Heaven was silent.
Not the sacred silence praised in scriptures, nor the tranquil stillness of enlightenment—but a broken quiet, the kind that followed catastrophe, when reality itself needed time to remember how to breathe.
The Heavenly Tribunal no longer existed.
What remained was a scar.
A vast fracture stretched across the sky, where golden laws had once interlocked in perfect harmony. Now they hung in disarray—cracked runes bleeding light, Mandate Threads drifting loose like severed veins. Fragments of judgment platforms dissolved into motes of fading authority, raining down upon the mortal world below.
In the lower realms, cultivators knelt in terror.
No one spoke.
No one dared.
Those who had witnessed the Tribunal's collapse felt something far worse than fear clawing at their hearts.
Doubt.
Within the highest layer of Heaven, alarms rang.
Not bells.Not sound.
Conceptual alarms—vibrations in causality itself.
The Heavenly Records Pavilion shook as endless jade tablets rattled violently on their shelves. Clerks of fate, beings formed entirely from karmic script, stumbled as lines of destiny rewrote themselves mid-inscription.
"Stabilize the records!"
A senior Heavenly Clerk raised both hands, divine ink flowing from his fingers as he tried to restore order. Before him, a floating tablet burned red-hot.
—ERROR——MANDATE BREACH——UNREGISTERED VARIABLES DETECTED—
That alone was impossible.
Every existence, from mortal to immortal, was born within Heaven's calculations. Even anomalies followed patterns. Even demons obeyed karma.
But now—
Five entries refused to settle.
"No…" the clerk whispered. "Their names—"
One tablet cracked.
Another shattered completely.
Where names should have been, there was nothing but scorched emptiness.
"They are not erased," another clerk said shakily. "They are… unwriteable."
The Pavilion fell into chaos.
Far above, within the Mandate Observers' Domain, streams of prophetic light collided violently. Countless futures overlapped, contradicted, then collapsed into void.
An Observer screamed as fate backlash tore through his form, unraveling centuries of cultivation in an instant.
"The threads won't align!"
"Cause and effect are looping!"
"This shouldn't be possible—!"
At the center of the chamber, the Chief Mandate Observer stood frozen, staring at a single fractured vision hovering before him.
In it, five silhouettes walked away from a burning sky.
"No…" he murmured. "This future was sealed."
He clenched his fists.
"Seal it again."
Golden formations activated. Thousands of fate arrays spun simultaneously, attempting to overwrite deviation with brute authority.
They failed.
The vision did not disappear.
Instead, it looked back.
The Observer staggered, blood pouring from his eyes as the vision shattered.
"Retreat," he croaked. "Suspend all future predictions involving them."
A junior Observer paled. "All… of them?"
"Yes!" the Chief roared. "Erase their paths from calculation entirely!"
Silence followed.
Then, a quiet, terrified realization spread through the chamber.
If Heaven could not predict them…
Then Heaven could not control them.
In the Karma Ledger Temple, bells rang in dissonance.
Normally, karma flowed like water—actions recorded, consequences assigned, reincarnation balanced. Today, the flow had turned violent.
Entire karmic accounts collapsed.
Merits vanished.Sins multiplied without cause.Reincarnation queues stalled.
At the center of the chaos, a massive blood-red ledger trembled uncontrollably.
The High Karma Monk slammed his staff into the ground.
"Identify the source!"
The ledger opened itself.
Five symbols burned onto its pages like open wounds.
One pulsed with endless blood.
One distorted the ink itself.
One erased lines outright.
One rewrote entries mid-sentence.
And one—
One refused definition.
The monk's breath hitched.
"Blood Samsara is overflowing," he whispered. "Xue Luo's karma exceeds measurable limits."
A junior monk trembled. "What about the others?"
The High Monk closed his eyes.
"Hunluan Zi destabilizes karmic weight."
"Kong Yin leaves nothing to judge."
"Ming Zhe alters outcomes after recording."
"And Wuji Mo—"
The staff cracked in his grip.
"—does not acknowledge karma at all."
Fear spread.
This was not rebellion.
This was systemic collapse.
Deep within the Dao Enforcement Sect, elder enforcers gathered around a shattered projection of the Tribunal.
One slammed his fist onto the table.
"Deploy Heaven Punishers immediately!"
Another hesitated. "Against which one?"
The room fell silent.
Against which?
Each name represented a different impossibility.
Against Chaos, formations failed.Against Void, targeting collapsed.Against Fate, strategy became meaningless.Against Blood, attrition only fed the enemy.
And against the Unbounded Devil—
No elder spoke.
Because no doctrine existed for that.
Far away, in the mortal boundary, reality itself struggled to mend.
Mountains trembled as cracks spread across ancient spirit veins. Rivers reversed their flow. Beasts howled, sensing the disruption of Heaven's will.
Above a desolate valley, space rippled.
Five figures emerged.
Wuji Mo stepped forward first, his robes fluttering calmly despite the lingering storm of broken laws. His gaze swept the horizon with quiet detachment.
"They'll be screaming by now," Hunluan Zi said, stretching his arms as distorted energy snapped and reformed around him. "You felt that panic, right?"
Xue Luo laughed, wiping blood from his knuckles. "Good. Let them panic more."
Ming Zhe adjusted his sleeves, eyes glinting with satisfaction. "They're suspending predictions already. Faster than I expected."
Kong Yin stood apart, half his form already fading into the background of existence.
"They are watching," he said softly.
Wuji Mo nodded.
"Of course they are."
He turned his gaze skyward, toward the fractured Nine Heavens.
"They always watch," he continued. "The difference is—now they're afraid."
Hunluan Zi grinned. "What's next, brother?"
Wuji Mo was silent for a moment.
Then—
"We move," he said. "Before they recover."
The air grew heavy.
"This world will not remain neutral for long," Ming Zhe added. "Sects will choose sides. Heaven will issue bounties. Names will spread."
Xue Luo cracked his neck. "Good. I was hoping for a hunt."
Wuji Mo's eyes sharpened.
"Let them come," he said calmly. "Every pursuer will become proof."
"Proof of what?" Hunluan Zi asked.
Wuji Mo smiled faintly.
"That Heaven bleeds."
Far above, within the ruins of the Heavenly Records Pavilion, a final emergency decree carved itself into surviving tablets:
—GLOBAL HEAVENLY EDICT——ALL REALMS ALERT——PRIORITY TARGETS CONFIRMED——DO NOT ENGAGE ALONE—
The names burned into the decree one by one.
They did not fade.
They did not erase.
They remained.
And for the first time in eternity, Heaven was forced to accept a truth it had never recorded before—
The villains had escaped.
And this time,
they were coming back.