Volume 2, Chapter 74: Unweaving the Plot
The battlefield didn't just split. It came apart completely.
When beings this strong start fighting, one pocket of space isn't enough to hold the pressure. Reality itself unzipped right down the middle. On the left side, the air turned into a cold, golden void where Huo Yuhao stood face-to-face with Chen Feng. On the right side, the Crimson Mother rose like a blood-red mountain of heavy mass, staring down the rest of the young gods.
I stayed right where I was on my wooden folding chair, leaning back against a floating chunk of rock. I pulled a slightly bruised apple out of my pocket, bit into it with a loud crunch, and watched the show.
"Don't mind me," I called out over the low dimensional hum. "Just pretend I'm the referee. Try not to bleed on the floor. It's a pain to clean up."
Chen Feng no longer looked like a confident transmigrator. He looked like an animal that had just realized the cage doors were electrified from the outside.
"You shouldn't be here!" Chen Feng screamed. His voice carried the ugly, distorted frequency of his Nihility core. He threw both hands forward, trying to unleash a massive Planetary Suppression wave meant to simply erase the space Yuhao was standing on. "My system… the plot… you're supposed to be a tool, not the master!"
Huo Yuhao didn't even blink. His long ice-colored hair drifted quietly in the vacuum. On his forehead, the golden Eye of Destiny hummed with a deep, steady note.
To Chen Feng, the universe was an equation he could cheat. To Yuhao, it was a web of branching paths that were already visible.
Every time Chen Feng tried to force a Timeline Intervention — shifting himself into an alternate path to attack from behind — the golden lens on Yuhao's forehead simply turned. The Eye did not track only Chen Feng's body. It tracked every possible direction his movement could take. Countless glowing threads stretched outward from Chen Feng, some bright, some thin and fragile. Before any of those alternate paths could fully form, Yuhao reached out with the Eye and cut the main threads.
Snap.
The probability of those alternate attacks collapsed. The dark void energy in Chen Feng's hands curdled into useless grey slag before it could cross the distance. Step by step, Yuhao walked forward on empty air. His midnight robes drank in the fading light of Chen Feng's weakening power. He was not rushing. He was simply removing every escape route, every cheap trick, and every stolen advantage one by one. It was not a brawl. It was a slow, steady eviction.
•••
On the right side of the split, the Young Gods were learning a hard lesson.
Ma Xiaotao, Long Aotian, Ji Juechen, Ning Tian, and Ye Guyi — the Goddess of Dawn — stood together against the Crimson Mother. They were all true gods now, operating as 4D beings. At that level, ordinary 3D limits meant nothing to them. A planetary explosion or a mortal weapon would pass through them like smoke. They could step through solid matter or ignore physical barriers as if those things were only drawings on paper.
But the Crimson Mother was a 5D God King.
Just as a 4D god is immune to a 3D sword, a 5D entity is completely untouched by standard 4D laws. To the Crimson Mother, the young gods' divine skills were just flat, two-dimensional projections.
That single step higher made all the difference. To her, their divine attacks were flat and incomplete. Ma Xiaotao roared and released a massive wave of phoenix fire hot enough to melt a small moon. The flames raced across the vacuum… and then simply slid past the Crimson Mother's body as if she weren't fully there. She was resting her weight on a higher direction the others could not reach.
"Impertinent insects," the Crimson Mother hissed.
She raised one multi-jointed red arm and rewrote the local rules of the pocket dimension.
What fell on Long Aotian was not ordinary gravity. Ordinary gravity belonged to the third dimension — the kind that pulled apples from trees and kept mortals stuck to the ground. This was four-dimensional weight. In the higher layers of reality, even a single pebble carried denseness equal to entire mountain ranges from the lower world. A small rock in the fourth dimension could outweigh a whole continent of three-dimensional stone.
The Crimson Mother multiplied that already crushing four-dimensional force by several million times and dropped it straight onto the God of Strength.
Long Aotian was slammed flat against the dimensional floor with a sound like continents colliding. The weight pressing on him was no longer something a normal god could measure. It was the equivalent of stacking multiple four-dimensional planets on top of his body at once. His divine bones groaned and cracked under the impossible pressure. Even with the Strength God core burning inside his chest, his arms shook violently as he tried to push himself up even an inch. The floor of the pocket dimension itself began to warp and sink beneath him.
"We can't touch her!" Ning Tian shouted from the rear, her Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Pagoda flashing as she tried to support the others. "Our attacks aren't missing — they're passing through her!"
Ye Guyi's Dawn light flared brighter, cutting clean paths through the red fog, but even her radiance only slowed the pressure. It could not break it.
I took another bite of my apple, swallowed, and sighed. I stood up from the folding chair and stretched until my back popped.
"Alright, alright," I muttered. "It's painful watching you kids try to fight a five-dimensional problem with four-dimensional tools. Let Teacher give you a temporary permit."
I reached deep into my chest and tapped directly into the Phoenix Heart God Core. As an avatar standing at the edge of the sixth dimension, my understanding of these higher layers sat far above everyone else in the room. I didn't need a finished divine weapon. The Core itself was the source.
I activated one of the Phoenix God's Authorities — Recursive Simulation, or as I preferred to call it in the old tongue, Paggaya sa Lahat.
This was not simple copying. The Authority let me listen to the exact frequency of any power or law I encountered, then use Chaos Qi as raw material to build a version of it that belonged completely to me. Once the Core finished the work, the simulation was no longer a temporary mimic. It became a native law I could call on again whenever I needed. In this case, I listened to the heavy five-dimensional presence the Crimson Mother used to keep herself untouchable, matched it, and shaped a counter-layer that carried the same weight.
The air around my rock began to vibrate with a clear, high bird-song that carried the old echo of Creation. I swept my left hand forward.
A wide wave of white-blue Glacial Requiem flame washed over the Young Gods.
The fire did not burn them. The sparks sank straight into Ma Xiaotao's phoenix wings, Long Aotian's fists, Ji Juechen's iron sword, Ning Tian's pagoda, and Ye Guyi's radiant Dawn light. For the next ten minutes, their weapons and soul skills carried the structural weight of a higher law — the same kind of weight normally found only in true Super Divine Artifacts.
"There," I said, sitting back down on the folding chair and picking up my apple again. "I just gave your attacks a temporary upgrade. You can hit her properly now. Don't waste it."
"There," I said, sitting back down and picking up my apple again. "You can hit her properly now. Don't waste it."
The change was immediate.
Ji Juechen moved first. He swung his sword in a simple, clean downward cut. This time the white-blue light coating the blade caught the edge of the Crimson Mother's presence.
CLANG.
A deep silver gash opened across her shoulder. Dark red divine blood leaked into the vacuum.
"What?!" she shrieked, stumbling back. "How can lower gods pierce me?!"
Even with the temporary upgrade running through their attacks, it was still an uphill fight. The Crimson Mother was no training dummy. The moment she realized she could actually be hurt, she stopped holding back and unleashed one of her strongest God King abilities — Timeline Intervention.
This was not simple speed or teleportation. Timeline Intervention allowed a 5D God King to step across multiple possible paths of the same moment at once. Instead of existing in only one version of the fight, the Crimson Mother could spread her presence through several branching possibilities at the same time. In one path she was in front of Ma Xiaotao. In another she was already behind Long Aotian. In a third she was striking at Ye Guyi's blind spot. All of these versions were real enough to attack from, and she could shift her main body between them freely.
To the Young Gods, it felt like the enemy had suddenly become many. Their movements no longer followed a single clear line. One moment they were pressing forward, and the next their bodies were being pulled into different overlapping versions of the same exchange. The Crimson Mother's red needles stabbed through those branching paths, striking from angles that should not have existed in the present. Every step, every swing, and every burst of power had to be adjusted against several possible versions of the fight happening at once.
"Stay close and watch each other's backs!" Ma Xiaotao shouted. Her wings flared with a mix of her own phoenix fire and the white-blue light I had given them. "Don't just look at where she is standing now. Watch for the paths she's about to take!"
••••
While the others finally drew blood, the left side of the battlefield stayed quiet and cold.
Chen Feng was sweating so hard his dark robes stuck to his skin. "System!" he screamed inside his mind. "Prime override! Delete his coordinates!"
In his head, the System had always been absolute. But a System is only a borrowed tool. It gives numbers and shortcuts without forcing the user to understand the real weight of power. Against normal cultivators it works. Against a true God King carrying Chaos Qi and the Eye of Destiny, it was just another set of artificial threads.
Yuhao's golden third eye turned toward the faint blue glyphs flickering around Chen Feng's head. To anyone else those glyphs were invisible. To the Eye of Destiny they looked like ugly, parasitic strings trying to force false data into the world.
"You built everything on a lie," Yuhao said quietly. His voice carried the steady weight of a planet. "You thought knowing the story meant you owned it. You never understood a single thing you were given."
He focused the Eye and cut the connection.
Snap.
The blue screens shattered into dark sparks and vanished. Chen Feng's Nihility aura collapsed from a storm into a weak, sputtering flame. He dropped to his knees in empty air, clawing at his forehead.
"My system… where is it? Where are my notifications?!"
"They were never yours," Yuhao answered, walking closer. "You treated this world like text on a page. Now you're just a man with no script left."
Chen Feng hung there, broken and shaking. Yuhao did not finish him. Instead he turned his golden eye toward the other side of the battlefield, where the Crimson Mother was still thrashing.
She had begun shifting across multiple possible paths at once, trying to make herself impossible to pin down. One moment she appeared in front of Ma Xiaotao, the next she was already behind Ning Tian, her movements splitting across several branching possibilities.
"Qiu'er," Yuhao called. "Bridge it."
Wang Qiu'er stepped up beside him without hesitation. Her five orange-gold rings spun hard around her waist. She gripped her dark platinum dragon spear with both hands.
Yuhao opened the Eye of Destiny fully. He mapped every major path the Crimson Mother could take and then, using his seat as God King of Emotion, pushed that shared vision outward.
A soft pink-and-gold wave washed through the minds of every Young God.
Suddenly Ma Xiaotao, Long Aotian, Ji Juechen, Ye Guyi, Ning Tian, and Qiu'er were no longer seeing only with their own eyes. They were seeing the branching possibilities the way Yuhao saw them. Bright golden ghost images appeared in the empty air — clear markers of where the Crimson Mother's body would arrive along her strongest paths.
"She's coming through the center path!" Ma Xiaotao shouted.
"Now!" Qiu'er roared.
Wang Qiu'er launched herself across the gap. She did not throw the spear at the Crimson Mother's current body. She threw it at the brightest golden ghost image — the path the Crimson Mother was most likely to take.
A heartbeat later the Crimson Mother shifted exactly into that coordinate.
THWRACK!
The platinum spear punched straight through her chest. The combined force of Ultimate Strength and the temporary higher-law coating shattered her core with a heavy, final crunch.
Before she could even scream, Ji Juechen, Long Aotian, Ma Xiaotao, and Ye Guyi's Dawn light arrived at the other marked paths, sealing every major escape route. The Crimson Mother's massive red form cracked from the inside. Bright golden light spilled out of every seam as her high-dimensional anchor collapsed.
I took one last bite of the apple, tossed the core into a small tear in space, and dusted off my hands.
"Now that," I said, a real grin touching my face as I watched the kids work together, "is how you run a practice drill."
End of Volume 2, Chapter 74