms. Reached out and projected an image of a broken shell into his mind—a portrait of another thread of light leaving his shattered world.

Text filled his perception, while incomprehensible power flooded his being. The monochrome continued to pour into him, but a thin threshold formed around his body, creating a border of separation between him and the surrounding miasma.

Drip by drip, something flowed across the Everblossom he was still clinging to and filled his broken Spirit once more.

Potential Host Detected

Organism Identified: Human - Subspecies [Cultivator/Trespasser]

Estimating Foundational Aspect Thresholds

Strength: [Error: Severe Conceptual Damage detected]

Speed: [Error: Severe Conceptual Damage detected]

Mind: [Error: Severe Conceptual Damage detected]

Awareness: [Error: Severe Conceptual Damage detected]

Constitution: [Error: Severe Conceptual Damage detected]

Will: [Error: Unable to quantify host’s limitations]

Source Corruption: 99.8%

Risk of Host Rejection: 0%

Beginning System Integration

Designation: Keter “Concept-Breaker”

Reconstructing host’s Nascent Spirit to Source Core

Repairing Foundational Aspects

What… What is this? Wei thought, a semblance of coherence returning to him.

A new color slithered into the trickle that remained of Wei’s Nascent Spirit, changing the once gray haze into a reflective pool of shifting hues, changing between blackness and white.

Do you wish to live?

Yes, Wei answered without hesitation.

Do you accept this request for immediate System-Symbiosis?

Wei didn’t understand, but he agreed regardless. Anything. He would give anything to see his vow fulfilled, to see his father’s betrayal undone. Yes!

Acknowledged. System integrating with host’s conceptual structure

Suddenly, Wei felt a surge of power rush into him, igniting him in mind, body, and spirit. And there was more power still. More power in the expanse surrounding him.

Warning: Your present Aspects are not Ascended. You are not able to—

Wei overrode the voice with a thought. Everything else was secondary to his father’s death.

Aspect of Will overriding System Ascension restrictions. Using ambient Source as reservoir.

[Override]: System Ascension > [GATE] 1

Aspect Advanced to Conceptual Threshold

Strength Ascended > Authority

Speed Ascended > Relativity

Mind Ascended > Enlightenment

Awareness Ascended > Omniscience

Constitution Ascended > Fortification

Will Ascended > Intent

Suddenly, the drowning chaos stopped trying to consume him. And Wei suddenly found himself able to see through it. No longer was it an incoherent haze washing him from existence, but a membrane of some kind—a threshold that contained all worlds and dimensions. His Nascent Spirit melted away then, but the monochrome pulled back from his flesh as if he was re-emerging from deep waters.

Around him, all became clear. He saw the brilliant flaring of dawn over his world, sensed the distance between him and the burning giant of gas, sensed the distance between him and his crumbling world, sensed the distance between him and his father once more.

Shaking himself free from awe, he clawed at the empty space he drifted in, but still found himself unable to move. He was weightless. There was nothing to push off of. His father was slowly becoming a speck in the distance, and the gulf was closing…

Destroy the Concept of [Distance] between you and your target.

What? Wei thought, not understanding.

Estimating Distance: 2.5 Kilometers

Obstructions: 0

Conflicting Laws of Reality or Adversarial Systems: 1

Threshold Established

Calculating Targeted Conceptual Structure…

Focus your Aspect of Intent on the distance.

Wei’s mind went blank for a moment, and then he did as the unknown entity asked. He harnessed his focus once more and found himself able to project it—externalize his willpower. It left his body in the form of a reaching arm of solidified monochrome, shooting fast across the distance as details and sensations flooded Wei’s mind. When he finally brushed the back of his father, he felt a sudden pressure lash against his will—but no matter. A stretch of reality had already been separated from the whole.

He could feel the shape of existence rubbing against his projected Intent, the very concepts of reality becoming tangible structures to him, as if laws were pillars as if both the material and metaphorical were both clay.

Conceptual Structure Calculated

Concept-Integrity of [Distance]: 80/80 Integrity Points

Break the concept of distance. Unmake the space between you and your target.

Whatever Wei expected to hear, it wasn’t that. Still, he turned his projected will into a fist, and he lashed out, striking with spirit and body both. A corona of darkness traced by light resonated from his body, and its vibration spread across existence itself. Wei channeled a might he never knew into his blow. He struck with his material fist first, striking the gulf of space he held in his awareness. His projected fist then immediately flew forward thereafter, knuckles striking the bedrock of conceptual reality.

For the first time, Wei felt reality crack. Wei felt a concept fracture.

He felt the distance between him and his father quiver. The demons carrying the man stumbled and halted. The man turned his head.

Concept-Integrity of [Distance]: 65/80 Integrity Points

Fractured, but still holding. Wei lashed out again and felt himself lurch forward slightly and unnaturally. Again, he cast out a fist, and again he felt his damage strike a structure rooted someplace deeper than even the realm of the spiritual and arcane. Numbers and text splashed across his vision, with each blow subtracting 15 points from the Concept-Integrity of distance itself.

The feat was mad—impossible. But it was working. Blow after blow, he felt conceptual reality sunder beneath his fists evermore, his hands blurring, his being flaring as he unloaded his fury in a torrent of rage. Through it all, every time he struck, his very being vibrated, and existence resonated thereafter, briefly painting all there was with a monochrome canvas that faded thereafter like an echo. There, he saw a crack forming between him and the tower, the lines spreading wider, deeper.

Concept-Integrity of [Distance]: 35/80 Integrity Points

His final three punches shot out in a chain, and he felt force flow out from him like nothing he ever knew. When the last hit landed, the space ahead of him burst apart in a rupture of colors, and Wei suddenly felt the [Distance] between him and his father break and cease to be. It simply stopped existence.

There was no acceleration when Wei traveled across space, no hint or warning of what was to come. Suddenly, he was right behind his father, two whole kilometers unmade. The next thing he saw was the haze of red sweeping over him, the demons turning, shocked by his sudden appearance.

And his father. His father, with his head looking back. His father, with his eyes wide with disbelief and fear.

“Father!” Wei howled, the hate tearing out from him with the scream. Swung his fist once more—

Warning: Ambient Source reservoir inaccessible.

Unable to maintain System Ascension Override

Defaulting all Aspects to [Foundational]

The blow flopped against Yu Wu Wen’s face as all the strength seeped out from Wei. The hit did no harm, but the dread was still there in the man’s eyes as Wei forced his way past his lethargy, dug his fingers into his father’s collar, and attempted a second strike.

A second strike that never came, for a flash of crimson lightning whipped into Wei’s back and drowned him in agony. Despite the pain, despite the damage, he still held.

It took two more lashes to make him loosen his fingers. Light filled Wei’s eyes. Once more, he was weightless, but falling this time, while his father remained above him. Falling, as the crimson bolts wrapped around Wei and carried him across the tower.

“And who might you be?” A melodious voice whispered to Wei.

He didn’t manage a response as his consciousness finally succumbed, his body failing his implacable will.

And so fell Wei An Wei, the once Young Master of the Drowned Sky Sect, carried by the forking fingers of a storm most unnatural into the embrace of the Claimed Hells of Diaspora; into a den of depravity and virtue; into a house of schemes and sin. Into a realm between realms, a nation between worlds; in pursuit of personal revenge, and soon after, retribution against the System-hosts that ruled existence themselves.

THOUGH

TRIBULATION

FALLS