Pain wasn't new to Lu Chen, but this was a different breed of agony.
It wasn't the sharp, clean bite of a sword or the burning exhaustion of draining his World Essence. This was a hollow, echoing torment. It felt as if a small black hole had been sewn into his gut, slowly chewing through his nerve endings.
He forced his eyes open.
Suffocating darkness swallowed him, thick with the copper stench of old blood and rot. The air was sludgy, coating his throat with a toxic film every time he gasped for a breath.
I'm alive, Lu Chen thought. The realization felt cold and empty.
He was lying on a bed of jagged, obsidian gravel. Slowly, with a groan that scraped his throat, he dragged his right hand toward his stomach. His fingers brushed through tattered silk, stiff with dried blood, and dipped into the hollow ruin where his dantian used to be.
The Innate SpiritRoot was gone.
Memories hit him like a tidal wave. The summit of the Azure Cloud Sect. The paralyzing poison Lin Muxue had slipped into his tea—the same woman who had sworn a Dao oath to stand by him. He remembered the mocking smile of Fang Tianyou as the bastard drove a ritual dagger into Lu Chen's core.
"Your providence belongs to the Sect now, Junior Brother," Fang Tianyou's voice echoed in his mind, dripping with fake pity. "The Age of Fading Providence needs a sacrifice. With your root, I'll become the child the Heavens desire. Don't worry. History won't even remember you failed."
Then, the fall. Cast into the Abyss of Despair, the bottomless scar at the heart of the Great Azure Realm where failed cultivators and forgotten gods were left to rot.
Lu Chen's teeth ground together, a feral hiss escaping his parched throat. He clawed at the sharp stones beneath him. He had bled for that sect. He had loved that woman with everything he had. And they had harvested his talent, his luck, and his future like common wheat.
As he clenched his fist, something sharp bit into his palm.
Lu Chen shifted, stifling a scream as his shattered meridians protested. He felt for the object. It was cold—unnaturally so—sucking the remaining warmth from his skin. He pulled it close to his face, straining to see in the gloom.
It was a mirror. It was about the size of his palm, framed in jagged, rusted metal that looked like skeletal fingers wrapping around the glass. The surface was pitch-black, reflecting absolutely nothing.
This was the thing he'd hit during the fall. The debris that had somehow slowed his descent before he hit the bottom.
A drop of fresh blood from his pierced palm slid down and hit the black glass.
Drip.
The sound was impossibly loud in the silence. The moment the blood touched the surface, the Abyss seemed to hold its breath. The fog around him went dead still.
The black glass rippled like a pond. Then, a violent, searing heat exploded from the mirror, screaming up Lu Chen's arm and straight into his brain.
Lu Chen screamed, his back arching off the gravel.
Images, ancient and terrifying, flooded his mind. He saw a primordial war. He saw the Heavens cracking open, raining golden blood—the Great Celestial Sunder. He saw the world's luck, once an infinite river, shatter into millions of stagnant, dying fragments.
Then came the voice. It wasn't a sound; it was a weight pressing against 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 stones, gasping. His eyes snapped open, but the darkness of the Abyss was gone.
The world had changed. The landscape was still a wasteland, but it was layered in shades of grayscale. The rocks, the fog, even his own broken body—everything was a dull, lifeless ash-gray.
But there was color.
Lu Chen pushed himself up on his elbows, ignoring his screaming muscles. He looked to the left.
Ten paces away stood a structure he'd mistaken for a small mountain. Now, with his new vision, he saw it for what it was: a ribcage. The bones were massive, jutting dozens of feet into the air like white towers.
But that wasn't what caught his eye.
Clinging to the base of the massive bone was a faint, pulsing aura of brilliant gold. It was a majesty that defied the rot of this place. It felt like destiny. It felt like the favor of the Heavens.
[Qi Yun,] the mirror whispered in his mind. [Providence. The residual luck of a fallen deity. Forsaken. Wasting.]
Lu Chen looked at his own hands. Ash-gray. Void. Fang Tianyou had taken everything, leaving him a hollow vessel. But the mirror didn't see that as a flaw. It saw it as a requirement. A cup can't be filled if it's already full. By stripping him of his luck, Fang Tianyou had accidentally made him the only perfect host for the mirror.
He was the Sovereign of the Void. He had no luck of his own, which meant he could take the luck of the world.
"Mine," Lu Chen croaked. He dragged his broken body forward. Inch by agonizing inch, he crawled over the sharp stones toward that golden glow.
Every movement was a war against his own body. Without a Spirit Root, he was weaker than a mortal. Tapi kebencian di dadanya adalah tungku yang butuh bahan bakar. He thought of Muxue's cold, bored eyes as she watched him plummet.
I will crawl out of this hell, Lu Chen vowed, his bloodied fingers hooking into the massive bone. And I will take every damn thing from you.
He slammed his palm against the ancient bone, right over the pulsing gold. He didn't know a technique. He didn't know a spell. He only knew the hunger the mirror had woken inside him.
"Plunder," Lu Chen hissed.
The Luck-Binding Mirror in his robes hummed with an abyssal power.
The golden aura shrieked. It was an ethereal sound, the ghost of a god's pride resisting a mortal's touch. But the mirror's pull was absolute. The Void demanded to be filled.
The golden mist tore away from the bone and slammed into Lu Chen's palm.
The heat returned, but this time it was different. It was a constructive, terrifying fire. The golden Qi Yun flooded his arm, burning through the gray, dead flesh. It hit his shattered meridians and didn't just fix them—it welded them back together, reforging the paths with raw providence.
Lu Chen roared as the energy crashed into his ruined dantian. The hole where his root used to be acted like a whirlpool, sucking the gold into the center. The Qi Yun spun, compressed, and crystallized.
It wasn't a new Spirit Root. It was something else. A foundation built not of talent, but of stolen destiny. A Void Root.
The whole thing took seconds, but to Lu Chen, it felt like centuries of torture and rebirth.
When the gold finally faded, the massive skeleton beside him crumbled. Without the providence holding it together, the god's bones turned into a mountain of gray dust.
Lu Chen lay panting. Then, slowly, he pushed himself up.
He stood.
His legs were shaking, his robes were rags, and he was covered in dried blood. But the hollow ache in his center was gone. In its place was a dark, thrumming vortex of energy. He clenched his fist. He could feel it—the faint whisper of World Essence answering him. He was back in Qi Refinement. It was a fraction of his old 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 turned into a cold, echoing sound that bounced off the Abyss walls.
"Fang Tianyou. Azure Cloud Sect. You want to hoard the world's luck? Good. Keep it warm for me."
Crack.
The laugh died in his throat. Lu Chen spun around, his senses sharper than ever.
From the shadows of the bone dust, a shape emerged. It was the size of a horse, walking on six scythe-like legs. Its body was a mass of leathery muscle, but its head was a nightmare—a smooth, eyeless dome split by a vertical maw with hundreds of needle-teeth.
A Nether-Gouger. A scavenger of the Abyss, warped by the miasma. The shift in Qi Yun had drawn it here.
Lu Chen had no sword. He had no techniques he could use without shattering his new Void Root. He was unarmed against a beast that feasted on the corpses of Golden Core cultivators.
But as the beast hissed, spraying acidic spit, Lu Chen's vision shifted.
Through the Luck-Binding Mirror, the monster turned gray. And right in the center of its chest, pulsing with a faint, dirty-yellow light, was a thread of Qi Yun. Small. Likely taken from the lucky cultivators it had eaten over the years.
It was weak. But it was luck.
The Nether-Gouger shrieked and launched itself into the air, its claws aiming to tear Lu Chen in two.
Lu Chen didn't move. He didn't flinch. He raised his bare, bloodstained hand, eyes locked on that yellow thread of destiny.
"More," Lu Chen smiled.
"Plunder."