Guarding the Ruins with Broken Bones

He had once been a Pure Yang Sacred Body, a once-in-ten-thousand-years prodigy. But at fifteen, his body was seized by another soul, his spirit torn to pieces, and what remained of him fell into the remote Niujia Village. He became a good-for-nothing without even a spiritual root. The blacksmith called him Ah Dai. The village children called him a useless rootless nobody. The local bully, a hunter, kicked out two of his teeth. Everyone thought this was all his life would ever amount to, until the Guixu Seed that had slumbered deep in his soul for ten thousand years beat for the first time, just as he was about to be taken away by a Chaos cultivator. From then on, he rebuilt his path to the Great Dao with a useless spiritual root. He used the Yantian Illustrated Record to glimpse the essence of all techniques, entered the sect as an outer-sect steward, “treated” every opponent on the arena, and pulled the sect's guardian Azure Bird, tainted by a demonic aspect, out of the Chaos Thorns root and all. His weapon was never overwhelming force. It was taking every badly forged, blunt sword and refining it until it could just barely cut through a stone slab. From the well in Niujia Village to the Zichen Starfield's main Zerg nest, from law-forged armor confronting a Calamity Aspect to primordial enlightenment in the Sea of All Things, only when the ultimate truth of entropy was revealed before the stele of the Taiyi Era did he realize that the “enemy” he had spent his life fighting was, in fact, the universe's oldest gift. And the story's ending is not the return of a heavenly god. It is a barefoot boy from a blacksmith's home, lying alone on a hillside behind the village on a summer evening, gazing up at the stars and thinking how beautiful they are. The clang of the blacksmith's shop down the hill is exactly like the clonk-clonk sound made long ago when someone struck an old furnace lid.