That was when the Heavenly Dao answered in full. Punishment slammed down, not lightning, not fire.

A stripping. A sentence. Banishment from the plane. It did not cast him into the void. It was worse than that.

It tore his registry out of the order of things. The world would not count him as a denizen of the samsara realm.

No return. No reincarnation. No familiar heaven to bargain with later.

This was what Radeon was after all had been after.

As heaven's malignance etched itself into his soul. The crystal formed a vortex to assimilate the surrounding energy.

Radeon's skin came apart grain by grain. Bone followed, a fine cracking that ran through him.

Even his soul, already under heaven's torment, began to fray at the edges, each breath a smaller thing than the last.

Radeon forced his shape to change. His ribs stopped screaming and started creaking. He became wood.

He lifted one arm and chopped it off like a man cutting his own finger to save his hand.

The branch snapped with a crack. He pressed Fay's soul into the fresh wound of that branch and sealed it in the living fibers.

Not a prison, but a cradle.

Heaven noticed. It did not understand kindness. It understood counts.

It saw its child alive. A branch. A plant. Flesh or leaf did not matter.

Life was life, and as long as something living carried Fay, her fortune could still be called hers.

Radeon felt it then. The curse on him eased. Not mercy. A withdrawal.

As if heaven had paused, hand hovering, unsure it had done the right thing.

His soul, already etched with those hard new lines, began to mend.

The heaven's curse did not only scar him. It stitched him back together.

Heavenly Dao itself tugged him toward the shape he had worn before all this, as if the world were ashamed of what it had allowed.

Strength seeped back into him in quiet increments. The raw tearing in his spirit dulled.

His bones stopped grinding. Even his youth returned, year by year, like water rising in a well.

Radeon did not want this. He waited anyway.

He was a cornerstone setting cultivator, and he had been a hundred and fifty, if you counted the sacrifice honestly.

He felt the number falling inside him, not memory, but measure.

A hundred. Fifty. Thirty. Twenty five.

Each count stole something from the ache and gave it back as muscle.

When the weight in his limbs lightened and he felt himself near twenty again, he moved.

He seized Fay's corpse. With the strength heaven had just handed him, he hurled her at the dark crystal.

Her body hit the crystal and vanished. Not falling. Not burning. Ground.

A single instant of red mist and bone dust, then nothing.

The crystal drank it all and turned smoother, heavier, more complete, as if it had found the missing part.

Blasphemy was what he did. The curse started etching itself again. Then Radeon let himself fall inward, into the crystal.

His soul nested inside it like a knife slid back into its sheath.

Then the crystal of misfortune took a portion of the curse itself, stealing it from Radeon's soul. It formed an endless loop.

The Dao felt it had given the punishment, yet the soul seemed to be unaffected.

Then the branch Fay was in roused. Heaven tried to correct itself again. It was an impartial, broken machine.

Healing came again. It poured mending into him anyway, giving more than Radeon deserved.

The curse did not leave. It only changed how it clung.

The crystal was natural, a thing of the world.

Radeon was human, a thing that should have fit into samsara.

Heaven saw the mismatch and began to calculate. Suffering measured. Error corrected.

It pushed blessings in the curse's place, trying to balance the weight it thought it had misapplied.

Elements came like a tide. Heat, cold, wind pressure, the taste of metal in the air.

The crystal ate them greedily. Radeon felt the power settle, then felt the hollowness underneath.

He was still not a denizen. The plane still did not recognize him. Again the Dao adjusted.

It judged him wronged. It judged him an infant. The crystal was his mother's womb.

A crystalline brain formed in his skull, clean and sharp, a gift given without understanding.

Then the weight above him lifted. Heaven went away, satisfied that the numbers had balanced.

Radeon lay inside his own new body and listened to the silence it left behind.

He had done all of this to exploit an empty Heavenly Dao. No witness. No confession.

This was the regret he carried from a past life. He paid it forward anyway.

Now his eyes could drink the world almost without restraint.

He was a body made of life and death, luck and misfortune, resentment and malice.

Radeon would feel any intention of deceit or violence despite through his new body.

'No record on how to cultivate this physique. I'll work it out.'

He was still within the crystal when he turned his head and saw it.

A huge flower had sprouted beside him, pushing up through stone and unbothered by the vortex made by the crystal.

Petals unfurled slow and sure, pale at the edges and dark at the throat.

The air filled with a sweet damp scent, like rain on warm soil.

He could hear it too, a faint thrumming in the qi, the sound of fortune trying to become visible.

This was why heaven kept calculating, again and again.

Fay had always been full of it. Fortune packed into mortal bones.

A woman who could wander into a famine and still find a bowl of rice waiting.

Comfortable, safe, blessed. Useless for cultivation, though. Luck was not the same as power.

Not until Radeon tied her to him. He had set her soul into a living branch that was connected to his own body.

That was not just a chance. It was a peerless one. A bridge between what could not cultivate and what heaven could not classify.

The Dao looked at the result and drew the wrong conclusion. It judged Radeon as a man who went beyond immortal and eternal, and it decided he must be her lucky star.

Heaven had always been good at counting. It had never been good at weighing the hearts of men.

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