A New Dawn
Darkness.
A silence so absolute it felt like floating through the void between worlds.
Then—pain.
A single, sharp moment. A thunderclap. The overwhelming sense of being pulled violently forward, as though reality itself was tearing.
Then came the light.
Bright, sterile, unrelenting. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't scream.
Until he did.
A baby's first cry pierced the air in Crimson Sky City's General Awakening Hospital, cutting through the antiseptic silence. Nurses and attendants, all dressed in white polymer armor suits, quickly moved around the mother and child, scanning vital signs, logging spiritual fluctuations, recording bloodline signal pulses on crystalline data slates.
But the child in their hands wasn't like others.
Su Mengtian had returned.
He wasn't supposed to remember.
But he did.
He had died in fire and steel—on a ruined battlefield surrounded by ash and bone. His last breath had been spent beside Yueying, the woman he loved, and whose death had splintered what little soul he had left.
But some part of him had refused to go quietly.
Even as death embraced him, he had screamed defiance into the void. Let me try again. Let me return. Let me protect her this time.
Now, against all odds, he had been reborn.
Not as the hardened commander of a legendary war division—but as a crying infant wrapped in gauze.
He couldn't move properly.
Couldn't talk.
Could barely keep his eyes open.
But his mind was untouched.
Fully intact.
"Another world?" he thought.
No. Not quite.
It was still Earth. The language, architecture, infrastructure—they were familiar… yet vastly changed.
A different Earth.
An evolved Earth.
A World Reforged by Dimensional Chaos.
In this timeline, Earth had survived the dimensional tears—but at a terrible cost.
A hundred years before Su Mengtian's new birth, a massive chain of rifts had opened across Eurasia, tearing open reality and flooding the world with monstrosities from unknown dimensions—creatures of fang and claw, flame and shadow. Humanity was nearly wiped out.
But then came the awakening phenomenon.
Something ancient within human DNA responded to the dimensional energy. Beasts from mythology—dragons, phoenixes, hydras, kirins, even titanic void serpents—began to resonate with select individuals.
That was when humanity adapted.
Individuals could awaken Magical Beast Bloodlines, transforming themselves into weapons of war against the monstrous tide.
Over the next century, nations reformed around this phenomenon. Societies evolved. And a new elite class rose—the Bloodline Aristocracy.
Families who held powerful, hereditary beast bloodlines became nobles and military leaders.
Others… remained as laborers, civilians, or expendable conscripts.
Power dictated status.
And for someone born without a noble bloodline...
Life was brutal.
Su Mengtian's new parents were not nobles.
His father, Su Leilong, worked long shifts in the Crimson Sky Industrial Core as an exo-suit operator—managing a loading rig in the mech docks, often returning home limping from overload stress or energy burn.
His mother, Long Xiumei, worked as a part-time nurse in Ward 3, where she tended to patients undergoing unstable awakening side effects. She had a gentle touch and eyes that always seemed tired but kind.
Their apartment was a cramped three-room sector unit in District 29, far from the city's glowing central towers where noble families lived among floating gardens, private academies, and crystal-forged beast temples.
Despite their poverty, the small home had something he'd never known in his past life: warmth.
His parents held him with joy.
Laughed at his first clumsy expressions.
Sang lullabies to him at night.
They loved him without condition.
It shattered something in him.
For Su Mengtian, who had grown up as an orphan child-soldier in his previous life, used and discarded by regimes and warlords… this was a foreign concept.
At night, he often stared at the ceiling, struggling to process this quiet, unconditional love.
"Don't get soft," he reminded himself. "This world has monsters too."
By age 6 months, he could recognize every sound in the house: the shift of his mother's slippers, the creak of a drawer, the hum of the purifier duct.
He understood language quickly—faster than any child should.
By 1 year, he began to balance his body more efficiently than expected, often startling his parents by walking upright before his peers could even crawl.
He kept his mental abilities hidden as much as possible, careful not to raise suspicion. In this world, children who showed abnormal intelligence or early energy fluctuations were often forcibly scouted by corporations, sects, or military academies.
Some disappeared entirely.
So he learned to play the role of a quiet, obedient child. Not too bright. Not too dull.
But in secret, he trained.
Each night, once his parents fell asleep, he would crawl out of bed, using cloth knots to strengthen his grip, dragging small water jugs to simulate weight, balancing on books to improve core strength.
He constructed training regimens based on his mercenary days—but scaled down for a child's fragile body.
He meditated in silence, awakening the memory of his meridian flow and refining spiritual awareness.
He even began mapping his internal qi routes, sensing the subtle pulse of dimensional energy that was woven into the very atmosphere of this new Earth.
It was faint. Incomplete.
But it was there.
He was already changing.
At age 3, it happened.
A Class-1 Rift tear opened in District 27, just two blocks away. It was small by global standards, but devastating locally.
The breach lasted only 7 minutes.
That was enough.
One Dark Mawling Beast slipped through containment—a wolf-like creature with bony armor, black fur, and venomous salivary glands that melted human tissue on contact.
It crashed through two streets before leaping through a third-floor apartment window.
His apartment window.
Su Mengtian had been playing with a toy block, feigning sleep, when he sensed the spike of killing intent.
He turned.
Time slowed.
The beast lunged for his mother, who had run into the room upon hearing the crash.
His infant fingers clenched.
With precise calculation, he hurled the toy block straight into the beast's right eye—the exposed socket where the bone plates hadn't fully covered.
The projectile was small, but thrown with deadly precision and the force of a trained assassin's strike.
The beast snarled in pain, reeling back.
That pause—half a second—was enough.
His father burst into the room with an industrial exo-blade, crashing it down across the beast's flank.
It fled, wounded.
The guardians arrived soon after and neutralized it.
No one noticed the precision of the throw.
But Su Leilong looked at his son for a long time that night—suspicion blooming behind his eyes. On that day he decided to settle in a village and start farming.
After that incident, Su Mengtian became even more careful.
But he also began planning long-term.
This world had rules.
Only at age 16 could one formally awaken a bloodline through the government-controlled Resonance Temple.
Until then, children could only train physically, study theory, or attend private academies (if rich).
Awakening results dictated life. Low-tier meant civilian life or menial military service. High-tier could mean entry into elite sects.
God-tier bloodlines were unheard of. If they existed, the world would fight wars to control them.
But Su Mengtian had a suspicions.
His soul—reborn and integrated into a new body—might have changed something fundamental within him.
Each night, he felt a faint pulse deep in his dantian. Something ancient. Something hungry.
Not like a traditional beast.
Something older.
Something that didn't belong in this world.
And he began to realize…
He wasn't going to awaken a normal beast bloodline.
By age 6, Su Mengtian could read and write fluently in five regional dialects. He memorized the structure of Rift tears, elemental resonance frequencies, and the names of all known beast bloodlines up to Tier-7.
He began visiting scrapyards in secret, salvaging old circuit cores and broken beast-tech weapon components.
He built miniature traps in the alleyways and tested stealth tactics by sneaking through the market unnoticed.
His mind never stopped.
"Nine halls," he whispered, sketching the first diagrams of his future organization in a notebook.
One for defense.
One for speed.
One for control.
One for information.
One for spiritual combat.
One for strategy.
One for beast integration.
One for tech and weapons.
One for Command.
He wouldn't just become strong.
He would build something eternal.
Dreams of Her
Sometimes, at night, he dreamed.
Yueying's face in the moonlight.
Her hand reaching out to him on that last battlefield.
Her final words echoing in his soul,
"Find me. No matter what world. No matter what name."
He would.
He didn't know when.
Or how.
But the memory of her was carved into his very being.
He would find her.
And this time, he would be strong enough to protect her.