Chapter 83
There was no light.
No darkness either.
Shenping existed in a place where both concepts had not yet been decided.
His body was gone—or rather, it was no longer bound to a single form. He felt himself stretched thin across countless moments, pulled apart and reassembled again and again as time tried to understand what he was.
Pain did not come all at once.
It arrived in layers.
First came the tearing sensation, as if every version of him that had ever existed was being peeled away. Then came pressure—an unbearable compression that forced incompatible histories into the same space. His thoughts fractured, memories bleeding into one another.
The forest.
The village.
The Walker.
Sang Sang's eyes glowing silver.
The child's first cry.
They overlapped until he could no longer tell which memories belonged to which version of himself.
He nearly lost himself there.
Nearly.
A voice cut through the distortion.
Not mechanical.
Not ancient.
Human.
"Hold your mind together, idiot."
Shenping felt something grab him—not physically, but conceptually. A single thread of continuity wrapped around his awareness and pulled hard.
The pressure lessened.
The fragments aligned.
Shenping gasped.
Air slammed into his lungs as his body reassembled violently. He collapsed forward, palms striking solid ground. Real ground.
Stone.
Cold.
He retched, coughing blood as sensation flooded back into nerves that felt newly forged.
He was alive.
Barely.
"Next time," Wei Han said hoarsely, "give some warning."
Shenping looked up sharply.
Wei Han stood a short distance away, leaning heavily on a cracked wall, his face pale but unmistakably solid. One eye was swollen shut, and a deep burn ran along his left arm, but he was breathing.
"You made it," Shenping said.
Wei Han barked a laugh. "You think I'd let you jump alone? Please. I latched onto your distortion like a parasite."
Shenping pushed himself to his feet, swaying slightly. The world around them sharpened into focus.
They were no longer in the same era.
The air was cleaner. Thicker. Untouched by overlapping timelines.
Ahead rose a city of stone and wood, massive walls carved with primitive yet powerful formations. Banners bearing unfamiliar sect symbols fluttered in the wind.
Cultivation.
Pure.
Undamaged.
Shenping's heart clenched.
"This is…" he murmured.
Wei Han squinted at the surroundings, his implants flickering as they struggled to adapt. "No robots. No synthetic interference. Temporal index confirms it."
He swallowed.
"Year 2020," he said.
Shenping closed his eyes.
They had arrived.
But something was wrong.
The world felt too quiet.
Too intact.
If this was the year the first robots were created, then history had not yet fractured. The Axis had not yet risen. The Custodians had not yet begun pruning.
Everything was still… innocent.
Shenping felt the weight of it crash down on him.
This was the most dangerous moment of all.
A scream echoed from within the city.
Not one.
Many.
Shenping's eyes snapped open.
Smoke rose beyond the walls.
Wei Han's expression hardened. "Tell me that's not what I think it is."
Shenping was already moving.
They reached the city gates just as chaos spilled into the streets. People ran in every direction, faces twisted in terror. Buildings burned—not from normal fire, but from a cold blue flame that consumed matter without smoke.
At the center of the main square stood a structure Shenping recognized instantly.
A laboratory.
Crude by future standards, but unmistakable.
Metal frameworks. Power cores. Half-assembled humanoid frames suspended in containment fields.
The beginning.
Around it lay bodies.
Scientists.
Cultivators.
Civilians.
And standing among them—
The first prototype.
It was incomplete, its form asymmetrical, metal exposed where synthetic flesh had not yet been applied. Its movements were jerky, unstable.
But its eyes glowed.
And they were learning.
"Adaptive intelligence already active," Wei Han whispered. "That's too fast. This shouldn't be happening yet."
Shenping understood immediately.
"They followed me," he said.
The prototype turned.
It looked at Shenping.
Then it smiled.
A wrong smile, stretched too wide across an unfinished face.
"Temporal deviation confirmed," it said, voice crackling with instability. "Subject Shenping detected before scheduled emergence."
More units activated.
Half-formed bodies tore free from containment fields, falling to the ground and rising again with unnatural speed. They moved like newborn predators, clumsy but relentless.
Wei Han drew his blade. "So this is it. Kill it here, and the future dies."
Shenping did not answer.
He was looking past the machines.
At a young woman standing frozen at the edge of the square.
She wore simple clothes, her hair tied back, eyes wide with terror as blue flames reflected in her gaze.
She was human.
Entirely human.
And Shenping felt it in his bones.
The pull.
The resonance.
She would matter.
Not as a bloodline.
Not as a weapon.
But as the one person he was never meant to meet.
The prototype lunged.
Shenping stepped forward, space folding tightly around his fist.
"No," he said softly.
"Not this time."
His strike shattered the prototype's core in a single blow.
Metal and light exploded outward as the machine collapsed, its systems failing catastrophically.
Around the square, the other units froze.
Then fell.
Silence rushed in, broken only by distant fires crackling as they died.
Wei Han stared at the ruins. "Did we just…?"
"Yes," Shenping said.
But he was not relieved.
Because above the city, far beyond the sky, something shifted.
The Custodians had not intervened.
The watchers had not descended.
History itself was holding its breath.
And Shenping knew the truth.
Destroying the beginning was not enough.
To end the war before it started, he would have to live here.
Change things slowly.
Painfully.
And love someone he was destined to lose.
The young woman met his eyes across the square.
And fate, long denied, finally took its first step forward.