Lucian flew toward Egypt with heavy, chaotic thoughts weighing upon his mind.
’My initial assumption of the birdman cursing me was also wrong...’
Whatever was happening to Earth was an unprecedented catastrophe—so terrifying that global leaders had felt forced to launch their entire nuclear arsenal at the Arctic. Alien rumors, the Voice of God, and the mysterious "mages" Ye Tianming had mentioned all pointed to a much darker conspiracy.
’Will all my curiosity be satisfied in Egypt?’ Lucian wondered, watching the horizon.
Below the nose of the plane, the desert sands stretched endlessly until the silhouette of the Great Pyramid of Giza finally came into view.
Most of the flight had been handled by the autopilot while Lucian focused on steadying his mind. He had even wondered if Ye Tianming possessed some kind of memory-altering or illusion ability, simply because the man’s claims of past friendship and mutual sacrifice were so difficult to digest.
"Huh?"
Lucian squinted into the clear desert sky ahead.
Hovering motionless directly in the flight path was a man floating mid-air, a long black cape fluttering behind his shoulders.
Before Lucian could alter their course, the man’s eyes flared.
SIZZLE! TZZZEEE!
Twin beams of concentrated darkness erupted from the man’s pupils with blinding velocity. The energy sheared through the plane, cleanly splitting the aircraft in half from nose to tail.
The engines detonated. As the severed wreckage tumbled violently toward the desert sands below, Lucian moved onto the ruined upper hull, wind whipping savagely against his white robes.
Even as the plane plummeted at great velocity, the cloaked figure hovered effortlessly just twenty yards away.
Shock would be an absolute understatement.
Lucian stared in pure, unadulterated horror at the face before him.
This man was the absolute pride of his homeland—an unshakable symbol of pure justice who had essentially functioned as a real-life Superman for modern humanity. With a spotless reputation and popularity that easily eclipsed even the strongest explorers on Earth, he was universally revered as the crown jewel of America.
Rex Carter. Given the title by the people: The Hope of Humanity.
And now, the living legend stood before him, dressed in all black, with eyes that possessed no white sclera—only two pitch-black voids filled with corrupting malice.
"Hahaha! Listen son, you should protect humanity, why are you siding with those evil things?"
"What evil things sir?! Just look around you, everyone is a zombie!" Lucian yelled into the rushing wind.
"Do not try to deceive me son, God himself has given me revelation that you are the enemy who kills innocent people of the world."
"What?!"
Before the word could leave Lucian’s lips, Rex Carter moved.
He crossed the distance instantly, his hand clamping around Lucian’s throat.
With explosive acceleration, Rex surged vertically straight up toward the sky.
Lucian mobilized every scrap of Qi he possessed, erecting layered barriers and circulating the Eternal Jade-Bone Method to withstand the brutal g-force. The blue sky rapidly darkened into deep navy, then into pitch-black void as the crazy hero carried them clean out of the atmosphere.
The air vanished. Lucian felt his lungs burning in the near-vacuum, but his tempered bone structure and refined dantian held together, keeping him alive in Low Earth Orbit.
’I can’t keep this up forever.’
Will he die this time freezing in space?
Rex Carter looked down at him through the vacuum, his voice vibrating directly through telekinetic force.
"Son, do you know what punishment God has given to those who betrayed them? It is my descent on the world, I am the force of nature who delivers judgement to heretics, I am the Ultimate Weapon Of God, I am Rex Carter."
Choked in the hero’s iron grip, Lucian turned his eyes toward the planet below.
The sight stole whatever breath remained in his chest.
Entire sections of western Africa had been completely obliterated, with massive, fractured chunks of continental landmass floating like broken islands in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
And hovering silently over the Western Hemisphere of the globe was a colossal, biomechanical spaceship, spanning hundreds of miles across the curved horizon.
The cold of deep space bit deep into Lucian’s marrow, freezing his blood as Rex’s pitch-black eyes flared with twin dark lasers once again.
The beams tore through Lucian’s defenses, obliterating him in a flash of dark light.
"This is the Judgement son."
Dropping the drifting remains of Lucian, Rex Carter turned his back on the Earth and flew straight toward the colossal spaceship—the true abode of his "God."
« You Have Died. »
« Please Select Your Harvest. »
***
Lucian didn’t have much Karma to harvest anything this run; his main priority had been gathering intelligence.
So when the floating projections of the transport planes appeared in the dark space, Lucian simply dismissed them and returned to reality.
Waking up on his dorm bed in the early morning, he sat up in a meditative posture, steadily organizing every piece of information in his mind.
’Rex was beyond S-Rank.’
It seemed the power ceiling on Earth would increase drastically in the coming two decades.
After attending his morning theory lectures, Lucian met up with Luther at their usual corner table in the student cafeteria.
"So will you tell me what happened?" Luther asked, leaning over the table with an eager, conspiratorial grin.
"For now I think I will refrain for a month, the situation has changed too drastically in the future," Lucian replied in a low voice.
"In the meantime, if you can, you should find information about someone named Sara from Egypt and Ye Tianming from China."
Luther’s eyebrows shot up.
"I don’t know about Sara, but Ye Tianming is quite famous actually, the world’s youngest active S-Rank explorer."
"What?" Lucian blinked in genuine shock.
"It just happened this week, he is representing China globally now," Luther explained, pulling up a public news headline on his phone.
Lucian fell silent for a long moment, processing the timeline.
"...Alright, so find anything you can about Sara, and also check if anything related to curse abilities pops up."
"Fine, I won’t charge you for this, but tell me the secret to becoming handsome."
"Fuck you."
With that friendly parting, Lucian stood up and went on his way.
Crossing the central campus walkway, he ran straight into Mari. Both of them immediately exchanged awkward, flustered glances; the sudden kiss they had shared yesterday by the park bench now left them both thoroughly embarrassed.
After a bit of shy, hurried small talk, they parted ways, mainly because Lucian had urgent business to attend to.
Looking back toward the academy gate, a thought crossed his mind.
’Well, we will at least be alive until 2050.’
Exiting the fortified perimeter of Academy City, Lucian moved discreetly toward the wilderness bordering the First Great Rift.
He needed to gather Karma—and a lot of it. Even though his cultivation put his combat power on par with a veteran A-Rank explorer capable of holding his own against lower S-Ranks, he knew his current strength was nowhere near enough.
’I got a little too arrogant, defeating mindless zombies.’
Rex Carter hadn’t even given him a single second to retaliate before dragging him into space to die.
Reaching the heavily fortified outer checkpoint of the Great Rift—a high-security gate that authorized hunting squads normally cleared on foot—Lucian didn’t bother showing his probation pass.
Slipping into a blind spot between the watchtowers, he channeled his Qi using Five Elements Harmonizing Art – Earth Burrowing.
His body sank smoothly beneath the soil, passing clean beneath the perimeter sensors and armed sentries without alerting the military authorities.
He surfaced a few hundred meters further out, right in front of the colossal Great Rift itself.
An immense, jagged blue fissure in space, pulsing with alien atmospheric pressure. Distorted gravitational waves rippled across the scorched ground around it, and the air smelled heavily of sulfur and ozone.
High-definition surveillance cameras and specialized thermal sensors ringed the clearing on armored pylons, constantly recording the rift’s fluctuations and broadcasting it back to the main base.
– Graa...
A low snarl echoed through the brush.
From the shifting blue spatial tear, a massive, six-eyed wolf-like beast stepped out onto Earth’s soil, sniffing the air as it began roaming the outer perimeter.
’This is why the outer area is also called the hunting grounds for newbies.’
The military intentionally left a loose boundary here, allowing low-tier rift beasts to wander into Earth’s environment so newly awakened cadets could practice live combat under controlled conditions.
Lucian didn’t hesitate. Using Nine Heavens Cloudstep, he moved at blinding, lightning speed straight toward the fissure.
On the security room’s monitor wall across the outpost, the cameras only registered a faint, split-second blur—a minor visual glitch.
In the next breath, Lucian crossed the threshold and vanished into the Great Rift.
***
Rift Monitoring Division, Security Room.
"Hey, what are you dozing off for? Focus on your work like your life depends on it, we have a visitor today!"
A woman slapped a stack of clipboards against her colleague’s console, startling the young man awake.
"What’s with this commotion?" the colleague grumbled, rubbing his bleary eyes.
Before she could answer, the security room doors hissed open. Every technician in the room immediately snapped to attention, scrambling to their feet.
Director Van—the stern, military-like tyrant who ran the monitoring division with an iron fist appeared. Walking right beside him was an exceptionally distinguished guest.
"...And these are the hardworking people always working for humanity without sleep," Director Van announced, his usually harsh voice softened with rare, deferential respect.
The guest was on an unannounced inspection tour of the Mongolian Great Rift, taking time to personally encourage the personnel who worked behind the scenes to keep humanity safe.
Low, excited murmurs rippled across the control room as the staff recognized the middle-aged man standing before them. He had broad shoulders, neatly trimmed graying hair, and calm, piercing blue eyes that held an aura of absolute authority.
"Great job everyone, thanks to your efforts ordinary people could live in peace, I hope you give your all for the sake of humanity," the man said, offering a warm, encouraging smile to the room.
"We are unworthy of such praise, sir!"
Several technicians bowed their heads in unison, visibly flushed with pride. Receiving personal praise from this man was an honor few in the explorer community ever experienced.
The man gave a polite nod, but as he turned to glance at the massive wall of surveillance monitors behind the workstations, his eyes narrowed by a fraction of a millimeter.
On one of the feeds, a tiny, split-second ripple of distorted light had flickered right at the edge of the rift—a visual anomaly so fast that normal human eyes would have dismissed it as an error.
His expression didn’t change in the slightest, remaining perfectly composed as he turned back to Director Van.
"Let’s change some of our plans and enter the great rift first," he said in a calm, even tone.
Director Van looked startled, but he didn’t dare question the order. He immediately saluted and accepted it without hesitation.
After all, the man standing before him was widely recognized as the pinnacle of human power—the German S-Rank Explorer, Maximilian Schwarzenberg.
And completely unknown to the rest of the world, he possessed an extraordinary secret ability.
An ability that lets him travel to another world.