Have you ever known despair?
Year 9,721 of the Human Era, Frost Moon.
Luo Dahe stood at the village entrance, watching cartload after cartload of people being taken away. The carts passed before him one by one, ten by ten, a hundred by a hundred, a thousand by a thousand, from dawn to dusk, dusk to midnight, and midnight to the next dawn.
He saw a child clinging to the side of a cage, reaching out to him.
It was his son.
He stood there without moving. For three months.
Then he took his first step.
He walked to Xue Family Village, where he met a sixteen-year-old boy named Xue Zhiyao. The boy had a battered ancient book that recorded something humanity had lost for thirty thousand years: a method of cultivation.
It was not scraps tossed down by the myriad races. It was humanity’s own path.
The boy punched through the old locust tree at the village entrance and said, “Want to fight? I’ll teach you.”
From that day on, three despairing people, Luo Dahe, Xue Zhiyao, and Li Shimin, sat around a fire and made a decision: they would no longer stand by and wait to die. They would stand and fight.
They did not know how long the road would be, how many people would die, or how far the sixteen-year-old boy would ultimately go.
They knew only this:
In thirty thousand years, humanity had knelt three hundred times and lost thirty billion lives.
This time, someone wanted to try standing up.
From a ruined mountain village to the Great Wall of Human Bones stretching ten thousand miles;
from trembling ants to the Human Emperor before whom all races bowed;
from standing alone to having eight million iron-blooded brothers at his back.
Xue Zhiyao spent his whole life doing one thing:
Straightening the character for “human,” which had knelt for thirty thousand years.
