Chapter Two: The Lich

The primordial world is immense, and Luo Zu is insignificant. When he stood atop the highest peak of the cave where his settlement resided, gazing into the distance, he could not see Buzhou Mountain.

The land was boundless, with countless mountains and plateaus. Though Buzhou Mountain was the tallest, the peaks obstructing Luo Zu’s view were themselves so lofty that his sight could not pass beyond them.

At first, he believed the distant mountain before him to be Buzhou, but his companions in the settlement told him it was not; its name was unknown to them.

As for Buzhou Mountain, the elders of the settlement had seen it, for they had migrated from there.

According to their descriptions, Buzhou Mountain connected to the heavens, whose height none could fathom, and was the backbone of the Great God Pangu.

The name Pangu had been bestowed upon the first generation of human ancestors by Lady Nuwa, then passed to the second, and now to Luo Zu, the third generation.

This tradition would continue, with each generation inheriting from the last.

Regarding the way back to their original home, Buzhou Mountain, the elders could not answer, for their journey had been so long and arduous that the memory was lost; they only recalled following the direction of the setting sun.

They walked for nearly three hundred years, crossing great rivers and mountains, traversing plains, swamps, deserts, snowy lands, and volcanoes, until finally reaching a place fit for the survival of the human race.

Along the way, brothers perished, friends died; of the three thousand who set out, only one hundred and twenty-one arrived. Newborn humans joined them; some died en route, others survived to the present.

The tribes of witches and monsters bullied them; mindless beasts preyed upon them, and natural disasters claimed their lives, mercilessly.

The elders once told Luo Zu of an incident where mortals suffered from a battle between immortals. They knew not which immortals fought—indeed, not even a shadow was seen. Their migrating group was swallowed halfway by land that suddenly broke apart.

He was fortunate to escape; at that time, their only option was to flee desperately, hoping luck favored them, unable to care for their companions.

That magical battle remained etched in his memory, unresolved to this day.

He often instructed the younger generation to avoid anything floating in midair.

After all, when immortals fought, magical treasures were sometimes involved, and immortals did not always appear human—they could take the forms of witches or monsters, or resemble mountains, rivers, winds, frost, snow, or moonlight, even more abstract shapes.

“What is this?” Luo Zu looked at the drawing scraped into the earth with a branch, a question mark rising above his head.

Simple lines depicted a creature with an octopus’s head, a dragon’s body, and a leopard’s tail, surrounded by a dozen floating spheres.

“An immortal,” replied the elder.

He called every “animal” that humans could not defeat an immortal.

Luo Zu could understand this, for humanity had only reached its fourth generation, still shrouded in ignorance, lacking its own script or habit of recording, relying solely on memory.

In the settlement, the only one who attempted to record anything was Luo Zu.

He inscribed the walls of the cave, and wrote upon hides obtained from hunting.

But he could not produce “simplified characters,” for even if he did, it was meaningless. He himself could not see how the symbols he wrote resembled anything but scribbles. Each time he wrote the same character, its appearance changed.

His conclusion was that Heaven forbade the present human race from possessing their own script.

The true reason, as Luo Zu later learned, was that the mighty ones of the witch and monster races had conspired so that all living creatures on the primordial earth could only comprehend the script of those two tribes.

Returning to Luo Zu’s exploration of his own divine internal world, he never ceased his experiments, conducting them daily.

He even named his internal world—Biosphere No. 9527.

At present, his internal world was still in a phase of frequent “tenant turnover,” as Luo Zu introduced every living creature he could capture, allowing them to live and reproduce inside, then expelling them after experimentation, or simply “ending the world” within.

Yet Luo Zu still had not discovered a true way to use his internal world. The best use was simply as a tool to transport the corpses of hunted prey.

“I must rely on the wisdom of my ancestors,” he mused.

By “ancestors,” Luo Zu meant not his predecessors in the primordial world, but the wisdom of humanity from his previous life.

Of course, as a lackluster member of society, his daily monotony was relieved only by reading novels and watching short videos; his knowledge of “wisdom” was limited to vague memories from those sources.

At this time, he happened upon a bottleneck in his breathing technique and wondered if he could use his internal world to experiment with it, hoping to break through.

Luo Zu had already used his breathing technique to fill his body’s flesh with spiritual energy, nourishing his muscles and bones toward greater strength. But a year ago, he discovered he could no longer inject spiritual energy into his flesh and bones; they all resisted its entry.

He understood then that he had reached the limit of his physical body.

It was the tenth year since Luo Zu had created his breathing technique.

Afterward, he consulted his companions; some faced similar troubles, others had not encountered this issue.

Thus Luo Zu realized that the human body had limits, even the first generation.

He began attempting to open the so-called “dantian,” but could not find it. Instead, he injected the absorbed spiritual energy into his internal world, but the internal world did not change.

After all, Luo Zu’s breathing technique was used by means of his own divine power, so every time he circulated it, the spiritual energy passed through his internal world.

Yet over all these years, the internal world had not changed much.

Its space had grown larger, but that was its natural progression, and the injection of spiritual energy had not quickened this growth.

Seeing no change, Luo Zu, unable to absorb spiritual energy into his body any longer, simply poured the energy gathered by his breathing into the internal world.

As for “ancestral wisdom,” it was little more than a comfort Luo Zu offered himself in this vast primordial land.

But as time passed, those memories grew hazy, so Luo Zu often recalled them, lest he forget his previous life in the endless years to come.

Time slipped by; ten years passed, spring turned to autumn.

The land remained unchanged, except that the highest peak Luo Zu had once gazed upon had collapsed.

It was struck down by a giant with eight arms, encircled by scarlet serpents.

The elders said it was a witch.

The witch’s opponent was, naturally, a monster—a colossal striped tiger with six wings, as tall as a mountain.

After witnessing their battle, Luo Zu dreamed a strange dream that night.