Chapter 1134: Turning Back Time
Silver inclined its head to the void and laughed. "Ha! You think you can kill me? On what grounds?"
Zhang Lie replied, "You're a newborn, not a reborn individual. Even if you were reborn, you existed in the past, back when you were a weakling. No matter how strong you are now, you can't wipe away that past."
Silver cocked its head. "So what?"
Zhang Lie pointed all around Silver. "On this battlefield exist traces of your past selves, all those that faced imminent death."
Silver retorted, "And yet you didn't succeed in killing me. Instead, you gave me a new lease on life."
"I may not have done it in the past, but I can still do it now."
Silver roared in laughter. "Indeed? And what can you do?"
Even its newfound power didn't allow it to return to the past. Speeding up time and halting time were two different matters entirely, and halting time and going back in time even more so.
Zhang Lie had displayed the ability to speed up time during their fight, but reversing time required four higher degrees of strength than that.
Could the Zhang Lie of the present accomplish such a feat? Silver didn't believe it.
Zhang Lie shook his head. "Correcting the mistakes of the past doesn't require that much work. [Ninesoul Dragonblade—Fourth Form: Warping Space and Time]!"
In Zhang Lie's sight, time seemed to suddenly reverse. Zhang Lie and Silver's shadows manifested around him, shadows of the past.
Zhang Lie's attacks rewound, and Silver reverted to the form of a magnificent door. The door shattered and turned back into a ball of light as world fragments burst from it.
.
Silver returned to his original form as the king of keys, surrounded by twin dragons, one black and one red, mired in a whirlpool of annihilation. Time stopped.
Although Silver didn't share Zhang Lie's vision, it could sense that Zhang Lie had managed to capture something.
"Changing the present doesn't require going back into the past. As long as I kill the past you, the present you shall be no more," Zhang Lie explained coolly. He stepped through the void and appeared before Silver, the blade in his hand lifted high into the air.
The blade landed far from Silver's current position, where there was nothing but the void. The sword strike had no target, certainly not Silver itself, but Silver felt a threat to its existence stronger than anything else to date.
The temporal energy surrounding Zhang Lie spun furiously. It didn't know what Zhang Lie was about to cut, but it subconsciously realized that it couldn't allow Zhang Lie to succeed.
Silver extended a hand. The mysterious source of life, which bypassed rational thought and mathematical logic, struck out.
Zhang Lie didn't stop, and he didn't defend against the incoming attack. He allowed it to strike his body, destroying over half of it in a tightly constrained explosion.
Sun Mengmeng shrieked, "Zhang Lie!"
"Stop!" Sun Xiaowu hurriedly blocked Sun Mengmeng from rushing toward him.
Wilbow's eyes widened. "Is he dead?"
Even Zhang Lie couldn't survive such an attack.
Wilbow shook his head and sighed. "He had a chance to live... what a pity."
The members of Team Zenith froze where they stood.
Zhang Hanxiang was stupefied. "How could it be? Brother couldn't have died!"
Zhang Lie's sword fell straight down. The next moment, it was Silver's turn to freeze.
Wilbow shook his head pensively. "If he had surrendered, things wouldn't have played out in this fashion."
The members of Team Zenith saw an unbelievable sight. As the blade fell, it struck the king of keys' past form—a shadowy remnant of when the king of keys had died after being struck by Zhang Lie's [Second Form: Piercing the Soul].
Zhang Lie's blade split the remnant in half, and that part of his body which had exploded now restored itself in shocking fashion. It didn't regrow; rather, the fragments of his body that had evaporated were now restoring themselves once again, as if time were being played backwards.
As Zhang Lie's blade landed, the temporal remnant shattered.
"You—you established a link to the karma of space and time!" Silver held Zhang Lie's gaze as its body began to crack.
As though it had revealed forbidden knowledge, the cracks on its body swiftly propagated. The next moment, as though its body were made of porcelain, it shattered and turned into dust, drifting away in the shockwaves from the fight.
The door of strength turned into a chaotic rift, as though what had just happened had never existed at all. The mysterious source of life, which bypassed rational thought and mathematical logic, winked out of existence.
Zhang Lie sighed in relief. If not for his recent interactions with karmic power in all its forms, endowing him with greater understanding of the gift he now possessed, he wouldn't have been able to reach new heights with his Fourth Form.
Zhang Lie could never have killed an enemy of the past with this attack before—it was fortunate that he had developed this ability in the intervening period.
Wilbow's mouth opened wide as he gaped. His heart jumped and thrummed in shock. "What have you done?!"
His father, who had seemed to rise to invincible heights, had fallen to a simple strike of Zhang Lie's blade, leaving behind a murmured, fragmented sentence that was impossible to?comprehend. Wilbow couldn't accept this outcome.
Zhang Lie shrugged. "I simply attacked the king of keys in the past, killing him before the situation could devolve to this extent, finishing him off as I should have. And since the king of keys has died, then Silver could never have existed—if I were to kill you as an infant, the 'you' in the future could never exist, either."
Yang Ze concluded, "It's just as if you were to fail to shoot your shot at a crucial period—if that happened, the you of the present wouldn't exist."
Zhang Lie nodded. "That's the idea, but the context..."
Zhang Hanxiang asked, "What do you mean, shoot your shot?"
"Ignore this vulgar fellow!" Sun Mengmeng dragged Zhang Hanxiang to her side before glaring at Yang Ze.
"Haha!" Yang Ze scratched his head in embarrassment.
Wilbow took a long time to comprehend what Zhang Lie had said. "You—you can turn back time?!"
Zhang Lie shook his head. "No. I simply killed the king of keys in the past."
Wilbow cried out, "Isn't that the same as turning time back?!"
Zhang Lie glanced toward the void in the distance. "Nothing so extreme."
Turning back time would be like having regressed, giving him memories of the future. In killing the king of keys, Zhang Lie hadn't reached such vaunted heights, and he certainly couldn't share the fact that he had indeed regressed in time.
Wilbow emphasized, "Killing someone in the past and changing their future—isn't that turning time back?!"
This 𝓬ontent is taken from fre𝒆webnove(l).𝐜𝐨𝗺