## Chapter 162: Full Power Unleashed
The air didn't just grow heavy. It shattered.
It was a sound Li Chang'an felt in his teeth, a pressure that punched the breath from his lungs. The Grandmaster, no longer a man but a vortex of condensed malice, rose from the center of the disrupted ritual circle. The intricate silver lines on the floor didn't just fade; they screamed, burning out like overstretched wires. The stolen life-force of the disciples, now a chaotic storm of violet and black energy, whirled around him, drawn into the core of his being.
Stone groaned. A hairline crack shot up the nearest pillar with the sound of a gunshot, then branched out like lightning. Dust, ancient and bitter, rained from the ceiling.
"You think to interrupt a god's ascension with parlor tricks?" The Grandmaster's voice was layered, echoing with the stolen screams of a hundred failed disciples. He didn't move, but the space around him warped. The very light bent, making him look like a heat haze given form and fury.
Li Chang'an's mind, accelerated by his Heaven-Defying Comprehension, analyzed the aura in frantic, crystal-clear detail. This wasn't just a higher realm of power. It was a qualitative difference. The Grandmaster's energy had weight, a corrosive history to it. Direct confrontation wasn't a battle; it was suicide. The understanding was cold and absolute in his gut.
Crunch.
The marble floor beneath the Grandmaster's feet didn't crack. It powdered, sinking a full inch in a perfect circle. Then he took a step forward.
The world lurched. A visible shockwave, dark as a bruise, rippled out from his footstep. It wasn't sound or force alone—it was a wave of pure, oppressive intent. Li Chang'an's instincts screamed. He didn't block; he flowed. He let the shockwave hit the air behind where he'd been a fraction of a second before, using its leading edge to propel himself sideways. The wall he'd been near didn't just break. It vaporized into a cloud of grit and fist-sized rubble.
BOOM.
The main support pillar of the chamber took the brunt of the ripple. It held for a heartbeat, stone grinding against stone, before it exploded inward. The ceiling above gave a final, agonized shriek.
This was the collapse. Not a slow crumbling, but a sudden, violent failure. Mountain-sized blocks of carved granite peeled away from the roof. The world became a deafening roar of falling stone and a blinding blizzard of dust.
Escape. Not fight. Escape.
His comprehension, already humming from disrupting the ritual, latched onto the chaos. He didn't see solid stone and dead ends. He saw the architecture of collapse—the stress fractures singing their final song, the pockets of air forming as slabs leaned against each other, the weaker mortar lines in ancient walls.
He moved not like a man running, but like a ghost slipping through closing jaws.
A monolithic slab crashed down, sealing the main archway. Li Chang'an didn't falter. His hand, coated in a shimmering, unstable film of void energy, shot out. He didn't strike the slab. He touched the air beside it, where the wall was thinner. His void energy didn't blast; it unmade. A section of the wall the size of a door simply ceased to be, dissolving into silent, gray motes that were swallowed by the dust. He dove through the new hole as the space he'd just occupied was buried under ten tons of rock.
The Grandmaster's laughter chased him, cutting through the din. "Run, little rat! The mountain itself is my domain!"
A section of corridor ahead pancaked without warning. Li Chang'an dropped into a slide, the falling stone grazing his back, tearing his robe. He came up running, his senses stretched to their limit. He could feel the Grandmaster's presence, a cold sun moving through the palace behind him, not chasing so much as herding.
A wrong turn. A dead end—a collapsed gallery filled with shattered statues. The Grandmaster's aura pressed in from the corridor behind, thick and suffocating.
Trapped.
Panic was a luxury he couldn't afford. His comprehension focused, not on the dead end, but on the mountain itself. The vibration of the collapse. The thickness of the rock. The memory of the palace blueprints he'd glimpsed weeks ago in the library flashed, cross-referenced with the seismic tremors he felt through his feet.
There. The wall to his right wasn't just a wall. It was the outer shell of the palace, thinner here, backed by compacted earth and scree before the open air of the mountain face.
It was his only shot.
He planted his feet, the ground trembling beneath him. Dust coated his tongue, gritty and dry. He could hear the slow, deliberate footsteps of the Grandmaster approaching down the ruined gallery. The air grew colder.
Li Chang'an emptied his mind of everything—the fear, the roar of collapse, the looming presence. He focused on the concept he had only theorized, the pinnacle of his void comprehension he had never dared to fully manifest.
[Void-Shattering Palm].
It wasn't about force. It was about negation. A point of absolute, consuming emptiness.
He drew a breath, pulling every shred of his energy into his right arm. The air around his palm didn't shimmer; it died. Light bent into it and didn't return. Sound faded. A sphere of perfect, silent black the size of a walnut coalesced above his palm, so dense it seemed to suck the color from the world.
The Grandmaster rounded the final corner. He saw Li Chang'an facing the wall, arm raised. A smirk touched his corrupted lips. "A final, futile gesture?"
Li Chang'an ignored him. He poured his will, his comprehension of void, of space, of endings, into that tiny point of darkness.
Then, he pushed.
He didn't throw it. He introduced it to the wall.
The black sphere touched the stone.
There was no explosion.
There was an absence.
A perfect circle, three meters wide, simply ceased to exist. Not broken, not blasted outward. The stone, the mortar, the earth behind it, the very space it occupied—it was all gone, leaving a tunnel of smooth, glassy nothingness that led straight to the open sky and the dizzying drop of the mountain face beyond. A cold, clean wind rushed in, scouring the dust from the air.
The Grandmaster's smirk vanished. His eyes widened, not with fear, but with a sudden, voracious hunger. "That power… it is not of this world. It will be MINE!"
He lunged, a blur of dark intent.
Li Chang'an didn't look back. He sprinted into the smooth, impossible tunnel he had created and leaped out into the open void, the wind whipping his torn robes. He fell into the vast openness, the colossal mountain palace crumbling in on itself behind him, a tomb for a would-be god.
As he fell, twisting to orient himself, he cast one last glance back at the hole he'd made.
There, silhouetted against the glowing, chaotic ruin of the palace, stood the Grandmaster. He wasn't trying to pursue. He was staring at the perfectly smooth, void-born edges of the escape tunnel, his expression one of transcendent, terrifying revelation.
Their eyes met across the chasm.
And the Grandmaster smiled. It was a smile that held no rage, only a chilling, absolute certainty.
He raised a hand, not to attack, but in a slow, deliberate gesture—a hunter marking his prey. His voice, amplified by his monstrous power, reached Li Chang'an even over the howling wind, clear and cold as a glacier.
"I know what you are now."
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