Lu Chen's first thirty years were a disaster designed with precision.
His umbilical cord was knotted at birth. He nearly drowned at four and lost his father at six. Someone else took his veteran resettlement placement. His business venture went bankrupt. After dating for four years, his girlfriend stood at the door of his rented apartment with her suitcase and asked, "Do you think you're just unlucky?"
He didn't answer. But he believed it.
That is, until the old fortune-teller in the sandstorm opened his eyes, stars swirling in his pupils. "You're not unlucky. This world itself doesn't want you alive."
The old man's name was Chen Tuan. Three hundred years ago, his sect was destroyed by Song Yan, the head of the Tianxuan Sect. He had waited three hundred years for the fourth generation of the Fate Defier.
A Fate Defier is a loophole in the Heavenly Dao System, an anomaly beyond its rules. The world has its laws and all things their order, but a Fate Defier is a grain of sand in that order, tangling the threads of cause and effect and throwing the workings of fate into disarray. The first three Fate Defiers all perished. The first died in a tribulation of lightning, the second in a siege, and the third... by the blade of an ally.
On the first day Lu Chen began cultivating, he saw his fate in a bronze mirror: a scorched paulownia tree struck by lightning, its trunk charred black and split by countless cracks. Deep within the largest crack was a speck of green light. Faint, but never extinguished.
The Tianxuan Sect's surveillance network had already detected the fluctuations of his life force. Qin Cang, deputy hall master of the Discipline Hall and Song Yan's blade, was on his way. A late-stage Nascent Soul cultivator and blade specialist, he had killed more people than Lu Chen had ever met in his life.
Everyone said his path had reached its end.
He said nothing. He simply planted his broken sword in the sand, tasted the metallic tang in his mouth, leaned against a jujube tree, and closed his eyes.
