The day it was proven that carbon-based lifeforms could crush the second law of thermodynamics with their bare hands, humanity lost the stars for good.
Those beings called themselves “immortals.”
They had neither starships nor Dyson spheres. They merely sat cross-legged in the vacuum of absolute zero and opened their pores, greedily devouring the light of stars and the universe’s higher-dimensional radiation like black holes.
The scientific community called this higher-dimensional energy, which violated the conservation of mass, “zero-point particle flow.” Those lofty immortals called it “spiritual energy.”
The great edifice of heavy industry, in which human civilization had taken pride for three thousand years, was as fragile before a cultivation civilization where “power resides in oneself” as a matchlock from the First World War.
Defeat did not bring a massacre, because humanity wasn’t even worthy of being slaughtered. In the eyes of the immortals, mortals without “spiritual roots” were fit only to be moss beneath the shadow of stars, scraping by on spiritual-energy scraps.
The remnants of humanity were driven into sunless underground cities. Here, there was no patriotism or hope of reviving civilization. There was only one thing: fuel.
Spirit stones, the most basic currency and cultivation material in the eyes of cultivators, were the only “high-purity uranium” that could power geothermal generators and water filtration pumps for the people of the underground cities.
Then he crammed himself into a smuggling capsule and hurtled like a rough iron cannonball toward the back garden of the immortals and Buddhas across the heavens.
He sought neither immortality nor the Great Dao.
He was only going up there to steal some “firewood,” so his family could make it through the winter.
Anyone who dared stand between him and the firewood he was bringing home would have their idol, along with all thirty-three heavens, smashed to pieces.
