The Immortal Who Was Never Meant to Ascend

L¿c Tr¿n has spent his entire life at the bottom of the Azure Heaven Sect, cleaning the bloodstained Steps of Transcendence while watching privileged disciples rise toward immortality. To the cultivators above him, he is nothing more than an expendable servant-weak, hungry, and destined to remain powerless.Then a forbidden jade slip changes everything.After his blood awakens the ancient artifact, L¿c Tr¿n gains the ability to see the hidden threads connecting every living thing. What he discovers shatters everything he believed about cultivation. Spirit Qi is not a divine gift. The sect's miracles, its powerful elders, and its promise of ascension are all parts of a vast system built on stolen luck, accumulated suffering, and the lives of countless forgotten servants. Those who believe they are climbing toward Heaven are actually being prepared for something far more terrible.The jade slip gives L¿c Tr¿n a forbidden technique known as the Karmic Breath, allowing him to absorb resentment, misfortune, debt, and the consequences abandoned by others. For the first time, the weakness that defined his life becomes a source of power. But power comes with a price.When L¿c Tr¿n receives a vision of his own execution, he learns that he has only three days before the sect's carefully arranged future claims his life. A planted accusation, a stolen pill, and the blade of the Divine Enforcer await him. To survive, he must learn to manipulate karma without revealing that he has become an anomaly the Heavenly Dao cannot control.As his enemies grow stronger, L¿c Tr¿n discovers that Marcus Holloway and the other powerful disciples are only pieces in a much larger game. Above the sect waits the true architect of the system: a cosmic mechanism that turns cultivation, ambition, and even the desire for immortality into fuel.L¿c Tr¿n was never meant to ascend.He was never meant to become a hero.He was never supposed to see the truth.And that may be exactly why he is the only person capable of destroying the system that has ruled the heavens for countless generations.His journey will take him from the lowest servant quarters to the heart of the Ascension Trap, where he must decide whether to claim the immortality everyone else desires-or tear the entire path to Heaven apart.