I want to tread the heavens

The Purple Star Domain, located at the easternmost point of the celestial realm, is known as the "Garden of Stars That Never Falls".

For thirty thousand years, eighty-one auspicious stars have ceaselessly spewed forth auspicious purple energy day and night, weaving a celestial river of light across billions of miles in the void. This spiritual river, known as "Purple Energy Coming from the East," has nourished three hundred and sixty cultivation civilizations, six thousand immortal sects and caves, and countless floating immortal islands scattered like pearls throughout the star field, each blooming with the Jade Immortal Flower that blossoms only once every three thousand years.

But at this moment, this garden of stars is dying.

A thick, almost tangible darkness was gushing forth from the "Sky Rift Abyss" in the eastern part of the star field. It was not the arrival of night, but an erasure of existence—wherever the darkness passed, the light of the stars was not obscured, but conceptually negated, as if those eternal stars that had illuminated the ages had never existed.

The Celestial Palace is suspended at the core of the Purple Starfield.

This celestial palace, forged from primordial divine iron and smelted with the cores of nine thousand stars, is the symbol of the Ling clan guarding the gateway to the Eastern Heavenly Realm. The palace walls, towering ten thousand feet high, are engraved with defensive celestial runes passed down since the beginning of time. At this moment, these runes are fading away at an unprecedented rate, each flash leaving spiderweb-like cracks on the palace walls.

"It's the seventh day."

Ling Zhan stood at the edge of the observatory, his dark armor, the guardian's armor, now covered in fine cracks. A deep, bone-revealing wound pierced his left shoulder, its edges teeming with writhing black demonic energy that relentlessly eroded his immortal body, a Great Luo Golden Immortal. Golden blood flowed down his arm, meandering through his armor in eerie patterns, finally dripping from his fingertips and scorching black holes into the starfall jade steps beneath his feet.

He held the Nine Heavens Thunder Spear in his hand.

This celestial weapon, which had accompanied him for 36,000 years, was now emitting a low, mournful cry. The innate lightning path sealed within the spear resonated painfully with the collapsing laws of heaven and earth deep within the star field. Each gunshot corresponded to the extinguishing of a distant star.

"Forty-one of the seventy-two outer defensive formations has been breached." Ling Zhan's voice was terrifyingly calm, a coldness tempered by countless life-and-death experiences. "The three stars of Dongxuan, Xiji, and Nanheng fell a quarter of an hour ago. All the defending generals were killed in battle, and the cores of the stars have been demonized and are transforming into a demon nest."

He spoke very slowly, each word as if he had used all his strength.

Because with each word he uttered, he had to forcefully suppress the surging Dao blood in his chest with his immortal essence—that was a primordial Dao injury, a consequence of being eroded by the Demon Emperor's "Ten Thousand Demons Devouring Heaven Technique." If he hadn't possessed the Devouring Heaven Bloodline, a secret technique passed down by the Ling Clan, which allowed him to forcibly devour and refine a portion of the demonic energy, his Dao foundation would have already collapsed.

"The Demon Emperor has not yet truly made his move."

A clear, cold sound, like jade stones striking each other, rang out beside me.

Su Yingxue walked to the railing of the observatory and stood side by side with Ling Zhan. She wore a moon-white star-patterned long dress, on which a celestial constellation embroidered with stardust slowly swirled. With each rotation, faint starlight fell, forming a protective aura as thin as a cicada's wing around her.

As the last princess of the Starfall Clan, Su Yingxue's beauty was breathtakingly sacred. Her long, black hair was loosely tied up with a single wooden hairpin, with a few stray strands falling beside her cheeks, making her skin appear as white as snow. But what was most captivating were her eyes—those eyes seemed to hold a complete Milky Way, within which stars rose and fell, flowing and changing, so deep that they could make one lose themselves.

But at this moment, what is reflected in this Milky Way is the collapsing Purple Starfield.

"He's waiting." Ling Zhan didn't turn around, his gaze still fixed on the ever-expanding darkness in the distance. "Wait until our minds are worn down by this war of attrition, until we watch as each subordinate star is corrupted by demons and each living being devoured, then cracks will appear in our Dao hearts."

His hand gripped the gun barrel tightly.

His knuckles turned white from the exertion, and beneath the skin covered by the innate lightning patterns, blue veins bulged out like coiling dragons.

Su Yingxue, this name once shook the heavens thirty thousand years ago.

At that time, she was not Ling Zhan's wife, nor the wife of the guardian of the Ziqiong Starfield, but the last princess of the Starfall Clan, the legendary one who single-handedly supported the "Starfall Sky Ship" in the spacetime turbulence and protected 30,000 of her clansmen who were fleeing.

The Starfall Clan, one of the ancient divine races, were born with the ability to resonate with the stars and draw upon their power. Legend has it that their ancestor glimpsed the ultimate secrets of the stars, angering a mysterious being and leading to the clan's annihilation. The "Starfall Calamity" thirty thousand years ago nearly wiped this ancient divine race, which had existed for nine eras, from the annals of history.

Su Yingxue was the only exception.

When Ling Zhan rescued her from the depths of the temporal turbulence, she was on the verge of death. The Starfall Clan's supreme treasure, the "Star River Mirror," protected her last vestiges of her soul, but it also cost her dearly—she lost all 30,000 years of cultivation, and her bloodline essence was almost completely depleted.

Ling Zhan spent a full thousand years using the Ling Clan's secret Devouring Bloodline to prolong her life, and then another two thousand years to help her rebuild her Dao foundation.

In this process, two people who should have never crossed paths fell in love.

"Yingxue," Ling Zhan suddenly spoke, his voice unusually soft.

"Um?"

"Our baby should be born in three months."

Su Yingxue's hand unconsciously touched her lower abdomen.

There, a new life is being conceived. Although only three months old, the little life has already stirred a strong resonance within her Starfall Bloodline—a kind of throbbing she had never experienced before, as if this child was born to carry out some kind of mission.

What alarmed the two even more was that the child seemed to have inherited Ling Zhan's Devouring Heaven bloodline.

Two supreme bloodlines that should have been mutually exclusive achieved a delicate balance within an unborn child.

"When I felt the baby move yesterday, I used my divine sense to investigate," Su Yingxue said softly, a gentle ripple appearing in the Milky Way in her eyes. "The power within him... is more active than we expected. Starfall and Devouring Heaven have formed a kind of fusion within him that we cannot understand."

Ling Zhan remained silent.

The Devouring Bloodline is the Ling Clan's greatest secret and its greatest curse.

Legend has it that this bloodline originated from a forbidden being who, at the dawn of chaos, devoured three thousand Great Daos and sought to merge with them. Those who possess this bloodline cultivate at an unparalleled speed, can devour all the laws of things and make them their own, are invincible among their peers, and can fight against those of higher levels as easily as drinking water or eating rice.

But the price is that it will inevitably incur divine retribution.

Of the thirty-seven recorded awakeners of the Devouring Heaven Bloodline in the Ling Clan, none met a good end. The strongest ancestor was struck by the Ninefold World-Destroying Lightning Tribulation and his soul was destroyed just as he was about to step into the Dao Ancestor Realm; the youngest genius, who stepped into the True Immortal Realm at the age of thirteen, mysteriously disappeared during a training exercise and was found three hundred years later as a dried-up corpse with its bloodline essence drained.

Therefore, Ling Zhan's father, the previous patriarch of the Ling clan, held his hand before his death and said, "Zhan'er, remember, either seal this bloodline forever, or... escape. Escape to the ends of the myriad realms, escape to a corner even the Heavenly Dao has forgotten, and perhaps there will still be a glimmer of hope."

Ling Zhan chose the latter.

Therefore, he volunteered to guard this remote but vital Ziqiong Starfield—both to protect the eastern gateway of the celestial realm and to exile himself away from the central vortex.

He just didn't expect that even after escaping here, what was bound to happen would still happen.

And it came so quickly and so fiercely.