“Chains do not fear blades.

  They fear those who remember what it means to walk without them.”

  — Li Fan, the Crownless

  A ripple of silent thunder cracked across the Celestial Realms.

  High above in the Heaven Encompassing Court, where the golden-robed arbiters of ascension sat, jade tablets shattered mid-judgment. Names vanished. Fate scripts trembled.

  “Someone touched the Root,” murmured a blind seer, tears of ash falling from her sockets.

  “No,” corrected another, voice sharp as shattered law.

  “Someone remembered it.”

  The Divine Chain, the golden lattice that linked all cultivators to the approved path of power — from the first Qi Refining to the throne of True God — flickered. For the first time since the Dawn War, it bled.

  Li Fan stood among burning roots.

  The ash-black tree — the Sixty-Seventh Throne — was now a pillar of scarlet fire, devouring the bindings of memory and fate.

  Beside him, Thal’Zir knelt.

  Not in defeat, but in reverence.

  “You’ve done what I could not.

  You refused the throne — and that unmade it.”

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  Li Fan turned, his eyes swirling with countless reflections — not visions, but possibilities. Power moved through him now, not as a gift of the heavens, but as the natural echo of his will.

  His dantian boiled with chaos.

  His meridians hummed with a rhythm outside the divine script.

  He had begun to cultivate something older than Qi.

  “I will teach others,” Li Fan said, “to forge their own paths.”

  “Then you must go back,” Thal’Zir warned, voice soft.

  “And they will try to kill you for it.”

  The sky tore open.

  Li Fan descended not in lightning or dragon chariots, but in silence — and silence spread fear faster than thunder.

  He returned to the Mortal Realms first — where disciples bowed to Sect Masters without knowing why. Where every stage was won by imitation, not realization.

  He did not challenge the Sects.

  He walked past them.

  And at every step, cultivators followed.

  No promises.

  No oaths.

  Just a single phrase written in spirit-light behind him:

  “Unchain yourself.”

  In the deepest realm, where Golden True Gods slumbered in nebulae and silence, one opened a single divine eye.

  It saw a mortal.

  A rebel.

  A flaw.

  And yet…

  “He walks the Pathless Path.”

  Another god stirred, her voice echoing across galaxies:

  “Should we erase him?”

  The oldest among them said nothing.

  Because he remembered the last time someone had done this.

  Because he remembered the war.