The sky of the northwest, perpetually covered by a sea of gray clouds, was torn in two.
The sound was not that of thunder, but the dry crack of silk being violently ripped. The silver void opened directly above the highest pillar of the Misty Peak Sect, completely ignoring the dozens of alert matrices and wind barriers that the elders had erected in recent days.
Zhì Yuǎn crossed the spatial portal.
The rift closed behind him with a mute snap. Suspended in the thin air, thousands of meters above sea level, the god did not use the pathetic flight of swords or wind chants. The weight of his Inner Universe distorted gravity itself around his charcoal‑gray tunic. The black silk cloak fluttered, and he descended slowly, in a straight line, toward the sect's central pavilion.
Down below, the atmosphere at Misty Peak was one of mourning and terror.
Ever since they had returned from the Guest Plateau, defeated by a mere woman who had not even needed to lift a finger to shatter the dantian of the mountain's greatest genius, the sect had sunk into chaos.
On the jade stairs leading to the Great Elder's hall, Lín Wújiàn carried a basin of bloodied water. The old cultivator, once the most feared man in the northwest, looked like a walking corpse. Inside the pavilion, lying on silk cushions once immaculate, Lín Xiù coughed violently, expelling dark blood. The untouchable beauty of the fairy had melted. Her dantian, shattered by Yù Qíng's merciless blow, leaked the woman's vital energy, rapidly revealing the wrinkles and fragility of her eighty‑two years beneath her skin.
"Grandfather…" Lín Xiù whimpered, her voice hoarse, her thin, wrinkled fingers clutching the sheets in agony. The illusion that the "ancestral monster" loved her had transformed into a delirious nightmare. "It hurts… my foundation is gone…"
Lín Wújiàn closed his eyes, impotent hatred tearing at his chest, when the alarm sounded.
It was not the sect's bells. It was the air itself.
The mountain's gravity suddenly sank. The bloodied water in the copper basin in the elder's hands levitated for a second before being crushed against the bottom of the metal, evaporating under the pressure. The pavilion's ceiling creaked excruciatingly.
Lín Wújiàn abandoned the basin and ran to the pavilion entrance, drawing his sword. The Sect Master, Zhào Fēng, was already in the central courtyard, flanked by the few elders who could still stand after the previous trauma.
They raised their eyes. And the little sanity remaining to those men evaporated.
---
Zhì Yuǎn landed softly in the center of the white‑stone courtyard. The god was alone. There was no blue fairy to exude Killing Intent, no golden beast to crush bones. There was only the man, the abyss incarnate, the same entity that dissected the world with an unfathomable gaze.
The Wisdom in his mind ignored the trembling swords of the elders. Zhì Yuǎn's black, apathetic eyes swept the stones beneath the feet of the mortal cultivators.
"The main groove of this pillar lies beneath your altar," his deep, unshakable voice resonated in the courtyard, not as a threat, but as a simple architectural observation.
Lín Wújiàn's brain short‑circuited. The grief of seeing his granddaughter rotting in a bed, added to the terror of seeing the cause of it return to his doorstep, obliterated the old man's last survival instinct.
"DEMON!" the Great Elder roared, tears of fury and despair springing from his eyes. His eighth‑stage Qi exploded in a suicidal whirlwind, his sword blade humming with all the vitality left in him. "YOU RUINED MY SEED! RETURN OUR ASTROLABE!"
Zhào Fēng's eyes widened. "Lín, don't!"
But the old man had already leaped. The blade of condensed wind flew toward Zhì Yuǎn's neck, propelled by decades of cultivation and pure madness.
Zhì Yuǎn did not blink. He did not assume a martial stance. He did not raise a hand to block.
The Inner Universe in the god's dantian merely turned, responding to the offense with the lethargy of a star crushing a meteor. Zhì Yuǎn silently activated the Law of Destruction on the fabric of space itself, two meters from his body.
The steel sword descending upon him was not blocked. It touched the invisible barrier of the Law and simply ceased to exist, converted into imperceptible atoms.
Lín Wújiàn's momentum hurled the old cultivator's body directly against the same spatial barrier.
There was no crash. No explosion of blood or breaking bones. The old man's shoulder, arm, and half his torso crossed the line of annihilated space and turned to cosmic dust instantly. The silence of the annihilation was so absolute that the Sect Master, dozens of paces away, fell to his knees and vomited.
What remained of the Great Elder's body crashed to the courtyard floor, a carcass cut with impossible precision, blood finally beginning to leak onto the white stones.
Inside the pavilion, Lín Xiù, dragging herself to the door to try to see what was happening, watched her grandfather erased from existence in a fraction of a second. The broken woman's eyes found Zhì Yuǎn's face. She expected to see hatred. She expected to see the fury her grandfather had provoked.
But what drove the final nail into the "fairy's" soul was not hatred. It was the most absolute and lethargic apathy.
Zhì Yuǎn was not even looking at the corpse. He looked at Lín Xiù, but his gaze passed through her as if she were made of glass. To him, the jealousy, pain, and tragedies of that sect meant nothing.
"My wife has already judged the value of your lineage," Zhì Yuǎn murmured, his voice stripped of arrogance, resonating only with the coldness of the void. "What she broke does not interest me. Get out of my way."
No elder dared to breathe, let alone attack. Zhào Fēng, weeping silently, merely pressed his forehead to the stone floor, submitting what remained of Misty Peak to the dust. Lín Xiù collapsed against the doorframe, her mind shattering completely as she realized she was nothing but a grain of sand that had tried to offer itself to an abyss.
The god ignored the kneeling insects.
He walked to the center of the white‑stone courtyard, exactly over the place where Wisdom indicated the presence of the buried foundation. Zhì Yuǎn knelt and pressed the palm of his right hand against the marble floor.
The Laws of Space and Destruction were not used. What descended through the man's arms was the pure, thick energy he and his wives had forged in the darkness of their bedroom.
Golden Primordial Qi flowed from his hand, melting the useless marble and descending in a luminous torrent until it reached the roots of black jade embedded in the mountain's heart.
The moment the Primordial Qi touched the matrix dormant for millennia, the colossal stone needle reacted.
The ground trembled. The pavilions of Misty Peak shook violently, deep cracks running up the hardwood walls. The gray mist covering the mountain's sky was torn in two by a pillar of silver and golden light that erupted directly from the mountain's core.
The deep‑space gear awakened. Starlight rose toward the sky, curving majestically on the horizon toward the Southeast, silently and invisibly connecting with the Ruin of the Throne beneath Shattered Heaven.
Zhì Yuǎn rose, shaking invisible dust from his robes. The first lock had been aligned. The entire pillar hummed with a vibration that the stagnant foundations of mortals would not withstand much longer.
Without a final glance at the sect beginning to crumble under the weight of the Qi he had just injected into the world, the god raised two fingers and tore space again.
"Two remain," Zhì Yuǎn murmured, stepping into the void and disappearing.
---
The silver rift spat Zhì Yuǎn thousands of kilometers to the west, directly above the domain of the Iron Abyss Sect.
Unlike Misty Peak, which hid in the clouds with illusions of grandeur, the Iron Abyss was noisy, brutal, and seated in the deep mining craters carved into the base of its respective rock pillar. The air there stank of coal, sweat, and incandescent metal.
The portal opened ten meters above the ground, exactly at the center of the sect's vast training field.
About three hundred cultivators of robust constitution, all with bare chests gleaming with sweat, spun heavy iron hammers in a choreographed rhythm that made the earth tremble. Commanding this army, on a stone platform, was the head instructor, Fēng Lì.
She was a vision of stunning brutality. The tall, incredibly beautiful woman wore only leather bindings on her forearms and a top of rough fabric that barely contained the force of her bust, her tight combat trousers highlighting the dense muscles of her thighs. Her black hair was pulled back in a high ponytail, and sweat ran down her bronzed collarbone.
When the sound of silk being torn ripped through the air above the field, the three hundred hammers stopped.
Fēng Lì lifted her sharp eyes. The silver dimensional rift floated in the sky, and from within it, Zhì Yuǎn descended. He landed in the center of the iron arena with such a soft thud that he did not raise a single grain of dust. The contrast of his elegant charcoal‑gray tunic and immaculate black silk cloak against the dirt and sweat of that army was striking.
The disciples of the Iron Abyss were not cowards; they were warriors forged in the 6th and 7th Stages. And the sudden appearance of an outsider in the center of their restricted area was the greatest of offenses.
"Intruder!" shouted one of the veteran disciples, raising his hammer. "Crush him!"
"Bone‑breaking formation! Advance!" roared Instructor Fēng Lì, leaping from the platform with her own steel mace in her hands, martial instinct igniting before the unknown danger.
The three hundred men roared in unison. A wall of pure muscle, steel, and raw Qi advanced against Zhì Yuǎn's solitary figure from all directions.
Zhì Yuǎn did not sigh, did not assume a combat stance, and did not invoke the Law of Destruction. He watched the wave of approaching cultivators with the same apathetic patience of someone walking against a light rain. That group had not offended his wives; they were merely performing their martial duty on their own ground. There was no reason to pulverize them. He simply had no time to waste.
His Inner Universe turned, adjusting gravity.
"Lie down," Zhì Yuǎn's voice was low, soft, but carried the weight of a constellation.
The manifestation of his existential weight did not obliterate the molecules of space. It was calculated with absurdly surgical precision, descending upon the arena like an invisible steel blanket.
The three hundred cultivators who were in the midst of their jumps and charges simply plummeted. The heavy iron hammers hit the packed‑earth floor with dry thuds, sinking into the dust. The warriors were crushed against the ground, arms and legs glued to the earth by a gravitational force that prevented them from even lifting their heads. No one had a bone broken, but the force required to move a single finger now equaled carrying a mountain.
Fēng Lì, who had been a few steps from striking him with her mace, felt the atmospheric blow. The steel weapon fell from her hands. The beautiful instructor's knees buckled, and she collapsed heavily, supporting herself only on her two trembling hands as the weight of the world threatened to crush her against the dirty ground.
She gasped, sweat dripping from her chin, and forced her own neck upward to try to face the enemy who had subdued them without even raising a fist.
But when Fēng Lì's eyes met his, the warrior's martial instinct and fury evaporated instantly.
The unfathomable, serene darkness in Zhì Yuǎn's eyes pierced her. The pale skin and perfectly sculpted beauty of that man exuded no threat, hostility, or any mundane flaw. He looked at her with an apathetic gentleness that obliterated the woman's defenses. Fēng Lì's heart raced against her heaving chest, hatred melting into stunning submission.
A god… the instructor's mind whispered, her eyes fixed on his figure, her breath failing as a terrifying fascination possessed her. We tried to attack heaven itself.
Zhì Yuǎn held the instructor's awed and terrified gaze for a fraction of a second, understanding that the field's hostile intentions had died. But he did not want witnesses and shouts interfering with his focus on the deep matrix resonating beneath those caverns.
With a fluid, lethargic wave of his hand, Zhì Yuǎn released a soft pulse of spatial Qi.
There was no impact. The pulse merely cut the consciousness of those present. The invisible wave swept the arena and, one by one, the eyes of the three hundred warriors rolled back. They collapsed onto the arena floor, falling into a deep sleep. Fēng Lì was the last to succumb, her gaze fixed on the god until the soft darkness of sleep finally took her body into unconsciousness upon the earth.
The training field plunged into peaceful silence.
Zhì Yuǎn lowered his hand. With calm, unshakable steps, he walked among the sleeping bodies of the Iron Abyss Sect's cultivators, his eyes fixed on the darkness of the mining caverns just ahead.
Wisdom mapped the path. The world's second lock awaited him in the darkness.
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