Heaven's Will Is a Cage, and I Rule Over All Beings

Yan Guichen, master of the Heavenly Secrets Pavilion, is the last spark of the Observer civilization, and the god-slayer who personally buried his homeworld.

For three thousand years, he has used the Big Dipper starfield as a chessboard to play against the Heavenly Dao:

The refugee A Qing is the sword of all living beings, sculpted by him from the sands of causality;

The puppet Xuanji is a god-slaying blade forged from data salvaged from the First Civilization;

Even the Third Prince Xiao Jingming, who slaughtered all living beings, was nothing more than a test subject for Yan Guichen's tampering with the terms of a contract.

When the wreckage of the mothership rises from the bottom of the Lake of Rebirth, the monstrous truth of the tampered “Sowers' Project” is revealed:

“Water spirit plants with the souls of a hundred thousand sword cultivators, then hatch the seed of civilization with the fortune of the empire.”

Yan Guichen gently strokes the throne of star-sand, watching all living beings struggle in his game of chess:

Xiao Mingli cuts out her own heart to feed a venomous worm, planting god-slaying poison in the spirit plant's mother body;

A traitor from Medicine God Mountain burns his soul as kindling, turning an alchemy furnace into a star-forging crucible;

And as A Qing wields the Sword of All Beings, the swordlight he carves through the bones of refugees reflects the face Yan Guichen wore in his previous life...

Is this game impossible to win?

As the Observers' judgment beam pierces the Big Dipper, Yan Guichen writes the final stroke on the contract scroll:

“With my divine soul as ink and the obsessions of all living beings as my blade, today I shall sever the starship and break the chains of causality!”