Chapter 55
"And in the next second," he continued, his voice growing softer, more distant, like an echo from something that had passed billions of years ago, "it can no longer be classified by any of the categories just mentioned. It becomes something else, Liu Xin. Not a god, not a human, not a cultivator, not anything that has a name. It simply… exists."
Fhoooh!!
The carefully crafted scheme of sowing discord designed by Ling Xu—poisoning the logic of the commanders with subtle whispers, engineering incidents along the borders between universes, creating tensions that slowly spread like fire beneath dry straw—collapsed in an instant when an elder from the first sect happened to possess the ability to read traces of conceptual manipulation, a rare talent that even Huan Zheng had not expected to appear within the Leaves and Fruits realm.
"They know, Zhao Wei," Ling Xu whispered, his voice cold but not panicked—because he had been surrounded too many times to panic, had seen death too closely too often to fear a new form of it, "they don't just know that we tried to manipulate them—they also know that we are the ones responsible. Look at their formations: parallelograms in the east and west, trapezoids in the north and south. There's no gap, Zhao Wei. Not a single one."
Huan Zheng, standing beside him with his hands in his pockets, merely let out a long sigh—a sigh that sounded like someone who had just realized his sleep would be delayed again by matters he had never asked for—then shook his head lazily, a motion that almost made Ling Xu laugh even as fifty Supreme Dao cultivators from two different sects surrounded them with weapons pulsing with Dao authority he could not even identify.
"I told you, Liu Xin," he said, his voice still lazy, yet carrying a tone Ling Xu had never heard before—a tone of a man no longer willing to hide what he had long suppressed, "schemes of discord are too complicated. Too many variables. Too many chances of failure. It's better—"
He did not finish his sentence, because he did not need to.
For the moment the words "it's better" left his lips, the aura of his existence changed.
Not like fire igniting or ice freezing, but like space itself suddenly remembering that it had an obligation to bow to something older, something stronger, something that had once stood at the peak and chose to restrain itself not out of fear, but out of boredom.
"Head Humanity," whispered a female cultivator from the second sect, her eyes wide as she could feel—not see, not hear, but feel with the deepest axis of her cultivation—that the lazy man before her possessed a foundation that should not exist within the Supreme Dao realm, a foundation older than the multiverse itself, a foundation that made their Dao tremble like frightened leaves.
Huan Zheng did not answer the whisper with words—he simply stood there, and in that lazy posture, with his shoulders still slouched and eyes still half-closed, he released it.
Not an attack, not an explosion, not a wave of Qi measurable by any scale, but the aura of his existence as one of the three Wheels of Cultivation—the aura he had hidden for years behind the mask of the indifferent, lazy Zheng Huan—an aura that tore apart the Dao foundations absorbed by the cultivators from both universes, foundations they had painstakingly built over thousands of years, ripping and shattering them like garments torn apart by a storm.
And as those Dao foundations collapsed, their bodies split in two.
Clean, precise, without a single drop of blood splattering, like fruit cut by a blade so sharp that the fruit itself had no time to feel pain.
"Ninety-nine percent," Huan Zheng muttered as he counted the corpses falling around him, his voice as flat as a gravestone, "only one or two escaped. Enough to spread the news, but not enough to pose a serious threat."
He turned toward Ling Xu, who still stood frozen, his third eye pulsing rapidly.
Not out of fear, but because for the first time, he witnessed what it meant to be one of the three Wheels of Cultivation—what it meant to possess the foundation of the Head Humanity, a presence that made Supreme Dao cultivators kneel without swords, without spells, without fire, merely through the aura of existence that declared:
I am here, and because I am here, you are not.
But bad news travels faster than light, faster than death, faster than anything that two beings who had just carved victory atop a pile of corpses could ever outrun.
Those who escaped the massacre—only two or three, their bodies nearly destroyed and their Dao foundations fractured in a hundred places—managed to reach the gates of an inter-cultivator organization that governed countless universes, and there, with their final breaths, they spread a story that was not entirely true.
That Ling Xu and Huan Zheng had seized both universes without compensation, that they had slaughtered dozens of cultivators who were merely defending their rightful property, that they were monsters who must be hunted, captured, and publicly punished as a warning to all Supreme Dao cultivators who dared to violate the rules agreed upon thousands of years ago.
"False news," Ling Xu hissed as he and Huan Zheng hid within the cracks of space between two uninhabited universes, a place where time flowed slower and gravity never truly decided which direction mattered more, "or more precisely, manipulative. They didn't mention that we were surrounded first, that they started it, that I was only trying—"
"No one cares about the truth, Liu Xin," Huan Zheng cut him off, his voice still lazy, yet his eyes—usually half-closed—now fully open, scanning every vibration around them with the vigilance of a being once hunted across all universes, "what they care about is that two outsiders have disrupted order, that two outsiders have killed members of their organization, that two outsiders must be eliminated before this story spreads further and makes them appear weak."
And so began a flight Ling Xu had never imagined would come this quickly, this dramatically, this desperately.
With every heartbeat, every breath, every blink of his third eye constantly projecting maps of the universes they needed to pass through, Ling Xu and Huan Zheng teleported.
Not because they wanted to, but because they had no choice. And every time they set foot in a new universe, among stars that had never asked to witness such horror, Ling Xu performed the same ritual.
Opening his third eye wide, absorbing forty percent of the talent and potential within that universe along with all the Qi radiation accompanying it, then teleporting again before their traces could be detected by the hunters trailing behind them like a pack of sharks that had smelled blood in an endless ocean.
To be continued…