The day Shen Ye was cast out of the Shen family, his father smiled for the media cameras and said, “His fate says he won’t live past three.”
Five years later, in Tianyuan City’s underground black market for aberrants, Shen Ye plunged his fingers into the chest of a direct heir of the Qin family and pulled out a fragment of destiny that was still beating. The moment he devoured it, a blue-green corpse mark appeared on his left arm. That was the price of merging three forbidden templates.
Lu Shuangmian handed him a hemostat. “Keep using this ability, and next time you’ll be the one to mutate.”
Shen Ye wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth. “Before I mutate, I’ll have dragged all five of those families down with me.”
The hunt among the powerful families began. Beneath rules that seemed fair on the surface lurked deadly traps, yet Shen Ye used a loophole to turn the tables on the Xie family heir in front of every camera. During the livestream, Xie Jiugge screamed, “He cheated!” Shen Ye turned around, revealing the corpse marks spreading from beneath his collar up his neck. “The rules? I’m what happens when the rules mutate.”
But the law of life-devouring spares no one. When he merged with a fourth template, an ancient rift split open in the sky above all of Tianyuan City. A supernatural ritual had spiraled out of control, and the progenitor of the aberrants, asleep for a thousand years, opened its eyes. The price of awakening it was the last shred of Shen Ye’s humanity.
