When the Sea of Worlds Flowed Backward

The bronze coffin, a world-devouring behemoth, thundered against the heavens.

Taichu crawled out of the coffin's rotting blood, his spine wrapped in nine-leaf chains formed by Xiyue, who had carved the formation into her own bones. His Dao companion, who had watered sword grass with the tears of an Immortal Emperor, had been nailed into the bronze coffin of three lifetimes by his own hand three hundred years ago. Now, her lingering soul inside the coffin was steeped in darkness. Xiyue, frost gathering at the ends of her hair, gnawed at her own spine, etching the laws of light and darkness into a blood-written covenant to sacrifice the universe.

Through a rift in time and space, the Corpse Immortal Emperor watched the bloody scene of their first meeting on the reef play out again: his seventeen-year-old self drove his sword through Xiyue's heart. The shattered fragments of light and darkness from the Great Luo Sword Embryo rained down like heavenly punishment, piercing a million dusks spent in each other's arms. The roots of a bronze giant tree pierced the skies of every era. In the pupils of a **newly born plane's young man**, black-and-gold vortices burst open, while the sword-grass leaf in his palm burned into a key that could reverse cause and effect. Should he sever the cycle of reincarnation and drag all the heavens down with it, or carve out the divinity corrupted by darkness, forge it into a blade, and cleave open the final rusted sliver of dawn at the end of the eternal night?

As light and darkness, like entwined candle dragons, tore at time and space, amid the blood rain of ninety thousand falls from heaven, someone forged love and hatred into a sword pointed at himself.