Many millennia later, the Celestial Realm flourished. Towering sects gleamed beneath skies of eternal starlight, and divine cities pulsed with cultivation and power. The memory of the Demon God Realm’s massacre had long since faded, erased not by time, but by design. The God Emperors, fearing what the truth might awaken, wiped all records of the event from existence. Every survivor of the Demon God’s bloodline had been hunted and exterminated. Scrolls were burned, names stricken from history, monuments dismantled. To speak of the Sword Dao Pavilion was heresy. To remember it was treason.

  The Celestial Realm itself was a realm of unimaginable grandeur a plane of endless floating continents, divine rivers of starlight, and colossal sects that spanned entire mountains. The skies shimmered with immortal auroras, and law itself bent to the will of its supreme rulers. At its peak stood the three God Emperors: Emperor Xuān, the Sovereign of the Void; Emperor Huāng, the Lord of Divine Flame; and Emperor Cāng, the Arbiter of the Azure Heavens. It was by their decree that the massacre of the Demon God Realm was not merely committed but erased.

  They did not stop at blood. They moved swiftly and ruthlessly, severing memories, purging sects, silencing witnesses. Great spirit arrays were deployed to rewrite history itself. No sects were spared. When the Demon God Realm was annihilated, every associated lineage and territory was wiped out alongside it. Not a single ally remained only ash and forgotten echoes. None remained to remember. Everyone who had stood in the God Realm that day, save for the three God Emperors themselves, had perished in the annihilation. Hóng Shā Tiān’s final oath "I, Hóng Shā Tiān, swear upon the heavens I will repay this grudge a hundredfold" echoed like thunder across the realms. But even those who heard it did not live long. They were either executed or had their memories forcibly erased. In the entirety of the Celestial Realm, no memory of him endured beyond the minds of the Emperors. Even celestial libraries were purged, and forbidden formations were used to scour the past from the heavens. In their eyes, it was not murder. It was containment.

  Peace reigned but it was a peace built on blood and silence.

  After the destruction, using the last flicker of his strength before the seal took full hold, Hóng Shā Tiān tore open a final rift in space. Not one of pride or power, but of desperation. It was wild, unstable, and unrefined. The divine laws of the Celestial Realm collapsed around it as his wounded, bloodied form was swallowed whole. He fell. From the highest heavens to the lowest world, he fell for what seemed like an eternity, his body burning through countless dimensions until at last, the rift spat him out onto the fractured edge of the Xuān Huāng Dàlù the Mortal Continent.

  Xuān Huāng Dàlù was vast and ancient. A sprawling land of towering mountain ranges, endless forests shrouded in mist, scorched deserts veined with spiritual minerals, and oceans so deep they bordered the unknown. Here, Qi existed but thinly like candlelight compared to the sun of the Celestial Realm. Many factions called this land home: sect remnants, wandering clans, hidden dynasties, and lone cultivators searching for enlightenment. Though mortal, they had built their own legends. Pillars of cultivation, though humble in comparison, still stood firm.

  This was where Hóng Shā Tiān's broken body landed in a desolate canyon cloaked in silence. The land cracked beneath his arrival, the air screaming as his demonic Qi scarred the earth. He lay still, nailed and bound, his divine aura forcefully suppressed by the seal.

  Millennia passed. The world moved on. Seasons came and went, mountains shifted, rivers carved new paths. The canyon that held him darkened and changed. Rock and soil gathered around him, the landscape molding with the slow patience of time. Legends of something falling from the heavens surfaced briefly in distant villages but like all mortal things, those memories faded. No one remembered him.

  Barely conscious upon impact, Hóng Shā Tiān should have perished. His meridians should have been shattered. His lifespan exhausted. But as his body remained motionless beneath stone and time, something stirred within him. Unbeknownst to him, the blood of the Demon God was not ordinary. While his mind lay dormant, it worked tirelessly. It healed. It repaired what should not be repairable. For eons, it nurtured his broken meridians, wove life back into ruined veins, and mended his shattered core.

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  The world forgot him. But the blood of the Demon God was no simple thing.

  Eventually, Hóng Shā Tiān regained consciousness. His awareness flickered like a guttering flame, barely clinging to life. His body, though intact, would not move. The seal still bound him like a prison of fate.

  "What could this be?" he thought, his mind clouded with confusion and pain. He could feel the passage of time in his bones, yet he did not know how long he had been buried in this grave of silence. His body, though weakened, had endured.

  Many more years passed. The sharpest edge of pain dulled, but the torment of the seal never truly faded. It gnawed at him constantly, a divine chain wrapped around his soul. Yet within that agony, a shift occurred subtle, but real. He could move, barely. His fingers twitched. It was the first sign of defiance, the first victory against the God Emperors’ seal. As he lay trapped beneath the world, Shā Tiān turned his thoughts inward, analyzing every thread of restriction, every rune carved into his flesh and soul. It was then he remembered when he fell, the ninth nail had not embedded as deeply as the others. A mistake, perhaps, in the chaos of his fall. It was the weakest of the nine. And weakness... was opportunity.

  He thought of countless methods to break the seal. Years passed as he tested theories within the cage of his own body none of them succeeded. Every surge of Qi triggered backlash. Every attempt to circulate energy resulted in unbearable pain. Eventually, his thoughts settled on a single idea. Simple. Desperate. What if he flooded his dantian with all the Qi that remained? If he concentrated it into the ninth nail the weakest one perhaps he could loosen it, even by a fraction. It was a gamble. If it failed, and his dantian was overwhelmed, he would lose his cultivation base entirely and with it, any hope of recovery. But after millennia of stillness, a gamble was all he had left.

  He thought to himself, Whatever... forget it. With that, he surged every ounce of Qi he had left into his dantian. The pain was unbearable, like fire ripping through his veins, but he pushed on. "This is nothing compared to what I saw that day in the Demon Realm," he growled inwardly. "This much... is nothing. If it lets me take one step closer to killing those God Emperor bastards, I'll do anything."

  With the sudden flood of Qi, the seal began to loosen barely, almost imperceptibly, but enough for him to feel it. He held nothing back. Seconds blurred into hours, hours into years. The pain became his world, but he refused to relent. He had long since lost track of time. All that remained was his will and he would not stop. Eventually, the seal shattered. Though his cultivation base had only recovered to the early stages of the Yuán Yīng Realm (Nascent Soul Stage), it was still an improvement a sign of life after eons of torment. As the first nail burst apart, his Qi surged outward in a wave of raw force. The divine chains that had bound him for countless years shattered like brittle glass.

  But freedom was far from his grasp. The other eight nails remained. And those... they would be significantly harder to break almost impossible. He racked his mind for answers, scouring every technique he had ever known, every forbidden theory he had once glimpsed. Nothing came. No plan formed. The remaining seals were perfect. So he gave up.

  For now.

  With the chains gone, he could now move. His Qi began to stir, slowly shifting the layers of earth and stone that had buried him for so long. Scraps of his once-proud robes clung to his battered form, fluttering in the faint wind that slipped into the cracks of his underground prison. His white hair, long and wild, swayed as he lifted himself from the broken ground. Chest bare, his limbs thin but not weak, he rose hovering gently into the air. He surveyed his surroundings with calm detachment. A great mountain range stretched endlessly around him, peaks like silent sentinels under a pale sky. He didn’t know where he was, only that he had descended into the lower realms. The Qi in the air was thin, barely perceptible to one accustomed to the Demon Realm’s rich flow.

  As his divine sense extended outward, it brushed against something faint an underground spiritual vein hidden beneath a cave tucked into the northern cliffs. His gaze sharpened. "This isn't a bad place to consolidate my cultivation," he murmured, voice hoarse yet resolute.

  He flew north, the wind curling around him. The cave was modest in size unremarkable to any passerby but beneath it flowed a gentle, pure stream of spiritual energy. It would do. He stepped into the cave, its walls rough and cold, the air still with age. Lowering himself onto the stone floor, he sat in the lotus position. Closing his eyes, he began to cultivate.

  Time slowed. The cave grew quiet.

  And there he sat motionless for years.