The Centipede's Longevity Art

[Subversive Cultivation, Unusual Protagonist, Racial War, Worldview Upended] After I swallowed a bowl of centipede soup, two moving, dark-gold tattoo-like markings crawled across my back.

The whole town pointed at me and called me a monster. The authorities put a twenty-tael bounty on my head.

I fled into the mountains, only to discover that the world had changed. Mountain beasts were going mad after devouring strange fungi, and my “illness” was actually the long-lost “centipede ancestor bloodline,” unseen for a hundred years.

On the night I was near death, the immense shadow of a centipede entered my dream and branded the nine stages of the Hundred-Legged Path of Mortal Shedding into my mind.

Bone armor covered my body, leaving blades and swords unable to harm me. Hidden venom glands could kill anyone who touched them.

Humans would not tolerate me, and demons saw me as food.

Then a woman with her face veiled in spiderwebs said to me, “Those of us who are ‘insect-transformed’ can only survive by sticking together.”

I crushed the compass of my pursuers and looked at my “inhuman” kin in the Earth Vein Alliance: some had shells growing from their backs, some had compound eyes, and some had arms transformed into pincers.

It turned out that on the path to immortality, the first thing I had to shed was this “human heart,” already useless to me.

“From this day on,”

The spines of my backbone burst through my skin, gleaming with a chilling light beneath the moon.

“I am neither demon nor human.”

“I am the last emperor of the Centipede bloodline.”