The dust in the sunbeam knew him. Each mote had once been part of a star he had watched ignite, or a mountain he had seen ground to sand by the patient breath of time. He was Wei Wuji, and his teahouse stood on a peak so high and so forgotten that it had no name. Mortals called the impassable range below the "Heavenly Barrier," never knowing that true heaven lay a single step beyond its highest ridge.
Wei Wuji, the Eternal Sovereign, the Final Daoist, the man who had seen the end of the Great Dao and watched it be reborn, poured himself a cup of tea. The cup was simple clay, unfired and coarse. The water was morning dew. The tea leaves were from a common bush that grew outside his door. To him, there was no difference between this and a divine elixir brewed from a star's heart. He had tasted both, and the concepts of "rare" and "common" had ceased to have meaning several kalpas ago.
His appearance was that of a young man in his twenties, with plain linen robes and eyes the color of a twilight sky. There was no overwhelming aura, no oppressive divine might radiating from his form. Power, when it becomes as absolute as the void itself, becomes silent. It is the struggling cultivator, the burgeoning immortal, who leaks their Qi like a cracked pot. Wei Wuji's power was so perfectly contained it was indistinguishable from nothingness.
He had mastered every law. Fire, Water, Space, Time, Life, Death, Fate, Karma, Sword, Saber... they were not tools he wielded, but extensions of his will. He could shatter a galaxy with a thought or birth a new one with a breath. He had fought beasts that devoured suns and debated sages who existed as living concepts. He had won. He had learned. He had surpassed.
And now, he was utterly, profoundly, and cosmically bored.
A ripple in the fabric of reality, infinitesimally small, disturbed his peace. It was the clumsy passage of a cultivator, tearing through space with all the subtlety of a charging bull. A moment later, a young man in resplendent golden robes landed before the teahouse. His face was arrogant, his sword pulsed with spiritual energy, and his eyes scanned the simple hut with disdain.
"Old man," the cultivator called out, his voice laced with the pride of someone from a great sect. He was at the Nascent Soul realm, a veritable god to the mortals below, but a squawking infant to Wei Wuji. "I am Jin Feng of the Golden Sun Palace! I am hunting the nine-winged sky serpent. Have you seen it pass?"
Wei Wuji took a slow sip of his tea. He had seen the nine-winged sky serpent. In fact, he had personally plucked one of its feathers three thousand years ago to use as a quill. The creature Jin Feng was hunting was its distant, pathetic descendant.
"It went that way," Wei Wuji said, gesturing with his chin towards the east.
Jin Feng snorted, his divine sense sweeping brazenly towards Wei Wuji, trying to gauge his power. It was like a single raindrop trying to measure the ocean. The divine sense vanished without a trace, absorbed into the infinite calm of Wei Wuji's being.
A flicker of surprise, then anger, crossed Jin Feng's face. To have his divine sense nullified meant the old man was either a master of concealment or far stronger than he looked. Given the hovel he lived in, Jin Feng assumed the former.
"You dare hide your cultivation from me?" he sneered. "Kneel, and I may forgive your insolence."
He lifted a hand, and a miniature sun, a signature technique of the Golden Sun Palace, formed in his palm. It blazed with terrifying heat, capable of turning a mountain to lava.
Wei Wuji sighed. It was a sound that seemed to carry the weariness of ages. He didn't move. He didn't even look up from his cup. He simply thought.
He thought of the Law of Inversion.
The miniature sun in Jin Feng's palm did not explode. It did not fizzle. It simply... inverted. The light became darkness. The heat became a soul-chilling cold. The sphere of violent energy collapsed into a perfect, tiny orb of ice that fell from Jin Feng's numb fingers and shattered on the ground, melting back into a single drop of morning dew.
Jin Feng stared, his jaw agape. His ultimate technique, his pride, had been turned into a droplet of water by a man who hadn't even looked at him. Fear, cold and absolute, replaced his arrogance. This was not a master of concealment. This was a monster. An ancestor. A being beyond his comprehension.
"The tea is getting cold," Wei Wuji said softly. His voice was not threatening, but it carried a finality that shook Jin Feng's very soul.
The young cultivator trembled, his face pale as death. He bowed, not the perfunctory bow of a superior, but a deep, kowtowing bow of a mortal before a god.
"This junior was blind!" he stammered, his forehead pressed to the dirt. "This junior begs for forgiveness from the esteemed senior!"
Wei Wuji looked at the terrified young man, and he felt nothing. Not anger, not pity, not even satisfaction. He just felt... tired. He remembered a time when he, too, was arrogant, when a new technique was a source of pride, when a powerful enemy was a source of excitement. Where had that feeling gone?
"The path is long," Wei Wuji said, his gaze distant. "Do not be so dazzled by the light of your own small sun that you fail to see the stars."
He waved a hand dismissively. "Go. Your serpent awaits."
Jin Feng scrambled to his feet and fled, not even daring to use his spatial arts, running like a common thief down the mountain path.
Wei Wuji was alone again. He finished his tea. The taste was bland. He looked out at the cosmos he commanded, a universe that bent to his every whim.
He had stood at the summit for so long he had forgotten what it was like to climb.
A decision, the first real decision he had made in a millennium, bloomed in his mind. Power was a prison. Omnipotence was a cage.
With a single thought, he sealed it all away. The laws, the concepts, the might that could unmake reality. He locked it in the deepest part of his soul, behind a seal that only he could ever break. He reduced himself, layer by layer, from the Eternal Sovereign to a simple man. He kept only his memories, and a body no stronger than any other mortal.
He stood up, his joints creaking with a sensation he had not felt in eons. He looked down at his hands, now soft and vulnerable. For the first time in forever, he felt the chill of the mountain wind.
And for the first time in forever, Wei Wuji smiled.
He would walk down his forgotten mountain. He would enter the world of mortals, not as a god, but as a man. He would eat their food, feel their pain, share their fleeting joys, and perhaps, somewhere in the red dust of the mortal world, he would find something he had lost.
He would find a reason to live.