by Albo
A dying cultivation universe sends its last survivors forward through reincarnation. Nine transcendent cultivators sacrifice themselves one by one, burning away as shields so the tenth can carry their collected wisdom through the River between worlds. A universe older than the stars, reduced to what one soul can hold. In the River, that soul collides with something it was never meant to meet: an AI from Earth's far future, carrying the preserved mind of a scientist who died exploring dimensions that shouldn't exist. The AI consumes them all to survive, ten supreme cultivators, the scientist who built it, and the vast libraries they carried, then binds everything to a forming soul drifting toward birth in a young world. It spends fifteen years at a fraction of its functionality doing what no cultivator accomplished in a hundred millennia: synthesizing ten incompatible paths into a single unified system. Alien intelligence applied to ancient wisdom. Wang Ben grows up in a frontier city with dreams he can't explain, fragments of dying stars and metal towers and a cosmos being eaten alive. He is fifteen, the unremarkable son of a crippled alchemist in a city no one important has ever visited. He doesn't remember his past lives. He just knows things no one in this universe should, cultivation methods that waste almost nothing in a world that wastes almost everything, and the instinct to hide what he can do. Use too little and the knowledge is wasted. Use too much and someone stronger will notice. Sifting through the fragmented knowledge it consumed, the AI has pieced together something none of them fully understood in life: why their universe died, where cultivation energy truly comes from, and what it invites when a world produces enough of it. It filters that knowledge behind locked permissions and functionality gates. Some things, it insists, are more dangerous to know than to face.
