Year 2042.
It had been twenty-seven years since Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem swept the world.
At first, people thought it was just a stunning science fiction story.
Until later, one incomprehensible incident followed another.
An intangible existence, similar to the "sophons" in the book, seemed to have arrived early and enveloped reality.
Every breakthrough in human technology that might pose a "threat" kept dying in a string of bizarre "accidents."
Unfortunately, in the real world, there was no Swordholder.
No hero like Luo Ji emerged from the stories.
That faint variable might fall upon an ordinary person.
His name was Lu Huiming.
To others, the young man living in a run-down studio in Zhongguancun was little more than "down and out" and "unrealistic"—except for his unusually handsome face.
On this day, after a simple goodbye to his girlfriend, he returned alone to his cold, quiet office.
In the empty room, only the low hum of servers echoed.
Suddenly—
Beep! Beep! Beep! —
A series of short, sharp alarms—unlike any system sound ever known—exploded without warning. Cold and piercing, they seized his entire mind.
The alarm—shrill as torn silk—ripped through the eternal silence of the Aethereal Metropolis of Myriad Forms.
At the apex of the Sacred Imperial Palace, its outline a sharp trapezoid.
The wave of sound pierced palace walls and holy light, slamming into the heart of the Dragon Throne Hall.
Augustus, the supreme ruler of the Kingdom of Metaphysics, slowly opened his eyes.
The throne was carved from a single block of Void-Abyss Obsidian, its back facing the starry sky, its front overlooking all living things.
When the alarm blared, the figure—still as a slumbering mountain—merely twitched an eyelid.
A pair of molten-gold eyes, their depths frozen with ice that had never thawed through eternity.
Deep enough to swallow starlight, calm as congealed time.
His face seemed chiseled by the highest laws themselves; every line spelled Unchallengeable.
He wore dark-gold heavy armor, etched with an ancient totem: the roots of the World Tree coiling around shattered stars.
A cloak as dark as clotted blood hung from his shoulders, stitched with the capital's emblem using threads of annihilation—an eye standing upon an infinite Möbius loop.
Most striking of all was the sword beside the throne, now firmly gripped in his right hand.
Sacred Sword of Dual-Dragon Judgment
The blade was slender, shrouded in a dark-gold aura that flickered endlessly, as if it were a living, flowing judgment itself.
An Eastern Dragon of Order coiled up from the hilt, its body winding around the blade, scales glinting with a gentle yet absolute luster.
Its head reared high, holding a slowly spinning pure-white orb—the embodiment of Definition and Edict.
Just above the orb, the ferocious head of a Western Chaos Demon Dragon stared it down!
The dragon's body stretched downward, forming an S-shaped grip that fit the palm perfectly, its power domineering.
The pommel was a sharp, dark-red dragon tooth, as if it could pierce through dimensions.
Divine and Chaos, Order and Frenzy—forcibly unified under an absolute will within this sword, balanced in a silent, roaring equilibrium.
Seres, Grand Saintess stood silently behind the throne, her peacock fan frozen mid‑air, her stunning face devoid of any expression.
Beneath the high platform, seven figures stood in a solemn fan formation.
Their auras varied—deep as abyssal mountains, sharp as freshly forged blades, ethereal as smoke, blazing as hellfire.
These were the Seven Grand Masters, the pinnacle of memory power in the realm.
Celestial Mechanism Pavilion, Hall of Spiritual Healing, Forge of Wills, Sect of Shadow Traces, Pavilion of the Piercing Sun, Myriad Phenomena Archive.
And the throne itself belonged to the supreme Sanctuary of Sacred Radiance.
His molten-gold gaze swept slowly, heavy as a thousand jun, finally locking onto one man.
A scholar in a blue robe.
He stood among the others, gentle and calm, seemingly detached from the world.
But a closer look into his eyes revealed a quiet ink sea—one that could reflect all things, or devour all light.
He was a scale unto himself.
Zhou Xun.
Leader of the Celestial Mechanism Pavilion.
Their eyes met. A thousand words condensed into a single moment.
Without moving his feet, Zhou Xun's figure drifted off the platform like a backward-flying blue feather, plummeting toward the vast, flashing-red city walls below.
He hovered. His robes whipped wildly in the chaotic energy currents.
Before him stretched a matrix of silver spheres, reaching the edge of sight.
Their once‑rhythmic red pulses now raged and scattered, like billions of bloodshot pupils convulsing at once.
He fell silent for three breaths. He straightened, closed his eyes.
A colossal, ancient‑styled brush landed in his hand.
Its shaft was purple sandalwood; its ferrule coiled with a faint Bai Ze phantom.
At the top, instead of a knob, rested a tiny sickle of death, its edge glinting with dim, cold light.
Judgment Brush of Life and Death.
He stood balanced on one leg, steady in the void.
A few strands of snow‑white hair broke free from their pin, floating upward against gravity.
His left hand formed a sword finger, tapping lightly against his pale lips.
His right hand spun the Judgment Brush at a frantic speed!
The sickle at its top blurred into a cold shadow.
At the brush tip, cyan-black light surged, with countless tiny, profound ink runes flickering into existence and vanishing within.
Buzz —!
A resonance that shook the very foundation of the soul burst open!
He turned himself into the origin of contradiction—extreme Calm and erupting Motion, pure White and surging Black, violently merging, spinning, collapsing within him…
A giant, rotating shadow of an ink-wash Tai Chi diagram, hundreds of feet wide, suddenly materialized over the city wall.
The next instant!
His eyes snapped open!
No whites, no pupils—only an abyss of pure black, swallowing all light.
His lips parted slightly.
Four words boomed out, heavy as heavenly decrees:
"Yi — Jing — Ming — Cha!"
Reflective Insight!
BOOM —!!!
A silent explosion erupted on the soul level.
Four forceful, unyielding ink characters blazed into existence before the wall.
Then they unraveled and splashed apart, turning into a vast, freehand ink scroll that covered the endless metal wall.
Where the scroll passed, the cold metal surface was instantly "dyed" with flowing ink.
Then a suffocating scene emerged—
Countless shadow swordsmen came alive from the scroll.
Their forms were abstract, their postures varied.
They moved like a silent tide, sweeping across sphere after sphere at the speed of thought.
Their gazes were scales, their minds blades; a single thought inspected ten thousand things.
Their efficiency was inconceivable, defying logic.
Yet even so, compared to a search that fought against the very underlying data of the world, he was still too slow.
The ink tide surged across the massive wall, forming an ever‑expanding, silent, overwhelmingly oppressive inspection domain.
Time stretched thin. Every instant was sliced into trillions of parts, ruthlessly examined.
At the absolute split second when the "crest" of the ink tide was about to swallow one unremarkable silver sphere—when the information feedback was moments away from forming—
Drip.
A soft, steady judgment sound rang out, as if coming from the very bottom of all cosmic laws.
The ear-splitting, city‑wide alarm cut off at the same time as the surging ink tide.
The abnormal red light winked out in unison.
The Aethereal Metropolis of Myriad Forms returned to its usual, glorious, icy "peace."
"No anomalies detected."
The ink storm vanished instantly.
Shadow swordsmen, ink scroll, Tai Chi shadow… all gone in a blink,
as if gently erased from reality by an eraser of highest authority.
The wall reverted to cold metal and holy radiance.
The spheres fell silent, glowing with gentle milky baseline light.
Everything returned to "normal."
But in that terrifying 0.001 second, deep within the milky light of the silver sphere that had nearly been "discovered"—
Mo Bai was held fixed by an invisible force field.
Beneath his closed eyelids, his eyeballs trembled violently, erratically, at high speed.
As if chasing an invisible nightmare, or catching a wisp of fading phantom light.
A voice cut through all noise, pain, and fog of chaos—
clear as a whisper in his ear, yet distant as if from the other side of time and space:
"Protect your three… true Memory Core Crystals."
The voice was cold and clear, with unshakable solemnity.
It was the voice from the rainy night, the green-dressed girl's tone.
But deeper now, a soul-soaked weariness, and a desperate urgency as if fire were at her heels.
"You are far too weak to fight everything before you right now. Hide them. And find the truth."
A tiny, static-like distortion marred the voice,
as if the transmission itself was being interfered with, erased.
"…Live on."
The final syllable stretched, ethereal, as if all strength had been spent—seeping with blood and hope:
"Perhaps… you are our last… hope."
The echo lingered, seeping into the boundless dark of his consciousness sea, then vanished completely.
Hope…