The spatial tear that swallowed Fang Tianyou snapped shut with the resounding crack of a breaking mountain.
Silence cascaded over the deepest abyss of the Ancient Sword Tomb. The residual echoes of karmic severance still hummed in the air, vibrating against the giant, rusted blades jutting from the scarred earth. Lu Chen stood alone, the newly claimed *Severing Edge* resting heavy in his grip. Its blade, forged from ancient meteorite, pulsed with an eager, almost predatory resonance.
He had severed the puppet strings connecting Fang Tianyou to Sect Master Fang. The ancient entity lurking in the dark had taken the bait, dragging the 'Heaven-Blessed Son' into its depths. But Lu Chen knew better than to celebrate. The Imperial Bureau's tether was still tracing him, and Sect Master Fang's Nascent Soul fury waited on the outside.
He needed power. Not just a drop, but an ocean.
Lu Chen plunged the Severing Edge into the stone beneath his feet and sat cross-legged. Above his spiritual sea, the Luck-Binding Mirror rotated silently. It had reached its Third Form: *Destiny Sight*.
When Lu Chen opened his eyes, the physical world faded into a translucent gray. In its place, the true nature of the Ancient Sword Tomb revealed itself. The air was woven with thick, pulsating rivers of golden light—the concentrated Qi Yun, the world's providence, hoarded by dead sword masters for millennia.
But there was something else.
Intertwined with the gold were jagged, crimson-black threads. They hissed and snapped like vipers whenever they brushed against Lu Chen's aura. This was the Heavenly Dao's rejection. The world's envy. The Heavens despised the Void; they recognized him as an anomaly, a parasite that defied the natural order. This crimson-black energy was the world's collective hostility, designed to suppress his cultivation and ultimately crush him with Heavenly Tribulation.
Lu Chen's lips curled into a cold, mocking smile.
"You envy what you cannot control," Lu Chen whispered to the empty abyss. "You suppress me because you fear the day I consume you completely. Let us see whose stomach is larger."
He formed a hand seal, his fingers blurring as he activated the Luck-Binding Mirror to its absolute limit.
"Devour."
The command was a silent detonation.
The Mirror flared, not with light, but with an absolute, light-consuming darkness. The newly evolved Earth-Rank Void Root in Lu Chen's Dantian awakened, expanding like the maw of a starving leviathan.
Instantly, the golden rivers of providence in the air stagnated. Then, they reversed course.
A hurricane of raw World Essence and Qi Yun tore through the valley. It wasn't a gentle absorption; it was a brutal, violent plundering. Lu Chen didn't just target the ambient energy. He reached out with Destiny Sight, grabbing hold of the crimson-black threads of Heavenly Envy.
If the world wanted to crush him with its hostility, he would digest that too.
Crack... CRACK!
The environment began to visibly decay. A colossal sword monument to Lu Chen's left, standing tall for five thousand years, suddenly lost its spiritual luster. The runes carved into its steel dulled, rusted, and then shattered into fine gray dust. The spiritual herbs clinging to the cliff faces withered instantly, their essence ripped from their roots.
The sheer volume of energy slamming into Lu Chen's meridians was agonizing. His skin cracked, radiating a terrifying mix of blinding golden light and pitch-black void energy. Blood seeped from his pores, immediately evaporating into bloody mist as the temperature around him plummeted to an unnatural, absolute zero.
Within his Dantian, his Peak Foundation Establishment cultivation was pushed to the absolute brink. The liquid spiritual sea began to boil, compressing rapidly under the immense gravitational pull of his Void Root.
Compress. Compress. Crush!
Normally, a cultivator forming a Golden Core would gently guide their essence, allowing it to crystallize naturally through harmony with the Heavens. It was a process of aligning one's soul with the world.
Lu Chen was doing the exact opposite. He was violently enslaving the world's energy. He gathered the golden providence, the crimson Heavenly Envy, and his own dark Void Intent, forcing them to collide in the center of his Dantian.
The friction ignited a spiritual fire that threatened to burn him from the inside out. Lu Chen gritted his teeth, the taste of iron heavy in his mouth. He grasped the hilt of the Severing Edge, channeling the overflow of chaotic energy into the ancient blade to stop his own body from exploding.
"Mirror! Bind!" Lu Chen roared internally.
The Luck-Binding Mirror descended directly into his Dantian, acting as an anvil. His Void Root acted as the hammer.
BOOM!
The liquid Qi sea collapsed inward. A single, infinitely dense point formed.
It wasn't golden.
It was pitch black.
A Void Core.
The moment it formed, the gravitational pull within Lu Chen's body multiplied by a hundredfold. It didn't emit light; it consumed it. The ambient glow of the cavern was sucked into his body. The Void Core rotated slowly, a perfect, seamless sphere of absolute nothingness, yet it brimmed with the terrifying power of an entire plundered dimension.
With the formation of the Core, Lu Chen's aura exploded upward. Early Golden Core!
But the cost of his breakthrough was the structural integrity of the entire realm.
Miles away, in the upper levels of the Ancient Sword Tomb, elite Azure Cloud disciples screamed in terror as the ground vanished beneath them. The spatial arrays holding the pocket dimension together were dissolving. The providence that acted as the glue for the ancient ruins had been entirely siphoned into Lu Chen's Dantian.
Standing on a crumbling floating island, Ye Xiyue watched the sky crack open, revealing the void of space. Her silver eyes widened as her 'Heart of the Sword' trembled violently. It wasn't beating in fear of the collapsing tomb; it was reacting to a newly born presence in the depths—a presence so antithetical to creation that it made her soul ache.
"He actually did it," Ye Xiyue murmured, her voice lost over the roar of collapsing mountains. "He stole the Heavens' foundation..."
Before she could react further, a spatial failsafe triggered, enveloping her and the surviving disciples in white light, forcibly ejecting them from the dying tomb.
Back in the abyss, the ancient entity that had dragged Fang Tianyou away let out a deafening, anguished roar. Its domain was turning to ash. Giant stone hands reached up from the chasms, clawing desperately at the disappearing providence, but they crumbled to dust before they could even brush Lu Chen's aura.
Lu Chen stood up. He felt no weight. The Void Core in his Dantian provided him with an endless, bottomless reserve of energy. He didn't just feel stronger; he felt disconnected from the mortal laws that previously bound him.
He looked up. The sky of the tomb was shattering like a fragile glass dome, revealing the swirling vortex of the spatial rift that led back to the Great Azure Realm.
With a single thought, Void Sword Intent coated the Severing Edge. The blade vanished, turning into a rift in reality itself.
Lu Chen swung upward.
The attack didn't produce a brilliant crescent of light. Instead, a silent wave of erasure traveled upward, carving a massive, clean hole right through the crumbling fabric of the pocket dimension.
He leaped, riding the updraft of the collapsing world, and shot through the portal.
***
Cloud Peak, Azure Cloud Sect.
The sky above the sect was a maelstrom of terrifying spiritual pressure. The massive spatial rift that had swallowed the elite disciples hours ago was now convulsing violently, spewing out survivors who crashed onto the jade-paved courtyards, coughing up blood.
Hovering directly beneath the rift was Sect Master Fang. His Nascent Soul aura was fully unleashed, a terrifying manifestation of a massive Azure Dragon coiled around the mountain peak. His eyes were bloodshot, entirely consumed by wrath. The karmic tether he had secretly attached to his son, Tianyou, had been violently severed. He didn't know who did it, but he knew they were about to come out.
"Whoever you are," Sect Master Fang's voice echoed like thunder, causing the eardrums of the Inner Disciples below to rupture, "I will extract your soul and burn it in the Azure Flame for a thousand years!"
Suddenly, the spatial rift stopped convulsing.
It died.
The vibrant blue portal turned a sickly gray, then black, before shattering entirely.
From the center of the shattered space, a figure descended. He didn't fall; he floated down, untouched by the chaotic spatial winds.
Lu Chen.
He wore his simple Inner Sect robes, but they were pristine, untouched by the dust of the collapsing tomb. In his hand, the Severing Edge drank the sunlight.
The moment Lu Chen appeared, the ambient spiritual energy of Cloud Peak spasmed. The golden mist that traditionally cloaked the Azure Cloud Sect was physically repelled by his presence, creating a massive, visible void sphere around him in the sky.
Sect Master Fang's eyes narrowed, his Nascent Soul senses failing to penetrate the absolute darkness of Lu Chen's new Core. "A mere Foundation Establishment rat? No... what is that aura?"
Before the Sect Master could launch his attack, the sky above them fundamentally changed.
It didn't just darken. It became a canvas of absolute despair.
Thick, ink-black clouds blotted out the sun across the entire Eastern Province. Lightning didn't flash; instead, silent, jagged veins of crimson energy crackled through the dark clouds. The pressure was so immense that thousands of disciples on the ground were immediately forced to their knees, gasping for air.
Even Sect Master Fang's Azure Dragon manifestation flickered and groaned under the weight of the sky.
"A Heavenly Tribulation?" Sect Master Fang shouted, disbelief warring with horror. "Black lightning? This is the Heavens' Extermination Decree! What have you done, Chen Lu?!"
Lu Chen didn't look at the terrified Nascent Soul master. He looked up at the churning black clouds. His newly formed Void Core pulsed, eager to feed. The Destiny Sight allowed him to see the massive, continent-spanning net of Heavenly Envy focusing entirely on his coordinates.
The Imperial Bureau's Gold-Robed Inspector Yan, watching from a distant peak, dropped his Heavenly Fate Compass. The glass shattered. "The Sovereign... The Sovereign of the Void has broken through..."
Lu Chen lowered his gaze from the tribulation clouds and finally looked at Sect Master Fang. The coldness in his eyes was absolute.
"Sect Master," Lu Chen said, his voice entirely devoid of inflection, yet carrying effortlessly over the roaring thunder. "I heard you wanted to burn my soul."
Lu Chen raised the Severing Edge, aiming the pitch-black point directly at the Nascent Soul patriarch. Behind Lu Chen, the first bolt of black, world-ending lightning tore from the heavens, striking him directly—not to smite him, but to be absorbed instantly into the vortex of his sword.
Lu Chen smiled, a predator baring its teeth.
"Come and take it."