I risked my life, using the butterfly effect to shatter the immortal realm.

There was no simultaneous sound of ten thousand swords.

There was no auspicious purple aura coming from the east.

Yu Liang gripped the sword hilt with his bloodied hand, and the world froze instantly.

The magnificent landscape was torn apart, revealing its decaying bones.

Xiao Wufeng's face turned into pieces of paper, the blood array became blocks of color, and the spiritual energy storm turned into noise.

Everything lost its depth, everything lost its color.

A strong sense of weightlessness washed over him, and Yu Liang's soul was forcibly pulled out of his body by a brute force.

It plunged straight into the abyss.

It passes through the physical body, through the spiritual energy, through this illusory facade called "the present world," and crashes into the deliberately forgotten recycling bin of the world.

……

There is no light here.

Only the remnants of the laws danced in the air.

In this deathly, gray-white void, countless glaring lines flow.

Densely packed, like blood vessels, like a spider web, it's even more like a breathtakingly intricate marionette chart.

As thick as a giant python, it represents the predetermined fate of a nation through the changing dynasties.

As thin as a spider's thread, that's where a single scallion in the bowl of an ordinary person in the city goes.

Gray lines define the trajectory, red lines entangle emotions and hatred, and black lines mark the deadly situation.

This is the [Ruins of Cause and Effect] – the dumping ground for the laws governing the operation of Heaven.

The rusty sword hovered in front of Yu Liang's consciousness.

Stripped of its disguise as a "sword," it is not an ancient divine weapon at all.

It is a chaotic, distorted, and constantly erroneous "flaw in the Way of Heaven".

It is a malignant tumor formed from discarded rules.

Its sole purpose is to conceal the flaws in the origin of the world.

"Unexpectedly, the ninth one to enter was an empty shell without even a spiritual root."

A mocking murmur arose, as if the great road had collapsed.

Within that chaotic fragment of laws, a distorted face vaguely emerged, scrutinizing him with the eyes of someone looking at an alien.

"Stop looking, this isn't about cultivating immortality, it's a back door to the Heavenly Dao."

That voice carried an absurdity born of a profound understanding of the world:

"Young man, there are eleven paths in this world: sword, alchemy, formation, kingship, hegemony, the five elements, yin and yang, slaughter, time and space, destiny, and reincarnation."

"Those who follow the will of Heaven are all puppets."

"Only this twelfth one... is tampered with."

Yu Liang stared at the chaotic laws, and his legs began to become ethereal.

"tamper?"

"Others follow the will of Heaven, we take advantage of what Heaven lacks."

The voice pointed to Yu Liang's transparent hand:

"The causal deception you used before was nothing more than instinctively plucking a few insignificant dotted lines in this cage full of loopholes."

"Turning a seemingly hopeless situation into a viable one, letting a butterfly flap its wings and create a storm—this is just a glimpse into the fundamentals."

"The true path of cause and effect is logical deception."

"It is to define the result directly without considering the process."

"They're changing the cardinal rule of 'a life for a life' to 'murder for wealth'!"

The voice suddenly turned cold, chilling to the bone:

"But there's no such thing as a free lunch; you're borrowing money from this world at exorbitant interest rates."

"As an anomaly in the Heavenly Way, the Heavenly Way will always be watching you."

"You will be unlucky, you will die young, your 'existence' is your currency."

"Every time you alter reality, you pay the price. Until the cause and effect are exhausted, and there is no trace of you left in the world, even the people you love most will feel that you never existed."

Yu Liang remained silent.

He looked at his almost completely transparent body, and Su Xiu's face in his mind was becoming blurry.

It turned out to be the case.

No wonder every time I use my abilities, I'm overdrawing my life force.

He was a cheater, an illegal immigrant, risking his life for a chance to defy fate.

"I won't do it."

Yu Liang suddenly spoke and took a step back.

That street-smart, roguish energy kicked in, and he shook his head like a rattle drum:

"This deal is a loss! I went through all that trouble to change my fate, only to be wiped out by God in the end? No way! Let me go back. Even if Xiao Wufeng stabs me to death, at least I'll have a whole body, a grave, and Su Xiu can burn some paper money for me during festivals."

You have no choice.

The voice sneered: "The moment you saw these lines, you were already in the game. If you back out now, the laws of Heaven will immediately eliminate you. Besides… do you really think the outside world is worth going back to be a dead man?"

Splash!

The gray fog was forcibly torn open.

The true face of the outside world is laid bare before our eyes.

Yu Liang's pupils trembled violently.

It is no longer the glamorous world of cultivation.

It was a huge, cold, sophisticated—breeding farm.

The sect is a circle, and ordinary people are pigs.

Xiao Wufeng, and those arrogant geniuses, all had an invisible black line stuck in their skulls, connecting them to the huge vortex in the sky.

They believed they were absorbing spiritual energy and pursuing immortality.

In reality, they are being raised like livestock, and once they are fat, they will be harvested.

The so-called ascension is nothing more than entering the slaughterhouse.

"This is how it should be."

The voice was filled with sorrow and madness:

"All living beings are provisions. To be a human, or a pig?"

Yu Liang stared intently at those images.

Looking at the mortals being harvested at will, looking at Su Xiu's face filled with fear and helplessness in the torrent of fate.

He's a fraud.

But he was also a paranoid, a madman who wanted things to be the way they were supposed to be.

If she doesn't overturn the table, Su Xiu will eventually become just another piece of meat on the assembly line.

"……Oh shit."

Yu Liang spat.

His gambler's instincts ignited, and he reached out his hand.

"Flip this broken table."

He suddenly looked up, staring at the indescribable causal will, stretched out his hand, and revealed a ferocious greed on his face, the kind that belongs to a cunning businessman.

"But this job is too dirty and too risky. I'm willing to take the blame, but I need more money!"

Yu Liang gritted his teeth, as if he were bargaining with the King of Hell, showing not a trace of the humility of a seeker of the Dao:

"I want the supreme power to alter the secrets of heaven! I want the greatest variable in this world! Since I am to be the anomaly, then I will be the anomaly that can cause the Great Dao to collapse!"

"besides--"

He pointed to his transparent arm:

"I'll take the debt, but I'll set the rules! From today onward, I won't cultivate immortality, I'll cultivate debt! The more people in this world owe me, the more I cannot die. You have to accept this logic!"

boom!

The chaotic laws seemed to understand his greed.

Or rather, it had been waiting for such a mad host for far too long.

There was no bargaining.

It transformed directly into a pitch-black torrent, carrying the resentment of countless eras and the flaws of the Heavenly Dao, and forcefully rushed into Yu Liang's body.

There was no dazzling golden light, only a madness powerful enough to overturn the world.

Within this stagnant rift in spacetime, Yu Liang's physical body underwent a terrifying reshaping.

The flesh melted away like candle wax, the bones crumbled into powder without a sound, and were then forcibly glued together by a strange force originating from nothingness.

He was no longer a mere mortal.

He became a living bug that walked outside the rules of Heaven.

The hideous and terrifying marks of divine retribution on his body miraculously healed, replaced by complex, obscure, pitch-black veins that spread wildly from his heart to his entire body, like ancient forbidden runes.

That is the embodiment of variables.

It is an intractable and unsolvable debt in this world.

As the black patterns took shape, an unprecedentedly cold and insightful power exploded deep within his consciousness.

There is no sound or panel.

There was only one kind of trembling and ecstasy that came from the depths of the soul.

He saw the true nature of the world.

It is no longer a colorful appearance, but countless gray and white interwoven lines.

Some lines are as tough as iron; that's just how they are.

Some threads are as fragile as silk; that's a variable.

And he became the only one who could reach out and pluck the strings.

Is this the true form of the twelfth path?

No spiritual root or comprehension is needed; all that is needed is the audacity to deceive the common people.

An intense, instinctive hunger instantly swept over my entire body.

That wasn't a craving for food, but a greed for "existence".

Intuition rang like an alarm bell: his life force was already as weak as a candle in the wind, and only by constantly disrupting his destiny or taking on karmic debts that even heaven and earth could not calculate could he fill the bottomless void in this body.

That ancient, weathered voice echoed deep within the soul, carrying a hint of mockery and madness, completing a kind of unorthodox handover of inheritance:

"Remember, on this path, innocence is a dead end, while debt is eternal life."

"Prying into causes, weaving, making falsehoods... until you tamper with the secrets of heaven, this is your long ladder to heaven."

"It is only natural for mortals to pay back their debts; but if you owe a debt that is so enormous that even the laws of heaven cannot calculate it, then this world will have to hold its nose and beg you to live, just to settle the debt."

Light and shadow reunite, colors return to their rightful place.

Yu Liang's soul suddenly fell back into that brand new body.

The excruciating pain of his soul and body reuniting almost made him scream, but he gritted his teeth and endured it.

The realm of error has been formed.

Open your eyes.

A hint of desolate annihilation flashed deep in his pupils, followed by a dangerously curved smile at the corner of his mouth.

I always thought of myself as nothing more than a desperate charlatan.

Unexpectedly, he turned out to be a born scourge.

This force cannot be exposed to the light of day, nor can it be tolerated by the world.

Once exposed, they will be enemies of the whole world and condemned to destruction.

but……

That's fucking awesome!

In this world of cultivation where mortals are treated like dirt and all living beings are like pawns, what could be more exhilarating than becoming a variable that drives those high-ranking pawns crazy?

Yu Liang gripped the rusty sword in his hand, which had stopped trembling and instead exuded an aura of intimacy.

It felt like holding the whole world in your hands.

"Pleasant to work with, my... lousy ally."