"Cough, cough... Caelus..."
At this moment, Zhang Lexuan endured the severe pain and stumbled over. She clutched her constantly bleeding chest, her face as pale as paper, but the shock and curiosity in her eyes were almost overflowing.
"You... how did you do it?"
She had witnessed the whole process. Caelus had only used Teleportation to get close to the Ice Empress and then thrown a punch. It hadn't even hit; it was blocked by the Ice Empress.
But the crimson lightning that appeared out of thin air was completely beyond her comprehension.
How could a Spirit Ancestor achieve such a thing?
Hearing Zhang Lexuan's question, the Ice Empress, who had originally closed her eyes to wait for death, couldn't help but reopen them. With intense confusion and final curiosity, she looked toward Caelus.
Yes, even if she died, she wanted to die with understanding.
What exactly was that crimson lightning? How on earth did he reverse the battle situation in an instant?
Caelus looked at the two women before him. One was a favored daughter of humanity, and the other was the Ice Empress of the Far North. At this moment, both were full of questions because of him.
He gently brushed the ice shavings off his hands, his calm gaze meeting the Ice Empress's emerald-green eyes, which were full of resentment and doubt, and he spoke slowly:
"Since you are about to die, I'll tell you."
"My Fourth Soul Skill, 'This Moment, That Moment', has the effect of 'effect before cause'."
He extended a finger and pointed at the Ice Empress:
"You being hit by my fist is a 'result' that has already happened in advance and been anchored by me; it is a destined 'future'. And you..."
His finger moved to the hand the Ice Empress used to block.
"...blocked my punch, which means you changed this established future."
"Changing a future that has already happened?"
Zhang Lexuan subconsciously murmured, feeling her worldview being overturned.
"Exactly."
Caelus nodded.
"And changing an established future requires paying a price. That crimson lightning did not originate from my power."
He raised his finger toward the sky, yet he also seemed to point toward some sort of existence in the unseen.
"That is the power of the Universe itself, a manifestation of one of the underlying rules that maintains the operation of all things—the Law of Karma."
"Universal rules... the Law of Karma..."
The Ice Empress whispered these words, her emerald pupils filled with disbelief.
She had lived for hundreds of thousands of years and touched the edges of Laws, but she never thought that one day she would directly 'offend' a fundamental Law of the Universe in this way.
"The future is inherently uncertain, with countless possibilities coexisting."
Caelus continued to explain, like a patient mentor.
"But a future that has been observed and anchored by someone is different. That is a trajectory I have 'fixed' from countless possibilities with my own will. Changing this trajectory is a violation of Karma, and one will naturally be rejected and punished by the Universe's underlying rules, which is what you saw—the punishment of the law of causality."
He paused, looking at the charred marks still remaining on the Ice Empress's body:
"Of course, the intensity of the punishment depends on the 'weight' of the altered future. You only changed a trivial future like 'being hit by my fist', so the punishment of the law of causality it drew wasn't intense, merely heavily injuring you who were already on the brink of death. If you had changed a major future like 'being killed by me'..."
Caelus did not continue, but the meaning in those unspoken words made a chill run down the spines of both the Ice Empress and Zhang Lexuan.
"Of course."
Caelus's tone shifted.
"With my current strength, I cannot yet directly anchor a future of the caliber of 'killing you'. The gap in Soul Power and mental force is too great, but..."
The corner of his mouth again curled into that arc that made the Ice Empress's heart tremble.
"I can borrow power. For example, just now, I used the punishment of the law of causality triggered by you changing a minor future to indirectly... achieve the goal of accelerating your death process."
Silence.
A deathly silence spread through the wind and snow.
The Ice Empress and Zhang Lexuan were completely dazed, their brains seemingly frozen, needing time to digest this information that was completely beyond their scope of cognition.
What kind of hellish Spirit Ability is this?!
After several seconds, the Ice Empress suddenly snapped back to her senses. A huge sense of absurdity and grievance made her almost spit blood. She forced herself to raise a finger and point at Caelus, her voice a bit out of tune due to agitation:
"You... you mean, if you want to hit me, I must stand still and let you hit me? Otherwise, it's changing the future, and I'll be... be struck by lightning?!"
"From a rule-based understanding, yes."
Caelus nodded with certainty, his tone matter-of-fact.
"If you had let me hit you with that punch, nothing would have happened. At most... your face would have been punched, and it would have hurt a bit."
He even kindly added a sentence.
"I'm not very strong."
"..."
Beside him, Zhang Lexuan's mouth couldn't help but twitch violently. Looking at Caelus's calm narration of 'Universal truths' and thinking of the rogue-like effect of this Spirit Ability, she only felt a sense of dizziness.
How is this a Spirit Ability?
This is simply a bug.
It's blackmail on a rule level, forcing the opponent to act according to a script he wrote; if they don't act, they get struck.
"Damn it!"
The Ice Empress finally couldn't help but curse. She had lived for so many years, experienced countless slaughters, and seen all kinds of bizarre abilities, but she was truly encountering such an overbearing, unreasonable, and... rogue-like ability for the first time.
She looked Caelus up and down as if looking at a monster, her tone full of unbelievable doubt:
"You... you kid, are you really human?! Have you human Soul Masters... already started researching this kind of thing?!"
She couldn't imagine what kind of Martial Soul and Opportunity could allow a Spirit Ancestor-level youth to master such a terrifying ability that touched the Universe's Origin rules.
This had completely exceeded her understanding of a 'Spirit Ability'.
Caelus did not answer her question directly, but just looked back at her calmly and asked in return:
"Now, do you understand how you lost?"
The Ice Empress opened her mouth, but in the end, it could only turn into a cold snort full of powerlessness.
She understood, but she would rather not. This way of losing was too frustrating; it was simply the biggest stain in her hundreds of thousands of years of career.
However, under the extreme frustration and anger, a tiny thought that even she hadn't noticed began to quietly surge—this human youth possessed such incredible ability... could he be... a variable that breaks the desperate deadlock before her?
Once this thought emerged, it could no longer be suppressed.
The biting cold wind swirled with ice shavings, making a wailing sound as if playing an elegy for this desperate land.
The Ice Empress collapsed weakly on the snow, the hundred thousand year snow lotus in her arms emitting a faint, soft light.
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