Chương 1: The Sword God's Last Breath

Ch 1: The Sword God's Last Breath The greatest enemy I ever faced was never the Abyssal Dragon. It was my own blood. The heavens trembled. A roar powerful enough to split continents rolled across the hundredth floor of the Tower, and the battlefield beneath it had long since stopped resembling a world at all. Mountains had melted into rivers of magma. Oceans had boiled away beneath black flame. The sky itself hung in fractured crimson fissures, like a pane of glass an instant from falling.

At the center of that ruin stood the thing that had haunted humanity for a hundred years, the Final Guardian of Ephora. The Abyssal Dragon. Its body stretched farther than sight could follow. Every scale reflected darkness. Its wings eclipsed the heavens, and each beat of its heart sent tremors rippling across the shattered ground. For a hundred years, no one had defeated it. No one had even reached it. Until today.

Far below the Tower, on every surviving satellite feed left to the last ten nations on Earth, billions watched in silence. No cheering. No prayer. Only the held breath of a species that understood one simple truth: if I lost, humanity ended with me. The Dragon lowered its massive head. Molten gold eyes met mine, and for a long moment neither of us moved. Then it spoke, and the sound of its voice bent the air around us.

"Human. For a hundred years I have watched them come. Kings. Saints. Heroes. Every one of them died." Its gaze sharpened.

"Yet you stand before me." A tired smile crossed my lips.

"So you can talk." A low rumble answered, something close to laughter.

"Draw your sword. Let history remember this battle." I looked down at the blade in my hand. Chipped edge. Hilt worn smooth by decades of use. It wasn't legendary. No god had forged it. It had simply outlasted everyone else who'd ever held it. My meridians were empty, not a single strand of Qi remained, and breathing felt like swallowing molten iron but I tightened my grip anyway. This battle had never belonged to me alone. I. One hundred years earlier, humanity reached too far.

A team of scientists opened Earth's first artificial wormhole, and history recorded that the celebration lasted exactly three seconds before the sky split open and a single voice spoke inside every mind on the planet.

"Channel-99991 has been registered. Eligibility confirmed. Beginning Universal Ranking Trial." A tower descended from the heavens. No kingdom claimed it. No civilization recognized it. It simply appeared, silent as a judge, and named itself Ephora. At first, the world ignored it. Governments studied it. Scientists searched for answers. Religious leaders called it divine punishment. No one entered, until the first Tower Break, when an entire nation vanished overnight.

Cities, mountains, millions of lives, gone without warning or explanation. Then another nation. Then another. Only then did anyone understand: the Tower never demanded challengers. It simply erased those who refused. So humanity climbed. Not for glory. Not for treasure. Only to survive. I spent forty-three years inside it. Not because I was gifted. Quite the opposite. When humanity first awakened, everyone received a Talent, ranked from D to SS.

Only three people in history had ever awakened SS — Heaven's Chosen, legends before they'd reached adulthood. I wasn't one of them. Talent Awakened: The One Who Walks the Martial Path — {Rank C}. People laughed. Some pitied me. My own instructors told me to quit before I reached Floor Ten. To them, destiny had already been decided. I disagreed.

While others leaned on their Talent, I trained, through torn muscle, through fractured bone, through hands wrapped in bloodied cloth because they could no longer close around a hilt. And one day, the impossible happened. Talent Evolution Detected. No Talent had ever evolved before. Scholars called it a System error. There was no explanation for it, only the fact that my C-Rank became B. Years later, B became A. Then S. Then SS. The world called it a miracle. I called it the result of refusing to stop.

Even after SS, I kept walking, because every summit only revealed another mountain behind it. I gave up comfort, sleep, recognition everything but the sword. And then the System itself changed. Universal Record Broken. Hidden Rank Unlocked. Talent Evolution Complete: SS → MYTHIC. For the first time in history, humanity learned that SS wasn't the end. There was another realm beyond it earned not through fate, but through the refusal to stop. The System gave me a title that day. Sword God.

And a final gift: Eyes of Apex --> sight beyond illusion, beyond deception, beyond the ordinary limits of perception. A blessing that would, though I didn't know it yet, one day bear witness to the worst betrayal of my life. II. The Abyssal Dragon spread its wings. Black fire gathered in its throat, and the space around us twisted until mountains ran like wax. I smiled.

"I only need one strike." Every last strand of Qi flowed into my blade. Then, beyond Qi, beyond mana, beyond life itself I gave it something greater. My soul. The sword didn't blaze with light. It hummed with silence. The wind stopped. The flames died. Even time itself seemed unwilling to interfere. The Dragon roared. The heavens cracked. I opened my eyes. One step was enough. The world disappeared into a single silver arc, and for one heartbeat, nothing happened at all.

Then a crimson line opened across the Dragon's throat. There was no hatred in its enormous eyes when they found mine again. Only admiration.

"... Magnificent," it said, and its head slid from its shoulders. The corpse of a continent crashed into the earth, and the shockwave parted the clouds. For the first time in a hundred years, sunlight touched the floor of the Tower. FINAL GUARDIAN DEFEATED. FLOOR 100 CLEARED. TOWER CONQUEST SUCCESSFUL. HUMANITY HAS CONQUERED EPHORA. Across the world, people wept. Parents held their children. Soldiers dropped to their knees on battlefields half a planet away.

Church bells rang out over cities that had gone silent for a century.

"... It's over," I said, and the sword slipped from my fingers. Clang. My knees buckled. Every last drop of strength I owned had gone into that final swing. The raid party rushed toward me — some laughing, some weeping, some simply staring at the fallen Dragon as though they still didn't believe the century-long nightmare had ended. One figure walked through the celebration without hurrying. Silver hair. Steady footsteps. A face I knew better than my own. Takeda Si-Woo. My younger brother. I smiled at him.

"Looks like we finally kept our promise." He didn't smile back. For a moment the noise of the battlefield fell away entirely, and I remembered a boy no taller than my waist, hiding behind me with a wooden sword clutched in both hands.

"Nii-san. What if I lose?"

"Then stand back up."

"What if I lose again?"

"Then I'll stand beside you. I promise." That promise had carried us through wars, through the Tower, through the deaths of every friend we'd ever made along the way. Si-Woo stopped a few steps away. He didn't speak. His silver eyes moved from the Dragon's corpse to me, and something in them wasn't hostility, wasn't anger — it was distance. A silence I had never once felt between us. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

"... Si-Woo?" His hand drifted to the sword at his waist. Shing. My smile faded.

"What are you doing?" He raised his head, and for the first time in decades his expression gave me nothing at all. He crossed the distance between us in a few slow steps.

"... You're scaring me," I said.

"So even after everything," he answered quietly, "you still trust me."

"Of course I do. You're my brother. The only family I have left." His shoulders trembled, and for one heartbeat I thought he was crying. Instead he laughed... a small, cold, empty sound.

"So that's what I hated most." THUD. Pain exploded through my chest. Time seemed to stop. Warm blood soaked into my robes, and when I looked down, a crimson blade had gone straight through my heart.

"... Why?" My voice barely existed anymore. Si-Woo leaned in close.

"So even now, you don't understand." There was no rage in him. Only exhaustion.

"I was born with an SS-Rank Talent. The world called me a once-in-a-millennium genius. They said I'd become humanity's greatest hero." A humorless laugh.

"But everywhere I went, I heard one name. Takeda Nobunaga. The Sword God. The man who surpassed destiny." He looked me in the eye.

"I spent my whole life living in your shadow." I tried to shake my head.

"I never wanted any of that. I know."

"That's why I could never beat you," he said.

"If you'd been arrogant, I could've hated you clean. If you'd looked down on me, I could've blamed you for it. But you never did. You loved me. You protected me. You believed in me." His smile disappeared entirely.

"And somehow, that made me hate you even more."

"... Brother. You could have told me. We would have found another way."

"There wasn't another way. As long as you lived, I would always be Takeda Nobunaga's younger brother." He twisted the blade. CRACK. Agony tore through every nerve I had left. He pulled the sword free, and I dropped onto the ruined earth behind me. The celebration went on. Nobody had noticed. Nobody looked back. Humanity's greatest victory had become my funeral. A pale window opened in front of my dying eyes. VITAL ORGAN DESTROYED. HEART COMPLETELY PIERCED. LIFE FORCE: BELOW 1%. DEATH CONFIRMED. Ten. Nine. Eight.

I stared up at the cracked sky. How ironic, to survive dragons and kings and a hundred years of impossible war, only to die on the sword of my own brother. The darkness came for my vision at the same pace it came for the sound of the crowd, until both had gone entirely.

"... So this is the end." Then a voice answered from somewhere beyond both, neither male nor female, neither young nor old, as though a thousand universes were speaking through a single throat.

"The first condition has been fulfilled."

"... Who—" No answer came. The darkness shattered instead, and light flooded in from every direction at once. Countless stars. No — not stars. Worlds. Thousands of them. Millions, spinning inside an endless sea of existence, and at the center of them all, an eye the size of a galaxy slowly opened. Its iris held universes. Its pupil was an abyss with no beginning and no end. The instant it turned toward me, every secret in creation threatened to pour into my mind at once.

"Bearer of the Eyes of Apex," the voice said.

"Will you walk the path once more?" Before I could answer, reality came apart, and everything dissolved into white. III. The first thing I felt was silence not the silence that follows death, and not the silence of an empty battlefield. This one was gentle. A cool mountain breeze drifted through a half-open window, carrying the faint scent of sandalwood, and somewhere beyond the room, birds were singing simply because morning had come. Then, steel struck steel. Clang. Clang. Clang.

Steady, disciplined, as though every swing had been practiced a thousand times before. My eyes opened on an unfamiliar wooden ceiling. Dark beams, polished smooth by time rather than luxury. Sunlight fell through paper windows in warm gold bars.

"... I'm alive," I said, and the words came out on instinct. I raised my right hand. Small. Soft. Nothing like it. The calluses I'd earned across forty-three years of swordsmanship were gone. So were the scars. This wasn't the hand of the Sword God it was the hand of a child. My fingers drifted, almost without my permission, toward the place where Si-Woo's blade had gone through my heart. Nothing. No wound. No scar. Only the steady beat of a healthy one.

"... So it really happened." The memories came back like a tide the Tower, the Dragon, the celebration, and then Si-Woo. The boy I had raised. The only family I had left, standing over me with a question I still didn't have an answer to. Why? No answer came. Only silence, and for one flickering moment -- anger. Not because I'd died. Death had never frightened me. But because I still didn't understand what I'd done to turn the boy I'd once protected into the man who killed me. Perhaps one day I'd find that answer.

Not today, though. The dead don't get to change the past, and if fate had truly granted me a second life, wasting it on the first one seemed like the worst use I could make of it. A sharp pain split through my skull, and unfamiliar memories poured in behind it, a boy stumbling across a training ground with a wooden sword nearly his own height; a stern voice telling him again; a graceful woman kneeling beside him after training, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

"You've worked hard today, Fan'er." Then mountains, endless and cloud-wrapped, pavilions on cliffs above valleys, disciples in white running through sword forms in unison, spirit trees glowing faintly blue at the root. Qi. Pure. Abundant. Alive, in a way I had never once felt it on Earth. The fragments settled, and I breathed out slowly.

"... Len Fan." Ten years old. Only son of the current Sect Master of the Heavenly Sword Sect. Two lives sat inside the same small body, Takeda Nobunaga, forged through decades of battle, and Len Fan, whose story had barely begun and yet there was no war between them. Len Fan's memories didn't feel foreign. They had simply, quietly, become part of me. Not a replacement. Another piece of the same story. I rose and crossed to the window. The moment I slid it open, I went still.

An ocean of mountains rolled toward the horizon. Waterfalls fell from cliffs high enough to lose their base in cloud. Stone bridges connected floating peaks where halls of pale stone looked out over valleys hidden beneath rolling mist. Far below, thousands of disciples trained under the morning sun, and every swing of every sword left a faint trail of blue Qi behind it. No skyscrapers. No highways. No machines, no satellites only mountains, only swords, only the pursuit of strength.

"... Domantia," I said. A world unlike Earth, and yet strangely, not unfamiliar at all.

"No matter the world," I murmured, watching the disciples train, "those who seek strength always walk the same road." I breathed in, and my expression changed before I'd finished the breath. Qi. Everywhere. Rich, pure, boundless every lungful here carried enough spiritual energy to rival months of cultivation back on Earth, where Qi had been so rare that most Raiders relied entirely on Mana and Talent instead, and only a handful of people ever found it at all. I had spent decades hunting it down.

Learning it, mastering it. Every impossible leap I'd made from a mere C-Rank to the first Mythic Talent in history had been built on the Martial Path, and even after forty-three years, Earth's Qi had stayed painfully thin. Here, the world itself breathed it. A quiet laugh escaped me.

"So I've finally arrived somewhere the Martial Path actually belongs." I closed the window, and the room fell silent again. For the first time since my death, I felt something I hadn't expected. Hope. Not because I'd become stronger I hadn't, not yet. Simply because this life had only just begun. Then a familiar blue light flickered into being in front of my eyes, calmer than the one that had followed my death. EPHORA LEGACY SYSTEM Synchronization Complete: 5%. The smile that spread across my face was genuine.

"So you crossed worlds with me after all." For forty-three years, the System had watched every step I took my victories, my failures, the impossible climb from nothing to Mythic. Now it had followed me into another world entirely. Another window unfolded beneath the first. Legacy Restored The One Who Walks the Martial Path. Status: Passive Legacy. Effects: Training Efficiency Increased. Growth Rate Increased. Endurance Growth Increased.

"Heaven favors talent. The Martial Path favors those who refuse to stop." I read every word twice. The Talent everyone had once mocked, the one that had carried me past destiny itself, wasn't classified as a Talent here at all. It had become something closer to a part of me.

"So that's your purpose," I said.

"This System isn't giving my strength back to me. It's returning what I earned." That made far more sense. Power built across decades of hardship shouldn't be handed back for free if I wanted the summit again, I'd climb for it again, exactly as I had the first time. Basic Status Restored. I accepted without hesitation, and a familiar panel unfolded.

Name: Len Fan Age: 10 Race: Human Cultivation: Mortal Realm – First Leaf Strength: 2 Agility: 2 Constitution: 1 Spirit: 4 Comprehension: 9 Endurance: 1 Legacy: The One Who Walks the Martial Path Synchronization: 5% Silence. Then a short laugh.

"I've seen children stronger than this." Everything about this body was underdeveloped weak muscles, fragile bone, meridians narrow and clogged with impurities I could feel every time I tried to breathe Qi in. To the cultivators of this world, Len Fan probably had no future worth speaking of. Strangely, that didn't discourage me at all. I'd started lower than this once, with nothing but stubbornness to my name. Compared to that, at least this body could cultivate in the first place.

My eyes caught on one more line near the bottom of the panel. Bloodline Status: SEALED My smile disappeared. Not dormant — sealed. A dormant bloodline simply slept. A sealed one meant someone had deliberately locked it away, and Len Fan's memories offered nothing about why. Whenever the subject came up, the elders changed it, as though even discussing it were forbidden. Interesting. Whatever secret hid behind that seal, I'd find it eventually. I closed the Status window, and a new tab appeared beneath it.

Status | Legacy | Inventory | Authority | Avatar"... Avatar?" Len Fan's memories answered before I could ask twice. Unlike Earth, where people awakened Talents, everyone born on Domantia possessed an Avatar — a projection of their innate potential. The higher the Avatar, the greater the promise of the cultivator carrying it.

For thousands of years, the world had recognized five realms: Mortal, Heaven-Reaching, Immortal, Divine, Supreme, each containing seven Leaves, and even a First-Leaf Heaven-Reaching Avatar outranked a Seventh-Leaf Mortal one. That was accepted as law, the same way Earth had once accepted that Talent decided a person's ceiling. An Avatar can never evolve. Len Fan had heard that sentence a hundred times in his short life. I smiled faintly.

"I've heard those words before, too." They'd said the same thing about Talents, once. I opened the Avatar tab. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then the whole interface convulsed, blue bleeding into crimson, and warnings flooded my vision at once. WARNING. SCANNING AVATAR. SYNCHRONIZATION INSUFFICIENT. UNKNOWN AUTHORITY DETECTED. PREVIOUS WORLD RECORDS FOUND. REEVALUATING HOST. ERROR. ERROR. ERROR. My expression hardened.

"... Previous world?" That line shouldn't exist at all. The words Mortal Avatar — First Leaf dissolved as something buried beneath them clawed toward the surface, and the System kept searching, again and again, until finally it stopped. AVATAR CLASSIFICATION FAILED. HOST CANNOT BE CLASSIFIED. CURRENT AVATAR STATUS: UNKNOWN. FURTHER SYNCHRONIZATION REQUIRED. For the first time, even the System couldn't define me. A slow smile crossed my face.

"So it seems I'm not the only one here looking for answers." At that exact moment, the mountain shook beneath my feet. BOOM. The wooden room trembled. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, and outside, birds burst upward into the sky all at once. Then a bell not a training bell, not a gathering bell, but something older and heavier began to toll across every peak of the sect at once. Dong. Dong. Dong. Shouts rose beneath it.

"Enemy attack! The eastern formation's been breached! Protect the disciples! Seal the inner gates! Someone inform the Sect Master!" Hundreds of feet thundered across stone. Steel rang against steel. The peaceful sect I'd admired from the window only minutes ago had already fallen into chaos. I crossed to the window again. Smoke rose from the lower courtyards. Crimson flames climbed through distant rooftops, and the wind carried the smell of blood up the mountainside toward me. Len Fan's memories surfaced instantly.

"... The Blood Moon Sect." A demonic sect that treated human lives as fuel. To them, massacre wasn't cruelty — it was cultivation. Watching the smoke climb toward the heavens, one thought settled over everything else. My second life had truly begun.