Chapter 474: His Rebirth

It was because Lin Feng knew that the only way to keep her sane, the only way to ground her mind in a terrifying, blood-soaked world, was to keep her in the kitchen.

He gave her a familiar environment.

He built a mental fortress for her out of recipes and prep lists.

He was holding her little fingers, helping her take her first steps in a hostile universe.

"Host has successfully intimidated the outer disciples," the System had announced clinically.

"You are so brave, little sister," Lin Feng’s soul wept with pride behind the screen.

But the tragedy of the fragmented soul was absolute.

Lin Feng’s fragment was not a perpetual motion machine.

He was a severed piece of spiritual energy, operating in a foreign dimension, expending massive amounts of power to maintain the System interface and shield her mind from the World Will.

His life fuse was burning down rapidly.

The vision shifted to a few months before the present day.

Ji’an had stabilized her core.

She had conquered the Drunken Peak, terrorized the elders, mastered the culinary arts of the Azure Empire, and forged a reputation as the terrifying, untouchable Iron Wok Demon.

She didn’t need a guide to walk anymore.

She was sprinting.

The golden orb of Lin Feng’s soul was now incredibly dim, flickering violently, reduced to a tiny, fragile spark of dying light.

He knew his time was up.

He was going to vanish.

But Lin Feng knew his sister better than anyone in the universe.

He knew that beneath the arrogant, spatulawielding, tyrannical exterior she projected, she possessed a heart that was fiercely loyal. She was kind and deeply empathetic, even when she bantered and argued with the mechanical System.

If he told her the truth, if the System suddenly dropped the robotic facade, revealed itself as her brother, and told her he was dying to save her, she would shatter.

She would abandon her cultivation and tear the Azure Empire apart trying to find a way to save a soul fragment that could not be saved.

The grief would break the fragile equilibrium he had sacrificed seventeen lifetimes to build.

He had to leave. And he had to make sure she didn’t mourn him.

The vision showed the golden spark making its final calculation.

"I must become useless to her," Lin Feng whispered, his light fading to a dull amber. "I must become an annoyance. A broken toy that she outgrew. If she thinks I am just a glitchy machine... she will not cry when I am gone."

And so, the "System" began to fail.

Transmigrator Ji’an remembered it clearly.

The System had stopped giving her useful quests.

It started throwing up "Error 404" messages, stopped providing recipe bonuses, and became a silent, useless app running in the background of her mind, occasionally chiming with irrelevant notifications.

She had complained about it.

She had yelled at the sky, calling the System a cheap, knock-off piece of garbage software.

And every time she insulted the broken machine, the dying spark of her brother’s soul had smiled with tragic, heartbroken relief.

"That’s it, Xiao-An," Lin Feng whispered as his light finally began to dissolve into the cosmic ether. "Do not rely on the machine. Rely on your own two hands. You are strong now. You don’t need me anymore."

The vision showed a quiet night on the Drunken Peak.

Ji’an was fast asleep in her bamboo cabin, exhausted after a long day of cooking for Master Jiu Zui.

The final ember of Lin Feng’s soul fragment hovered over her sleeping face one last time.

He didn’t project a blue screen or sound a digital chime.

"I love you, Xiao-An," the brother whispered into the silence of the room, a farewell she would never hear. "Live proudly."

The golden spark flared one final time, and then... it quietly, silently extinguished.

[System Shutting Down. Goodbye, Host.]

The message had flashed across her mind while she slept.

When she woke up the next morning, the System was gone.

She had felt a brief, strange pang of emptiness, but she had quickly dismissed it, chalking it up to a software crash, and went about her day.

She had never shed a single tear for the machine.

His plan had worked perfectly.

In the dark Corridor of the Eclipse, Transmigrator Ji’an was not just crying.

She was howling.

She collapsed entirely, curling into a ball on the invisible floor, clutching her spatula to her chest as if it were a lifeline, her body shaking with violent, racking, uncontrollable sobs that tore her throat raw.

"BIG BROTHER!" Ji’an screamed into the void, the sound ripping through the darkness with such grief that the corridor actually trembled. "ELDEST BROTHER, I’M SORRY! I’M SO SORRY I YELLED AT YOU! I DIDN’T KNOW! I DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS YOU!"

She had called him a tin can, a useless piece of garbage, and complained about his quests while he was literally bleeding his soul dry to keep her alive.

The guilt was a physical weight, crushing her lungs, driving her face into the cold, unseen floor.

He had died completely alone in her mind, pretending to be a broken robot just to spare her feelings.

"Look back," the darkness of the corridor whispered, slithering over her shoulders, sensing the absolute totality of her emotional collapse.

"Look back at the brother you insulted, at the brother who died for your arrogance. Turn your head, Ji’an. Surrender to the grief."

The darkness pulled at her chin, a cold, phantom pressure trying to physically turn her head backward.

Ji’an closed her eyes.

The tears soaked the collar of her white inner tunic.

She was so incredibly tired.

The burden of seventeen lifetimes, the blood, the betrayal, and the unfathomable, crushing sacrifice of her brother was too much.

The void felt warm, like an apology owed to none.

She let her head tilt, just a fraction of an inch, yielding to the pressure.

But then... the peripheral vision flared one final, brilliant time.

The story of the soul fragment was not over.

The Heavens, the true, underlying Dao of the universe, the foundational code that existed beneath the corrupt bureaucracy of the Stargazing Tower, possessed an unyielding law regarding karmic merit.

To save a life was a merit.

To sacrifice one’s own soul, endure centuries of agony, cross dimensions, build a fortress for another, and willingly fade into oblivion solely to spare them from pain... that was a merit of such astronomical purity that the Dao itself could not allow it to vanish.

The vision illuminated the deep, terrifying, primordial abyss between the dimensions.

The extinguished spark of Lin Feng’s soul fragment was drifting into the absolute void, preparing to become nothingness.

Suddenly, the abyss itself reacted.

A swirling vortex of pure, primordial cosmic energy coalesced around the dead spark.

The Heavens refused to let the merit die.

The Dao forcibly breathed life back into the fragment.

But it could not rebuild Lin Feng.

The memories were gone; his identity as the great General Ling Feng was burnt away.

The energy coagulated, forming a new vessel.

A physical body forged from the raw, untamed essence of the void itself.

The vision shifted to a desolate, rocky crag on the outskirts of the Azure Empire.

A young boy, perhaps around fourteen years old, was lying naked in the dirt. He had dark, messy hair as he opened his eyes.

They were wide, innocent, and completely hollow, voids of pure emptiness.

He had no name, no past, and no understanding of the world.

He was a blank slate, born from the abyss.

But as the boy sat up, shivering in the cold wind, a single, undeniable instinct flared deep within the reconstructed core of his soul.

It wasn’t a memory or a gravitational pull.

It was a fundamental, biological imperative written into the very marrow of his new existence.