With those two words, the space around Qin Chuan—and the flow of time itself—froze.
The altar beneath his feet, the furnace behind him, even the players prying up tiles nearby all began to turn transparent under a rule none of them could comprehend.
Their existence was being forcibly erased.
Dies Martin's mosaic body flickered wildly. He could not even get a curse out.
Night Cherry Tangle had drawn End Judgment only halfway before it was forced firmly back into its sheath.
Qin Chuan stood where he was, the hem of his coat suspended in midair. He did not so much as furrow his brow.
His right thumb gently rubbed the Ring of Annihilated Karma.
[Karma Tampering] activated.
A faint speck of dark gold light appeared on the ring. It pushed back against the rule of Erasure, raced along an invisible Causal Line, and shot into the sky.
The speck was no bigger than a grain of rice. Against a colossal hand of law spanning tens of thousands of kilometers, it barely counted as dust.
It stirred no earth-shaking surge of energy. It simply drifted upward.
But the instant it touched the palm of that hand blotting out the sky, the speck vanished.
The hand that had covered the sky a moment before suddenly went rigid.
The vast will hidden behind a gap in the clouds let out an agonized groan unlike any before.
It was not the pain of flesh being torn apart. The foundations of his very existence were collapsing.
The absolute rule of "Erasure" twisted strangely in midair and turned back the way it had come.
Starting at the fingertips, the hand spanning tens of thousands of kilometers rapidly dissolved into broad swaths of transparent grid, like a pencil drawing rubbed out by an eraser.
Even the sky