Journey to Become the Zenith

When the Moon Was Cut in Half

Across the continent, people continued staring at the heavens.

The moon above their heads had been sliced in half.

Even the brilliant stars seemed to have faded.

Mages gathered in towers and observatories, staring at the impossible sight with eyes filled with fascination.

For them, this was not merely terrifying.

It was an opportunity to witness a level of power they had never imagined.

They began desperately trying to determine what kind of spell could create such destruction.

Some started arguing over ancient forbidden magic.

Others searched through forgotten magical records.

A few even believed an ancient celestial spell had been awakened.

None of them considered a sword technique.

To the mages of this continent, magic possessed the greatest destructive potential.

A sword technique?

Impossible.

In their understanding, no sword technique could ever reach the destructive capabilities of the most powerful magic.

They were simply unable to imagine that what they had witnessed was not magic at all.

It was swordsmanship.

And that realization had not yet reached them.

The temples established by humans to worship the Gods and Goddesses were also thrown into chaos.

Priests rushed through sacred halls.

Holy knights gathered their weapons.

Priestesses prayed desperately before their divine statues.

The sudden destruction had convinced many of them that another temple had declared war.

After all, who else could possibly possess enough power to cut a moon?

Who else could destroy dragons from beyond the horizon?

Who else could break an ancient continental barrier with a single strike?

To them, the answer was obvious.

Only the Gods.

Yet the panic did not last long.

Within minutes, Popes and holy maidens across the continent began receiving divine revelations.

One after another, the messages arrived.

The Gods were not responsible.

No divine war had begun.

No temple had been attacked.

No God had descended to punish the mortal world.

Instead, the revelations carried something far more disturbing.

A being of unimaginable strength had caused the destruction.

A being whose exact location could not be determined.

A being whose presence could not be properly traced.

The temples fell silent.

Some of the Gods and Goddesses, however, already had an idea of who it could be.

They knew of Victor’s other incarnations personally.

They understood that there was someone connected to those incarnations whose existence was far more terrifying than ordinary mortals could comprehend.

But even among the divine beings, not everyone could make the connection.

Some Gods and Goddesses searched through the heavens.

They examined the traces left behind by the sword.

They searched the spatial fluctuations.

They investigated the broken barrier and the distant celestial wound.

Nothing.

There was no clear trail.

No signature they could follow.

No presence they could pinpoint.

The being responsible for the attack had left behind destruction on a scale that shook the continent, yet the identity of that being remained beyond their grasp.

Some of the Gods and Goddesses can guess as to who it could be since they knew of Ren’s other incarnations personally. The other Gods and Goddesses, on the other hand, couldn’t find any trace of the being who did that attack.

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This was one of the passive skills that each incarnation possessed—the ability to elude the senses of divine beings.

It was not a technique meant for battle, nor was it something that could be activated at will. It existed almost like a natural law within the incarnations themselves, a veil woven around their existence so subtly that even the most perceptive Gods would struggle to notice them.

They needed this skill.

Without it, their enemies would find them far too early.

Each incarnation needed enough time to grow, to recover what had been lost, and to reach the point where they could finally confront the enemies that were destined to be dealt with.

Normally, an incarnation of Victor was already the strongest existence in the world from the very beginning.

That had always been the frightening part.

The first incarnation had never needed to climb from the bottom. He had been born standing at the summit, and the worlds beneath him had simply been forced to accept his existence.

But lately, something had changed.

Each new incarnation was becoming weaker.

Not weak by ordinary standards. Even the weakest incarnation could still stand above countless powerful beings and treat ordinary cultivators as insignificant.

But compared to what they should have been...

They were weakening.

The influence of the Universal Emperor was finally beginning to affect them.

It had taken an extraordinarily long time for that influence to reach even them. Their very existence resisted it. Their souls, bloodlines, and origins were fundamentally different from those of ordinary beings. They were anomalies that should never have existed according to the natural order of the worlds.

Yet even they could not remain completely untouched forever.

Still, their unnatural strength allowed them to withstand the influence.

For now.

That was why the passive concealment ability was so important.

They could not afford to be discovered before they were ready.

And yet...

Victor had just drawn his sword.

Far beyond the place where the battle had taken place, the consequences of that single strike were already spreading through the night.

Most beings on the continent would never even understand what they were seeing.

The attack itself had crossed distances so vast that ordinary people could not even comprehend them. To those who lived beneath the heavens, the source of the phenomenon was hidden somewhere beyond their perception.

They could see the result.

They could feel the aftermath.

But they could never have imagined the hand that had caused it.

...

In the Ancient Continent, where countless races had lived beside one another for generations, the night suddenly became strange.

The wind stopped.

Then returned.

The trees shivered despite there being no storm.

Animals hidden deep within the wilderness instinctively raised their heads toward the heavens.

The elves noticed it first.

Of all the races inhabiting in the Ancient continent, the elves were the ones most deeply connected to the world itself.

Their senses extended into the forests, the rivers, the soil, and even the faint fluctuations of moonlight.