Chapter 225: Origins Relived: The Golden Apocalypse
Immediately after Su Tianhao connected with the inherited memories, his consciousness expanded. The vision shifted. He was no longer seeing through the eyes of a newborn lying in his mother's arms—but through the combined perception of his parents, their divine sense spreading outward like two vast oceans merging into one.
Tunlong Chenyuan's surged first—vast, domineering, absolute, covering the continent in a single breath. Tian Yuexin's expanded more slowly, more precisely, deliberately painting the world in vivid crystalline detail.
From the grand room they were in, her senses flowed outward.
The interior of their home unfolded like a living masterpiece. Wide, elegant hallways stretched in every direction, their walls adorned with seamless panels of luminous jade that emitted a soft, breathing light. Intricate dragon and phoenix carvings adorned the pillars, seeming to shift and flow as her perception passed. Side chambers and pavilions branched off the main corridors—each one more exquisite than the last, filled with ancient treasures, floating spirit lanterns, and furniture carved from thousand-year spiritual wood.
The sheer scale was staggering. What appeared as a single building from outside contained entire wings and layered spaces that defied ordinary architecture—grand libraries, training halls, meditation chambers, and hidden inner gardens woven into the structure itself. Every corridor and room radiated quiet, overwhelming luxury, as though wealth and power had been pressed into the very bones of the building.
As her divine sense expanded further, more of the compound revealed itself.
A single-story structure—yet towering with a height and majesty that dwarfed even the grandest imperial palaces. It sprawled across several kilometres: a flourishing paradise of spirit trees heavy with luminous fruits, serene spirit ponds reflecting a false sky above, ethereal waterfalls cascading down floating crystalline cliffs. Pavilions and gardens dotted the landscape, each one more exquisite than the last, as though the entire compound had been plucked from a dreamscape and pressed into physical form.
Su Tianhao's breath caught inwardly.
This was not a home.
This was a hidden immortal realm.
The moment Tian Yuexin's divine sense extended nine kilometres beyond the outer walls, everything vanished.
The house. The compound. The waterfalls. The spirit trees. All of it—gone into nothingness.
What remained was a vast mountain range filled with thriving life—lush ancient forests, roaring rivers, powerful spirit beasts roaming freely. Nature itself seemed to have smiled upon this place. But at this moment, that beauty was being violently tested.
The mountains trembled. The earth cracked. Ancient trees toppled against one another. Rivers surged wildly. The wind howled.
Although he could no longer see the compound, Su Tianhao understood with crystal-clear clarity: the entire estate was somewhere deep within these mountains—sealed, cut off from the rest of the world by an ancient formation. A separate dimensional space unto itself.
A quiet testament to his father's godlike mastery of the formation dao.
The divine sense did not stop.
It swept across thousands of miles in a single breath.
Villages that felt more like prosperous towns. Towns that dwarfed Longzhou's capital entirely. Cities so grand and majestic they seemed to belong to a different world—sprawling, layered, ancient, alive with millions of lives going about their daily existence when his birth struck them like an apocalypse.
All of it appeared before Su Tianhao's borrowed eyes with perfect, unrelenting clarity.
But he could not admire any of it.
Because every single one of those cities, towns, and villages had gone dark.
Not dim. Not shadowed. Dark—the absolute darkness that had fallen the moment his eyes opened, still holding, still total, pressing down on the continent like a hand that had not yet decided whether to lift. Millions of people standing in streets they could barely see, the only light coming from lanterns that flickered like dying embers and barely illuminated the space around them. Cultivators frozen mid-movement, their spiritual sense strangled to almost nothing. Children crying in the dark without understanding why. Spirit beasts across the wilderness falling silent simultaneously—every predator and prey united for one impossible moment by the same instinct, the same ancient recognition that something scared had emerged that the world had no category for.
Mortals fell to their knees in prayer, begging forgiveness from heavens that knew—but could do nothing to stop it. Philosophers stumbled into ancient libraries carrying dim lanterns, struggling to piece things together. They found nothing.
Kings, monarchs, and emperors deliberated endlessly while chaos fell upon their territories—panic, distress, and despair mounting with every passing moment. They hurried to seers and so-called prophets who could foresee the future. Those seers suffered heavy backlash before they could glimpse even the barest outline of a cause.
Top powerhouses ascended from their dwellings, hovering above the world with deep frowns and confusion written plainly across their faces. These were godlike figures in the Azure Dragon Continent—people with the power to split seas, move mountains, and tear through space itself with a flick of their wrist. Beings who had never known powerlessness.
Even they were completely helpless. Dread bleeding into minds that had not felt dread in centuries.
Then—just when the world seemed to have collectively decided it was ending—a single defiant light appeared in the sky.
Golden. Divine. A tiny beacon blazing in the apocalypse.
It appeared above the Xuanming Range—the same mountains where Su Tianhao's family resided. In that instant, Xuanming became the center of every eye on the continent. Every gaze turned toward that distant light.
But before anyone could comprehend what they were seeing, the golden light deepened and expanded—cutting a deep gash through space itself like the slitted pupil of an ancient beast opening for the first time.
And then—
BOOM!!!
The golden light detonated.
A world-sundering explosion that tore through the sky like a supernova—brilliant arcs of shockwave expanding for thousands of miles like molten gold poured across the dome of heaven, each wave shimmering and spreading, illuminating the world and purging the darkness in a single catastrophic sweep.
For one impossibly precise moment, every living being on the continent went blind—regardless of strength, race, power, or status. Su Tianhao's parents were no exceptions.
When they opened their eyes again, the darkness was completely gone.
The sky had turned gold.
Not the gold of sunrise. Not the gold of lantern light. A deep, sacred, ancient gold that had no sun behind it, no moon, no stars—just a canopy of living light that illuminated the world from no single direction, as though the sky itself had become the source.
Vibrant motes of golden light filled the air, drifting like divine snow descending upon everything beneath them. Each mote carried spiritual energy so pure, so profound, so incomprehensibly dense that merely touching one was enough to change a life.
Mortals felt vitality rising within them—years of additional longevity settling into their bones without warning or explanation.
Cultivators received more. Some gained sudden enlightenment on techniques and concepts that would have otherwise taken decades to master. Some achieved breakthroughs on the spot—their cultivation bases surging upward in the span of a breath, leaving them standing in the street staring at their own hands with expressions of stunned disbelief.
It was as though whatever being had caused the catastrophe was offering compensation—indiscriminate, vast, entirely indifferent to whether it was deserved.
Even the plants and spirit beasts were not exceptions.
Spiritual herbs grew and bloomed far ahead of harvest. Ancient trees shot upward to impossible heights, some gaining a faint intelligence that hadn't been there moments before. Spirit beasts felt their cultivation bases leap entire grades, their bloodline density purifying in real time.
In the Xuanming Range itself—where it had all started—the sky blazed brighter than anywhere else.
Spiritual energy swirled into massive vortexes in the clouds, vast and otherworldly, like portals opening from somewhere beyond the mortal realm. And from within those vortexes, they descended.
Ancient dragons, their roars rolling across the continent like thunder that carried no storm. Phoenixes singing songs that no living person had ever heard and no words had ever been written to describe. Other divine creatures the world had no names for soaring through the golden sky, their forms half-familiar and wholly impossible—creatures drawn from the deep mythological memory of every civilization on the continent.
They announced themselves with the particular authority of beings who had arrived for a reason.
Su Tianhao watched them in awe, through his parents' divine sense.
"Those beasts—" Tunlong Chenyuan's brows drew together, his gaze moving carefully across each creature.
"You're right." Tian Yuexin arrived at the conclusion before he could finish. "They're summoned beasts."
A brief silence.
"Does that mean..."
"Yes." Her moon-like eyes fell to Su Tianhao, warm and full of quiet wonder. "Our son has the potential to become a summoner."
Tunlong Chenyuan's eyes widened. "Is there summoner lineage in your bloodline?"
"Not that I know of." She shrugged lightly, her gaze still on the child in her arms. "All I know is this talent has something to do with his spiritual energy and soul. Something neither of our bloodlines carries."
Tunlong Chenyuan's lips curved into a wide smile—sharp fangs glinting underneath, not threatening, simply what they were. "Looks like Shengzi is an even bigger monster than I thought."
"Tianhao."
She corrected him with a sharp glance that left no room for argument.
He fell silent immediately.
Su Tianhao's lips twitched inwardly—but his thoughts were already elsewhere.
'Summoner.'
He was familiar with the term from his inherited memories. And if his parents were right—which they always were—then there was not a single summoner in the entire Azure Dragon Continent. They existed only on the Black Tortoise Continent. And the Holy Central Continent.
'I'll have to visit that place eventually.'
He filed it away and returned his attention to the memory unfolding before him.
---
The Xuanming Range had transformed overnight.
It had become something the mortal world had no business containing—a heavenly landscape that operated by different rules than the land surrounding it. The air was saturated with energy so thick and invigorating that simply breathing was enough to extend one's lifespan. Trees, plants, and spirit beasts evolved in real time—each gaining draconic features without having been born with any, their strength leaping entire grades or major realms in the span of minutes.
But mankind was, by nature, greedy.
The moment cultivators across the continent identified Xuanming Range as the source, they moved. They came from every direction—flying, riding spirit beasts, crossing distances in heartbeats. Empires mobilized armies. Ancient sects dispatched their strongest disciples. Solitary powerhouses who hadn't moved from their cultivation caves in decades abandoned their seclusion without a second thought.
Xuanming became a convergence point.
The golden motes here were denser, stronger, purer than anywhere else on the continent. But they were also fewer—most already absorbed by the mountains themselves, distributed in quantities that made every remaining mote a prize worth killing for.
The drums of war sounded across miles.
Lei Tianji—one of the Azure Dragon Continent's top powerhouses, a 7th Level Martial Emperor—was the first to obtain a golden mote. In a single instant, his cultivation base surged past the 8th level, past the 9th, stabilizing at a height that would have taken centuries to reach through ordinary means. Not just that—draconic power flooded into his bloodline. A power said to exist only within the Imperial Long family of the Great Long Dynasty.
At that moment, all pretense collapsed.
Morals, hesitation, alliance, loyalty—everything discarded in a single breath. Cultivators who had stood side by side moments before turned on each other without ceremony. Friends against friends. Families against families. Blood against blood. Those who were weaker were cut down without mercy. Those who were stronger held on longer—before they, too, were eventually brought down by numbers or by something worse than numbers.
Only the truly powerful prevailed.
But even that didn't last.
The battle stirred what had been sleeping.
Ancient calamities.
Entities buried in the deepest seas, sealed within volcanic cores, entombed in whatever depths had been sufficient to contain them through centuries of undisturbed rest—felt the energy and the violence and woke. They moved across the continent, each one a walking disaster, drawn by the battle and the prize waiting for whoever survived it.
What had been a war between cultivators became something that had no clean category.
Treants tearing through armies. Elemental spirits descending from the sky without allegiance. Ancient beasts moving through the battlefield like weather systems, indifferent to everything beneath them. The sky split with explosions that had no source anyone could point to. Infernos raged without fuel. Lightning struck without clouds.
The Xuanming Range—which had been paradise an hour ago—became an apocalyptic wasteland in the time it takes a candle to burn down.
Killing intent saturated the air so thick, so heavy, it changed the color of the sky. The vibrant gold deepened—darkened—shifted through shades that had no name until it settled into something that had never existed in that sky before.
Crimson-gold.
Deep, bleeding crimson-gold.
Tunlong Chenyuan stared at it for a long moment in silence. Then he turned to his wife.
"Yuexin." His voice was quiet and final. "Xuanming Range is no longer safe. We have to take our son somewhere else—away from the flames of war."
Tian Yuexin nodded once, her expression sharpening.
"I know of a hidden valley in the Black Tortoise Continent," Chenyuan continued, his gaze dropping briefly to Su Tianhao. "Somewhere that won't draw unnecessary attention."
"Do it."
The moment Tian Yuexin gave permission, Tunlong Chenyuan's spiritual energy surged outward—covering the nine-kilometre estate in a cocoon of cosmic purple that shimmered like a rift in the fabric of the void, space itself peeling back to reveal layers of deeper realities beneath.
One heartbeat later, it was gone.
The energy.
The estate.
The house itself.
Gone—as though it had never existed.
The war raged on, utterly unaware of its lord's departure. Xuanming Range continued its transformation into a wasteland that would haunt the powerhouses of the Azure Dragon Continent for generations to come.