Ten Thousand Years of Waiting, Gone in the Blink of an Eye

Cang Xuan, the last guardian of calamity from the age of the ancient gods, was once a mortal cultivator. But an ancient curse forcibly turned him to stone, leaving him standing in the middle of a desert for ten thousand years. He bears a singular mission: when the apocalypse arrives, a single blink will activate the ultimate seal underground, at the cost of sacrificing his own consciousness.

Over the long millennia, dynasties rose and fell like bubbles on the sand, while love, hatred, honor, and disgrace faded into passing clouds. Cang Xuan’s emotions wore smooth, and he learned to observe the sheen of lizard scales and the paths left by dispersing raindrops while frozen in place. His consciousness nearly merged with his stone body. Then a ragged band of explorers appeared. They held up torches and mistook him for an ancient relic. The starlight in their eyes shattered his ten thousand years of silence: these people had been labeled “the apocalypse” by a prophecy that had been tampered with.

Duty and mercy waged war within Cang Xuan’s mind. In the end, he defied fate and spared the group, only to uncover layers of secrets. The so-called calamity was in fact the World-Eroding Race, which fed on energy. The ancient gods had altered the prophecy to use the power of his seal to resurrect themselves. As the World-Eroding Race’s king drew near, mysterious Rift Wardens appeared, and the military became involved, Cang Xuan gradually broke free of his petrification, allied with the explorers, and set out to find the curse fragments and close the rifts to the Eroding Realm.

When the truth revealed that “the present world and the Eroding Realm were originally one,” Cang Xuan faced a final choice: closing the rifts would throw the energy balance into chaos, while opening them would allow the world to be consumed. Only by becoming a balancer could he find a way through, but the price would be the sacrifice of his companions’ bloodlines. The rifts to the Eroding Realm continue to expand, and the remnant souls of the gods watch from the shadows. Cang Xuan’s path to balance has only just begun.