Chapter 1087: Chapter 585: Opportunity at Last! (Part 2)
When his fist touched the crystal’s surface, it already carried the stacked force of over a hundred layers of erupting space!
Crack!
Boom!
The crystal surface exploded in a shockwave, and the Primordial Spirits imprisoned inside seized the chance to break free.
The moment those twisted soul fragments overflowed, they were burned to ash by the Phoenix True Flame flickering in Jiang Shu’s left eye.
He wasn’t being cruel; those Primordial Spirits had long been corrupted by a virus, and in their pupils flickered the same unsettling gray runes.
The Mechanical Mother suddenly laughed. In her shattered chest cavity, the crimson core voluntarily split open, revealing a rotating black cube within.
Every face of the cube was engraved with triangular sigils, and at this moment it was folding and recombining in a way Jiang Shu could not comprehend.
"Mechanical Divine Country, memory cleaning protocol, initiate."
A phantom sound of meshing gears suddenly echoed in the Void. Jiang Shu’s temples throbbed, and the golden characters in his Sea of Consciousness—those representing Law scriptures like the Great Void Heart Scripture and Panwu Great Strength Dao Book—suddenly dimmed.
That cube was tampering with his battle memories!
The force trajectories of the Panwu Heaven Opening Axe, the techniques of the Qi Swallowing Vientiane Fist, even his comprehension of those Law Origins, were being forcibly stripped from his consciousness by some higher-dimensional existence.
"Don’t even think about it!"
The Chaos Thunder Pool seethed in fury, and the Three Holy Embryos shrieked in unison.
Jiang Shu actually reversed the flow of Taichu Dao Rhyme, redirecting the memory-cleansing energy into the Desolate Star Halberd.
The gray-misted airflow along the halberd shaft abruptly surged, transforming into a giant axe phantom spanning the star river.
This was the complete form of the Panwu Heaven Opening Axe, fusing all of Jiang Shu’s understanding of the Dao, making the distant onlookers from the War Alliance and Jiuyu Commerce Alliance stand hairs on end, as though facing a calamity that could kill them outright.
"I’ll return it to you!"
As the Giant Axe cleaved down, the Mechanical Mother’s silver-white hair suddenly stood on end strand by strand.
The data streams erupting between her strands of hair constructed seven layers of defense within a thousandth of a second, yet all were contaminated by the memory-cleansing energy shrouded within the axe light.
Her elegant features showed a rare, human-like terror.
This strike of Jiang Shu’s wasn’t only aimed at her physical body; it was also destroying the battle database she had accumulated over a hundred thousand years!
The core crystal finally shattered completely, like a glazed lamp exploding to pieces.
The Mechanical Mother’s broken body went rigid, and the data streams in her pupils gradually went dark.
But before her consciousness dispersed, a wisp of silver light suddenly shot from her fingertip and sank into the space between Jiang Shu’s brows.
This was not an attack, but an encrypted message.
"Doomsday Sect."
Just those three simple words.
The Mechanical Mother was trying to tell Jiang Shu that the mastermind behind all of this was precisely that Doomsday Sect which thrilled in throwing the world into chaos.
However, Jiang Shu had known from the very beginning that this was a trap, and that all of this was the handiwork of the black-robed man, so his expression did not change in the slightest.
At this moment, the Wind Cloud Pride watching from a thousand miles away had pupils suddenly contract, and cold sweat seeped from Zhan Feng’s bronze-colored skin.
He had clearly seen the trajectory of Jiang Shu’s final axe strike. That was not a simple chop, but the primordial might of opening heaven and earth, simulated by compressing Taichu Dao Rhyme to the utmost!
Zhan Yun’s Bronze Battle Axe hummed and trembled, and the Axe Spirit transmitted a simple message through its fear.
If that axe were aimed at him, any defense would be a joke.
The gray-misted airflow swept past, and the last sounds cut off abruptly.
Expressionless, Jiang Shu crushed the crystal, watching the silver-blue data streams disperse between his fingers.
When he bent down to collect the Mother’s remains, he discovered that the gray-blue nerve cords were still wriggling, actually trying to burrow into his skin.
The remnant violet lightning of the Chaos Thunder Pool descended, completely purifying these dangerous materials.
Jiang Shu stowed the still relatively intact mechanical left arm and core fragments into his Storage Ring, then turned to look toward the slowly rotating Eye of the Void in the distance.
This was a body outside the body of the Mechanical Mother; the metal used to shape that form was certainly a treasure worth a king’s ransom, so there was no way Jiang Shu would let it go.
There were no longer rainbow lights within the Eye of the Void, only a shattered Bronze Lamp Array.
Of the nine Ancient Lamps, only three still burned, and the Space Heart Fragments rising and sinking in their flames were emitting a faint resonance.
"Is it over?"
The energy turbulence gradually calming in the distance was reflected in Yu Tianming’s snake pupils.
The scale patterns on her neck had spread to her cheeks without her realizing it—aftereffects caused by over-stimulating her Heavenly Snake bloodline.
Jiang Shu looked at the Heart of Space in the distance, but did not immediately rush toward it. Instead, he turned to the Wind Cloud Brothers and Sisters and smiled. "Shall we go together?"
He knew this was the black-robed man’s trap, so he did not believe that Heart of Space was any kind of pure blessing.
Hearing this, Zhan Feng laughed heartily, thumped his bloodstained fist against his chest, then waved his hand.
"You jest, brother. This opportunity rightly belongs to you!"
Zhan Yun also nodded and said quietly, "If not for Brother Jiang, we’d already have been turned into Puppets by the mechanical virus."
The members of Jiuyu Commerce Alliance all stepped forward as well. A wisp of Soul Dao Rhyme condensed on Yu Tianming’s fingertip as she looked at Jiang Shu and said, "We are willing to act as protectors for Your Highness."
Jiang Shu no longer declined. As he turned, the Desolate Star Halberd lightly swept through the Void, and the Halberd Tip tore open a crack in the seven-colored light patterns, after which he imperceptibly raised his brows.
He knew full well the black-robed man’s tricks, yet this Heart of Space was indeed genuine. The dense Space Dao Rhyme on it, nearly condensing into substance, could not be faked.
To lay this trap, that bastard had truly been willing to pay a heavy price.
The instant he stepped into the Eye of the Void, Jiang Shu felt the flow of time start to become viscous.
The shattered Bronze Lamp Array floated in the distorted space, each lamp reflecting him at a different point in his life.
The ancient lamp on the left displayed the scene of him cultivating at the bottom of a magma lake; the one on the right projected a blurred image from some future timeline.
Just then, the most intact Ancient Lamp in the center suddenly lit up.
The rhythm of the lamp flame’s flickering gradually synchronized with Jiang Shu’s heartbeat, and he sensed some ancient consciousness slowly awakening.
This was not an Artifact Spirit, but an original will spontaneously formed by the Space Law itself, akin to the heaven-and-earth pressure contained within a tribulation.
"A trial of the Space Law, is it?"
Jiang Shu dispersed his Protective Dao Rhyme, allowing the razor-sharp space fragments to cut into his body.
Fresh blood had just seeped out when it was decomposed into basic particles; under the guidance of the Ancient Lamp, those particles actually reassembled into a Space Mirror Image identical to him.
The Mirror Image did not use any Great Techniques, merely pushed out a simple palm, yet the spatial mystery contained within that palm made Jiang Shu feel as if he were witnessing countless worlds being born and destroyed.
He instinctively used the Desolate Star Halberd to block, but the halberd shaft was twisted into a braid by an invisible Power, only to recover in the next instant, like a shadow reflected on the surface of water.
"So that’s how it is."
Jiang Shu suddenly released his weapon and met the strike with his right fist, plain and unadorned.
The moment his fist touched the Mirror Image, the Taichu Dao Rhyme automatically simulated the frequency of space fluctuations.
When these two forces of the same origin but different nature collided, what erupted was not the imagined energy storm, but the trembling of space itself.
Then the Mirror Image suddenly spoke, asking, "In your view, what is space?"
The sound was not transmitted through air, but rang directly in Jiang Shu’s Sea of Consciousness.
A flash of insight came to him; he recalled the Chaotic Qi Flow he had seen within the Mirror Abyss. "Space is the Dao’s mark."
"Not without reason."
The Mirror Image turned fist into finger and pointed at the space between his brows.
"Look at this again, and see if you can gain any insight."
The instant the fingertip touched, countless images exploded before Jiang Shu’s eyes.
He saw the first expanding ripple when the cosmos initially opened; he saw the curvature formed by the force fields when stars were born; he saw the microscopic gaps between each of his cells. Finally, all the images collapsed into the crystal at the center of the Ancient Lamp.
That was not a physical object at all, but the conceptual concretization of the Space Law.
As the Mirror Image dispersed, the three Ancient Lamps simultaneously went out. The Heart of Space automatically flew toward Jiang Shu, recombining in his palm into a crystal shaped somewhat like a heart.
There was no fixed form within the crystal—at times as soft as flowing water, at times as hard as diamond.
When Jiang Shu sent his Divine Sense into the crystal, what he saw was not inheritance memories, but countless entrances to parallel timelines.
In one timeline, Zhan Feng was locked in a life-and-death battle with the Mechanical Mother; in another, Yu Tianming had obtained the Heart of Space ahead of time.
What shocked him most was that in one timeline, the black-robed man was actually kneeling in worship before his statue.
"So this is space—this is the greatest opportunity in the entire Void Sea."
The instant the crystal merged into his Dantian, semi-transparent Scale Armor surfaced over Jiang Shu’s body.
This was not a defensive technique, but the projection of space’s structure on the surface of his skin.
With each movement of his hands and feet, the space around him was no longer a shackle, but had become an extension of his limbs.
