First Life, First Death, First Theft
Prologue – The Day I Died Laughing
I died on the 999th step of the Heavenly Ascension Stairway.
They called it the ultimate trial: a staircase made of condensed starlight and the compressed regrets of every cultivator who had ever failed to reach immortality.
One million steps.
One million chances to break.
I reached step 999.
Then the Eternal Soul Sovereign - the same bastard whose fragment I had stolen, copied, refined, and eventually surpassed - appeared before me one last time.
He looked exactly like the legends: violet robes flowing like liquid night, one eye burning with the light of devoured galaxies, the other already hollow because he had long since given that part of himself away.
He didn't speak with arrogance.
He spoke with exhaustion.
"You became better than me, Lin Zhao.
You became everything I refused to become."
I grinned, blood running from the corners of my mouth, ribs shattered, dantian cracked like cheap porcelain.
"Then why does it feel like I'm the one who lost?"
He raised a single finger.
"Because you still have something I never did."
He pointed at my chest - right where the original fragment had first entered me all those years ago in the gutters of Black Lotus City.
"A heart that still remembers how to hate."
Then he pressed.
Not a palm strike.
Not a technique.
Just... pressure.
The pressure of an entire lifetime of someone who had seen the end of everything and decided it wasn't worth continuing.
My cultivation collapsed inward.
My soul tore open like wet paper.
My memories - every stolen technique, every devoured bloodline, every face I'd worn like a mask - burned away in violet flame.
I laughed the entire way down.
Because even as I fell, even as my body turned to ash and my soul scattered into motes smaller than the ones I had once collected...
...I realized something beautiful.
The fragment - my fragment - didn't die with me.
It simply waited.
Waited for the next fool stupid enough to pick it up.
Waited for the next life.
Chapter 1 – Second Life, Same Gutter
The smell hit first.
Wet charcoal.
Rotting rice.
Blood already drying on cracked earth.
I opened my eyes.
Same filthy alley behind the broken rice wine shop.
Same night sky torn red by sect war.
Same crater smoking in the distance where the Sovereign had just finished killing himself.
I was fourteen again.
Filthy.
Starving.
Nameless.
But this time...
...I remembered everything.
Every technique I had ever copied.
Every bloodline I had ever devoured.
Every arrogant young master I had crushed.
Every heavenly daughter I had used and discarded.
Every step I had climbed on that cursed stairway before the Sovereign decided I was too dangerous to let live.
I looked down at my trembling, child-thin hands.
Then I started laughing - the same cracked, ugly laugh from my first death.
Because the fragment was already here.
It hadn't chosen me again.
It had never left.
It had simply rewound time with me.
I pressed a palm to my forehead.
A familiar violet pulse answered, warm, smug, almost affectionate.
"Welcome back, little thief."
I whispered to the night, voice hoarse but steady:
"This time...
I'm not climbing anyone's stairway."
I stood up.
Looked toward the crater where the Sovereign's soul had just shattered.
And smiled.
"This time...
I'm going to make sure no one ever reaches the top again."
First life: I stole the fragment and became a sage.
Second life: I remember being a sage...
and I remember how it felt to be erased by one.
Now?
Now I'm going to steal everything -
starting with the heavens themselves.
The Copycat Sage has returned.
And this time, he's not playing by anyone's rules.
Not even his own.
To be continued...
