The ancestral hall was filled with an uproar of lively congratulations.
The three bronze chimes of the patriarch’s bell had drawn every core member of the David family away from their morning duties, and upon learning that Lucien had finally broken the five-year curse and shattered his mortal threshold, pure joy erupted through the room.
Second Uncle Miller laughed boisterously, clapping Lucien on the shoulder with a grip that would have crushed the boy only twenty-four hours earlier.
Third Uncle Kyle and his wife handed him warming tonics, while Isabella, Reaser, and young Inoha crowded around, firing off a dozen questions all at once about how his dantian felt.
Even Rovman, usually proud and reserved, offered a nod of sincere respect.
At the head of the raised platform, Lucas David stroked his dark beard, his chest swelling with pride.
“We shall host an open banquet!” Lucas declared, his deep voice carrying through the rafters.
“Seven days of wine and roasting pits in the outer courtyards! Let the whole of Aurora City know—especially the rats of the Lewis Clan—that the grandson of Lucas David walks the sovereign path!”
“Grandfather, please wait,” Lucien stepped forward, offering a courteous bow.
Lucas raised an eyebrow, amused.
“What is it, boy? You’ve suffered five years of idle whispers. You deserve to hold your head high.”
“Stepping into the first level of the Body Tempering Realm is merely taking the first breath of a child,” Lucien answered calmly, his voice ringing with absolute clarity.
“In the wider expanse of the Triad Kingdom, let alone the Eastern Continent, a first-level mortal is barely an ant. Throwing a lavish banquet over a foundation step invites idle pride and gives our rivals a clear look at our affairs. When I stand at the summit, the world will celebrate on its own. For now, it is not worth celebrating.”
The hall fell dead silent.
Uncle John blinked, while Leona’s lips curved into a quiet, proud smile.
Lucas stared down at his grandson, his sharp eyes widening before he erupted into a thunderous roar of laughter that shook the decorative silk banners along the walls.
“Good! What magnificent arrogance!” Lucas strode down the steps, his heavy palm coming down in an approving thud against Lucien’s back.
“A heart that refuses to drown in shallow puddles! You are your mother’s son through and through.”
Lowering his tone slightly, Lucas turned serious.
“A foundation without techniques is like an unsharpened iron rod. Cultivation builds the furnace, but martial skills forge the spear. Now that your blood can bear the strain, you must begin martial training.”
Lucas leaned in, tapping Lucien’s chest.
“In our world, martial skills, cultivation arts, and weapons are bound by five sovereign grades: Mortal, Spirit, Earth, Sky, and Heaven, each divided into low, mid, high, and peak ranks. In a remote place like Aurora City, High-Rank Mortal skills are rare treasures—our David Clan only preserves two in the ancestral vault. Tomorrow, I will personally open the vault for you to select one.”
“Thank you, Grandfather,” Lucien replied, nodding with genuine appreciation.
While the Primordial Genesis Art governed his internal cosmic engine, understanding this world’s standard techniques was essential for masking his true methods.
As the gathering dispersed, Reiner bounded over, his broad grin practically splitting his face.
“Forget the ancestral vault until tomorrow, little brother,” Reiner slung an arm around Lucien’s shoulders, chuckling.
“Scrolls are dead parchment. True martial artists speak with cold steel. Come on, I’m taking you to the weapon pavilion. I’ll personally teach you the fundamentals of swordsmanship before the sun sets!”
Seeing his elder cousin’s overflowing enthusiasm, Lucien smiled and nodded.
The family weapon pavilion smelled intensely of grindstone dust, leather oil, and chilled iron.
Racks upon racks of forged blades, spears, halberds, and sabers lined the stone walls, shimmering with dull gray light.
“Every weapon here is forged from cold-rolled star-vein steel,” Reiner said, gesturing broadly to the weapon racks.
“Since you’ve just stepped into the first level of Body Tempering, standard practice is to pick a lightweight, double-edged rapier or a short saber. If you choose something too heavy, you’ll tear your shoulder ligaments on the first swing. Look around, see what calls to your blood.”
Lucien walked down the central aisle, letting his gaze drift over the rows of slender steel blades.
They felt fragile.
With his newly tempered Stellar Physique, which possessed the compressed density of nine whole temperings in its first level alone, these light swords felt like dried reeds in his eyes.
A single full-strength thrust would likely shatter them beneath his kinetic force.
His blue eyes stopped at the bottom row of a reinforced iron rack.
Resting on heavy wooden blocks was a massive single-edged greatsword.
It measured nearly six feet in length, its blade as wide as four adult fingers, forged with a thick, brutal spine and a raven-black hilt wrapped in coarse beast leather.
It wasn’t an elegant dueling foil; it was an executioner’s slab, weighing at least eighty kg—a tool meant for third-realm martial artists, far too unwieldy for an ordinary beginner.
“Wait, Lucien, you can’t be serious,” Reiner warned, walking over with a frown.
“That single-edged cleaver was brought back by Second Uncle from the northern frontier. Even peak Body Tempering disciples can barely wield it for three minutes without their forearms going numb—”
Lucien didn’t answer.
He stepped forward and wrapped his fingers around the coarse black leather hilt.
Whoosh.
The moment his skin made contact with the cold steel, the world around him froze.
The wooden pillars of the armory, the scent of grindstone dust, and Reiner’s warning voice instantly dissolved like smoke blown away by a gale.
Time did not just stop—reality was stripped bare.
Lucien found himself floating in the middle of a vast, pitch-black cosmic void.
There was no earth beneath his feet, no air in his lungs, yet he did not fall or suffocate.
Millions of ancient galaxies spiraled silently in the unfathomable distance, swirling in ethereal purples and silent golds.
What is this place?
Lucien thought, his breath catching in his throat.
Before he could process the space around him, a chill colder than absolute zero pierced straight through his marrow.
Out of the endless darkness of the void, an entity coiled into existence.
It was a serpentine monstrosity of pure, abyssal blackness.
Its scales were so colossal that entire clusters of stars reflected across the sheen of a single plate.
It was vast as multiple galaxies, an incomprehensible cosmic beast whose very existence defied mortal perception.
The suffocating, primeval malice it radiated was heavy enough to crush a mortal mind to dust in a microsecond.
Lucien stood entirely paralyzed, pale as ash, frozen in sheer terror before the cosmic predator.
Then, he noticed a tiny white speck standing in the void between him and the serpent.
It was a man.
He was clad in simple, flowing white robes, with long snow-white hair that drifted freely in the vacuum of space.
Compared to the galactic monstrosity bearing down on him, the man was not even a speck of dust—a microscopic grain against a celestial mountain.
Yet the moment Lucien looked at him, his soul trembled for a completely different reason.
The white-robed man radiated an aura that made the cosmic serpent look like an insignificant worm.
It wasn’t loud or chaotic; it was the absolute, crushing silence of an entity that stood above creation and destruction alike.
It was more than a thousand times more terrifying than the beast before him.
On the man’s back rested a plain, pitch-black longsword.
The white-robed figure did not speak.
His face remained calm, utterly devoid of emotion or hesitation, looking at the galaxy-devouring serpent as if looking at a fallen leaf.
Casually, the man reached over his shoulder and gripped the black hilt.
He drew the blade.
A single, horizontal swing followed.
There was no deafening roar of thunder.
There was no blinding flash of light.
Across hundreds of light-years, the fabric of space simply divided.
A clean, silent line of absolute nothingness sheared straight through the cosmos.
In the blink of an eye, the unfathomable serpent was split cleanly in half.
Before its colossal blood could even spill into the void, the beast’s entire gargantuan body vaporized into nothingness, erased from the cosmic record as though it had never drawn a single breath.
The white-robed man calmly slid the black blade back into the sheath on his back, fading into the dark fabric of the universe.
Thump.
A golden seal in the deepest depths of Lucien’s soul shattered open, unlocking a brand-new memory that washed through his consciousness in blazing starlight:
Genesis Sword Art — Volume One.