The crisis came without warning.

A spatial rift — one of the universe's natural disasters, occurring when the barriers between realms thinned and broke — opened directly above the Spirit Stream Sect. Rifts could discharge anything from toxic spiritual miasma to hostile entities from other dimensions, and this one was larger than any the sect had ever faced.

The evacuation began immediately. Disciples were herded down the mountain, elders activated ancient defensive formations, and the Sect Leader began the ritual that would — if they were very lucky — seal the rift before it released its contents.

Bai Xiaochun, naturally, was among the first to start running. He had plotted this exact evacuation route years ago, and his students were already following him down the mountain path.

Then the rift opened.

It wasn't miasma that emerged. It wasn't hostile entities. It was something worse: a spiritual pressure so dense and oppressive that it pinned every cultivator below the Nascent Soul level to the ground. Bai Xiaochun's Silver Skin absorbed some of it, but the pressure was too much, too pure — the spiritual signature of a divine being.

Through the tearing fabric of reality, a hand emerged. A hand the size of a mountain, with fingers of starlight and skin that shifted through every color of the cosmic spectrum.

'Mortal cultivators,' a voice said, not in sound but in direct spiritual transmission. 'Your world's barrier has weakened. The Realm of Gods has noticed.'

Bai Xiaochun, pinned to the ground alongside everyone he knew, had one coherent thought: I should have run faster.