The moment Raizen stepped out of the Frost-Tomb Expanse, the sky cracked.
Not thunder. Not weather.
But will.
Somewhere far beyond the clouds, in the upper realms where mortals couldn't breathe and laws twisted like thread, eyes opened.
He could feel them.
Not one. Not two.
But dozens.
Gods. Saints. Voidsworn. Beings so old their names had been lost even in sect records.
They'd sensed the awakening of the Old One's legacy.
And now… they were watching.
Raizen stood still on the frozen peak, the shattered shrine behind him already erased by the void winds. His gaze didn't lift to the sky. He didn't challenge them.
He simply whispered, "Let them come."
The power that now swirled within him wasn't just an increase in strength—it was clarity.
The kind that stripped lies from truth.
The kind that didn't flinch from horror.
He now understood that for thousands of years, every single void cultivator who refused to kneel had met the same fate—silenced, erased, turned into a warning for the next.
But the truth had never been about being too dangerous.
It was about what they might discover.
Void was not just destruction.
It was revelation.
It exposed the rot hidden beneath systems. It peeled away comfort and left only raw possibility. It could reshape legacies, crush foundations, and rewrite laws that even the heavens bowed to.
And that terrified them.
Raizen's thoughts turned inward. He didn't suppress them this time. He let his doubts rise to the surface.
"Am I just repeating the cycle?"
"They feared the Old One, and now they'll fear me."
"But… is that all I'm meant to become? A shadow in their history?"
He clenched his fists.
The world was already trying to devour him. Mortal sects. Immortal kings. Divine beasts. Even gods.
And he hadn't even reached his third cultivation peak.
"This world's not mine yet. I haven't even settled here. Haven't even built a home."
He looked out across the mountaintops.
"Was this what the Supreme One meant?"
"To prove myself… without knowing what that meant?"
He remembered the trial.
The first time he'd tried to "prove" his worth—naive, arrogant, trusting the void blindly.
He had almost died.
His soul had been torn apart. His body nearly turned to ash. If not for his raw instinct and the fragment of the Origin's breath within him, he wouldn't have survived.
It wasn't just power he lacked back then.
It was understanding.
And now, even with that growing understanding, he realized something else:
"I still know too little."
"Not just about power. About this world. Its real history. The forces that shaped it. And what waits beyond it."
Suddenly, he vanished.
Not from fear.
But from hunger.
For truth.
For purpose.
For control.
He reappeared in a region few dared to even map—an unnamed stretch of floating obsidian islands known as the Starlight Abyss. Here, old realms collided and stitched together, and countless lost inheritance tombs drifted out of reach of time.
Raizen's gaze fell on a lone spire in the distance, suspended in mid-air, radiating unstable dimensional pressure.
The Mirror Hall of Fallen Saints.
Said to reflect the faces of those who challenged the gods—and fell.
He walked toward it.
One step.
Then another.
Behind him, the void spiraled. It carried whispers, watching eyes, and divine intent.
But none
dared move.
Not yet.
Because for the first time in history…
A void cultivator wasn't hiding.
He was hunting.