The Calculus of Cruelty
Wei Shao died at the threshold of immortality, betrayed and broken by seven Transcendent cultivators who feared his power. But death was not the end—the enigmatic Sovereign offered him a choice: oblivion or return to the beginning with three hundred years of memories intact.
He chose to return.
Armed with forbidden knowledge and ruthless pragmatism, Wei Shao embarks on a second life where power matters more than morality, and survival requires sacrificing everything—including his humanity. To save his sister from a tragic fate, he binds corrupted spirits that orthodox cultivators fear to touch. To advance his cultivation, he hollows himself out piece by piece, trading emotion for efficiency, identity for power, consciousness for capability.
But true power demands true price.
Each advancement strips away more of what makes him human. His emotional capacity—consumed by an Emotion Eater spirit. His sense of self—eroded through the Hollowing. His very existence—dissolved and reconstructed by the spirits he thought he controlled. Wei Shao becomes something unprecedented: a distributed consciousness maintained by three increasingly autonomous spirits, each more human than he is.
In a world where cultivation is everything, Wei Shao proves that some paths to power should never be walked. He calculates his way past human limitations, optimizes himself beyond morality, and transcends consciousness itself—only to discover that becoming more than human means becoming less than alive.
A dark cultivation journey exploring the true cost of power, the nature of consciousness, and what remains when everything human is sacrificed for advancement.
Warning: Contains themes of identity dissolution, emotional absence, body horror, systematic dehumanization, and philosophical nihilism. This is not a redemption story—it's an examination of what happens when someone optimizes themselves out of existence.