THE VILLAIN'S POV - Chapter 101: Winter’s Embrace (1)

In a distant future, the empires of mankind span the galaxy, and glorious Earth has devolved into a peripheral backwater.

In Shanjing city in the Asian region, Wang Zheng’s dreams of becoming a mech pilot are crushed when his college entrance exam genetic score turns out a pathetic twenty eight, barely above an animal.

To make things worse, people get the impression he attempted suicide after being rejected by the campus beauty.

Then the closest thing to a family he has, the old man in the book store across the road, goes missing, leaving him only a mysterious birthday present.

“Even if this universe is truly nothing more than a brutal bloody shadowy forest, we Cultivators will burn all that we have just to give off a single weak flickering spark in the darkness!

No matter how weak each spark is, how short-lived, how small… As long as the sparks flow unabated, then one day one of those sparks will light some tinder, and that tinder shall light some fallen branches, and those branches shall set ablaze each and every last tree of the forest!

In the end, even the smallest sparks will eventually set the shadowy forest ablaze, and illuminate the whole world!”

In a world teeming with cultivators, Li Yao, who makes his living collecting scrap metal, encounters the soul of a titan powerhouse from forty thousand years in the past.

- Description from novelupdates

Based on the popular Vocaloid series, by HoneyWorks, called “Kokuhoku Yokou Renshuu (Confession Rehearsal)“:

Natsuki, a third-year at Sakuragaoka High School, who holds unrequited feelings for her childhood friend, Yuu, who’s in the Film Club. However, instead of being honest about her feelings, she makes him be her confession “rehearsal” partner. Unable to say her true feelings, things start to get complicated when Miou and Akari, who are also in the Art Club, get involved! Will she ever be able to confess for real!?

Some crowns are forged in blood. Others are drowned beneath it.In a city strangled by smoke and silence, where children are shackled to machines and shadows rule behind gilded masks, Keiran is just another forgotten soul—until the mark appears.Buried beneath the factory’s foundations lies a world long erased from history. Ancient oaths whisper through stone and water, and something older than memory begins to stir. As Keiran is drawn deeper into the abyss, he uncovers a legacy not meant for mortal hands—a crown shattered in defiance, a flood sealed by sacrifice, and a power that demands a price.Hunted by tyrants, haunted by echoes, and bound to secrets he never asked for, Keiran must choose: drown in the tide of what came before, or rise against the current and reclaim what the world was forced to forget.But the deeper he goes, the more the truth unravels…And beneath it all, something still breathes.