---
title: "Chapter 1: Five Hundred Years Backward"
slug: "ch-1"
novel: "reverend-insanity"
number: 1
views: 1950000
likes: 142000
wordCount: 3300
createdAt: "2014-04-04"
---

The primordial gu wriggled in Fang Yuan's palm, its body composed entirely of temporal energy. He'd spent three lifetimes hunting for it, three complete iterations of existence dedicated to locating this single creature. And now, in what should have been his final moments, as the heavenly tribulation descended to annihilate him, he finally possessed it.

The choice was inevitable.

*I refuse to accept this ending.*

He crushed the gu, and the world inverted.

Time folded backward like origami, centuries compressing into seconds. Fang Yuan felt his body dissolving across temporal dimensions, his consciousness fragmenting into components that experienced time in reverse. The sensation was torment—every moment of his existence playing simultaneously, every regret and triumph and humiliation occurring at once across five hundred years of history.

When it ended, Fang Yuan found himself standing in a spring valley, his young body betraying him with unfamiliar strength and flexibility. The sky above was unfamiliar—a deeper blue, untouched by the industrial cultivation civilization of his original era. The air tasted different. Cleaner. Older.

A moment of disorientation, and then awareness crashed over him: he was five hundred years in the past. In this timeline, the heavenly tribulation hadn't occurred yet. The powerful immortals who shaped his original future were still children or hadn't been born. The grand sects that dominated his former world were either tyrannical shadows of themselves or didn't exist.

He was a god descending into an infant world.

Fang Yuan clambered to his feet, examining his surroundings with predatory attention. To the east lay a small village—smoke rising from cooking fires, the sound of merchants bartering at a market. To the north stood mountains that matched his memory of younger geography. To the south flowed the River of Twilight, an ancient waterway that would eventually dry up in his original timeline.

He was alive. He had access to his memories, his experiences, his knowledge of five hundred years of cultivation advancement. And he had returned to an era where none of his enemies existed.

*What would a normal person do with such fortune?*

The answer was simple: live a normal life. Settle in a village, cultivate quietly, avoid conflict. Become a forgotten sage who eventually died of old age.

Fang Yuan smiled coldly. He was not a normal person.

He waited until nightfall, then crept into the village. Finding a poor family's house, he entered silently. The family of four slept on mats spread across an earthen floor. Fang Yuan studied them with complete detachment—the mother, the father, two children. They were nothing. Irrelevant.

He selected the youngest child, a boy of perhaps seven years, and examined his potential with cultivation senses that this-era gu masters wouldn't develop for centuries. Adequate potential. Not exceptional, but adequate.

What Fang Yuan needed was bodies. Vessels for his experimentation. This era had no understanding of advanced gu cultivation—no demonic transmutation techniques, no method of engineering immortal bodies or refining the human form beyond conventional cultivation. Here, gu refinement was crude, simplistic, limited.

He would change that. He would create techniques that were impossible in his original era. And he would do it using this timeline's population as raw materials.

Using gu from his possession that he'd stored in his lower abdomen, Fang Yuan crafted a simple sleeping compound and administered it to the family. They would experience vague dreams they'd forget by morning. As for the boy—

Fang Yuan implanted a parasitic gu into the child's body, one that would slowly modify his physiology according to specifications the youth's consciousness would never understand. By the time the boy reached adulthood, his body would be fundamentally restructured, optimized for a cultivation technique that wouldn't be "discovered" for centuries.

He was an experiment. The first of many.

Leaving the village before dawn, Fang Yuan made his way toward the mountains. In his original timeline, these mountains held a hidden sect of powerful cultivators. But in this era, they would be barely above the level of mortal martial artists. Easy prey.

As the sun rose, painting the ancient sky in colors he'd almost forgotten, Fang Yuan felt something close to happiness. Not joy, exactly—he'd forgotten genuine emotion centuries ago. But satisfaction. Purpose. The exquisite pleasure of having infinite time and victims before him, and the knowledge to exploit both perfectly.

He had been sent to the past to build his ideal world. And unlike mortals who wasted their second chances, Fang Yuan knew exactly how to use his.

The era of reverend insanity was about to begin.
