He spent sixteen years squatting beside the pigsty.
He traced ants in the dirt with his finger, drool hanging from his chin. Everyone in the city called him the Ling family's idiot.
One day, the young master of the Wang family kicked him in the chest, sending him sprawling across the flagstones. He got back up, an ant's corpse clenched in his hand, and looked up. “I'm done counting ants.”
With one palm, he slammed the young master, a peak Foundation Establishment cultivator, into the flagstones.
He closed his eyes for three breaths, and memories flooded back. Twenty thousand years ago, he was Ling Xuan, master of all six paths and the Ninth Heaven of the Profound Sky Supreme Realm. He ruled the world's number one sect, the Profound Sky Sect, with a hundred thousand disciples under him. His cultivation had been stuck for three thousand years, so he scattered all his world-shaking power and reincarnated to cultivate anew. Someone sabotaged him, sending him crashing into the Azure Cloud Realm, where he spent sixteen years in a daze.
What was the first thing he did after waking up?
Go check on his sect.
Its ninety-nine floating peaks had been smashed to rubble. The signboard had been chopped in half, and one piece was now propping up a chicken coop. The Ancestral Hall had collapsed. Seven of the nine life lamps belonging to his disciples' disciples had gone out, and the youngest, Gu Changgeng, had been drained of twenty years of his essence, left hanging on by a thread while waiting for him. Only eighty-three people remained in the sect. The sect leader was a stuttering boy, and the whole sect survived by raising pigs and growing vegetables. The Blood Fiend Alliance came every month to collect spirit rent, with a heavy hand and an even heavier foot.
He squatted beside the pigsty and felt for the formation core buried beneath the ground. He had buried it himself ten thousand years ago, and it still worked.
“Are you awake?”
The formation core hummed.
An early Golden Core elder of the Blood Fiend Alliance brought more than thirty men to collect rent. He struck down with his palm, intending to pound this third-level Qi Refining brat into mincemeat. Ling Chen pressed his hand to the ground. Ten thousand feet below, silver light erupted and starlight coursed through him. The Golden Core elder fell to his knees in front of everyone.
The news spread across the Azure Cloud Realm in a single day. The idiot who had been addled for sixteen years was back, carrying a blade from ten thousand years ago!
