Xian unleashed his Qi. He spread his arms forward, and between them, a sword of void-black energy condensed from nothing, its form solidifying with a sound like cracking ice.
Wushia simply smiled, strolling forward as if on a morning walk. "I love the certainty in your eyes," he said, his voice a rich hum that vibrated in the bones. "It makes my blood sing for tales." He lifted a single finger.
A point of white light, pure and intense, appeared at its tip. It condensed, pulling the very light from the air around it, and then shot forth—a **comet of solidified spirit**. It tore across the sky with a sonic boom that flattened the rubble below.
Xian tilted his head. The movement was slight, effortless. The comet passed by his shoulder, missing by an inch. The ease of it was disorienting to the watching cultivators. The comet struck the ruins of a distant pavilion. The structure did not explode. It **unfolded** into ten thousand perfect, geometric pieces of stone that hung in the air for a breath before drifting downward like grey snow.
Xian flicked the black blade in his hand. "**Gentle Lethality**," he murmured.
The sky turned black. Not with clouds, but with a sudden, profound absence of light, as if a storm of pure shadow had been born in an instant.
Wushia's eyes flickered with genuine interest. He felt a thousand cuts land on his divine armor. Not from one direction, but from all sides at once—above, below, the flanks. The impacts were the sound of a million needles striking diamond: a high, relentless ***PING-PING-PING*** that threatened to deafen the observers below. The armor held, unmarked.
But Wushia was not aimless. He tilted his head, smiled, and cannoned forward. His hand stretched out, not to strike, but to **grasp** the space Xian occupied.
Xian moved. His motion had none of the brutal force of the Royal Guard or Gen's blazing speed. It was a trying, fluid disengagement, as if he were walking away from a boring conversation. He stepped to the side and tapped the tip of his black blade gently against Wushia's armored side.
The impact made no sound.
It was the absence of sound that was deafening.
The Divine General was forced to take a single step back, his advance halted. Where the blade had touched, his magnificent, opalescent armor now **smoked**. A deep, inward dent marred its perfect surface, glowing with residual black energy.
The sight sent a jolt of primal unreality through every witness, especially Gen and Lorel. They knew, firsthand, the insane durability of a Divine General's armor. Xian had just **bent it** with what looked like a casual flick.
"Impressive," Wushia said, examining the dent with academic curiosity. "That skill. Is that what you call 'Lethality'? It doesn't look like any Wheel of Destiny I have observed in this world."
Xian flourished the void-black sword. "Normal. It is not one of the five Wheels. It is one of the three Dark Wheels. The **Zhadao**. Dominance, given form." His obsidian eyes held Wushia's. "The Dark Wheels are constituted of three: the **Miedao**, the Wheel of Destruction; the **Zhadao**, the Wheel of Dominance; and the **Wudao**, the Wheel of Nullification."
Wushia cracked his neck, a sound like settling mountains. He spread his arms wide. From his palms, two orbs of condensed white light bloomed, each containing a miniature, swirling vortex of impossible pressure. He joined them together with a casual clap, forming a single, terrifying sphere of **compressed conclusion**, and pushed it toward Xian.
The massive orb moved, slow and inevitable. It did not fly; it **ate the path ahead**. The air and light where it passed ceased to have meaning, turning into a grey, static haze. It was an attack that sought not to destroy, but to **finalize**.
Xian wore a bored smile. "Stop trying to probe me. Show me your Domain Spell. Otherwise, this is tedious."
Normally, **Jingdao**—Reinforcement—could never hope to *hold* against such a thing. But **Zhadao** was not about reinforcement. It was about **dominance**.
By forcing the concept of his blade—*Gentle Lethality*—to dominate not just matter, but the very **principle of finality** hurtling toward him, Xian made the impossible logical. He dominated the event of the collision, declaring his blade the superior truth.
He waved casually.
**Gentle Lethality** met the sphere of conclusion.
The orb was **torn into nothingness**. Not deflected, not destroyed. It was **dominated into ceasing to be**. The two residual halves of catastrophic energy passed harmlessly to either side of Xian, landing in distant quarters of the Heaven Gate. The resulting explosions were not explosions; they were **silent erasures**, leaving perfect, smooth craters of glass where buildings and streets had been.
Seeing the level of destruction from a mere probing attack, Gen finally understood the cold terror behind Juo Si's command to evacuate. But beneath his awe, his cultivator's mind raced. *The Dark Wheels… they have roots in the original system, but they corrupt the core essence. Zhadao must be a twisting of Jingdao's Reinforcement and Shidow's Manipulation… turned inward, into tyranny over reality itself.*
In the sky, Xian grew bored of Wushia's games.
He became a streak of black light.
Using **Zhadao** on his own body, Xian didn't just move fast. He **dominated speed**. He dominated the space between points. His figure became a beam of oppressive darkness that moved faster than a Divine General's thought.
By the time Wushia's eyes registered the movement, **Gentle Lethality** was hammering against his neck.
Xian pressed, the void-black sword screeching against the divine armor, pushing with the absolute will to **decapitate a celestial being in a single stroke**.
Blood boiled in the veins of every watcher.
Wushia's glorious armor **cracked**. Not a dent, but a visible, spider-webbing fracture at the point of impact. It trembled, emitting a sound of immense strain.
Wushia, an epic warrior, did not panic. His expression merely shed its amusement, turning serene and serious. *Clearly,* his posture said, *this one is of the caliber Jiang faced. Carelessness is no longer an option.*
So, he released it.
**Domain Spell: World Nova.**
The moment the concept left him, Xian's instincts shrieked of existential danger. He retreated in a flash, the speed granted by **Zhadao** pulling him back so fast he left a ripple in the air, as if the void were water he'd skipped a stone across.
Wushia's gaze touched the ripple. "Missed," he said, the word a period to a sentence.
A strange feeling washed over the Heaven Gate and beyond. The very quality of the world changed. A shimmering, liquid-blue **field** permeated the space, thick as honey and humming with a deep, foundational frequency. It was a **sphere of altered laws**. This was the **World Nova**.
Gen could feel it around him. He wasn't targeted, but he felt its nature. The air within it was heavier. Light bent in strange ways. He turned to Lorel. Her eyes were wide, her senses screaming.
"I can feel it too, Gen," she whispered. "It looks like your Infinity… but it's not the same. It's not endless possibility. It's… a closed system. A tiny, complete world with one rule: whatever he focuses on, ends."
Wushia turned his finger upward, pointing at Xian from across the sky. "It is rare to see someone force me to use the World Nova so easily." His voice was the calm before the cataclysm. "**Freeze.**"
He did not shout. He ordered.
Before Xian could use his insane speed, the liquid-blue field around him congealed. The air itself turned solid, locking him in a perfect, unbreakable crystal of altered physics.
Wushia took a step forward.
If Xian's speed dominated space, Wushia's speed within his own **World Nova** dominated **causality itself**. He was simply *there*, fist drawn back. The power of the Nova gathered at his knuckles, condensing the force of a contained apocalypse into a single, focused terminus.
He struck forward.
As the impact descended, Xian tensed. Using **Zhadao** to its absolute epitome, a skeletal, dragon-like scale of pure dominance erupted from his chest, spreading over his body—a final, desperate declaration of his will over the imminent ending.
The fist of World Nova landed.
The dominant scale **shattered into nothingness**.
The force was not kinetic. It was **existential**. Xian was blasted through the sky as if the concept of his position had been revoked. He tumbled, a broken puppet in the dark.
Yet, he planted **Gentle Lethality** into the fabric of the air as he skidded, using its dominant nature as an anchor. He wrenched himself to a halt, spinning violently in the void. A mouthful of blood, dark as his robes, sprayed from his lips.
Even with his defense, taking the **World Nova** head-on was too much.
Xian stood up in the air, wiping the blood from his chin. He had no understanding of how the World Nova functioned, but he understood its category. It was not an attack of energy. Like Gen's Infinity, it created a **reality with its own rules**. But where Infinity offered endless possibilities, the World Nova imposed a **single, catastrophic law** within a defined space—a law of ending.
Where Gen's beams could be outmaneuvered or blocked with sufficient understanding, the World Nova created attacks that could, in their full expression, **obliterate worlds by rewriting their final moment**.
Xian himself now understood the true, daunting scale of the task he had undertaken.
But instead of panic, instead of questioning, he smiled. This was the ultimate test. After years of planning, of sacrifice, of watching his old self die piece by piece, it was time to conclude his story.