For three years, he was a good-for-nothing, and everyone laughed at him.
At the cafeteria, someone stole the tea egg from his lunch. He couldn’t earn a cent writing papers for other people. The convenience store owner docked his pay and called him crazy. His classmates treated him as a joke, and street thugs used him as a punching bag. An orphan, a pauper, a pushover: everyone took a turn stepping on him.
No one knew he had once been humanity’s strongest. He had slain gods and conquered the heavens, sealing away his memories and power to hide inside an ordinary human body. The Ninefold Soul-Sealing Marks: one sealed his memories, another his power, and the rest concealed the name that had once made the gods tremble.
But now, the seals were breaking.
Beaten to the brink of death in an alley, he unconsciously sent five thugs flying. When black mist seeped through a crack in an abandoned laboratory, he raised his hand and cleaved it apart. Dark golden markings appeared on the back of his hand. An endless black sea surged through his dreams, while crows kept watch outside his window day and night.
Someone was looking for him. Someone feared him. Someone was waiting for him to wake.
Three years ago, he had sealed himself away with his own hands. Three years later, it was time to remember.
A crow outside the window said, “They’re here.”
The owner of the old bookstore said, “Your name used to be Ye Xing.”
The woman at the funeral home said, “You once told us to kill you before you became a god completely.”
He had never imagined that an orphan dismissed as worthless would have to face the last truth left behind by an entire Age of the Gods once his seal was broken.
The masses trampled him into the mud. He rose from it and took up his broken blade again. This time, he would cut down the very word “god.”
