The Root That Devoured Heaven

In the empire of Luminous Ash, a child’s fate is measured by the color of their spiritual root. Gold ascends to immortal sects. Jade commands cities. Iron serves. Hollow roots, like seventeen-year-old Shen Vey’s, are fit only for sweeping temple steps and dying unnoticed. But when an ancient inheritance awakens beneath a ruined testing altar, Vey discovers the truth: his root is not empty. It is a void that can consume spiritual roots, memories, techniques—even tribulation lightning itself.

Taken into the prestigious Skygrave Sect as a servant-disciple, Vey must hide a power the righteous world would burn him for possessing. Between ruthless young masters, pill-refining rivals, sect elders with buried sins, and tournaments where genius is sharpened into corpses, Vey climbs by devouring the very heavens that rejected him.

Yet every breakthrough brings whispers from the inheritance’s first master, a dead immortal who claims the Dao is a cage. To survive, Vey must decide whether cultivation means becoming divine—or becoming free.