Returnee from Earth: Lord of Immortality

After the Assembly of Authored Realities, a quiet awe fell upon the world. What had once been realms locked in brutal contests of orthodoxy now stirred with uncertain possibility. The Ink-Threaded Heir had not just inspired a movement—he had altered the very mechanism of cultivation itself.

But something lingered.

Beyond the whispers of political change and literary rebellion, a question haunted the dreams of cultivators and sages alike: Where did the Sigils come from?

Jian Rou had once theorized that the Sigils were fragments of a greater scroll—one lost to time, legend, or perhaps intention. A document so vast and sacred that it wrote not of the world, but of all possible worlds. It was called, in fragments of ancient tongues, the Library of Infinite Forewords.

No one had seen it. No one knew where to begin looking.

Until Lin Feng did.

It began with dreams—hallucinatory echoes of unread tomes, forgotten dialects that spoke through rustling wind and shadowed ink. In these dreams, he walked a staircase with no steps, spiraling inward rather than upward, where each breath he took became a chapter and each blink of his eyes redefined the laws of grammar.

He awoke clutching a phrase he did not recognize: The Codex of Futures Untold.

Jian Rou and the elder scribes conferred, alarmed yet intrigued.

"This is not a translation," Mira said, tracing the symbols Lin Feng had scribbled in half-conscious frenzy. "It's a manifestation."

And so, guided by dreams and guided by uncertainty, Lin Feng and a small cadre embarked on a pilgrimage. They left behind the Blooming Path, taking only the Manifold Scroll, a few defensive techniques, and the inkstones blessed by the Sigils.

Their journey led them to places untouched by any ink: the Mouth of Silence, where language itself died; the Glade of Erased Years, where memory faded on contact; and finally, to the Rift of the Unspoken.

There, amid suspended glyphs and echoing paradoxes, they found a stair—spiraling downward into a library with no walls.

The Library of Infinite Forewords defied perception. It was not built, but written—each column a sentence, each hall a paragraph. Books fluttered like birds. Ideas breathed like beasts.

A librarian awaited them.

She was neither young nor old. Her robes shimmered with punctuation marks in constant rearrangement. Her eyes held mirrors of stories never told.

"Why have you come?" she asked.

Lin Feng answered simply, "To read."

She nodded, and the library expanded.

Time within the Library was nonlinear. A moment could last a century. A glance could unravel a life's worth of meaning. The scroll Lin Feng carried began to evolve, growing appendices of its own will. The Sigils resonated with texts they had never seen, as if recognizing ancestors.

Here, Lin Feng learned that the Sigils were not divine—they were permissions. Grants of narrative agency written into the metaphysical source code of reality. Some realms had abused them. Others had feared them. But in truth, they were not powers to be hoarded—they were questions waiting to be asked.

Fei'er discovered a treatise titled The Lexicon of Remorse, and within it, a forgotten martial form: The Syllable Reversal Palm, capable of undoing causality within ten breaths.

Mira uncovered a fragment of her own past—a version of her life where she had become the Voice of Oblivion, a warlord of erasure.

"I was meant to destroy stories," she whispered.

"No," Jian Rou replied, touching the scroll. "You were meant to understand why they matter."

And Lin Feng? He read his own future—ten thousand versions of himself, each shaped by a different story. In some, he was a tyrant. In others, a martyr. But in only one did he survive long enough to write the final foreword.

That was the one he chose.

They stayed in the Library for what felt like years. When they emerged, the world had changed.

The Pale Quill had collapsed under the weight of their contradictions. The remnants of the Canon Guard had rebranded themselves as the Chroniclers of Discipline, adopting more inclusive philosophies. And the Blooming Path had become a network, not a hierarchy—a guild of writers, warriors, and wanderers dedicated to nurturing shared stories.

Lin Feng did not return as a savior.

He returned as an editor.

To be continued in Chapter Forty-One – "The Scribe Who Refused to End"