…

Finally, as countless eyes stared at him with trembling hope, Ni Luo revealed the long-awaited truth.

The secret of cultivation—once a mystery belonging solely to beasts and heaven—was unraveled by a boy barely past his childhood. Under the shadow of the collapsing kingdom, he guided the strongest martial artists through the first steps of sensing qi.

The results were explosive.

The talented ones absorbed his teachings like starving wolves thrown fresh meat. In mere hours, several of them successfully opened their meridians, stepping into the Qi Refining Realm. By sunrise the next day, more than ten Qi Refining cultivators stood alongside Ni Luo.

Only one individual failed to sense qi at all.

Watching from afar, Wang Chen felt a flicker of astonishment.

Compared to the outside world, the humans of the Garden of Eternity seemed monstrously gifted—unreasonably so. It was as if the calamity he accidentally unleashed had forced evolution down their throats.

A new era dawned.

The age of cultivation ignited like wildfire across humanity's dying embers. Under Ni Luo's command, the Rising Sun Kingdom rallied. Beasts that once hunted humans like livestock were pushed back toward the world qi sea—territory they had claimed without resistance for centuries.

Five years.

That was all it took for humanity to reverse its fate.

A miracle nobody would have believed half a decade ago.

For this unprecedented act, Ni Luo was crowned Emperor of Humanity, the sole ruler of all human civilization.

But Ni Luo never wanted a throne.

Five years after unifying humanity, he quietly stepped down, turning his back on the palace without hesitation. Once more he set out into the wilderness, the same unwavering resolve burning in his eyes.

He still sought the heavenly pillar—the source of enlightenment that had reshaped the world.

During the decade that followed, Ni Luo's cultivation never halted. His qi increased steadily until he reached the very peak of the Qi Refining Realm. Yet there he stopped completely.

A wall.

A bottleneck.

A barrier he could not push through no matter how fiercely he trained.

Years drifted by as he wandered the vast wilderness, slaying beasts, studying the world, searching for answers.

And still—no heavenly pillar.

Now Ni Luo was thirty years old. The fragile innocence he once carried was long gone, replaced by the hardened temperament of a warrior who had walked alone since childhood. His eyes were sharp, energetic, filled with relentless hunger for strength.

He stared down at the corpse of a newly slain beast, dipped his fingers in its blood, and tasted it. The thick vitality washed through him, feeding his body, his strength, his unyielding ambition.

The heavenly pillar had eluded him.

But the hunger for evolution did not.

"If the heavens refuse to show me the way… then I'll forge one myself."

Wang Chen raised a brow as he watched the scene unfold. For a moment, he considered intervening—offering guidance, perhaps nudging Ni Luo toward creating his spiritual space.

But then he shook his head.

Better to observe.

If Ni Luo's evolution was destined, he would naturally discover a path to form a spiritual space. And if cultivation beyond Qi Refining wasn't meant to exist naturally in this miniature world, Wang Chen was even more curious to see which direction Ni Luo would take.

Whether Ni Luo succeeded or failed, Wang Chen benefited either way.

So he continued watching with serene patience, unaffected by the passage of decades. Years of isolation in the tower had long carved away his sense of time.

For him, waiting was nothing.

For Ni Luo… the next step would define an entire world.

Meanwhile, Ni Luo calmly carved open the corpse of the beast before him—a grotesque hybrid of lion and crocodile—its thick scales still steaming from the battle. His hands moved with ritualistic precision as he sifted through sinew and bone until his fingers brushed something smooth and cool.

A faintly glowing stone rested inside the creature's stomach, pulsing with weak waves of qi.

"Hm… so this is the secret of the beast…"

Ni Luo lifted the gemstone toward the dim sunlight filtering through the canopy. Even with his calloused fingertips, he could feel the subtle warmth radiating from within. It hummed like a miniature heartbeat, filled with condensed qi essence.

A strange light flashed through his aged eyes.

A vessel that stores qi… an organ beasts had refined through endless generations of evolution.

After a moment of silence, Ni Luo settled on a name.

"Dantian."

From that day forward, humanity had a clue. A direction.

Time flowed like rivers parting one era from the next.

Fifty years passed.

Ni Luo was now eighty years old. Even at the peak of Qi Refining, time had carved deep lines into his weathered face. His once-black hair had turned a sweeping silver-white, yet his gaze remained blazing—sharp, proud, and filled with relentless resolve.

Seated upright on a simple wooden bed, Ni Luo looked down at the gaping cavity in his abdomen. There, embedded within muscle and bone, rested a small gemstone—the dantian he had forcefully integrated into his own body. Translucent veins wrapped around it like living chains, pumping blood and qi together in a rhythm that resembled a second heart.

Not far away stood the pillars of human civilization—the mightiest warriors of the Heavens Rending Dynasty. Their very presence caused the air to tense, as if the world itself bowed in respect. Among them stood a man whose features mirrored Ni Luo almost perfectly.

He Ni Yong, Ni Luo's only son.

That's right. When Ni Luo finally accepted that he could no longer progress by strength alone, he settled down, built a dynasty with his own hands, and became its undisputed emperor.

But even emperors could not escape their own mortality.

"Father…" Yong'er's voice cracked like dry wood.

He stood frozen, torn between pride and grief as he watched shards of vitality flicker away from Ni Luo's body like dying embers.

Ni Luo had long understood the truth: the dantian was not something a human body could naturally support. It was a culmination of countless cycles of beast evolution—something humanity had never achieved. Integrating it directly into his own stomach was reckless, desperate, foolish.

Any sane scholar would call it suicide.

But Ni Luo had done it anyway.

And, impossibly, he had succeeded long enough to surpass the bottleneck blocking humanity for centuries.

His body was rejecting it now. There was nothing left to save.

But Ni Luo… smiled.

He had opened a path.

With trembling fingers, Ni Luo lifted his gaze to his son.

"Yong'er… I have wronged you."

His voice was soft—far softer than anyone had ever heard from the emperor who carved hope into an age of despair.

"After your mother passed away… I drowned myself in humanity's suffering. I forgot you. I kept you away from the warmth you deserved."

He took a shallow breath, the gem pulsing faintly inside his torn flesh.

"Forgive me."

Ni Yong's entire body shook. His fists clenched so tightly his nails drew blood. In his childhood, he had hated Ni Luo with every fiber of his being—resented him for the silent halls, the cold nights, the loneliness that carved scars no blade could compare to.

But he had grown. He had seen the burdens his father bore—burdens heavier than mountains.

Still… still, the pain of his youth lingered.

At those words, something inside him shattered.

Without caring about the dozens of great warriors watching, he fell forward and cried openly, tears spilling across the cold stone floor.

The mighty Martial Saint, savior of humanity, was dying.

But the man—Ni Luo, the father—finally spoke to his son.

And that was enough to break him.

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