Chapter 1
The wind in the Divine Realm does not carry the scent of rain or dust. It smells of crushed white jade, burning sandalwood, and the cold, eternal perfection of a heaven that has forgotten how to bleed.
I hate the smell of it.
Standing at the edge of the Vermilion Orchards, my fingers curled into the silk of my sleeves, hiding the faint dirt stains around my nails. Down in the mortal realm, dirt meant life—it meant crops, mud, things that grew and died and mattered. Up here, dirt was an insult. A flaw to be swept away by the immortal attendants whose eyes always slid right past me, or worse, lingered with that quiet, pitying contempt that cut deeper than any blade.
Shen Yueling. Daughter of the Heavenly Emperor. Princess of the High Heavens.
What a magnificent joke the Three Realms whispered behind my back.
In the Demon Realm, they sharpen their sabers on the bones of fallen beasts and laugh in the dark. In the Mortal Realm, men bleed, love, weep, and burn through their brief, brilliant decades like shooting stars. But here, in the Divine Realm, time stretches out like a frozen lake, and I was the cracked ice everyone pretended not to see.
Every immortal in my father’s court could summon wind and call down lightning by the time they lost their milk teeth. They walked on floating clouds, their spiritual roots burning with the pure, dazzling light of the upper heavens.
Me? My spiritual sea was a dry riverbed.
I couldn’t channel a single drop of divine qi. For three centuries, my father, the Celestial Emperor Shen Zun, had poured elixir after elixir down my throat, watched by the cold, disapproving eyes of the Heavenly Queen—who was more than happy to remind him that an heir without divine power was an abomination to the throne.
"You are a fox, Yueling," the whisper echoed in my mind, remembering the venomous words of the grand preceptor during my coming-of-age rites. "A wild, woodland creature that somehow crawled into the golden halls. A stain on the imperial bloodline."
They called me an outcast. They locked the inner sutra pavilions to me. The high immortals stopped bowing when I passed, or worse, they bowed with a mocking stiffness that made my claws itch beneath my skin.
I wasn't entirely powerless, though. They just refused to call my gifts divine.
Deep beneath my skin, tangled in my blood and bones, lived the wild, ancient instincts of my mother’s lineage—the nine-tailed celestial fox clan of the mortal-bordering wildlands. I could hear the heartbeat of a grasshopper three leagues away. I could run faster than the wind could chase, and if I concentrated hard enough, I could shift the shadow beneath my feet.
But a fox’s tricks were not enough to buy dignity in a palace built on god-fire and golden tiles.
"Princess."
The voice was cold, clipped, and dripping with artificial deference.
I didn't turn around. I didn't have to. The arrogant ripple of immortal energy gave her away instantly.
"Lady Zhilan," I murmured, keeping my eyes fixed on the twisting silver branches ahead.
Zhilan stepped into my field of vision, her silk robes embroidered with silver frost-lotuses—a pattern reserved for high-ranking noble families of the inner court. Her hair was piled high in an intricate celestial coil, pinned with a hairpin carved from frozen glacier-jade. She looked like she had been sculpted out of ice and arrogance.
"Should you be wandering so close to the Ancestral Vaults, Your Highness?" Zhilan asked, her lips curling into a smile that didn't reach her sharp, almond-shaped eyes. "The air here is quite pure. It might... agitate your constitution. After all, the mortal Qi you seem so fond of tracking has no place near the sacred trees."
A hot spike of anger flared in my chest, sharp and familiar. I turned to face her, letting a fraction of my true nature slip—my pupils slitting into amber vertical lines for a single, fleeting heartbeat before I forced them back.
"The Vermilion Orchards belong to the Heavenly Palace, last I checked, Lady Zhilan," I said, my voice low and steady, masking the tremor of humiliation. "Unless my father has abdicated and handed the keys to your clan, I believe I have the right to walk beneath the sun."
Zhilan’s smile faltered, her gaze dropping momentarily to my hands, where my nails were dug agonizingly deep into my palms.
"The sun belongs to those who can harness its light, Princess," Zhilan replied smoothly, recovering her poise with a flick of her embroidered fan. "Not those who merely stand in its shadow. Rumor in the eastern courtyard is that the Emperor is considering stripping your title. A powerless princess cannot represent the Divine Realm when the great seals of the Three Realms are tested."
"Tested?" I stepped closer to her, my height nearly matching hers. "When was the last time the seals were tested? The Demon Realm has been sealed behind the Great Abyss for ten thousand years. No demon has ever crossed into the Divine Realm. Our ancestors cleared the path of filth long before we were born. You speak of threats that only exist in old wives' tales to frighten children."
"Complacency is the death of immortals, Yueling," a new voice cut through the heavy orchard air.
My spine went rigid.
Grand Preceptor Mo Cen stepped out from behind a massive pillar of white marble, his long silver robes dragging silently across the grass. His eyes, milky-white with ancient wisdom and absolute disdain, swept over me as if I were a speck of dust on his immaculate garments.
"Preceptor," Zhilan bowed instantly, her tone shifting to one of deep, sickening reverence.
"Princess," Mo Cen addressed me, his voice like grinding stones. "The barrier between the realms is eternal, yes, but the heart of an immortal can rot from within. A ruler—or an heir to one—must possess the spiritual might to suppress chaos. You possess neither the light of the gods nor the discipline of the immortals. You are a hollow vessel."
He didn't yell. He didn't need to. His words carried the weight of centuries of institutional cruelty, delivered with the casual indifference one might show to a broken piece of pottery.
"If the vessel is hollow," I whispered, staring straight into his cloudy, unblinking eyes, "perhaps it is because you and the elders spent centuries pouring poison into it instead of qi."
Mo Cen’s brow twitched. A low, menacing hum of divine pressure—a subtle flex of his thousand-year cultivation—washed over the courtyard, pressing down on my shoulders like a mountain. It was designed to force me to my knees, to make me grovel in the dirt like the outcast they claimed I was.
My knees buckled slightly. The air turned heavy, thick as molten lead.
Don't kneel. The fox blood in my veins surged, hot and wild. I clenched my teeth so hard I tasted copper. I refused to give them the satisfaction. I channeled every ounce of my physical strength, every drop of the wild, untamed fury I kept chained inside me, and forced myself upright, locking my knees until the joints protested.
Mo Cen’s eyes narrowed slightly. A flicker of surprise crossed his ancient face, quickly masked by cold disapproval.
"Insolent beast," He muttered, turning his back on me with a sweep of his sleeves. "Come, Zhilan. The celestial council awaits. Do not waste your breath on things that cannot even bloom."
They walked away, their immortal steps silent and weightless, leaving me alone in the shimmering stillness of the orchard.
When their presence vanished entirely behind the jade wall, the breath rushed out of my lungs. My legs trembled violently, and I stumbled backward, my hand catching the rough bark of a tree to steady myself.
My palm burned.
I looked down at the tree. It was the Primeval Sun Apple Tree—a legendary divine tree said to have grown from a single seed dropped by the Mother Goddess during the creation of the Three Realms. Its trunk was thick as a city wall, forged from wood that resembled hardened gold and ancient amber. Its leaves chimed like tiny bells in the wind, and hanging from its highest branch was a single, glowing fruit—the Sun Apple.
It glowed with a blinding, fierce white-gold light, pulsing like a miniature sun. Legend said that whoever consumed the Sun Apple would have their spiritual meridians completely cleansed, their divine roots forged anew, granting them boundless celestial power.
For three hundred years, the elders had forbidden anyone from touching it, claiming its power was too volatile, too sacred for ordinary consumption. But deep down, everyone knew the truth: they had all tried. Generation after generation of high immortals had climbed its branches, channeled their purest qi, and failed to pluck the fruit. The tree rejected anyone whose heart held a trace of arrogance or impurity.
I stood there, panting, the humiliation of Mo Cen’s words still burning in my ears like acid.
Powerless.Hollow vessel.Beast.
"If I am a beast," I snarled to the empty air, the frustration tearing out of my throat, "then let me tear your precious garden apart!"
Acting purely on blind, reckless rage, I reached up and grabbed the lowest branch of the Primeval Sun Apple Tree.
I didn't try to use divine qi—I didn't have any to use. I didn't recite a sacred chant or mold a spiritual seal. I simply grabbed the golden wood with both hands, channeled every ounce of my raw, unfiltered physical fury, and yanked downward with all the wild strength of a cornered predator.
For a second, nothing happened. The ancient tree stood motionless, mocking me.
Then, a sound like a cracking glacier echoed across the divine realm.
CRACK.
It wasn't just the sound of wood snapping. It was the sound of reality tearing open.
A blinding flash of golden-white light exploded from the point where my fingers touched the bark. The light was so fierce it turned the entire orchard into a blinding expanse of white, washing out the blue of the sky and the green of the leaves.
My hands went numb. A surge of energy—so hot, so violently powerful that it felt like swallowing liquid fire—rushed up my arms, flooding into my chest, tearing through meridians that had been sealed shut since the day I was born.
No—
I tried to let go, but my hands were glued to the wood, welded to the divine tree by a current of pure, unbridled chaos.
With a deafening roar that shook the floating islands of the Divine Realm, the massive trunk of the Primeval Sun Apple Tree split cleanly down the middle.
The fracture raced upward like jagged lightning, tearing through the heavy branches, shearing the golden wood apart with a force that sent shockwaves rippling across the sky. The chiming leaves shattered into a million glittering shards of light, raining down like a golden snowstorm.
And right at the apex of the tree, the glowing Sun Apple was caught in the middle of the split. As the two halves of the trunk pulled apart, the fruit was ripped violently in two, releasing a tidal wave of golden divine energy that blasted outward in a three-hundred-degree radius.
BOOM!
The shockwave hit me like a physical wall. I was thrown backward through the air, tumbling head over heels across the grass before slamming hard against the marble base of a stone pavilion, the breath knocked completely out of my lungs.
Silence fell over the orchard—a heavy, suffocating silence.
I pushed myself up onto my elbows, coughing, my whole body aching as if I had been run over by a celestial chariot. My hands were smoking slightly, charred at the fingertips, glowing with a faint, residual trace of blinding white light.
I slowly turned my head toward the center of the grove.
The Primeval Sun Apple Tree—the sacred, ten-thousand-year-old pillar of the divine realm that had stood untouched since the dawn of creation—was no longer a tree.
It was two massive, smoldering halves, lying flat on the scorched earth, sap glowing like liquid gold pooling out of the gaping wounds in the wood. The golden fruit was gone, vaporized into a fine mist of stardust that hung heavily in the air.
I stared at the destruction, my heart hammering wildly against my ribs.
I did that. Without a single drop of cultivated divine power. Just pure, unadulterated rage and the raw, heavy grip of a fox who refused to stay down.
Scrambling to my feet, my legs shaking, I looked down at my hands. The strange, tingling heat was still pulsing beneath my skin, a foreign, terrifying power that felt entirely different from anything the high immortals possessed. It wasn't the calm, orderly qi of the heavens. It was wild, destructive, and fiercely alive.
"Let's see if Mo Cen calls me hollow now," I muttered, a reckless, wild grin breaking across my face despite the terror creeping up my spine.
I wanted to feel it again. I wanted to see if I could do it twice. If a single burst of anger could snap the sacred tree in half, maybe—just maybe—I could shatter the entire illusory cage the high immortals had built around me.
Stepping forward, ignoring the warning bells screaming in the back of my mind, I walked up to the severed stump of the northern half of the tree. The golden sap was still bubbling, hissing softly as it met the cool air of the orchard.
I raised my right hand, focusing every ounce of my willpower, trying to summon that same rushing torrent of heat from my chest, trying to force the divine-fox energy to ignite in my palm.
I closed my eyes. I breathed in the scent of burning sandalwood and ozone. I pictured Mo Cen’s face, Zhilan’s sneering smile, the cold, distant eyes of my father on the throne.
Burn, I thought. Break.
Nothing.
Absolute, dead silence.
I opened my eyes and pushed my hand flat against the glowing golden sap.
The wood was cold. The energy was gone. The blazing fire that had rushed through my veins a minute ago had vanished as completely as a morning mist under the noon sun, leaving behind only the dull, familiar ache of my empty, unawakened spiritual sea.
I shoved harder, panic suddenly clawing at my throat.
"Come on," I whispered, pressing my palms flat against the jagged wood, a desperate edge creeping into my voice. "Do it again. Open up. Let me see it."
Not a single spark answered me. The sap cooled into hard, lifeless amber beneath my fingers. The shattered branches around me remained stubbornly, silently broken.
The miraculous power that had felled the greatest tree in the divine realm had flickered out like a dying candle, leaving me once again as nothing more than the powerless, outcast fox princess standing among the ruins of her father's garden.
Far off in the distance, the deep, resonant toll of the Great Bell of the Heavenly Palace began to ring—once, twice, three times.
Someone had noticed the quake.
Panic seized my chest. I ripped my hands away from the wood, wiping the sticky golden sap against my robes, and spun around just as a distant shout echoed from the edge of the cloud-steps.
"Someone has breached the Vermilion Orchards! Guard the gates!"
I didn't think. I dropped low, let my instincts take over, and bolted into the thickest part of the immortal forest, disappearing into the shadows before the first golden-armored celestial guards could crest the hill.
