Time, for everyone else, moved at its usual uneven pace—
too fast when they were content, too slow when they were waiting.
For Ren, it was simply… full.
Training sessions blurred into dates, blurred into manor meetings that started serious and ended with people slumped over a table at midnight, laughing about something that had nothing to do with politics.
Weeks like that accumulated quietly.
...
Shigune walked more and flinched less.
At first she could barely cross the training field without clutching Poh like a shield, shoulders hunched, eyes darting to every fluctuation of aura. Now she walked the floating platforms alone, each step steady, letting her presence stretch just a little beyond her skin. Poh—once a nervous, gnawing knot of hunger—could curl up in her arms and actually nap instead of trying to devour every stray wisp of energy that brushed its mask-like face.
Sometimes, when she thought he wasn't watching, Shigune would look up at him mid-exercise.
Her eyes would tremble.
Then she'd firm her grip and push through the next movement anyway.
Ren always pretended not to see.
He was proud of her. Saying it out loud in front of her would probably kill her on the spot.
...
Natsume called the wind "hers" one day without catching herself.
It was during a spar on one of the sky platforms. Lightning-glass clouds rolled beneath them, the dragon-bone pillars humming softly with the weight of his Heaven's laws. Natsume's aura flared as she executed a new spear form, wind answering her call with a resonance that didn't come from any Sacred Gear or devil bloodline.
"My wind—" she said, and stopped dead, eyes widening.
Ren laughed from the sidelines, leaning on the barrier.
"Yeah," he called. "That's the point."
Color rushed to her cheeks. She turned away, grumbling something about "show-off cultivation systems," but the next time she summoned it, she didn't take the word back.
The wind listened more carefully after that.
...
Lavinia's butterflies evolved from simple frozen wings into something subtler and far more terrifying.
At first, her conjured ice fairies simply froze everything they touched—good for stopping a blast, bad for not turning your own allies into statues. Now they fluttered through battlefields and training scenarios like fragments of moonlight, seizing only what she willed: falling rubble, a stray curse, an errant spear of flame.
"See?" she said once, cheeks slightly pink as a boulder paused above Ren's head, every shard outlined in soft blue light. "Targeted freeze. Perfect control."
Then she pecked his cheek.
"For at least twenty percent better performance, Ren-chan. That's just how it works."
"Science," he agreed gravely. "Can't argue with the data."
She giggled, half-buried her face in his shoulder, and the butterflies spiraled higher, tracing circles of frost in the air.
...
Le Fay bounced between his Heaven, Vali's base, and London's hidden lanes with a new kind of confidence.
She no longer crept through the manor like a guest overstaying; she drifted in, left piles of books in odd corners, and occasionally crashed face-first onto his couch with chalk on her fingers and spell diagrams still flickering behind her eyes.
The first time she referred to herself as "Ren's magician" in public—a casual aside during a multi-faction meeting in the Underworld—she nearly swallowed her tongue.
There was a heartbeat of silence.
Several devils blinked.
Azazel choked on his drink.
Ren just smiled, eyes warm.
"Yeah," he said. "You are."
Le Fay's ears went scarlet. She didn't retract it.
After that, when she walked into a room at his side, fewer people saw "a small human witch" and more people saw "a magician walking in the shadow of a new Heaven."
The difference in their gazes didn't affect her spells.
But it affected the way she held her head.
...
Rias learned to wield her Throne of Ruin as more than a symbol.
Within her Soul Palace, crimson thrones rose from shattered stone, each one representing a choice she could have made and didn't. Her Power of Destruction no longer lashed out in raw, self-consuming waves; it coiled and unfolded with deliberate precision, erasing only what she pointed at.
Once, during a training match against a manifested projection of her own former self, her current Throne crushed the phantom's power with a single, merciless decree.
She stepped down from the throne afterward, shaking slightly.
Ren had been watching in the corner of her Soul Palace, hands in his pockets.
"You chose yourself," he said softly. "About time."
Rias laughed, a little hoarse.
"I had help."
Akeno's lightning, by contrast, grew quieter.
No longer a screaming storm meant to impress or punish, it sank into each movement, each smile she wore when she pushed herself too far. Her second Soul Palace—once a half-formed temple of unresolved faith and resentment—settled into something calmer, a shrine without chains.
Her attacks didn't get flashier.
They got lethal.
Lightning that once split the sky now flickered just once—and whatever it touched stopped moving.
...
Asia's healing reached further.
She still mended wounds and knit shredded flesh. But under the influence of his Dao and the Soul Palace he'd built with her, her light began to touch deeper things: twisted curses tangled in a soul, vows that had curdled into shackles, angels who didn't know what to be without Heaven's old system directing their every breath.
When she healed now, sometimes the patient woke with tears on their cheeks and no idea why they suddenly felt… lighter.
She'd smile, wring her hands, and tell them it was "just a blessing."
Ren knew better.
The world did, too.
...
Koneko's Immutable Core developed a tail of its own.
Literally.
Her nekomata tail no longer just twitched when she was annoyed; it began to move with a gravity that reflected the Soul Palace inside her—a dense, white core of refusal to be used again. When she anchored herself in battle, the entire field felt like it had slammed into solid stone.
Rossweisse drove that conjured car more times than she'd ever admit.
Sometimes alone, as a stress-relief loop through a conjured copy of a Norse highway under a sky painted in aurora. Sometimes with Asia or Koneko screaming happily in the backseat as she panicked about imaginary traffic rules. Sometimes with Ren beside her, one hand hanging out the window, letting the wind catch his hair.
"You know these roads aren't real, right?" he teased once, watching her check the nonexistent side mirror for the twelfth time.
"A proper shield-maiden follows regulations," she muttered, tightening her grip on the wheel.
"Of course," he said mildly. "Couldn't feel safe without your imaginary turn signals."
Her cheeks puffed up, but she didn't deny that she liked it when he sat in the passenger seat, laughing quietly as the scenery streamed by.
...
Amaterasu began appearing at the manor unannounced.
Sometimes in full divine regalia: layered white and gold robes, hair pinned with sun-motifs, every step radiating authority. On those days, they negotiated pantheon matters over tea: borders of influence, the treatment of wayward yokai, the terms of Heaven's new cooperation with Shinto shrines.
Other times, she arrived in a simple blouse and skirt, hair tied up with a plain ribbon, carrying a bag of convenience store snacks and a question about a new drama she'd "accidentally" binged all night.
On those days, the house's ambient temperature went up a few degrees.
Not enough to burn. Just enough that everyone noticed.
Rias would arch an eyebrow. Akeno's smile would sharpen. Koneko would relocate to the shade. Asia would scramble to prepare extra drinks. The small, quiet sun-goddess who used to watch mortals from afar now sat cross-legged on their living room floor, frowning earnestly at the concept of "season finales."
Ren treated both versions of her the same—respectful, amused, careful in ways that had nothing to do with fear of her power.
The goddess of the sun noticed.
...
Months slipped by like that.
The world shifted under the quiet pressure of Ren's Dao.
The Underworld's old hierarchies bent around new cultivation paths. The ancient nobility who scoffed at his "strange Eastern methods" gritted their teeth and watched lesser bloodlines blaze past them. Heaven's light grew less brittle, more resilient; the angels who embraced cultivation found that faith and Dao were not mutually exclusive, and that a stronger soul prayed more clearly. Grigori's researchers alternated between exasperation and glee as Ren shattered their assumptions with some offhand demonstration, then patiently taught them how to rebuild their theories around it.
War didn't vanish.
But the shape of it began to change.
Factions that might once have reached for genocide as their first solution now paused, glancing toward the man who had erased a god-beast and reworked curses like they were puzzles. They remembered what it had felt like when his Heaven settled over the world like a new sky. They reconsidered.
His women laughed more.
They also trained more.
And through it all—through dates and battles and quiet mornings where he made breakfast with Asia tugging at his sleeve, through late-night talks with Amaterasu under an artificial sunset and casual afternoons where Le Fay dragged him through magical back alleys—a feeling grew in Ren's chest.
A pressure.
Not from outside.
From within.
...
It hit him fully one night in the training dimension.
The field was empty.
No conjured obstacle courses. No spectating girls. Just a flat expanse of pale stone and sky, stars wheeling lazily overhead, shaped by his will into a dome that responded only to his thoughts.
Ren sat cross-legged on a floating stone platform, as he had for Shigune, for Natsume, for countless sessions.
This time, his senses turned inward.
Within his inner Heaven, twelve Fate Palaces dimmed, their radiance folding inward until they were not twelve blazing suns but twelve quiet worlds, each resting in its own orbit.
The Nine Worlds foundation lay beneath everything—heavy, ancient, unshakeable, like the bones of a dead but still-remembered universe. Above it, the Tenth World's chaos-refined flexibility flowed, weaving between them, connecting structures that had no right to coexist and making them sing in harmony.
Three Immortals World's introspective clarity pulsed at the center of his Anima, a quiet lamp that never went out, illuminating truths others would never see. Eight Desolates' ferocious ambition arched over all of it, Dao Fruits hanging from Primordial Trees like stars—each one a road someone else had declared too steep and he had climbed anyway.
His Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique rumbled quietly beneath it all, mountain ranges shifting in his bones; every tendon a chain that could anchor a world, every joint a sealed gate. The Immortal Soul Bone along his spine sang, turning the incomprehensible complexity of his cultivation into simple lines and diagrams only he could read. Chaos energy flowed between Soul Palaces, refined into neutral power by endless Myriad Origin circulation, feeding each world in turn without revealing its source.
On paper, he was stable.
Powerful.
Terrifying, by the standards of this universe.
But the feeling in his Dao Heart was unmistakable.
A ceiling.
Not of raw strength—he could push his numbers higher, he could compress more force into each punch, refine his laws until they cut finer than any sword.
A ceiling of growth.
It felt like a tree planted in a too-small pot. Its roots could still thicken, its trunk could still widen, its leaves could still grow lush and green.
But it would never become the forest it was meant to be unless the ceramic shattered and its roots sank deeper than the boundaries allowed.
Ren exhaled slowly.
"…Figures," he murmured, lips quirking.
The DxD world had been good to him.
It had given him people to protect. Enemies worth crushing. Gods arrogant enough to be entertaining. Women whose hearts burned bright in a hundred different colors.
It had given him a place to build a Heaven and see it reflected in other souls.
But his Dao wasn't just about protection.
It was about walking forward.
Always.
Even if it meant stepping into a storm again.
His awareness shifted—both inward and outward.
The thin layer of chaos between universes brushed against his senses: subtle, elusive, the same fabric his Myriad Origin Scripture let others touch only under supervision. He had used that layer before: to open paths between realms inside this cosmology, to link his Heaven to distant branches of reality, to close roads behind him so certain monsters could never crawl back into the light without his permission.
The Universal Travel Art pulsed in his memory.
It was a living equation: Biblical God's old world-linking seals, Infinity's borderless reach, Great Red's dream-trails, Trihexa's irreversible destruction—all dissected, rewritten, and bound into a new law. A road-art, not just for moving bodies, but for moving Dao.
He had designed it to be flexible.
He'd also designed it to be… safe.
For other people.
For himself?
His smile deepened, lazy on the surface, edged with something harder.
"Guess it's time to take the training wheels off," he said softly.
The thought that had been circling in the back of his mind for weeks finally crystallized.
A path.
Not to a random divergent world.
To a particular one.
Somewhere deep in the layers of his soul, older than this life, older than his first Fate Palace, an old human memory glowed.
A story.
A world he had once known only through text on a screen and the quiet, hungry nights of a man in a too-small apartment, reading about someone else breaking their limits.
Martial World.
Sky Spill Planet.
Back then, it had been escapism: a tale of a boy from a backwater kingdom climbing step by bloody step to the peak of martial arts, defying gods and fate.
Now?
It felt like… home waiting to be walked.
Or at least, a place his Dao wanted to test itself against.
He didn't say the name aloud.
The universe didn't need the warning.
His Dao Heart already knew.
"Lower realm first," he murmured. "Scope it out. No need to knock on the Realm of the Gods' door on my first visit."
He wasn't afraid of Empyreans.
But this wasn't about picking a fight.
Not yet.
He wanted to measure.
To walk the roads that had inspired him in another life. To see how his path—built from Emperor's Domination's fossils and Nine Worlds' bones, from Eight Desolates' hunger and his own stubborn will—would resonate inside a universe dedicated entirely to martial ascent.
His Heaven unfolded around him, threads of Dao-essence weaving into a formation unlike any magic circle devils or angels had ever seen. Essence from Nine Worlds, arrays from Three Immortals, conceptual structures borrowed from Eight Desolates Dao Lords—all combined, twisted, simplified until only what mattered remained.
The Universal Travel Art woke fully.
It reached.
Not along space.
Along narrative.
Along themes.
For a place where the human body was treated as a universe. Where cultivation was not just power, but meaning. Where lower realms birthed geniuses that made higher worlds tremble.
Chaos responded.
The training dimension blurred, colors bleeding out until everything became an endless, shifting gray. The ground under his platform ceased to mean anything; up and down became suggestions, not rules.
His twelve Fate Palaces dimmed by his conscious will, radiance pulled inward until he felt… small.
Not weak.
Concealed.
He compressed his aura, wrapping it tight, letting Myriad Origin recycle any leaking power into fuel for the formation. His Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique locked down, mountains in his bones sitting so still even Heaven's eyes would slide past them.
"Don't want to trip any alarms," he muttered, tone light. "Lower realm wardens are annoying when they panic."
The Immortal Soul Bone traced possible paths through the chaos.
He ignored the ones that led to familiar signatures—the DxD cosmos, its adjacent realms, other universes he'd brushed against while experimenting. He reached deeper, following a faint resonance that hummed along his Dao: a world where martial artists split seas with a punch, where thunder could cross continents in the time of a stick of incense, where an Empyrean's final strike once scarred the planet from one continent to the other.
A universe where, at the end of all roads, a single man stood above heaven and earth, his name synonymous with strength.
Lin Ming.
Ren's lips quirked.
He didn't know where in that vast story he'd arrive.
Didn't matter.
He was going to carve a legend here with his own hands.
The formation clicked.
"Coordinates" solidified—not in distance, but in concept.
Lower Realm.
Sky Spill Planet.
He stepped.
...
The first sensation was… weight.
Not crushing.
Dense.
The chaos gray peeled back, revealing a dark expanse studded with stars.
But these weren't the cold, distant points of the DxD universe.
Each "star" was a world.
Some small and flickering, like dying candles. Some larger, shining steady. A few blazed like miniature suns—great worlds where the laws were thick and the qi abundant, where even lower realm geniuses could reach for the heavens.
The lower realm's billion boundless worlds spread out before him like a sea.
Martial World
Ren floated in that sea, his platform gone, his body outlined in faint Dao-light that only he could see.
In every direction, worlds spun, bound to an order both familiar and alien. Threads of cause and effect linked them to the Realm of the Gods far above, to wars long past and future calamities not yet born.
"Beautiful," he murmured.
His voice vanished into the void.
He stretched his senses.
The laws here tasted different.
Heaven and earth energy—thick, raw, unrefined. Space whose grain wasn't quite the same as his usual playground. Time that moved with a slightly different rhythm, the "beat" of the Dao subtly shifted.
But under it all, a pattern echoed the Nine Worlds: realms arranged like steps, shackles meant to be shattered, a road carved by fists and blood instead of miracles freely given.
He smiled.
"Found you."
One world burned brighter than the rest in his perception.
Not the largest.
Not the most refined.
But heavy with significance.
Sky Spill Planet—mostly blue, its two main continents like brown-red scars on a vast ocean, each surrounded by four boundless seas.
Even from here, he could feel its absurd scale. A giant among lower realm worlds, wrapped in barriers and subtle formations, watched over by a warden whose duty was to keep monsters out and, sometimes, to keep certain prodigies in.
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Ren narrowed his eyes.
The barriers were good.
Complicated.
They'd stop most things above a certain level cold, especially anything stupid enough to knock loudly.
He had no intention of being "most things."
He let his aura compress further, drawing every whisper of Primordial Saint might, every hint of Fate Palace radiance, every trace of Hell Suppressing pressure into his core. On the outside, he allowed only a thin layer of neutral chaos to leak—enough to register as a wandering anomaly, nothing more.
His presence folded in on itself, becoming a single, quiet point.
He moved.
Not with a dramatic streak of light.
He simply… appeared closer.
The planet swelled in his vision. Ocean and continent curves resolved; storms swirled over impossibly vast landmasses. From this height, cities were dust, mountain ranges scratches across the face of a god.
He imagined the boy who'd once stood under these skies, staring up and daring to dream beyond them.
His chest tightened in a way it hadn't in a long time.
In another life, he had followed that boy's story chapter by chapter, night after night: Lin Ming bleeding, crawling, soaring, turning every humiliation into fuel.
That memory pulsed now, not as a fan's squeal, but as a cultivator's respect.
"You did good," Ren said quietly—to the path, to the idea, to the man at the end of it. "Now it's my turn."
His Universal Travel Art probed the barrier.
It wasn't a wall.
More like a sieve woven from ancient Divine Realm laws, checking for certain thresholds of power, certain signatures of higher realm qi. Anything too strong, too blatant, too marked by above would be bounced or burned before it could set foot on this world.
Ren smirked.
He slid along its edges, letting his chaos layer mimic lower realm energies. He twisted the "flavor" of his Dao, presenting himself as a strange, but not unacceptable, anomaly—like some oddity from a distant boundless world that had slipped through on a quirk of fate.
The barrier pressed against him.
For a heartbeat, it felt like a vast, impersonal eye swept over his existence.
His Hell Suppressing Physique didn't tense.
His Fate Palaces didn't flare.
He let the impression of being harmless sink in.
The sieve probed, found nothing it was designed to fear, and let him pass with a soft ripple.
Warmth washed over him.
Gravity grabbed hold.
He was falling.
Not uncontrolled—he shaped the descent, turning freefall into a long, lazy glide as clouds rushed up and then split around him. The air was thick with qi that made many "rich" worlds he'd visited feel like deserts by comparison.
The smell hit him first.
Earth.
Real earth: wild, deep, alive. Not the tamed gardens of Kuoh or the carefully-calibrated training fields of his Heaven.
Below, a mountain range sprawled like the spine of a buried dragon, valleys wrapped in morning mist though the sun was already high. Rivers cut silver lines through the green. Far off, a city's faint aura pulsed—walls, formations, the rise and fall of countless mortal lives stacked on top of each other.
His Dao Heart surged.
It felt like stepping into a dream he'd had a thousand times.
Except this time, the dream looked back.
He angled his descent, cloak of neutral chaos wrapped tight, and touched down on a lonely cliff overlooking a vast forest.
The rock was solid under his boots.
He knelt and pressed his palm to the ground.
Qi rose to meet him, thick and eager, like a herd of wild horses smelling a new river.
He let a trickle of his own energy meet it, neutral and patient, tasting.
The laws responded.
Here, the body truly was a universe. Meridians as rivers, dantians as stars, bones as mountain ranges. Here, "breaking through" wasn't just a genre trope—it was a rule written into the bones of reality itself.
His lips curled into a slow, satisfied smile.
"This," he whispered. "…is perfect."
Wind rushed past, carrying the distant cry of some beast that would someday become a minor footnote in someone else's legend.
He stood, hands sliding into his pockets like he was just some tourist who'd found a good view.
Inside, his Dao blazed.
He could feel the routes already.
Places where his Dao would mesh seamlessly with Martial World's cultivation paths. Places where his Soul Palace system could sprout entirely new branches. Challenges—natural, structural, inevitable—that his Ancient Ming bloodline and Hell Suppressing Physique would relish grinding against.
He breathed in.
The air tasted of adventure.
"All right," he said softly, to himself, to the world, to the long road ahead. "Let's see what you've got."
...
Ren stood on the cliff until the wind stopped feeling like wind and started feeling like breath.
The planet exhaled around him.
He closed his eyes.
His sensing range didn't "spread" outward so much as settle.
Within his inner Heaven, twelve Fate Palaces dimmed again, their light folding tighter until all that remained, from the outside, was a single, quiet presence. His cultivation base—Primordial Saint, Nine Star Eternal Prestige, twelve heavens, half-complete Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique—curled in on itself like a dragon pretending to sleep.
Outside, Sky Spill Planet unfurled.
Qi-lines traced themselves across his perception: rivers of True Essence running beneath mountain ranges, spiraling up through ancient forests, pooling under cities like underground lakes. Far above, the lower realm's billion boundless worlds echoed faintly, but here, on this giant among them, the laws of martial cultivation beat like a slow, steady drum.
He let his Soul Palaces do what they were built for.
Chaos energy refined by Myriad Origin wrapped his soul sense in a neutral sheath, masking its true weight. The Immortal Soul Bone along his spine sang softly, turning the planet's overwhelming complexity into clean, simple layers: mortal dynasties sprawling like ink on parchment, sect formations humming faintly in hidden mountains, wild lands where beasts roamed and the world's will gathered like thunderstorms waiting to fall.
Overlaid on all of that was another rhythm.
His Heaven.
Somewhere far "above" this world, in another cosmos entirely, the Heaven he'd forged—twelve Fate Palaces fused into a single vault—floated over Kuoh, over Heaven and the Underworld, over all the pantheons that had grudgingly accepted it. Inside it, Soul Palaces pulsed: Rias' crimson throne world, Akeno's web of quiet lightning, Asia's twilight sanctuary, Koneko's dense, white core that refused to bend.
He reached for that presence without opening a path.
Threads of Dao extended from his Anima, thin as spider-silk, slipping into the chaos layer his Universal Travel Art used. One anchored here, in the stone beneath his boots. The other brushed gently against his Heaven's outer shell.
"Time first," he murmured.
This wasn't about clock time. There were no synchronized watches between universes.
But Dao felt rhythm.
And rhythm could be compared.
He shaped a simple test.
At both ends of the thread—here, and in his Heaven—he imprinted a tiny, closed circulation loop. Energy would drip through them at the same initial rate, burning down like two white candles lit at the same moment. The Immortal Soul Bone fixed both patterns in his mind, two crystalline diagrams: one marked "Sky Spill," the other "Home."
"Let's see how fast you breathe compared to mine," he said softly.
He didn't open a full connection. He didn't let any of the girls feel even a ripple.
The last thing he wanted right now was Asia panicking because a thread of his Dao stretched somewhere far beyond their universe.
This was his test.
His responsibility.
Still… his gaze lifted to the sky.
Even as his Dao Heart burned at the thought of climbing a world built specifically for martial artists, part of him remained anchored to that small blue planet and the manor that had somehow become the center of his life.
Rias will pout if I vanish for months.
Akeno will smile like she isn't worried and then fry me later.
Asia will just hug me until my ribs creak.
The thoughts came with the warmth of habit, not chains.
He smiled faintly.
"I'll come back," he said to nobody in particular. "Relax."
The wind took the promise and scattered it over the forest below.
...
He turned his senses toward Sky Spill in earnest.
The main landmass—Sky Spill Continent—rolled beneath his perception like a titanic ring coiled around an inland sea. Far away, on the opposite side of the planet, Holy Demon Continent pulsed like a bruise—a birthplace of slaughter, abyssal energies, and destinies he intended to tangle with later.
For now, he aimed lower.
More precise.
Sky Spill Continent. South Horizon Region. Divine Phoenix Province. A tiny, common country near the south—no sect inheritances, only a fragile little dynasty and a handful of local martial houses.
Sky Fortune Kingdom.
In the scale of this world, it was dust.
What mattered to Ren wasn't the name.
It was the weight.
He narrowed his focus.
"Magic Cube," he called inwardly.
The name wasn't a spell, just a concept: a heavenly treasure condensed from Soul laws, a crystallized will left behind by a fallen True Divinity. A knot of rules and meanings wrapped so tightly that souls changed just by touching it. That kind of thing couldn't hide from someone whose Dao spanned multiple epochs and whose own soul anchor was an Immortal Soul Bone.
He let his awareness sink.
Not into the crust or energy veins, but into the world's soul.
Lights appeared in his perception—points of soul significance.
Ancient inheritance grounds, where old arrays still whispered under layers of dust. Old battlefields, where too much killing had stained the land and left echoes that never quite faded. Tiny sparks where children slept, their futures coiled tight like seeds waiting for spring.
And then he felt it.
Heavy.
Not enormous like a world shard.
Dense.
A single point of soul law so concentrated that, even in the lower realm's murk, it shone like a black star.
Ren's lips curved, quiet satisfaction moving through his chest.
"There you are."
The point lay beneath a city at the southern end of the continent.
Sky Fortune City—capital of Sky Fortune Kingdom. On this vast world it was nothing more than one more cluster of walls and roofs. But destiny sat under it like a buried stone: royal palace to the south, mansions of nobility clustered in the north, poorer districts fading toward the outskirts, and an old weapon shop whose history predated the kingdom itself.
Ren stepped.
He didn't blaze across the sky.
He simply changed what "here" meant.
One heartbeat he stood on a cliff above wild forest.
The next, he stood on a different cliff overlooking rolling grasslands and the dark outline of a city in the distance—high walls, defensive formations humming faintly, towers catching starlight.
Night had fallen here.
Stars pricked the heavens, cold and numerous. Torchlight marked the streets, forming a rough map of the city's rhythm: palace district bright and steady, markets dimming, slums flickering unevenly near the southern edge.
He tasted the air.
Mortals.
Sparse auras of martial artists—most at Flesh Training and Body Tempering, some at Houtian, a few faint sparks at Pulse Condensation. No Revolving Core. No Xiantian pressure looming over the city.
A true backwater.
He let his presence shrink further, from "wandering anomaly" to "nothing at all." Myriad Origin compressed every trace of external energy. His Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique sat motionless, mountains in his bones refusing to quake. If some warden or diviner had placed eyes here, at most they'd see a minor fluctuation of chaos and then nothing.
Then he went down.
Stone accepted him.
He didn't brute-force his way through—that would leave scars in the world's laws and invite questions. Instead, he slipped through the seams between them, borrowing techniques from Dao Lords who had once walked between eras as if they were mist.
Layers peeled away: cobblestone street, foundation rock, packed earth, old formations half-asleep and half-broken.
Below the southern outskirts of the city, an unremarkable cellar opened around him—a cramped stone chamber no bigger than a tiny bedroom. To mortal senses, it was just a forgotten room carved into the earth: dust, stale air, a few rusty chains hanging from hooks, a stone plinth in the center.
The only thing that mattered hung above that plinth.
A cube.
Grey-black, about the size of his fist. Its edges were too perfect to be natural, each line sharp enough that it felt like it might cut thoughts instead of skin. Its surface was matte one moment, then subtly luminous the next, faint motes of soul-light drifting inside it like stars trapped in a deep well.
Its presence made the air feel thicker, as if each breath carried an extra layer of meaning and risk.
Ren halted a few steps away.
Magic Cube.
Even sealed and dormant, it radiated a sense of deep, terrifying law—Soul woven into an artifact so fundamental that it answered more to "spirit" than to any normal concept of treasure.
From what he remembered of the original story, Lin Ming would one day find this same Divine Crystal Magic Cube in the stomach of a gold-backed pangolin he was deboning in the kitchen of Great Clarity Pavilion, setting off the true beginning of his martial path. That meant at some point, this quiet cellar and this suspended cube would intersect with a butchered beast and a desperate boy.
Interesting.
But not why Ren was here.
He extended a thread of soul sense, fine as a hair, wrapped in neutral chaos.
The cube responded.
Not with hostility.
Not with welcome.
With attention.
For an instant, an image brushed his mind—a woman of snow and starlight, her soul so wounded she had retreated into the cube's depths just to persist. Mo Eversnow, reduced to a soul form, forced to fight in that state at great cost, every possession of a body a fresh wound.
The image passed as quickly as it came.
Ren didn't push.
"This world owed you better than being a convenient vessel," he said quietly.
He understood the tangle she was trapped in—sect collapses, saints, ancient grudges, karma that stretched from the Divine Realm to this lower planet. He also understood the man whose fate intertwined with hers, the one whose shadow ran through this entire universe, the one who would one day be called Human Emperor and Dao Originator.
Lin Ming.
Respect—not rivalry—stirred in Ren's chest.
"Your road is yours," he murmured, to the cube, to the slumbering soul within. "This is mine."
He lifted his hand.
Chaos-light coiled along his fingers, refined and refined again until it barely had a flavor at all. The cube's surface rippled as his Dao brushed it—the way a still lake might notice a breeze.
"We're going to do better here," he said, tone mild, eyes cold. "The Eternal Demon Abyss, that idiot Demon God, the saints' invasion, Astral Vault's mess, Good Fortune Saint Sovereign and his precious Saint Son Wumo… all of them are on my list. Soaring Feather God King?" His smile tilted, faintly amused. "She's getting something a little different."
The cube said nothing.
But its presence stopped bristling, as if acknowledging a declaration rather than a threat.
He didn't force it open.
Not here, not now, not before he fully understood how the time rhythms between his Heaven and this universe aligned.
Instead, he folded his fingers slowly.
Space between his hand and the cube thinned, twisted, and inverted. The treasure slipped along that inversion and vanished into his Inner Void—a sealed pocket nested within his Fate Palaces, locked under the crushing weight of his Hell Suppressing Physique and the endless cycling of Myriad Origin.
The cube disappeared from the room.
The air felt abruptly empty.
He regarded the bare plinth for a long moment, then turned away.
No guilt stirred in him.
If anything, his Dao Heart exhaled.
Left alone, this world's destiny would grind its people through calamities written by someone else's pen.
He hadn't come here to "respect the original plot."
He had come to interfere.
To make sure that when humans—and all other beings willing to climb—stood at the peak, it wouldn't be because some aloof will had finally allowed it.
It would be because they had carved that peak themselves.
With their own blood.
Their own sweat.
Their own Dao.
The Magic Cube would be part of that.
Just not like this.