Chapter 348: My Chef
The internal struggle to remain a "green flag" completely evaporated. The sociopathic, homicidal monster beneath his ice didn’t roar in anger. It wept tears of pure, euphoric joy.
He had been holding back his rage for twenty hours. He had been suppressing his absolute zero aura. He had been playing the polite, benevolent gentleman because he didn’t want to slaughter innocent maidens and upset his Chef.
But Hu Yanlie and Mo Wuchen?
They were not innocent maidens. They were aggressive, toxic, and durable male protagonists who had actively provoked him and obsessed over the one person he loved.
They were not off-limits.
They were a socially acceptable outlet for his homicidal rage.
’Thank you, Heavens,’ Wangchen’s internal monologue wept with gratitude, the ruby light in his eyes flaring into a blinding, apocalyptic crimson. ’I finally get to hit something.’
"Maidens," Wangchen murmured. His voice was no longer a polite, strained hum. It was a dark, vibrating, incredibly smooth purr of absolute, lethal anticipation.
He raised his right hand.
"Please. Step back."
The temperature in the clearing didn’t drop.
Reality itself froze.
The blizzard instantly ceased its chaotic swirling, every single snowflake freezing mid-air, suspended in perfect, terrifying stasis. The ground beneath Yanlie and Wuchen cracked with a deafening BOOM as a massive, intricate, hundred-foot-wide array of black ice instantly materialized beneath their boots.
Yanlie’s mocking smirk vanished. His beast instincts screamed a warning of absolute, imminent death.
"Mo Wuchen, move your ass!" Yanlie roared, unleashing a massive, roaring pillar of demonic beast fire, attempting to melt the array.
It was utterly useless.
Wangchen didn’t draw Winter’s Sigh.
He didn’t need a sword to deal with stress-relief toys.
He took a single step forward, his white robes snapping in the sudden, violent vacuum of air.
"You asked where my Chef is," Wangchen whispered, his voice echoing directly inside the minds of the Beast Lord and the Assassin.
CRASH!
Wangchen materialized directly in front of Hu Yanlie. The speed defied all orthodox logic. It was a teleportation fueled entirely by spite.
Yanlie swung his massive bone-cleaver, a strike that could level a fortress.
Wangchen didn’t dodge.
He simply raised his bare, pale left hand and caught the jagged, cursed blade of the cleaver directly by the edge.
The impact sent a shockwave that shattered the suspended snowflakes for a mile. Yanlie strained, his muscles bulging, but the blade did not move a single millimeter. It was locked in the unyielding, terrifying grip of a Nascent Soul immortal.
"My Chef," Wangchen continued conversationally, offering a polite, chilling smile, "prefers a clean workspace."
He casually twisted his wrist.
The legendary bone-cleaver shattered into a thousand useless fragments of ice and bone.
Before Yanlie could even register the loss of his weapon, Wangchen’s right hand shot forward, burying his palm directly into the center of the Beast Lord’s heavily scarred chest.
BOOM!
A hyper-concentrated, localized blast of absolute zero kinetic force detonated. Yanlie’s demonic armor vaporized.
The Beast Lord was violently launched backward, his ribs cracking audibly, coughing up a mouthful of blood as he crashed through three solid pillars of ice before embedding himself deeply into the side of a frozen glacier, incapacitated.
Mo Wuchen, the Shadow Assassin, did not freeze. He utilized his supreme agility, melting into the shadows cast by the ice pillars, attempting to flank the Ice Demon and strike from the blind spot.
"And furthermore," Wangchen’s voice echoed from the empty air, unbothered by the assassin’s stealth.
Wuchen lunged from a shadow directly behind Wangchen, thrusting his twin daggers toward Wangchen’s exposed neck.
Wangchen didn’t even turn around.
He flicked his long, silver hair.
A wave of razor-sharp, microscopic ice needles erupted from his aura, moving with surgical, homing precision. They completely bypassed Wuchen’s daggers, striking the assassin at the exact, specific pressure points of his major meridians.
Wuchen gasped, his momentum instantly arresting mid-air. His muscles locked, and his Qi flow was completely, forcefully paralyzed by the freezing needles.
He fell to the ground like a severed puppet, completely immobilized, his dark eyes wide with shock behind his metallic mask.
The entire fight had lasted less than a few seconds.
Two of the most powerful, lethal prodigies of the younger generation had been completely, effortlessly dismantled.
Wangchen stood in the center of the shattered clearing.
He slowly lowered his hands, adjusting the cuffs of his pristine white robes, completely untouched by the violence.
He looked at the incapacitated Beast Lord groaning in the glacier as he looked at the paralyzed Assassin twitching on the ice.
He had not killed them, just meticulously, carefully measured his kinetic output.
He had shattered their bones, bruised their internal organs, and subjected them to agonizing pain, but he had left them with exactly 1 point of HP.
"I am sparing your lives," Wangchen informed them politely, his ruby eyes glowing with intense, terrifying satisfaction. "Not because you deserve mercy. But because indiscriminate murder is a red flag, and murder reflects poorly on Ji’an’s brand."
He offered a short, elegant, completely sincere bow to the bleeding men.
"Thank you for the physical exertion. It was highly therapeutic. I feel significantly more emotionally regulated."
He turned on his heel, his pristine white robes snapping smartly. He walked back to the group of twelve Azure Lotus maidens, who were currently staring at him with their jaws unhinged, terrified by the casual violence they had just witnessed.
Wangchen offered them a flawless, bright, incredibly polite smile.
"Shall we proceed, Maidens?" Wangchen asked cheerfully, completely reinvigorated. "The center of the realm awaits. Please, watch your step on the shattered ice."
As the terrified maidens scrambled to follow the terrifyingly polite psychopath through the blizzard, Xie Wangchen felt a profound sense of inner peace.
He had maintained his green-flag status. He had successfully vented his homicidal jealousy without technically breaking any of Ji’an’s rules.
’As expected, I am the perfect partner he needs,’ Wangchen thought smugly, his silver hair trailing in the wind as he marched toward the Middle Zone. ’Now, I must find him before he attempts to cook something dangerous without proper supervision.’
The dawn of the third and final day within the Illusory Shattered Realm did not arrive with a gentle sunrise. It arrived with the deafening, apocalyptic, metallic grinding of the Encroaching Void Array slamming shut, sealing the survivors within the absolute, undeniable epicenter of the map.
They had reached the Heart of the Realm.
The environment had shifted dramatically from the pearlescent, mind-bending corridors of the Middle Zone. The final arena was a colossal, floating colosseum of pristine white jade and polished gold, suspended over a terrifying, churning vortex of pure, raw spiritual energy. There was nowhere left to run.
There were no more bushes to hide in, no more illusory beasts to farm.
It was the final culling ground.
Standing at the grand entrance archway of the colosseum, Lin Ji’an let out a long, heavy exhale, the breath pluming in the cool morning air.
She stood with her hands resting casually on her hips, the heavy, hyper-saturated Szechuan Red silk of her combat robes billowing sharply in the high-altitude crosswinds.
Beside her, Shen Zechuan was obediently holding her four-hundred-pound Black Iron Wok under one arm, while using his other hand to meticulously try and scrub a speck of mud off his white sleeve.
Ji’an’s silver-flecked eyes swept across the vast expanse of the jade arena.
It was an absolute, unmitigated bloodbath.
The brawling had started hours before dawn.
The moment the strongest disciples had crossed the threshold, the fragile, temporary alliances forged in the outer rings had violently imploded.
Spells, sword-auras, and explosive talismans detonated continuously, illuminating the arena in a chaotic, blinding strobe light of multi-colored violence.
Ji’an did a rapid, highly tactical headcount.
’Ninety-seven,’ her internal supercomputer calculated, her brow furrowing slightly. ’Ninety-seven surviving disciples.’
It was a surprisingly high number.
She had designed the shrinking fog, the loot drops, and the boss-spawns specifically to eliminate at least ninety-five percent of the participants before the final bell. She had expected maybe thirty or forty exhausted, traumatized survivors to crawl into the final ring.
But it seemed she had underestimated the cockroach-like resilience of the continent’s elite youths.
The foreign delegations had clung to their heavy hitters, and the Celestial Sword Sect disciples had rallied behind their respective peak lords.
They were battered and bruised.
Their robes were torn and stained with sweat and beast blood.
But ninety-seven highly trained, hyper-aggressive, Golden Core-level cultivators were currently tearing each other to pieces on the jade tiles.
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