After a quick nap to rest up, Xuan opened his eyes to find himself staring at the dark ceiling of his assigned private quarters. The candles in the room were all blown out, of course, giving off the impression that he was indeed sleeping, but really, all he did was doze a bit.

Gently but swiftly, he moved his blankets off of his body and rose from the bed, before stepping towards the window and quietly opening it up. The atmosphere hit him like a truck—the cool night breeze, the soft chirping of cicadas, and the bright full moon high above in the dark sky where the sun was during the day. Given all of these features, Xuan surmised the time was now deep into the night. The silence of the sect only confirmed that further, so if he wanted to pull something off, now was the best time.

Moving back to his bedside, he neatly stuffed a pillow underneath in his place just in case anyone came to check on him. It wasn’t a very good disguise by any means, but he was doubtful anyone would come check, and even if they did, they wouldn’t dare to come close enough to disturb the guests’ sleep.

With that done, he slipped out of the front doors quietly, taking care not to make as little noise as possible. He moved nimbly, and after looking both ways, he exited the courtyard onto the pathway right outside, following the path towards a hidden area of the Sky Cloud Sect. It was a forbidden place he’d unintentionally found during the early stages of his past life, but never dared to enter at the time due to his low cultivation.

Later on, he had came back to that spot and created an opening in the energy barrier—also known as an array—protecting it to investigate what the place’s contents were, only to find a bunch of body tempering arts that were no longer of any use to him—who had been well beyond that stage by that point. As such, he hadn’t bothered looking in detail, and simply left in disappointment.

This time, however, things were different. Those body tempering arts were exactly what Xuan needed right now. He even remembered that at the time, he felt somewhat regretful due to just how powerful these special body tempering arts were. Too bad cultivators could only cultivate one Body Tempering Art in their lifetime. It was painful just to think about how much stronger he could’ve been had he used them instead of the art he was given along with everyone else in the Sky Cloud Sect.

But as for why these techniques were stored in a forlorn forbidden area, well…

… That’s because although they were certainly powerful, they also all came with a steep, demanding price.

*****

After a good while of walking and avoiding patrolling guards, Xuan arrived before the place known as the Forbidden Archives. It was in an isolated location hidden behind the Library of the Sky Cloud Sect, with a special array meant to keep people away. If someone didn’t know of this area beforehand, they would never have been able to find it.

Thankfully, all the guards on patrol duty at night were only Body Tempering or Core Formation stage outer disciples, given how weak of a sect this was compared to other powers in the world. It was quite big in terms of land size, but that was about all the Sky Cloud Sect had going for them. It really meant nothing considering this region didn’t hold any rich cultivation areas or valuable resources to excavate, which was also why no powerful force bothered to assimilate into this area.

Since all these guards had low cultivation, slipping past them was easy. Cultivators did not develop world sense until the Nascent Soul stage, so before then, when it came to awareness, they were just like any average human. Xuan’s experience and familiarity with the sect’s layout allowed him to slip by any patrolling guards who came his way quite easily, since there were many shortcuts and unorthodox paths to be taken in this area.

Staring ahead, he found himself looking at what appeared to be a solid concrete wall—a dead end. At least, to normal people, that would be what this is, but Xuan knew this was nothing but an illusion thanks to his past experience of accidentally tumbling in here. Confidently walking straight forward, he phased through the mirage of the dead end with ease, and soon found himself looking at an abandoned shack, forgotten and neglected.

Compared to the rest of the sect, this seemed quite out of place, given how worn-down it looked. However, rather than shy away, Xuan smiled. This was the place he’d been looking for—and better yet, there didn’t seem to be anyone patrolling this area either.

It seemed the sect’s seniors were both very confident in their array-making abilities and also didn’t want their disciples ever coming near this place, even if it was for patrol. After searching his own memory for a bit, Xuan circled around to the right side of the shack and reached his hand out, as if trying to touch the stone walls that enclosed it on all four sides. As expected, as soon as his fingertips got close, a bright yellow barrier appeared, marked with complex-looking runic symbols.

“So, the defensive array is still here,” he murmured to himself, inspecting the wall of energy.

If memory served him correctly, this was a simple but effective array made for simple defenses, known as the Earth Core Array. It utilized a core deep underground to power the array and fuel it with world energy, which meant that as long as the core was tampered with, openings could easily be created in the barrier.

In other words, this array was quite a low-grade one, given how easily breakable it was. It didn’t make sense to use such a defense to guard a place dangerous enough that the disciples don’t even know about it, but it was also precisely because of that fact that a higher-level array wasn’t necessary. If anything, this Earth Core Array’s entire purpose was simply to add some comfort to the hearts of the seniors and elders of the sect.

In the past, Xuan had been friends with an array grandmaster NPC, who at the time taught him various things about arrays as a return favor for saving his daughter by chance. After that, Xuan had come back to this place and created a opening using his newfound knowledge, and that’s what led to his discovery of the Forbidden Archives’ contents. Now, this was all a long time ago, but if his guess wasn’t wrong, the entrance should be somewhere…

Taking two steps to the right, Xuan gently placed his hand on the barrier in front of him, and as expected, it phased through. “… Here.”

There was still some resistance, of course, but it wasn’t blocking him off completely like the other parts of the array. Without a doubt, this was the location of the opening. But to think it still existed, even after all this time… could it be that the marks previous players left behind weren’t erased at all? If that’s the case, then all the treasures he left behind…

It would make sense for the items inside a player’s inventory to be cleared since their entire profiles were deleted, but unlike most, in Xuan’s past life, he actually never carried any artifacts or treasures with him. This was because he had a secret art that allowed him to brand all of his possessions and allow him to summon them any time he wanted, known as the Keeper’s Brand.

At the time, he had obtained this technique off of an ancient powerhouses’s inheritance cave—it had taken quite the effort to reach it, but it had certainly been worth the trouble. After all, with this, there was no need to carry around anything in his player inventory, which was always a risk thanks to the powerful aura high-grade artifacts give off—not to mention difficulties in aura concealment.

So with that being said… it was very possible that all of Xuan’s past belongings still existed exactly where they had been left, in his hidden stashes all around the world of Xianxia Online. After all, if the array opening he’d created all those years ago still had not been patched, then there was no reason the treasures he once held would be erased. He didn’t know why this was the case, but he wasn’t going to complain about it.

Stepping through the opening, his body phased through the barrier with little resistance—and just like that, he successfully infiltrated the abandoned Forbidden Archives of the Sky Cloud Sect. His body did feel a bit awkward going through, but thankfully, there was no noticeable backlash. Had he attempted to enter elsewhere, the force would’ve most likely triggered an alarm tied to this, which… would not have been very good.

“Now then…” He narrowed his red eyes, gleaming with curiosity and anticipation. “… Let’s see what secrets you’ve been hiding, Sky Cloud Sect. In detail, this time.”

Slowly, Xuan approached the entrance of the Forbidden Archives, guarded by nothing but a set of rusty metal doors. He gently placed his fingers on its grimy golden handles, resisting the urge to wipe his hands, before pushing with all his might.

With a somewhat loud creak that was befitting their age, the doors were forced open, scraping against the dust-covered floor and tearing apart the numerous spider webs that had formed around it throughout the years. Xuan entered cautiously, taking careful note to re-close the doors as gently as possible due to how heavy they were. Opening them already made enough noise; causing any more of a ruckus would not be ideal.

After closing the doors behind him, Xuan felt around on the dirty walls with his fingers before finally finding a switch, and flipped it on. Under normal circumstances, this would’ve turned on the lights in the room and brought forth the illumination he very much needed to explore this place. But due to just how long the Forbidden Archives had been abandoned for, it seemed the lights had stopped working a long time ago.

This wasn’t something as simple as an electricity failure, of course. There wasn’t any of that in this world—the only electricity one would see over here would be one of three things: a cultivator’s technique, an artifact, or a heavenly tribulation, all of which came in the cruder, more primal form called lightning. Artificial sources of light, on the other hand, were powered by world energy, or World Qi. This was energy taken from the atmosphere itself, born from the combination of nature as well as the remnants of cultivators’ personal Qi in the region.

In other words, the reason that the lights weren’t functioning here was that the World Qi in this area had long been drained. The little that remained was used to power the protective array around this building. The lack of World Qi made sense considering no cultivators had been here for years, but it did spell a problem for Xuan. Thankfully, there was a singular dusty window in the room, and the moon was bright enough so that he could use it as a source of light to examine the contents of this forbidden library. It wasn’t optimal by any means, but it would have to do.

Beginning with the first row, he lightly browsed through the treasure trove of scriptures on the shelves, each scroll or book storing a powerful but also consequential body tempering technique. As one would expect from a forbidden archive, most of these techniques were evil, with many involving sacrifice to progress—either the blood of innocent people or the cultivator’s own lifespan. Since Xuan was neither genocidal nor masochistic, he skipped over most of these techniques.

It’s not that he was afraid to kill—he’s done so more than once or twice in the past. It’s just that, in this world, there was a universal omnipotent power known as the Heavenly Way, and it had specific karmic laws and rules that all cultivators were bound by. No one in existence has managed to break free from these chains as of yet, but it is rumored that once one reaches the Godhood phase, they can ascend beyond the Heavenly Way and truly forge their own path in the road of cultivation.

Regardless of whether or not that was true, Xuan was nowhere near that stage right now, so he still had to follow the laws of the Heavenly Way. Since he didn’t want something extremely unfortunate to randomly happen to him one day, he decided to stay away from the evil body tempering techniques. A cultivator only had one chance to temper their body unless they were reborn, so choosing the right technique was crucial to one’s future potential and success.

“Jade Cutter Body… Hearthfire Body… Steel Soul Body…” Xuan murmured as he went along, recognizing each and every one of these techniques. Whenever he found one that didn’t involve ritual slaughter or self-harm, he picked it up in his arms as a potential option and carried it along, but in his mind, he was thinking deeply about all this.

‘Indeed, these are all good body tempering arts, but it’s a shame they all require some sort of sacrifice. The real question is… why are these all in the Sky Cloud Sect’s Forbidden Archives? Where did they get these techniques from? There’s even some secret techniques of certain destroyed sects here, abolished due to their evil practices… how in the world did the Sky Cloud Sect, the beginner, starter zone, get their hands on all these?’

Suddenly, as he neared the end of the last aisle with a few decent picks in his arms, his gaze suddenly caught a blank black book with a strange-looking symbol on its thick spine—a hemisphere that looked like the bottom half of an eye, with faint lines of energy emanating from it where the eyelashes should be. Due to the top half being missing, the eye looked like it was narrowed ominously in anger, like it belonged to some ancient demon craving nothing but death and revenge for its imprisonment.

There was also a very peculiar but potent energy coming from the book itself, one that resounded with familiarity to Xuan but just wasn’t enough for him to pinpoint what exactly it was. Curious, he cautiously pulled the mysterious book out from its shelf and brought it along with the others to a place where the moonlight from outside could reach.

But as soon as he did so, his eyes widened in shock.

Unlike all the other books and scriptures Xuan had carried along, the pitch black book had a unique feature to it—its spine was, in fact, in the shape of a demonic black wing. He didn’t notice it earlier due to the darkness, but now, it became crystal clear what this book’s identity was, and why it had felt so familiar to Xuan. There was only one body tempering technique in existence with such a strange appearance, and it was…

“Impossible… the Chaos Scripture…?”

Without a doubt, this was the Chaos Scripture—one-half of the Heaven Devouring Body, the top body tempering technique in existence. It was said that this was the technique left behind by the great ancestor who created the world itself, and with its power, one could devour even the Heavenly Way and command it to their will.

In fact, the technique was so powerful that when the great ancestor fell, in order to prevent someone from ascending to the peak in a single instant, he separated the body tempering art into two parts: the Order Scripture and the Chaos Scripture, which Xuan was now holding in his very hands.

‘Unbelievable… the Sky Cloud Sect even has something like this lying in their Forbidden Archives?’ He thought, utterly bewildered. ‘Just what is the origin of this sect?’

Now, Xuan realized that even in his past life, he never bothered trying to figure out what the history of the Sky Cloud Sect was. But with this discovery… perhaps the origins of this sect are more profound than one might think. To hold one of the world’s top cultivation arts in its forbidden archives, and not being exposed until today… it was a deed worthy of respect. Hell, Xuan himself had missed it in his past life, since he never would’ve thought something like that would be here.

This was no fake, either. The distinct energy it was giving off confirmed that. Although his cultivation was practically nonexistent right now, he could still faintly feel the tremendous pressure that the half-closed eye was emanating. How could any of the other body tempering arts in this place even begin to compare to this? No other in the world could surpass it!

It seemed like a no-brainer for Xuan to cultivate this body tempering technique. After all, since such a fortuitous opportunity has been granted to him, he would have to be a fool to not take it. But just as with most of the other arts in this forbidden archive… the Chaos Scripture, too, came with a price.

Xuan gulped as he stared at the half-closed eye on the wing-shaped spine of the peerless black book. He knew the effects of the Chaos Scripture very well, thanks to all of his past knowledge and experience. The specifics of it were lost to time, but he knew that the Chaos Scripture granted the power to infinitely devour, while the Order Scripture oversaw the process and kept it in check. With these two seemingly contrasting forces acting in unison, the Heaven Devouring Body can be cultivated free of any risk.

However, since Xuan only had the Chaos Scripture now… attempting to cultivate it will be dangerous. Without the Order Scripture to balance things out, he may end up biting off more than he could chew, and end up succumbing to the chaos. If that happened, he would turn into a mindless demon of wrath and destruction, killing everything in his path, devouring more, more, and more until a group of masters finally came and put him down.

Naturally, that was not the outcome he wanted his life to become. But even so…

Xuan took a deep breath, and smiled sinisterly.

… This was simply too good of an opportunity to pass up.

Storing all the other Body Tempering Arts in his inventory while carrying the Chaos Scripture in his hand, Xuan exited the Forbidden Archives. Then, stepping closer to the outer walls of the sect, he jumped up, hands wrapping around the ledge, and flipped himself over it with little effort.

Usually, there would be a protective barrier here, but all the World Qi in this area was busy supplementing the defensive array he’d just broken out of. The sect must’ve cut down the outer barrier a long time ago and shrunk it down, leaving the area surrounding the Archives unattended to. Which was good, since this provided a free passageway to a safe and secluded spot to begin his cultivation.

To cultivate efficiently, Xuan must first find a place dense in World Qi. Secondly, he must not be disturbed during the cultivation process, and finally, due to the infamous nature of the Chaos Scripture and Heaven Devouring Body, he must not be seen when cultivating, lest someone manages to identify it.

After landing on the grass-covered soil outside with a soft thud, Xuan began strolling through the forest. There was a gravel path beside him leading from the sect’s main entrance down to the foot of the mountain, but he chose to avoid it. Without the help of feather-walking techniques, walking on material like that would make more noise than he liked.

Instead, he traversed through the forest, each tree towering above him like titans as they loomed above the ground. Their shadows covered the entire ground, leaving little room for the moonlight to illuminate the path that Xuan walked, making it somewhat difficult to see without night vision. Even so, however, his footsteps did not slow down, and no fear was in his heart. After all, he was no stranger to this area—nor this world.

Before long, he arrived at a good spot. Far away enough from the forbidden area to have a suitable amount of World Qi, and also secluded enough to avoid being seen by anyone. This was, after all, in the middle of a thick forest at night. If he had his original appearance with white hair and white robes, perhaps someone would be able to find him, but with his current black attire and black hair… no one should be able to spot him here.

Sitting down, Xuan adopted a lotus position, and flipped open the Chaos Scripture. Then, he closed his eyes, and began the process for body tempering. Feeling the World Qi around him, his mind entered a state of calmness and tranquility, keeping an even breathing rhythm and an unmoving figure. The black book’s pages flipped open, coming to life as the World Qi drew ancient red runic characters in the air.

After a few seconds, Xuan’s eyes suddenly snapped open.

With a smirk on his face, Xuan let out a soft chuckle, not even bothering to check what the ‘stats’ in question were. He already knew—Strength, Defense, Soul Strength, and Soul Defense. Each was self-explanatory in their own right: Strength and Defense represented physical power, while Soul Strength and Soul Defense referred to mental power.

Regardless, Xuan was now a First-Layer Body Tempering Stage cultivator, the lowest of the low in terms of cultivation. But to think he of all people would be sitting here, tempering his body once more… well, life was filled with surprises, wasn’t i-

“What the…”

… Yep, life really was filled with surprises. Even Xuan was pleasantly bemused to have this notification pop up before him, having never seen anything like it in his past life.

In this world, certain high-level Body Tempering techniques come imbued with arts of their own. Usually, to advance layers in this stage, physical training is the only requirement since most Body Tempering arts simply cultivate the body. However, as it would seem, some exceptionally rare ones like the Chaos Scripture actually allowed cultivators to use Qi before even reaching the Core Formation Stage, which allowed cultivators to hold Qi in their bodies.

With this innate skill, however, Xuan would be able to skip past all the harsh and painful Body Tempering experiences, and instead, simply use World Qi to strengthen and solidify his body. Not only was this infinitely times better, it was also much faster and easier due to the powerful nature of World Qi.

Without wasting any time, Xuan immediately closed his eyes once more, and began cultivating. The World Qi around him began flowing into his body directly as a result of the Gathering Qi ability, unlike before, when it passed through the Chaos Scripture first. With this technique, 100 Qi was gathered in the matter of a mere few seconds.

‘… Heh. Double? As if that’s going to stop me.’

Re-closing his eyes, Xuan began cultivating yet again, absorbing the World Qi around him until there was none left.

———

———

“Incredible…” Xuan breathed, looking down at his own hands. “Such cultivation speed… I’ve never experienced it before. Is this what the geniuses of those rich families and top sects feel like? Heh… hm?”

Again, Xuan’s eyes widened in shock. He had never seen such a technique before, even in his past life. The ability to absorb the Qi of other cultivators was powerful beyond comprehension—broken, even.

If used correctly, Xuan could render any incoming moves that utilized Qi useless, and instead turn it into a more powerful next attack for himself. Running out of Qi would also never be a problem for him if he used this technique, since not only could he already absorb World Qi from the atmosphere, he could also now simply steal other people’s from their techniques that used Qi. Of course, it wouldn’t work against martial moves like sword arts and whatnot, but even so, this was a great boon.

With this skill, even if he was still mere Body Tempering stage trash, he would be able to fight head to head with cultivators multiple realms above him. No wonder it was called the Heaven Devouring Body—techniques like this so powerful they were forbidden would be more than enough to defy and devour even the Heavenly Way.

“Good… good, good,” Xuan chuckled to himself with an ambitious smile. “Worthy of a Nirvana-Grade treasure indeed. Too bad I’ve already drained this area of its World Qi, and it’ll take time to supplement itself… otherwise, I would’ve already taken a look at what other innate techniques the Chaos Scripture holds.”

Excited and eager for more, Xuan stood up and decided to quickly check on his stats before looking for another suitable cultivation spot. He opened his Profile on his System, and gazed upon it for the first time since reincarnating.

It was then that he realized, as he stared at the reflection of his avatar on the hologram before him.

“Huh? This is…”

He quickly patted his face, his head, and most importantly, his hair. It was no longer black and short—it was long and white, like an angel of death had been born. His eyes were still the same red as before, but they now resembled something greater—the shadow of a once-legendary figure who disappeared not too long ago. He was strikingly handsome, enough to charm any woman who stared at him for too long even without the use of beguiling techniques, and his figure was several inches taller than what he used to be as well, just minutes before.

There was no doubt about it—his real appearance had came back.

Zero had returned.