Pfft!
Blood dripped down the length of the bone sword and fell onto the snow, resembling blooming, gorgeous red plum blossoms.
A trembling breath fell near Zhang Zhibai’s ear. He gazed down quietly, his long, thick eyelashes catching ice crystals that veiled the intense, vivid crimson in his pitch-black pupils.
“Why? Why?” The man clutched Zhang Zhibai’s sleeve tightly, seemingly in utter disbelief. “How could you?”
Zhang Zhibai silently stared at him. Watching blood surge from the man’s mouth, just as it was about to stain his robes, Zhang Zhibai furrowed his elegant brows slightly. With a sudden thrust and flick of his sword, he threw the man off.
The man collapsed onto the ground, his face paler than the falling snow. As he looked back through his messy dark hair, his eyes were filled with terror and disbelief.
“Impossible,” he mumbled, clutching his lips as blood spilled out through his fingers. “Impossible. You are just an NPC, and I am the protagonist! How could you kill me? No, there is a BUG! Clear the BUG! System, where is the System?”
His hands began to wave about frantically in the air.
Zhang Zhibai appreciated the man’s frantic, hideous state for a moment before stepping forward with a faint smile on his lips.
He possessed an extraordinarily breathtaking appearance, with hair as dark as spilled ink, skin like curdled jade, and delicate, exquisite facial features. Beneath his left eye and on his right cheek sat a small mole each, blooming like flowers past their prime amidst the snow and blood.
The man lost his train of thought for a moment out of instinct. Realizing what was happening, he dragged his bloodied body backward in a desperate struggle, as if he had laid eyes on an alluring, soul-stealing ghost from hell.
“Ah Sui, why fear me so?” Zhang Zhibai opened his lips slightly, his voice crisp and clear, his tone soft and affectionate, as if whispering love into someone’s ear.
The man’s complexion instantaneously turned even more lifeless. His originally dignified face was twisted by overwhelming terror, and his voice grew so shrill it seemed capable of tearing through the quiet, snowy night: “Log out! I want to log out!”
“Log out? How heartless.” Zhang Zhibai kept his pace slow and steady. “You stole my family status, gouged out my sword bone, and severed my immortal veins. One incident after another, with so many old debts left unsettled between us, yet you wish to leave?”
“It was not me! The plot, the game plot was supposed to go this way! Ugh, ah!“
“Heh.” Zhang Zhibai curled his thin lips into a smile. Immediately after, he slammed his foot down violently onto the man’s ankle. In a fraction of a second, a crisp sound of shattering joints echoed as he brutally crushed the man’s foot bones without hesitation.
A tragic, shrill scream instantly pierced the sky, tearing open the boundless, pure white snowfield. The entire snowy landscape shattered like a broken mirror, dispersing into points of light. Scarlet light shone in turn upon Zhang Zhibai’s exquisite face.
In the blink of an eye, the boundless snowfield transformed into an abyssal hell.
“The barrier is broken!”
“Charge! Kill the Demon Venerable!”
Drums and horns sounded in unison from afar, and a stench of blood tainted the heavy snow. Zhang Zhibai turned his head. The dozens of immortal sects charging on their flying swords poured into his vision like a surging tide.
His expression did not change in the slightest; only a hint of impatience surfaced between his brows, as if he had long grown accustomed to this world-shattering siege.
“Log out.”
A voice as faint as a mosquito fell by Zhang Zhibai’s feet. He did not bother to give the person beneath his feet another glance. With a casual wave of his hand, the Heavenly Canopy Sword in his grip unleashed a blinding ray of sword light. For a brief instant, heaven and earth almost came to a standstill, followed immediately by an ear-splitting explosion! Dark clouds and snowy mist rolled and scattered in grand proportion, while heaven, earth, and mountain peaks fractured simultaneously. The land on Zhang Zhibai’s left was sliced in two, giving birth to a sword scar spanning across heaven and earth, a single sword strike splitting a mountain.
The surging crowd thousands of meters away came to a sudden halt.
Countless wary, terrified eyes were cast upon Zhang Zhibai from a distance, moving from his cold, stunning face to his pristine, spotless robes, and finally to the severed head slowly rolling over to his feet.
The moment they clearly saw the head, their suspended breaths cleared violently, and their suppressed chests suddenly expanded! Almost all the immortal cultivators who came to participate in the siege seemed to be controlled by something, their eyes turning red with fierce indignation at the exact same time!
“How dare you, you brat?”
“Kill him! Avenge Immortal Venerable Mingxue!”
“Avenge Immortal Venerable Mingxue!”
Extreme grief and anger swept away everyone’s sanity. Countless array formations and sword lights bombarded toward Zhang Zhibai like meteorites. Yet, Zhang Zhibai merely flicked his sleeve lightly, causing innumerable bone hands to break through the ground. Scrambling to block the attacks for him, they lifted the severed head from the ground and presented it before him.
“Has there been no change this time either?” Zhang Zhibai stared at the head. “The world has been restarted 143 times, and hundreds of side branches have been wasted across nearly a thousand years. Even so, you refuse to change the protagonist? You really have that much backbone? System?”
A strand of sword Qi broke through the defense, brushing past Zhang Zhibai’s neck in an extremely perilous manner. As if completely oblivious, he kept his eyes fixed on the head. Suddenly, he pursed his lips and laughed softly. Extreme, dense madness transformed into a deep red inside his eyes, swirling in the depths of his pupils.
“Forget it. Let us do it again, then.”
He waved away the white bones, and the head rolled back onto the ground. Zhang Zhibai turned around to face the distant, bloodthirsty cultivators. Countless people were shouting “monster” and “beast” at him. The shame and hatred in their expressions were so thick they seemed tangible, as if they would condense into cold, sharp blades to skin him alive, pull out his tendons, and hack him into a thousand pieces.
Yet Zhang Zhibai smiled at them. Amidst the wind and rain of blood, the radiance in his eyes was captivating enough to snatch one’s soul.
“Heaven’s decree and all living beings are but puppets.” Zhang Zhibai gripped his sword tightly and pressed it against his throat. “I do not blame you.”
“In the next cycle, I will definitely bring this to an end.”
“I will definitely lead all living beings to escape this world.”
As soon as his words fell, the sharp sword blade sliced into his throat without hesitation. The spraying blood merged into the crimson sky and crashed into the snow beneath his feet, which had already been dyed red, until it turned freezing cold.
[Reached Ending: “The 143rd Collapsed World”]
[Do you want to restart the world?]
[Yes] [No]
[Option error, please try the other one]
[Option error, please try the other one]
[Option error, please try the other one]
[Option error, please try the other one]
[Restarting the world for you]
[Welcome back]
Zhang Zhibai seemed to have fallen into an extraordinarily deep dream.
In the dream, all the hundreds of cycles he had gone through over the past thousand years vanished completely, returning to his youth before anything had ever begun.
He was born into the top sword-cultivation sect of the immortal path, the Ming Zhou Clan. His father was the eldest son of the direct lineage, and his mother was a master medical cultivator who cured the world. He was a noble descendant in every sense of the term, to say nothing of his innate sword bone and spiritual physique. Across the three branches and eight lineages within the Ming Zhou Clan, they truly held him in the palm of their hands, fearing he would break, and kept him in their mouths, fearing he would melt.
Zhang Zhibai had almost never suffered any grievances.
Pampered in a gentle realm built upon gold and jade treasures, his personality was haughty in the extreme. Smooth and prosperous up to seventeen, Zhang Zhibai was arrogant beyond measure. No one ever managed to catch his eye, nor was he willing to look at anyone directly. Yet even so, the cultivation world never harbored half a word of dissatisfaction toward him.
Back then, he was still named Ming Zhoubai. Among the dozens of immortal sects, across the four realms and six continents, there was not a single person who did not know his name. In fact, when people brought up the Ming Zhou Clan, the first thing they recalled was not the world-famous Ming Zhou Sword, but his terrifying talent, unmatched among his peers by the age of seventeen, and his face, which was praised in word-of-mouth legends and yearning desires as “towering like a bright cloud, with a divine demeanor and brilliant elegance.”
Everything came far too easily for him. Even if he simply stood still, countless people would love him. Because of this, Zhang Zhibai quickly grew tired of the world.
Back then, he was too young and too arrogant, believing that Heaven had endowed him with untamed free-spiritedness, and thus he never deigned to look upon ordinary beings.
It was not until the Grand Immortal Selection when he was seventeen that an obscure, unknown youth defeated him with a plain iron sword right under everyone’s eyes.
It was raining that day, and the drizzling rain wet the arena platform. Zhang Zhibai stood in the rain holding his sword, watching the youth dressed in simple black robes bow to him and announce: “My name is Suixue, and my surname is Wu.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
This was the first time Zhang Zhibai had ever looked at someone directly.
He had never expected that this very glance would end everything he had and drag him into a hellish destiny.
After meeting Wu Suixue, Zhang Zhibai’s previous seventeen years were like an illusory dream. Everything he possessed vanished overnight.
Those who liked him suddenly detested him; those who flattered him began to trample on him. When the praise of “towering like a bright cloud, with a divine demeanor and brilliant elegance” reached his ears again, it had already turned into “the appearance of an alluring ghost, the form of a non-human.”
Zhang Zhibai had never cared about these people. Such blatant insults were merely met with floggings and warnings unless brought right before his eyes, after which he would turn the page and move on.
What truly shook Zhang Zhibai’s emotions and made him lose his composure was the Ming Zhou Clan.
One month after the Grand Immortal Selection, the Ming Zhou Clan announced to the world that they were adopting Wu Suixue as a foster son, entering him into the main family genealogy with his name placed alongside Zhang Zhibai’s.
Livid with rage, Zhang Zhibai immediately drew his sword and stormed into the ancestral hall. The tip of his blade pointed directly at the Ming Zhou clan elders and at Wu Suixue, who stood right in the center of the ancestral hall, staring straight at him.
“You do not carry Ming Zhou blood, yet you dare kneel before the heavenly spirits of my parents! Who gave you the courage? And who permitted you to kneel?”
A terrifying pressure spread out in an instant! The entire ancestral hall was thrown into utter chaos. The ancestors’ spirit tablets hummed, the red silk decorations in the hall tore apart in the air currents, and the lamp stands and candles were all swept to the floor and smashed, giving rise to a roaring blaze!
Amidst the distorted flames, Zhang Zhibai only had time to see Wu Suixue grab the sword blade aimed at his heart with his hand before his vision went dark, for the Patriarch of Ming Zhou, who had never been harsh to him in the slightest, struck him right in the chest and sent him flying.
“To have a direct descendant like you is simply a disgrace to the Ming Zhou name!”
The Patriarch flicked his sleeves in fury. “Guards! A hundred lashes of clan discipline! Lock him in the woodshed! No medicine is permitted until he confesses his crime!”
That was the first time Zhang Zhibai had been beaten so severely; the hundred lashes of clan discipline nearly took half his life.
That night, this young master, who had always been a neat freak, lay alone on the filthy floor of the woodshed. Amidst the trusted servants’ repeated questions of “Do you admit your fault?”, he gritted his teeth and did not say a single word.
However, this was only the beginning.
Because Zhang Zhibai failed to stop Wu Suixue from entering the Ming Zhou Clan the first time, the family’s bias only grew worse. How the Ming Zhou Clan had once raised him like a precious treasure was exactly how they cast him aside like trash later on.
The clansmen accused Zhang Zhibai of being arrogant, insulted him by saying he had nothing to offer besides his face, and forced him to wear a cultivation suppression ring. Even a young master from a side branch dared to grab his chin, spewing filth like he was soliciting a prostitute.
Zhang Zhibai ripped out his tongue and severed his hands and feet, but in return, he received even harsher punishments from his elders.
They pinned him down in front of his parents’ ancestral tablets, intending to sever his spiritual roots and spiritual veins to compensate for that man’s hands, feet, and tongue. Zhang Zhibai, who would rather die than bow his head to anyone in his life, shed tears from his bloodshot eyes in that moment, screaming heartbrokenly that he was willing to admit his mistake! He only begged them to spare his immortal root! At least, at least do not make him look so battered and pathetic before his parents!
Yet, no one cared about him.
Even two months later, when Zhang Zhibai woke up in a weak state, he discovered that not only had his spiritual roots and veins been severed, but even his sword bone had been extracted, the only thing his parents had left him.
He lost his mind completely. Disregarding his dying state, he crawled and dragged himself to find the Ming Zhou Patriarch to demand where his sword bone was, only to run into Wu Suixue, who had likewise just recovered from a severe illness.
Wu Suixue was shrouded in brilliant spiritual light, smelling of Zhang Zhibai’s sword bone from head to toe. He gently supported the teetering Zhang Zhibai and told him: “Your immortal root is ruined, so the Xuantian Sect has decided to take me as their head disciple instead. I negotiated on your behalf, and they agreed that if you marry me as my wife…”
A loud hum resonated, and Zhang Zhibai could not hear a thing. With open, dead-water eyes, he dazedly reached out and pressed his hand against Wu Suixue’s chest.
That was the location of the sword bone.
Wu Suixue lowered his eyes and blinked at him, seemingly in confusion: “This was granted to me by the Ming Zhou elders. Zhibai, you…”
“Granted to you.” Zhang Zhibai closed his eyes, as if hearing something hilariously absurd, and raised his pale lips. “Granted to you?”
He suddenly burst into a raspy laugh.
“Zhibai?” Wu Suixue called out his name.
Before his words could finish landing, a hand pierced straight through Wu Suixue’s chest, brutally grabbing his spine and ribs inside his chest cavity! Wu Suixue’s eyes widened. Before he could react, Zhang Zhibai gritted his teeth and twisted decisively, throwing his body aside as he ripped out the bloody sword bone!
Blood splattered, dark clouds thundered, and heaven and earth changed color.
Zhang Zhibai’s eyes turned a bloodthirsty scarlet, and a majestic demonic Qi dispersed from his body. Clutching the sword bone, he seemed deaf to the terrified screams around him. He merely brushed away the internal organs clinging to it with slow, methodical movements. Holding the sword bone in his arms, he knelt down and kowtowed heavily three times in the direction of the ancestral hall.
“Your son Zhibai has disgraced my parents’ immortal fame.”
“Your descendant Zhibai has disgraced the Ming Zhou immortal body.”
“The immortal Zhibai has failed the expectations of Heaven and Earth.”
Tears of blood fell one by one from his long eyelashes onto the ground. Zhang Zhibai lifted his head. The spiritual lights of the Ming Zhou sword cultivators’ flying swords wove into an inescapable net, pouncing toward him. Zhang Zhibai lowered his eyes slightly, initially preparing to yield his neck to slaughter, but at that exact instant, amidst the spiritual light of the immortal spells, countless screens as red as blood appeared out of thin air, scrambling to manifest!
[Detected the death of the world protagonist “Wu Suixue”!]
[Game Error! Game Error! Game Error!]
[Correcting! Correction failed!]
[Antagonist character “Ming Zhoubai” encountered an error. Clearing… Clearing failed…]
[Reached Ending: “The 1st Collapsed World”]
[Restarting the world…]
With a loud boom, a streak of lightning illuminated heaven and earth in stark white, flashing in the depths of Zhang Zhibai’s pupils like a spark, striking straight into his soul.
That was a scene he could never forget for the rest of his life.
Countless spiritual swords pierced through Zhang Zhibai amidst the roaring thunder, and he closed his eyes deeply.
This was the beginning of his journey onto the path of cycle restarts, seizing the identity of the “protagonist” from Wu Suixue.