Prologue II
But before the eggs hatched, the Will of Heaven discovered something that threatened the harmony it sought to create: a heaven-defying race, barbaric and dangerous, that had existed in the spaces between creation. Together with seven individuals of incomprehensible power—the Pioneers—the Will of Heaven waged war against this ancient enemy. The war was apocalyptic, a conflict so devastating that it shook the foundations of reality. Seas of blood flowed across the vast realms, staining the world with the memory of violence.
In the end, both sides were mutually destroyed. Only the Will of Heaven survived, its form diminished but its purpose unbroken. The blood of the defying race, coagulated by the Will of Heaven's intervention and mixed with mystical energies, gave birth to the ninety-nine eggs. For eons they slept, absorbing the essence of the world around them, until finally, they hatched.
From those eggs emerged the ninety-nine Ancestors, beings born at the Heaven Overlord Realm. They were the progenitors of all races that would follow, the architects of civilization in the Boundless Realm. Through proliferation, procreation, intermarriage, and the experiments of powerful beings, new races emerged. Ninety-nine became ten thousand, then one hundred thousand, then countless more.
Then came the Heavenly Tower—the first splinter that had escaped, now a realm of its own with 999 vast worlds. Then came the wars. The Beast Emperor War. The Heavenly Demon War. The Second Beholder War. Each conflict reshaped the world and created new legends.
And then, after 999 eras, the Boundless Realm was destroyed. The war shattered it into countless pieces, scattering its fragments across the Void. The largest fragment became the Celestial Heaven Realm, which formed its own Heavenly Dao and laws, using the Boundless Realm's original laws as a prototype.
But even that realm was destined to fall. Split apart by war and instability, the Celestial Heaven Realm was destroyed, giving birth to the Supreme Heaven—ten realms in total: nine heavenly realms stacked upon each other, and at the very bottom, the Mortal Realm.
The truth of what had come before was lost. The cultivators of the Supreme Heaven knew fragments of legends—whispers of the Celestial Heaven, tales of the ninety-nine Ancestors. But they had no knowledge of the Boundless Realm, no understanding of the ancient wars that had shaped their very existence.
Only the ancient fossils, beings who had transcended Dao and lived through the Boundless Era, knew the truth. They had survived the destruction, hiding in the shadows of existence for countless ages. And they knew that something was coming—a convergence that would take billions of years to complete.
But they did not know about the second splinter. They did not know about the System. They did not know about the boy who would one day shake the foundations of the cosmos.