The teleportation matrix plaza in the border city seethed with a chaos of dust, merchants' shouts, and the clinking of weapons.
The wind swept the filth from the ground as the two titanic shadows of the Night Wyverns descended from the sky and landed in the stone courtyard. Dozens of people stepped back, covering their faces. The monumental carriage of dark wood and steel settled onto the ground with a dull thud, its heavy wheels grinding the loose cobblestones.
No sect crest or clan banner adorned the vehicle's plating.
On the driver's box and along the sides of the carriage, three men waited in a sepulchral silence. Mò Zhōng, Lóu Jiàn, and Jiàn Wúshuang no longer bore the decrepitude of old age. Bathed and purified by Zhì Yuǎn's Primordial Qi in the past, the three displayed the dense musculature, broad shoulders, and hard features of warriors in the prime of their thirties. They were walls of flesh standing watch at the gates.
The heavy cabin door swung open with a polished click.
Mò Yán descended the steps. Between the carriage walls, the snow-haired young woman wore her Hanfu of the purest silk, the fabric straining against the fullness of her bust. But to the eyes of the world outside, the invisible weave of the Law of Karma and Illusion woven by Zhì Yuǎn distorted reality in an absolute way.
The crowd and the merchants did not see a goddess of profane beauty. They saw only a dust-covered peasant woman with coarse features and not a single detectable trace of Qi. A weak, perfectly forgettable mortal servant.
Mò Yán walked to the administrator's stone table at the matrix. Without uttering a single word, she placed a small leather pouch on the stone. The muffled sound of Spirit Stones laundered through the underworld made the administrator swallow hard. He looked at the dirty peasant woman, looked at the colossal carriage and the three imposing warriors escorting it, his mind throbbing with confusion before that grotesque contrast. Even so, the man asked no questions. He stamped the transit clearance swiftly.
Mò Yán turned to return to the carriage.
"Move that carcass out of the way!" A shrill, impatient voice tore through the plaza's noise.
A young man in robes embroidered with silver thread stepped forward, flanked by six heavily armored guards. He belonged to one of the wealthy clans of that province. His eyes swept over the Wyverns' black scales and the carriage's wood with pure covetousness. Then his gaze fell on the ragged mortal servant holding the coins. The noble's arrogance swelled instantly upon deducing that this was merely a group of merchants who had gotten lucky enough to find a stray luxury vehicle.
"What kind of mortal trash thinks it can occupy the main matrix space with beasts it can't even tame?" The young man snapped his fingers, pointing ahead. "Push those lizards and that cart to the side. My clan passes first."
Inside the armored cabin, sealed from external sound but catching everything through her open pores, Yù Méi ground her teeth. The girl in golden silk was lying face down on the plush rug, her skin still tingling from the residual heat of the journey.
"I'm going to use that little brat's tongue to choke his own guards," Yù Méi growled, her almond-shaped eyes glinting in living gold.
A pale hand came to rest softly on the warrior's shoulder. Yù Qíng was reclined on the main seat, her head resting languidly against Zhì Yuǎn's thigh, while her husband's long fingers traced the contour of her black hair. A sweet, predatory smile shaped itself on the woman in blue's lips.
"A tree does not shake its branches to crush the worm crawling at its root, little flower," Yù Qíng whispered, her velvety voice melting in the protection of that isolation. "Let the dogs clean the sidewalk. Our boots need not step in the mud today."
Outside, Lóu Jiàn drew no weapons. He emanated no blazing Qi or ostentatious murderous intent. The Shadow Syndicate did not make public spectacles. And above all, nothing would justify delaying the Master's journey over an irrelevant corpse.
Leaning against the outer side of the carriage with his arms crossed beneath his rough cloak, Lóu Jiàn simply lowered his dark eyes toward the young master and his six guards.
The intent was surgical. One thousandth of the pressure of the 4th Sub-realm of Immortal Establishment descended from the sky, focused with millimetric precision on the seven men.
The air did not tremble. The stones did not crack. The crowd in the plaza saw absolutely nothing happen.
But the kneecaps of the young noble and his guards exploded silently from the inside.
The seven men collapsed into the dust simultaneously, like puppets with their strings cut. The young man opened his mouth to shriek in pain, but the suffocating weight crushed his lungs, collapsing the air in his throat. Thick blood began to seep from the eyes, noses, and ears of the group as they convulsed mutely in the dust, their kneecaps reduced to bone flour, unable to draw a single breath of oxygen.
The crowd fell back in a terrified silence, watching the powerful men drown in their own blood without a single blade having been drawn.
Lóu Jiàn did not alter his hard expression. He released a small black jade token that slid between his fingers and fell directly into the wooden bowl of a ragged beggar sitting in the gutter.
"The entire lineage," Lóu Jiàn's voice flowed out, drawling and monotone, audible only to the underworld spy disguised in the rags. "I want the ashes of every generation of his thrown into the border river before sundown."
The beggar collected his bowl and disappeared into the shadows of the plaza.
Mò Yán climbed the steps and locked the cabin door behind her. Old Mò Zhōng snapped the reins on the driver's box. The Night Wyverns surged forward, pulling the colossal carriage to the center of the silver circle. The matrix light exploded, swallowing them in an obliterating flash that tore across the continent.
The spatial void lasted only a few seconds.
When the silver light dissolved, the filth, the smell of sweat, and the packed-earth dust of the border simply ceased to exist.
They had landed on the central platform of the Capital of the Two-Faced Crown Empire.
The moment the carriage materialized, Mò Yán and Bái Wǎn released a unison gasp of pure sensory shock inside the cabin. The air that flooded their lungs was not heavy, hostile, or punishing. It was an absolute nectar. The city's Qi was so absurdly dense, purified, and abundant that the atmosphere exhaled an intoxicating freshness, washing the fatigue from any cultivator in milliseconds.
Zhì Yuǎn slid his fingers aside, pulling back the heavy velvet curtain of the window. The god's dark, unfathomable gaze swept across the paradise that stretched to where the horizon curved.
There were no obsidian streets or rough stones. The Capital was a colossal utopia forged in light and order. Immense avenues, wide enough to accommodate the parade of ten simultaneous armies, were paved with solid blocks of impeccable white marble, without a single smudge of dust. The walkways gleamed like diamonds under the sun, paved entirely with plates of crystalline quartz.
Thousands of jade palaces, towers of pale gold, and hanging gardens rose in a divine architectural harmony, designed to display the immeasurable wealth of the ancestral lineages. Billions of people lived and breathed in that urban vastness. Billions.
And Zhì Yuǎn's Wisdom dissected the most terrifying statistic of that paradise in the blink of an eye: there was not a single mortal there. The density and purity of the environment were such that common biology would evaporate in the cradle.
This was the exclusive world of the Great Dao.
Through the window, the god observed a baker on the corner of the quartz walkway. The man used no conventional oven. The baker's eyes shone silver as he manipulated small spatial rifts through the Law of Space to bake the dough using the dimensional friction of the vacuum. A mere street cook, flaunting the apex of the 4th Transcendent Stage.
Several blocks ahead, the sound of an anvil echoed like a muffled thunderclap. A shirtless blacksmith covered in golden sweat did not strike metal with brute force. Each hammer blow he delivered distorted the air within a hundred-meter radius — an authentic Saint Domain bending the laws of reality to forge steel. A reclusive Saint, living as a street corner craftsman.
The abyss in Zhì Yuǎn's eyes shed its lethargy, taking on a predatory, calm, and deeply satisfied gleam.
"They turned immortality into street commerce," Zhì Yuǎn murmured, his deep voice reverberating in the cabin, his Inner Universe throbbing with Hunger before the absurd concentration of Laws and Qi walking those marble streets.
Marching along the avenues in surgically ordered formations, patrollers imposed the peace of the utopian city. Their armor blazed like mirrors in the sun. On their breastplates forged in celestial silver, they bore the empire's pride: a majestic Ochre Dragon intertwined with a Blue Luan Bird, and, floating in the space carved between the two mythic beasts, a Golden Crown. The absolute symbol that the Capital City was guarded and governed by the unbreakable equilibrium of the two hegemonic clans.
Lóu Jiàn, mounted on the side of the carriage, did not look at the imperial guards. The assassin was watching the infinity of high-ranking mercenaries who moved peacefully along the quartz walkways — men whose very footsteps carried Laws of their own.
"The Mercenary Guild, Master," Lóu Jiàn's drawling voice seeped through the gaps in the window, mapping the underworld with canine devotion. "Managed directly by the Two-Faced Crown. Their web is not limited to this city. The operations of those dogs encompass a territory of millions of kilometers, covering every ocean, jade mountain, and flame valley on the continent, unifying every manner of ancient lineage under the seal of the Dragon and the Luan. No one breathes without the permission of the two clans."
Inside the cabin, Yù Méi threw herself to the edge of her seat, her full chest crushed against the window ledge. The youngest's almond-shaped irises were dilated, dazzled by the level of power walking the sidewalk and radiating a scorching Qi. The warrior smiled, her sharp canines drawing the purest martial lust.
"Just look at them, sisters..." Yù Méi whispered, her hyper-dense body vibrating beneath the golden silk. "Every single one of those guards could take a punch to the chest without turning to pulp on the first try. This place has no cowardly insects!"
Yù Qíng slid her cold, pale hands along Zhì Yuǎn's shoulders. The goddess in blue assessed the impeccable white marble, the spatial bakers, and the opulence of the palaces with the quiet lethality of a queen surveying a prepared banquet.
"It is a breathtaking garden, my love," the priestess purred, her red lips grazing her husband's neck, her sadistic devotion appraising billions of lives as nothing more than nutrients. "They forged a paradise so rich and watered the earth with a nectar so pure... just so the roots of our family could drink from a clean cup when we swallow it."
Zhì Yuǎn adjusted the collar of his charcoal-gray robe.
"Follow the shadow route. Madame Feng awaits us at the back of the auction houses," the god commanded, his unshakeable authority setting the course through the capital.
The Night Wyverns advanced along the immaculate marble streets. The monumental carriage glided through the heart of paradise — a silent calamity stepping through the gates of heaven to begin the end of that era.