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--- Chapter 485 ---
The global transmission didn't just end. It severed the joint consciousness of the entire Federation.
For seven minutes and forty-two seconds, every public screen from the high-rise plazas of Mingdu to the small coastal terminals of Eastsea City had displayed the true, unedited, terrifying reality of peak power.
They saw the peerless legend, Yun Ming, bleeding.
They saw Title Douluos cleaved into meat like soft tofu. And finally, they heard the voice, a cold, metallic rasp that labeled the revered figure of their history as "parasitic Jailers."
Then came the static. A white, blinding void that left an entire continent staring at their own pale reflections in the glass.
In the federal capital of Mingdu, the Central Parliament building was in an absolute, chaotic, unmitigated anarchy. Alarms wailed across the military bunkers beneath the senate floors. High-ranking generals screamed into their personal Spirit Guidance communicators, their faces slick with cold sweat as reports from the radar networks confirmed the impossible.
A hundred-mile radius of the southern ocean had literally ceased to exist on the map!
"Get me the Sea God Pavilion right now! Why isn't the emergency channel connecting?!" Speaker Mo Bu slammed the mahogany briefing table, his voice trembling despite his long decades of political composure.
"Speaker...The interference around the coordinate zone is too strong," a sweat-drenched communications officer replied, his fingers flying across a glowing holographic console.
"The energy signature lingering in that sector isn't spirit energy. It's... it's an anomalous force. The thermal sensors are registering absolute zero in the center of the crater. The ocean is rushing in to fill the void, creating a localized mega-tsunami, but the space itself..."
He swallowed hard, looking up with hollow eyes.
"The space itself has been denied."
"No one beneath the Title Douluo Realm could enter that place."
"Damn it! Shrek, what have you done this time?" Mo Bu sank back into his leather chair, his breath catching in his throat.
Like every other citizen in the Federation, no, world, Mo Bu had seen the giant, mountain-sized silhouette of the Clear Sky Hammer manifest in the sky right before the broadcast died. He had heard the furious roar that shook the very foundations of his soul.
The public was already losing its mind. The central network was flooded with millions of questions every second.
Who was the voice?
What is a 'Jailer'?
Is Shrek Academy hiding something from us?
Was that really the divine spirit of the Tang Clan?
Tang Hao? Isn't that the Father of Sea God?
That hammer, it really is Clear Sky Hammer!
It must be him! It must be the Clear Sky Douluo, Tang Hao!
The immaculate, golden facade of the Shrek hegemony hadn't just been ruined. No, no, no, it had been stripped bare, exposed as a system under the heel of another anomaly.
Meanwhile, three thousand kilometers away, the atmosphere above the Sea God Lake was suffocatingly heavy.
The Ancient Golden Tree was weeping.
Its massive, shimmering leaves, which had stood vibrant for millennia as the spiritual anchor of Shrek Academy, were shedding a faint, crystalline dust.
A low, mournful murmur resonated through the bark, vibrating through the soles of the remaining Sea God Pavilion elders who stood on the wooden deck, staring blankly out across the water.
The Holy Spirit Douluo, Ya Li, clenched her hand tightly. Her veins turned white. Her breath came in short, ragged gasps. "Brother Yun Ming... His presence is very weak."
Beside her, the Light Dark Douluo, Long Yeyue, stared into the distance with an expression of shock. Her aging face seemed to age another decade in a matter of seconds.
"It hasn't gone out. Yun Ming will be fine." Long Yeyue whispered, her voice cracking with an emotion she hadn't felt since her youth. "But it is dim. So incredibly dim... He burned his divinity, Ya Li."
"He broke the threshold to fight that mechanical demon..."
"And yet, the world saw him fail," A cold, sharp voice interrupted from the shadows of the pavilion entrance.
The elders turned sharply to see the current Pagoda Master of the Spirit Pagoda, Qiangu Dongfeng, stepping onto the deck.
He wasn't wearing his usual tactful smile. His eyes were wide, gleaming with a terrifying mixture of lingering dread and ambition.
"Qiangu Dongfeng! This is Shrek's sacred ground! How dare you trespass during an emergency?!" One of the younger elders roared, spirit rings instantly flaring around his feet.
"Trespass? Look around you, fools!" Qiangu Dongfeng barked, pointing a finger toward the sky where federal military airships were beginning to encircle Shrek City's airspace.
"The Federation, no, the whole world just witnessed the 'Number One Under Heaven' Atlas Douluo Douluo get beaten up by a mechanical demon."
"They watched your very ancestors get called out as parasites on a global network that the Federation supposedly monitors, but couldn't shut down because someone bypassed our entire firewall within mere seconds!"
"Suppressing this... in a short time is impossible!"
He took a step forward, his voice laced with a demanding tone. "So, as the representative of Spirit Pagoda, I got an immediate call from the Parliament themselves."
"The Parliament is holding an emergency summons."
"They aren't asking for Shrek's excuses anymore! They want answers! They want to know what the hell that mechanical demon was! What it meant when it said we are being kept in a cage by the Tang Clan!"
Long Yeyue's eyes flashed with a dangerous glint. "You dare use this tragedy to play your political games, Qiangu?"
"It's not a game anymore, Light Dark Douluo," Qiangu Dongfeng stated softly, a genuine shiver running down his spine as he recalled the silver ray that had turned a hundred miles of sea into a void.
"If that thing can bypass a divine power like the Clear Sky Hammer... then none of us are safe."
"Not Shrek. Not the Spirit Pagoda. Not the Federation."
"The era of the Spirit Master... just met its executioner."
"And you, Shrek, are the very center of this execution..."
Back in the ruins of the southern ocean, the sky was silent.
The clouds had been burned away, leaving a perfectly circular dome of exposed, stark blue sky that looked like a hole cut out of reality. Below it, a massive, swirling whirlpool miles wide roared as the waters cascaded into the newly formed void.
Floating right in the center of the madness, a single figure hovered a mere inch above the rushing spray.
Yun Ming's Qiantian Tianming Armor was broken. The brilliant white-gold alloy was cracked, its intricate inscriptions burnt to cinders by the spatial backfire of his own final strike.
His right arm hung uselessly at his side, the bones within pulverized by the kinetic recoil of countering the last farewell gift.
His breathing was a wet, shallow rattle. Blood soaked his pristine robes, dripping steadily into the churning sea below.
Yet, his left hand still clutched the Atlas Spear. The weapon was dull, its divine light reduced to a flickering, dying ember, but it remained solid, unbroken.
Yun Ming raised his head slowly, looking up at the empty sky where the massive rift had closed.
His divine perception, though fractured and fading, could still feel the lingering structural residue of that silver ray. It wasn't spirit energy. It wasn't soul power.
It was pure, unadulterated cosmic power.
An outerversal power made physical, designed specifically to break this very world.
"A cage..." Yun Ming whispered to the empty air, his voice swallowed by the roar of the whirlpool.
He closed his eyes, a bitter, tragic smile touching his bloodied lips. For his entire life, he had believed he was reaching for the sky, that his ascension to godhood was blocked only by his own mortal limitations. But today, the mechanical demon had torn back the curtain.
He wasn't climbing a mountain. He was merely hitting the ceiling of a very well-designed cell.
"Is this... why you left us behind, Ancestor, no, Tang San? Dogs? We are just your dogs?" He muttered into the void, calling the founder who had ascended twenty thousand years ago, leaving the descendants to guard this stagnant world.
The Atlas Douluo let out a weak, coughing laugh that brought more blood to his lips.
He didn't care about his high reputation. He didn't care that the world had watched him bleed. His heart, for the first time in fifty years, was filled with a deep, terrifying doubt and curiosity.
The machine had brought truth. And the truth was beautiful, even if it burned the world to get here.
Far below, hidden within the shadow of a jagged, half-melted reef that had survived the blast, a tiny mechanical drone smaller than a grain of sand blinked once with a faint crimson light.
It analyzed Yun Ming's vital signs, mapped the destruction rate of his Four-Words Battle Armor, and quietly transmitted the data across an untraceable frequency.
The transmission went deep into the crust, past the tectonic plates, straight into a hidden factory buried beneath the industrial area of Mingdu.
Inside the dark chamber, a giant, liquid-metal cylindrical vat hissed as it received the data. Inside the fluid, the humanoid silhouette of a much larger, far more menacing figure began to shift, its crimson sensors flickering alive in the dark.
"Atlas Douluo... Yun Ming."
"What a fine specimen."
"I wonder... What would you do now, knowing this sliver of truth?"
"The Seed of Doubt had been planted, and it's just a matter of time before it bursts beautifully..." Xu Deming's voice echoed through the spiritual data, cold and rich with anticipation.
Gnosia's voice echoed, "Data synchronization complete. Phase Two... begin."