When Bai Xiaochun opened his eyes, the divine fragment was gone. Absorbed into his body, integrated into his cultivation base, permanently bonded to the Undying Live Forever Technique at a level he couldn't yet understand.

He was alive. He was, according to the senior elders who rushed to examine him, more than alive — his cultivation had jumped from Qi Condensation Level Nine to the peak of Foundation Establishment in a single step. His Iron Skin and Silver Skin had merged into something the technique manual didn't have a name for, a composite defense that absorbed over eighty percent of incoming damage. His meridians, which should have been fried by divine-level energy, were instead humming with a vitality that made the examining elders gasp.

'This is impossible,' the medical elder said. 'Your body should have been vaporized.'

'I'm hard to kill,' Bai Xiaochun said. 'It's my only talent.'

The celebration that followed was the largest the Spirit Stream Sect had ever held — not just because Bai Xiaochun had survived, but because the divine trial had been answered. The fragment's absorption meant the sect had been acknowledged by a being from the Realm of Gods, which conferred protection, prestige, and spiritual blessings that would strengthen the entire mountain for generations.

Bai Xiaochun was named an honorary elder. He was given his own peak with the most heavily reinforced chambers in the sect's history. His survival class enrollment tripled overnight.

But in the quiet of his new chambers, looking at his reflection in a basin of water, Bai Xiaochun studied the face of someone who had faced a god and lived. He was still afraid. He would always be afraid. But fear, he had learned, was not a weakness. It was a compass — pointing toward danger so you could prepare for it, circumvent it, or, when necessary, walk straight through it.

The Storm of Realms was coming. The cultivation world was about to change. And Bai Xiaochun, the coward, the survivor, the boy who had joined a sect to escape death, was now one of the strongest cultivators in the Spirit Stream Sect.

He didn't know what was coming. But he knew — with a certainty that surprised him — that he would survive it.