Chapter 53: Chapter 53
The volcanic crater of the Heavenly Furnace Mountains was no longer hot.
When Yan Shuo drew the heavy black iron sword from its scabbard, the natural laws of the mortal realm simply stopped working. The bubbling red magma far below them lost its fiery glow, turning into dull, gray stone. The ash suspended in the air froze completely still.
The pitch-black aura bleeding from Yan Shuo’s body was not just spiritual pressure. It was the absolute, unadulterated manifestation of the Abyss. It was a hunger so profound and ancient that it began to devour the light, the heat, and the very concept of hope within the crater.
Up on the floating jade platform, the Righteous Alliance Elders felt their knees buckle.
They were Late Core Formation and early Nascent Soul experts. They were the pillars of the orthodox path. But looking down at the fifteen-year-old youth cloaked in absolute darkness, their Dao hearts violently shattered.
"What... what is that?!" an Elder shrieked, dropping his sword. His hands were shaking so violently he couldn’t even form a hand seal. "That isn’t a human! That is a calamity!"
Bai Chen stumbled backward, his back hitting the glowing array core of the jade platform. Behind his weeping silver mask, his eyes were wide with pure, paralyzing terror.
He had stripped away the Saintess. He had isolated the light. He had thought Yan Shuo would be left weak, fragile, and vulnerable.
"Kill him!" Bai Chen screamed, his voice cracking with sheer desperation. "Don’t just stand there! He is alone! Strike him down before his domain expands!"
Driven by the frantic panic of a cornered beast, thirty Righteous Alliance Elders roared. They burned their lifespans, funneling every last drop of their orthodox Qi into their supreme-tier weapons. Dozens of massive, radiant sword phantoms and roaring elemental dragons shot down from the sky, converging on the solitary figure on the obsidian path.
It was an attack powerful enough to level a continent.
Yan Shuo didn’t dodge. He didn’t even look up at the incoming barrage.
He slowly lifted the dull, unadorned black iron sword.
"You thought she was my armor," Yan Shuo whispered. His voice was completely devoid of its usual lazy warmth. It was a sound that belonged to a graveyard of dead empires. "You thought the Saintess was protecting me from the world."
He channeled his dark Nascent Soul directly into the blade. The iron didn’t glow. It simply drank the surrounding light, turning into a rift of pure void.
"You were wrong, Bai Chen," Yan Shuo stated, stepping forward. "She wasn’t protecting me from the world. She was protecting the world from me."
Yan Shuo swung the sword upward.
He didn’t unleash a complex martial art. He didn’t shout the name of a heavenly technique. He simply swung the sword with the sheer, crushing weight of his absolute rage.
VWOOM.
A crescent wave of pitch-black gravity erupted from the blade. It didn’t clash with the incoming orthodox attacks. It simply erased them.
The radiant sword phantoms and the roaring elemental dragons hit the black wave and instantly dissolved into absolute nothingness, swallowed completely by the Abyss.
But the wave didn’t stop. It shot upward, tearing through the fabric of the sky itself, and slammed directly into the massive, floating jade platform.
CRA-CRACK!
The supreme-tier array that Bai Chen had spent three years building didn’t even put up a second of resistance. The sheer gravitational density of the strike cleaved the massive jade platform perfectly in half.
"AGH!"
The thirty Righteous Alliance Elders screamed in unison as the anti-gravity arrays failed. The platform shattered into millions of pieces, and the elders plummeted helplessly into the dead, gray crater below, completely silenced as they hit the rocky bottom.
Bai Chen fell with the debris, his white robes wildly flapping in the wind. He desperately channeled his Qi, managing to cushion his landing just enough to avoid breaking his legs as he hit the obsidian path.
He rolled across the jagged rocks, gasping for breath, clutching the glowing core of the Heavenly Dao Relic tightly to his chest.
He looked up.
Yan Shuo was standing right in front of him.
The youth hadn’t walked or flown. He had simply folded the space between them using pure gravity. Yan Shuo looked down at his old sworn brother, his dark eyes swirling with apocalyptic murder.
"Stay back!" Bai Chen shrieked, raising the glowing white Relic. "I will use it again! I will isolate you! I will cast you into the void!"
"The Heavenly Dao cannot isolate the Abyss," Yan Shuo said coldly. "Because the Abyss is where the Heavens go to die."
Yan Shuo didn’t swing his sword again. He simply reached out with his bare left hand.
Bai Chen frantically poured all of his remaining Qi into the Relic, triggering a blinding beam of pure white isolation light directly at Yan Shuo’s chest.
Yan Shuo’s hand plunged straight through the blinding light. The heavenly energy sizzled against his skin, trying to warp his physical body into the void, but the Abyssal Star-Core in his dantian roared, devouring the isolation laws faster than they could take effect.
Yan Shuo’s fingers wrapped like an iron vice around Bai Chen’s throat.
The blinding light instantly died.
Yan Shuo lifted the Faceless Scholar off the ground with one hand. Bai Chen gagged, his hands frantically clawing at Yan Shuo’s iron grip, his legs kicking helplessly in the air.
With his free hand, Yan Shuo reached out and casually ripped the weeping silver mask off Bai Chen’s face.
The face underneath was pale, aristocratic, and completely twisted in absolute terror. This was the man who had stabbed him in the back a century ago. This was the man who had stolen his empire.
But right now, Yan Shuo didn’t care about the past. He only cared about the present.
"Where is she?" Yan Shuo demanded, his voice dropping into a terrifying, demonic rumble.
"S-She is gone!" Bai Chen choked out, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. "The casket is sealed! You cannot break it! If you kill me, the spatial coordinates will be lost forever!"
Yan Shuo didn’t argue. He didn’t negotiate.
He slammed Bai Chen face-first into the jagged obsidian path with earth-shattering force.
CRUNCH.
