At the beginning of heaven and earth, there was only the Void: the primordial chaos, the source of all things. The ancient gods within the Void had no consciousness or form, and were one with the chaos. Then, one day, the first thought was born in the Void: "Separation." In an instant, existence split from nonexistence, light parted from darkness, and the three realms came into being.
The ancient gods saw the three realms as a wound torn into the Void. They waged war, seeking to merge the realms back into it. The first deities of the three realms, formed from fragments of the primordial thought, paid a terrible price to drive the ancient gods into the depths of the Void. They established the Gate of Return to the Void as a boundary. This gate was no ordinary gate, but a barrier born from the very concept of "Separation," the foundation on which the three realms endured.
After the war, the ancient gods established the Celestial Court and brought order to the world, while Buddhism flourished in the Western Heaven. Only the Divine Lord of the Heavenly Eye refused investiture and stood alone guard over the Gate of Return to the Void, watching what stirred within it with his "Spirit Eye of Illusion-Piercing." Ten thousand years later, the Divine Lord died for no apparent reason. With his dying breath, he scattered the laws of his Spirit Eye into the cycle of reincarnation, waiting for someone destined to inherit his resolve to keep watch.
After the Divine Lord's death, cracks gradually appeared in the Gate of Return to the Void. Fragments of the ancient gods quietly seeped into the three realms, waiting for the return of the Void's supreme god.
In Qingshi Town, Jiangnan Circuit, in the Great Zhou Dynasty, the left eye of Li Due, a seventeen-year-old orphan, suddenly saw ghosts. He did not know this was the sign that the Divine Lord of the Heavenly Eye had awakened after nine cycles of reincarnation. Nor did he know that the black scale in his arms, which he had dug up beneath an old locust tree, was the first fragment to fall from the Gate of Return to the Void, a token left to the three realms by the ancient god, the Void.
From Qingshi Town to the underworld, from the mortal realm to the Celestial Court, from pawn to player, Li Due will carve out a path no one has ever walked before amid betrayal and schemes. At the end of that path, before the Gate of Return to the Void, the ancient god, the Void, is waiting for him.
Only after crossing through all the calamities that plague living beings does one understand that the one who delivers them from calamity is himself the final barrier.
