Chapter 2: The Path beyond.
Yet even before the book could answer, a memory stirred from deep within the well of Xiao Ning’s consciousness—dormant, dust-covered, and long buried beneath layers of pain and cultivation. A moment from the distant past, from the darker years of his life.
A memory that began with defeat.
It was many decades ago, in the middle stages of his cultivation ascent.
At the time, he had just broken through the Nascent Soul Realm, daring to challenge a powerful elder of the Heaven Sound Sect, a mid stage faction famed for their soul cultivation techniques. That elder’s cultivation was also like him at the Nascent Soul Realm, but the man had long stood as one of the thirteen Grand Protectors of the the Heaven Sound Sect.
What madness had driven Xiao Ning to provoke such a being?
He couldn’t even remember anymore—perhaps it was revenge, or perhaps something else.
He lost.
Not merely defeated, but hunted. The Grand Protector’s soul-mark was placed upon him, and the chase lasted a full ten years.
Xiao Ning fled to the one place even that old monster would not follow—
The No Dao Territory.
A cursed land on the edge of the known cultivation world.