The single word dropped like an executioner's iron coin, and Shen Yu moved.
He did not drop into a defensive crouch.
He did not erect a Qi screen.
Instead, he planted his bare feet into the coarse red dunes, his spine straight as an unsheathed saber, and began weaving his fingers through a blur of ancient, sharp mudras.
From his lips spilled a low, resonant cadence, the primordial cipher of the Celestial Devouring Seal.
It was the forbidden extension embedded within the deepest chambers of the "Primordial Yin-Yang Scripture", a technique he got from the system when he defied the heavens during the Tenth Stage of Qi Condensation.
Its principle was madness itself, to forfeit all resistance, turn the mortal vessel into both lightning rod and crucible, and forcibly swallow the destructive fury of the heavens to refine it into pure, unblemished Yang essence.
Circulating the technique was walking the razor's edge of absolute oblivion.
