Chapter 67: Servant
The heavy, concussive rumble of the splitting mountain echoed across the plains, a dull, tectonic groan that signaled the definitive end of the Shu Clan’s ancient rule.
With the vanguard erased and the three Supreme Elders reduced to a fine crimson mist, the battlefield fell into a horrific, absolute silence.
The only sound left was the steady pattering of the rain hitting the churned mud.
Slowly, deliberately, the extraordinarily muscular white creature turned its eyeless, featureless face away from the split mountain.
It shifted its stance, its massive feet squelching in the muck as it began to walk towards Evan and Peaker.
Seeing the monstrosity advance, a cold, paralyzing wave of reality washed over Peaker. He did not know that it was Evan who had triggered the system and summoned this nightmare from the higher realms.
In his mind, this was simply an unaligned, chaotic entity of cosmic destruction that had intervened by chance or cosmic anomaly.
Now that the supreme elders and the others were dead, Peaker realized with absolute certainty that they were the only ones remaining on the field.
Without any other targets to draw its wrath, they were now probably doomed.
’Why didn’t I think about it earlier?’ Peaker thought, his mind racing frantically as a cold sweat broke through his blood stained skin.
’We were so focused on the elders dying that we forgot this thing is a mindless monster of destruction. We are completely defenseless.’
He grabbed at the mud, trying to force his trembling legs to move, to find some way to pull Evan back into the shadows.
However, to his absolute horror, Evan did not run.
Instead, Evan stepped forward, his boots clicking softly against the damp grass as he walked straight towards the approaching immortal beast.
Peaker’s eyes widened to the size of saucers, his throat tightening in sheer panic.
"Get back, you fool!" he hissed, his voice cracking under the immense strain.
"What are you doing? It will erase you from existence!"
Evan ignored the frantic warnings.
He kept a steady, measured pace, his dark eyes locked onto the giant, faceless entity.
The distance between them shrank from ten meters, to five, to two.
When he reached the immediate shadow of the immortal beast, right where the heavy, alien pressure should have vaporized a mortal cultivator, a bizarre phenomenon occurred.
The towering white entity stopped.
Its extraordinarily muscular frame relaxed completely, and with a slow, mechanical grace, the immortal beast bent its knee, dropping heavily into the boiling mud, and knelt before Evan in a posture of absolute submission.
Peaker made a completely dumbfounded expression, his jaw dropping so low it looked as if it might unhinge.
His brain entirely stalled, unable to process the divine comedy unfolding in front of him.
"What the..."
Before Peaker could even finish his sentence, the white flesh of the kneeling creature began to shimmer with a faint, residual golden light.
The extraordinarily muscular body slowly started to transform, its physical mass rapidly shrinking and folding inward like liquid wax.
Within seconds, the humanoid shape condensed into a thick, crystalline cocoon that pulsed with a faint, rhythmic heartbeat.
A moment later, the cocoon fractured, dissolving into a small, snow white caterpillar that crawled across the mud before undergoing one final, rapid metamorphosis.
The caterpillar sprouted translucent, delicate wings, turning finally into a beautiful, pale butterfly.
However, the transformation was not perfect.
One of its main wings was visibly frayed, torn, and leaking a microscopic trail of golden essence.
The devastating impact of the Flames and Symphony of the Frost Dragon killer move had successfully damaged its immortal body by twenty percent.
The pale butterfly fluttered its damaged wings weakly, rising a few inches into the air before it gently descended and sat directly on Evan’s open palm.
Evan stared down at the fragile creature, his brow furrowing as he felt the faint, frantic throbbing of its aura.
The system was completely offline, leaving him with zero instructions on how to handle an entity of this magnitude.
"I cannot refine it right now," Evan muttered to himself, his voice tight with frustration as he analyzed the bleeding golden essence.
"My mortal aperture isn’t stable enough to bind an immortal thing. But if it doesn’t consume Qi right now to heal that twenty percent, it will remain damaged forever... the thing inside it will fracture permanently."
He raised the palm closer to his face, his mind struggling to comprehend the bizarre anatomy of the higher realms.
"I don’t know, man, what kind of thing this is... is this a blood worm who has a blood worm inside it, or is it a completely separate species? Ahh, what the hell... what should I do? Wait!!"
Evan immediately got an idea, a wild, theoretically impossible concept that defied every established rule of cultivation he had read about in the academy.
If his own mortal aperture could not hold an immortal worm without exploding, he couldn’t refine it in its current, compressed state.
But to execute his plan, he had to activate the beast transformation again, a feat he had no idea how to perform manually without the system’s blue interface prompting him.
He poked and pressed the butterfly a bit with his index finger, trying to wake it up, though it miserably failed. The butterfly merely shivered, its essence leaking slightly faster against his skin.
Realizing that subtle methods were useless without the system’s guidance, Evan decided to rely on raw verbal authority, banking on the absolute submission the creature had shown him previously.
He looked directly at the insect on his palm and simply said, "Turn into a beast again."
The air instantly warped.
The pale butterfly exploded outward in a flash of blinding white light, its mass expanding violently until the towering, two-horned, extraordinarily muscular immortal beast materialized once more, kneeling precisely in the mud before him.
"Well I guess I am a fool."
Evan did not waste a single second of the creature’s compliance.
He stepped closer, his voice carrying an unyielding, authoritative weight as he issued his next command.
"Give me one of your immortal apertures."
