Ten thousand years ago, the skies bled silver and fire as San Yun, the Chaos Deity, faced the end of all things.
The Devourers—formless nightmares that feasted on fate itself—had torn through the realms, unmaking destiny and unraveling the threads that bound life to time. When the final blow was struck, and silence swept across creation, it was San Yun who stood at the brink—his soul fractured, his body broken, and his divinity fading.
With the last echoes of his power, he forged the Destiny Lines anew. From chaos, he shaped the balance of Life and Death, giving rise to two sovereign Deities. He passed down laws, taught the first cultivators under the shattered skies, and vanished—his name swallowed by time, his sacrifice erased.
Now, the world lay splintered. Destiny was thin, cracked like brittle glass. Cultivators were rare, short-lived. The heavens were silent.
In the bone-dry outskirts of the Weeping Iron Ravine, among rusted wreckage and scavenged bone, a boy named Chu Jon Yu searched for something—anything—that might earn him a half-loaf of moldy bread.
He was no one. No clan. No name in any registry. A ghost among the dying, a rag-cloaked shadow with calloused hands and a gaze far too old for sixteen.
"Scraps, just scraps," he muttered, sifting through a pile of broken farming tools. His thin fingers closed around something odd—too weighty for iron, too cold for rusted steel.
He pulled it free. A sword, or what once resembled one. Its blade was dulled to gray, chipped and lifeless. The hilt was bound in unraveling black cloth, its core etched with ancient, weathered markings.
Yet when his skin touched it—
The wind died.
The air grew thick, heavy, watching.
For the first time in his life, Chu Jon Yu felt heat in his chest—not hunger, not fear. Power.
That night, as the blood moon crawled across the sky, he slept inside a cave shaped like a beast's maw. The sword rested beside him.
At midnight, the sword hummed.
It did not ask permission. It did not speak in words.
It tore into his soul.
Jon Yu awoke screaming, his body arched in pain as lines of crimson light etched across his skin. His Qi network, once fractured and closed since birth, snapped open like thunder splitting wood. Old bones shifted, his spine crackled, his lungs filled with something clean.
The sword drank from him—and in return, poured into him. Memories of wind-carving slashes, of chaos unbound, of a name forgotten in stone.
The rust burned away. A black-silver gleam pulsed along the blade.
Jon Yu, orphan and scrap-picker, gasped for air beneath the light of the blood moon.
He had become a Sword Cultivator.
And unknowingly, he had just claimed the lost sword of Chaos Deity San Yun.
The world did not know it yet. But destiny, long lost, had just started to move again.
Morning broke with the distant howl of wind weaving through the Weeping Iron Ravine. A pale mist clung low to the cragged ground, curling around the ankles of those few desperate enough to wander it.
Chu Jon Yu stirred beneath the jagged lip of a cave. The blood moon had vanished hours ago, leaving no trace but the way his body now felt different—lighter, stronger, whole. He sat up slowly, expecting to see the old sword lying next to him. But it was gone.
Panic rose—but just as quickly, it faded.
He could feel it.
Not in his hand, but within. Deep inside, in that still place cultivators called the Cultivation Sea—a place he had never known, never accessed. His own had always been broken. Dead. But now...
Now it rippled with presence.
The sword wasn't beside him anymore.
It was part of him.
And yet, when he reached out with his awareness, he sensed nothing. No Qi surged through his meridians. No breakthrough, no Core, no golden light. It was as if the world remained unchanged.
"Still no cultivation," he muttered.
But he no longer felt empty.
Jon Yu did what he always did. He slung his satchel over one shoulder and made his way toward the forest on the edge of the Ravine. There were no sects to take him in. No family to protect him. So he scavenged, searching for scrap metal, dried beast hide, or cracked talismans he could trade in the slums.
Today felt like any other day.
Until he heard the screams.
"Help! Somebody!"
His feet were already moving.
He broke through the underbrush into a clearing where two wandering merchants were trapped—one limping, the other dragging a splintered cart behind him. Opposite them was a Level 3 Bonehide Wolf, its spined back bristling with agitation, saliva hissing from its teeth as it snapped and snarled.
The older merchant tripped. The wolf surged forward.
Jon Yu didn't think. He didn't hesitate.
He grabbed the nearest thing from the ground—a broken tree limb no longer than his arm—and charged.
The beast turned, sensing movement, and lunged at him with a growl.
Jon Yu swung.
The branch whistled through the air—not with force, but with precision. The sound it made wasn't of wind being broken, but of space being cut.
The wolf yelped midair, tumbling aside, a clean gash slashed across its shoulder.
Jon Yu blinked. He hadn't used strength. He hadn't channeled anything.
Yet something had cut.
The beast circled warily now, limping slightly. Jon Yu moved without thinking—one step, then another, his broken branch held forward like a blade.
The wolf lunged again.
He met it.
And this time, when the branch struck, it shattered—but not before the air cracked like thunder and the wolf was sent sprawling backward with a cry, a long red line seared across its muzzle.
It scrambled away and vanished into the woods.
Silence.
Then the merchants' shocked breathing.
One of them staggered to Jon Yu. "That… that was impossible. You're not a cultivator, are you?"
Jon Yu shook his head. "No. I'm no one."
The man glanced at the half-stick in his hand. "Then how…?" He trailed off.
To them, the sword had been just a rusted relic. And now, it had vanished into Jon Yu's very soul.
To the world, he still looked like a clanless orphan with no future. No one could sense the sword's true nature—not even the most powerful divine sect elders, if they had been present.
Because the Sword of Chaos was beyond comprehension.
No Qi signature. No divine aura. No heaven-rending resonance. It existed in silence.
Later, as Jon Yu returned deeper into the forest with a few coins pressed into his hand by the merchants, he could still feel it: not the sword itself, but something else.
A pressure.
A silence after the storm.
Like something vast, ancient, and coiled... waiting.
He stopped by a still pool of water, looking into his reflection.
"Did I... cut the air?"
His own eyes stared back at him. There was no answer. No voice in his mind. No glowing runes or visions.
But deep within, in the stillness of his Cultivation Sea, the sword pulsed softly.
Not a weapon of the present. Not a tool for war.
It was a remnant of a god, asleep in a world that had long since forgotten him.
And now, it was bound to a boy no one had noticed.
Not yet.