“Could it really have been a trick of the eye?” Even Brian Carter was starting to feel uncertain, and he couldn’t confirm it through the layers of people in front of him.

Suddenly, at that very moment, that painting in his eyes actually transformed into a beam of light and shot toward him, instantly merging into his mind.

“Boom!”

It was as if something exploded inside Brian Carter’s mind, giving him no time to react at all.

He felt countless divine radiances shining within his body, an unbearable pain wracking his entire being, as if every cell in his body was erupting like a volcano, each one being torn apart.

At the same time, a flood of images surged into his mind.

It was as if he were dreaming, but the dream was incredibly real. In the dream, he was someone else.

It was a glorious era, with emperors reigning in the world. The civilization of that time was unimaginably powerful, conquering era after era, sweeping across plane after plane, subjugating race after race.

And he was a genius in the art of alchemy, beginning to study alchemy at the age of five, mastering pharmacology by ten, and becoming a renowned alchemy master by fifteen.

After the age of twenty, he began to travel the world. By twenty-five, he had become a highly sought-after Alchemy King, and by thirty, he had reached the unprecedented realm of Alchemy Emperor.

In the field of alchemy, he not only perfectly inherited the knowledge of the ancients, but also constantly innovated, making alchemy one of the most prominent disciplines of the era.

The pills he refined could move even emperors’ hearts; even a single one, if spread, would cause countless people to fight over it.

By then, his life had reached its peak—successful from a young age, until he encountered that great war, when a scroll descended from beyond the heavens, sparking a struggle among the emperors of the time.

Because within the scroll was a divine spark, something that could allow anyone to become a god and reach the other shore of immortality.

So Dylan King also joined the war. It was a terrifying battle—gods and demons clashing, countless figures fighting fiercely in the sky, each one like a demon god, unimaginably powerful, seizing stars and grasping the moon, overturning rivers and seas, capable of anything.

On the entire battlefield, these figures were all as mighty as demon gods, but their faces were equally indistinct, impossible to see clearly. Only one among them was incomparably powerful, able to fight hundreds of demon gods alone. His face was also unclear, but his golden eyes could be seen—deep as if containing a universe, opening and closing with world-destroying power.

As the battle grew fiercer, most of these terrifying, demon-god-like beings perished. Finally, it came down to that towering figure with golden eyes.

Scenes of the sky collapsing and the earth shattering were everywhere. Although Dylan King unintentionally took the divine spark with his unique landscape scroll, he also became the target of all the emperors. Not being skilled in martial arts, he soon fell, and after that, the memory abruptly ended.

Brian Carter suddenly snapped out of this endless dream.

Chapter 3: Difficult Family Circumstances

All of it felt like a dream, and he didn’t know how much time had passed—maybe just a second, maybe ten thousand years. At last, Brian Carter awoke from the endless dream.

“Huff, huff, huff!”

Brian Carter gasped for breath. In just an instant, he felt as if a lifetime had passed. Now awake again, it felt like a world away.

The scenes from the dream were almost as if he had experienced them himself—from the nervousness when he first learned alchemy, to the high spirits when he became a renowned alchemy master, to the glory of achieving Dylan King, and finally to his fall—each scene was exceptionally vivid.

It was as if he had truly witnessed such a world-shaking battle in ancient times.

It was a twilight of the gods, with peerless powerhouses falling one after another like dumplings.

Brian Carter didn’t know how strong the most powerful human experts were nowadays. After all, his own level was still too low. But instinctively, he felt that they were probably far less powerful than those godlike beings in his dream.

Today’s top human experts are said to be able to survive even a nuclear explosion—unimaginable in the Common Era—but he’d never heard of anyone overturning rivers and seas or seizing stars and grasping the moon.

“That must have been... ultra-ancient times?” Brian Carter recalled the scenes from his dream. The script those people used was indeed ancient seal script.

He just didn’t know why such a glorious, world-shaking battle, along with Dylan King’s experiences and memories, had been preserved in that landscape scroll and now had all poured into his mind.

He had figured it out—this was definitely not a dream. No dream could be so clear. The strength of many of those powerhouses was beyond his imagination. Even though he had never experienced it, he understood that ultra-ancient civilizations themselves hid many, many secrets that had never been unraveled.