Wisps of pale cloud drifted across the endless blue sky. Atop a towering mountain peak, the sharp morning wind brushed across Finn’s face.
Finn completed a slow breathing cycle, then opened his eyes.
Once, he had been an engineer barely scraping by. Six hundred years ago, he had been transported to another world. Since then, he had wandered the Endless Worlds, traveling from one great realm to another.
Now, after three hundred years in closed-door cultivation, he had finally cultivated the Fire Profound Divine Art to the Second Heavenly Layer. Power surged through every inch of his body, making him feel as though he had been reborn.
This was a prime spirit-gathering site, once overflowing with spiritual qi. Only in a place like this could his cultivation advance by leaps and bounds.
Unfortunately, he had drained every last trace of spiritual qi from the area.
It was time to leave seclusion.
A warm ray of sunlight fell across his face. Finn smiled faintly.
At last, the sun was out.
He sent his consciousness into his storage space and pulled out a titanium-alloy smartphone and a solar charger.
Both devices had time runestones attached to them, slowing the passage of time. That was the only reason they had survived three hundred years in storage.
Finn peeled off the runestones and unfolded the dark gray solar panel. Holding it above his head, he harnessed the power of technology to convert sunlight into electricity and charge his phone.
Before long, the battery reached six percent.
Finn woke the screen, opened his contacts, and called a number he had saved five hundred years ago.
The cross-world connection should still work. Hopefully she hasn’t changed her number.
He raised the phone to his ear.
Beep. Beep. Beep...
After a long wait, the call finally connected.
“Hello? Who’s this?” A lazy woman’s voice came from the other end. “Need something from your big sis? I just came through a black hole. I’m exhausted.”
“Su-Jin. Come pick me up,” Finn said flatly.
“Finn!”
Her voice snapped awake.
“You holed up in that cave for three hundred years, and you’re finally coming out? Your timing couldn’t be better. We’re desperately short on capable people right now. The old guard is gone, the next generation isn’t ready, and too many people have already died. You—”
“Cut the chatter. Do your job as an interworld transport officer and come get me.”
“Fine, fine. Send me the coordinates of your world and your exact position within it,” Su-Jin replied at once.
A moment later, the roar of engines and the hum of circulating energy came through the phone.
Finn sent her his location. Before long, Su-Jin’s booming voice blasted from the speaker.
“Is the area empty?”
Finn looked up at the vast blue sky and answered without hesitation.
“Empty.”
After ending the call, Finn kept the solar panel raised and continued charging his phone. Once it had a little more power, he planned to listen to some music.
His phone had 12.8 terabytes of storage and nearly two thousand songs saved on it, though they were all three hundred years old by now.
He wondered whether Nightwish had released any new singles while he had been away from Earth.
The battery had just reached twelve percent when a shadow swept over him, blocking both Finn and the solar panel from the sun.
Finn looked up.
A strikingly handsome cultivator with the ethereal bearing of an immortal hovered directly above him on a flying sword.
The man stood tall and proud upon a long, jade-blue blade, his posture heroic and refined. He glanced left and right without noticing Finn on the mountaintop—or the fact that he was blocking Finn’s sunlight.
The cultivator furrowed his sharp brows and called to a young woman behind him.
“Little Junior Sister, this so-called spirit-gathering treasure land hardly lives up to its name. There’s barely any spiritual qi here. Why would Master send us here under false pretenses?”
“Third Senior Brother.”
A beautiful young woman with rosy lips and a slender figure flew over on a sword of her own. Her flowing robes of pink and pale green fluttered gracefully as she came to a stop beside him.
She bit her lower lip, her eyes glimmering with affection.
“Master may have misled us, but he also gave us the perfect chance to get away from that annoying Eldest Senior Brother and spend some time alone together, didn’t he?”
The cultivator she called Third Senior Brother smiled. Taking her delicate hand in his, he said indulgently, “I’ve already inherited Venerable Tianyue’s legacy. It’s only a matter of time before my cultivation surpasses Master’s. When that day comes, we’ll soar through the heavens side by side. Who would dare stand in our way—”
“Hey, you two. Mind moving? You’re blocking my sunlight.”
Finn lowered the solar panel, his face expressionless.
The man and woman suspended on their flying swords both jumped. They had been so wrapped up in each other that they had completely overlooked Finn.
They looked down and finally noticed him standing on the mountaintop.
His face was covered in stubble, his hair was a tangled mess, and his clothes had rotted into rags. He looked like a wild man who had just crawled out of a cave.
The male cultivator swept Finn with his spiritual sense. Sensing no spiritual power from him, he sneered.
“Don’t worry, Junior Sister. He’s only a mortal with no cultivation. I’ll kill him now.”
Immortals and mortals belonged to different worlds. Cultivators who possessed spiritual roots and could pursue the Dao stood in an entirely different class from ordinary people.
The pair remained in the air on their swords, looking down at Finn as if he were an insect.
Their contempt was not a deliberate display of arrogance. It was the instinctive superiority of people who had never once considered mortals their equals.
That pissed Finn off.
The man flicked a finger, eager to show off his strength in front of the woman.
In an instant, a crushing force carrying the weight of a mountain shot toward Finn’s head.
BOOM!
Stone fragments scattered and dust billowed into the air. The blast tore a deep trench through the mountaintop.
Finn remained standing exactly where he had been.
His hair was only slightly messier.
“Senior Brother, there’s something strange about this mortal.” The woman covered her mouth, her eyes wide with shock.
“Don’t panic, Junior Sister. I held back just now,” the man said calmly. “This insect probably has some kind of protective treasure. A little more force will crush him with ease.”
“If you’re willing to kill, you’d better be ready to die. Now it’s my turn.”
Finn’s expression turned cold.
He flipped his hand and pulled a thick, pitch-black tube from his storage space. Resting it on one shoulder, he aimed it at the two cultivators in the sky.
The weapon was painted black and dark green. Its front end was large and rounded, while four fin-like stabilizers protruded from the rear.
It possessed a brutal, mechanical beauty utterly foreign to this world and era.
“What is that? Some kind of mortal firearm?” the male cultivator asked with a scornful laugh. He could not sense the slightest trace of spiritual power from it.
“This is a nuclear rocket launcher!”
Behind the sight, Finn’s eyes were sharp and steady.
Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger.
A flaming projectile screamed through the sky.
In the next instant, an enormous sphere of searing white light erupted between heaven and earth.
BOOM!
The thunderous nuclear blast shook the world. A blinding glare burst outward, swallowing everything in sight.
The shock wave surged across the land like a collapsing mountain range, pulverizing everything in its path. Unimaginable heat swept over the earth, consuming every living thing too weak to withstand it.
The white glare filling Finn’s vision gradually faded, but the nuclear fireball continued to radiate terrifying light and heat. At the center of the explosion, it gathered and rose, forming a colossal mushroom cloud.
Devastation stretched as far as the eye could see.
A vast crater had been blasted into the ground. The mountain peak had collapsed, and every stream and spring had dried up.
The air itself seemed to burn, scorching the lungs with every breath.
Even the trees in the far distance had been flattened outward from the blast. Their charred trunks stood bare of leaves and branches, like the corpses of withered giants bearing silent witness to the horror of the explosion.
The male cultivator and the young woman who had tried to kill Finn had long since been vaporized in the detonation, their bodies and souls erased without so much as a speck of ash remaining.
“Watching a nuclear explosion up close never gets old.”
Finn brushed the radioactive fallout from his clothes as he stood atop a pile of rubble.
Moments ago, he had been standing on the mountain’s summit.
Now, the entire peak had been blown apart.
He had planned to play around on his phone while waiting for Su-Jin, but the enormous amount of residual radiation in the area would wreak havoc on its electronics, so he put it back into his storage space.
Through the thick gray clouds of smoke and dust, a streak of blue-green light raced toward him.
It wasn’t Su-Jin.
The newcomer was a well-dressed man with sharp brows and striking eyes. Following the radial blast marks, he reached the center of the explosion and came to an abrupt stop in midair.
His expression turned grim.
“Third Junior Brother? Little Junior Sister? Where are you?”
His anguished cries echoed through the air.
He belonged to the same sect as the man and woman from before.
He was their Eldest Senior Brother.
Not long ago, from a thousand li away, he had sensed the auras of his Third Junior Brother and Little Junior Sister. He had assumed his junior brother was helping her with her cultivation.
Then he heard the deafening explosion, and worry seized him.
He rushed over as fast as he could, only to find that both their auras had vanished without a trace.
They had been annihilated in the terrifying explosion.
“You killed them?!” the man demanded, fury blazing in his eyes.
He stood on a green, leaf-shaped artifact, hovering in the air.
Finn was the only living person in sight.
The answer was obvious.
“Who are you?” Finn asked flatly. “What were those two cheating bastards to you?”
“I’m their Eldest Senior Brother! Little Junior Sister and I grew up together as childhood sweethearts. We love each other, and we’re already engaged! Third Junior Brother wasn’t just my fellow disciple—he was my closest friend, like a brother to me! And you dared to kill them!”
The man’s eyes bulged with rage. Veins stood out across his forehead as if he wanted to skin Finn alive and tear out his tendons.
Finn was speechless.
Buddy, you know they are cheating on you?
The man suddenly regained a shred of clarity through his rage.
Sensing the immense amount of nuclear radiation around him, surprise flashed through his eyes.
“You’re an evil cultivator from another realm!”
He took a step through the air and raised a hand, summoning an enormous flower-shaped artifact.
“Demonic scum! I’ll use the Tianling Sect’s True Immortal artifact—the Pure Lotus Rainflower—to blast you into pieces!”
As soon as he finished speaking, the gigantic artifact in the sky unfolded petal by petal.
Brilliant streams of rainbow light poured from it, while overwhelming spiritual power surged like a tidal wave.
Countless razor-sharp swords of light formed within the heart of the lotus and locked onto Finn.
There was nowhere for him to run and no way to dodge.
Faced with the incoming attack, Finn suddenly seemed to remember something.
Panic spread across his face.
“Calm down! We can talk this out! Get down here—don’t stay in the air!”
“Hahahaha! What’s wrong, heretic? Afraid now?”
The man hovered in midair as he controlled the artifact. Seeing Finn’s panicked expression filled him with satisfaction.
Then his face turned cold.
“It’s too late to beg! I’ll kill you and avenge my junior brother and Little Junior Sister!”
“Damn it. This is bad.”
A chill ran down Finn’s back as a terrible premonition washed over him.
Crack.
A strange spatial tremor spread across the sky, like frost suddenly blooming over the surface of a still lake.
Without warning, a sleek, shuttle-shaped starship blinked into existence in midair.
Right where the self-proclaimed Eldest Senior Brother had been floating.
“AAAAAH! THERE’S A DEAD GUY JAMMED IN MY COCKPIT!”
Su-Jin’s horrified scream nearly shook the starship apart.