Death Domain.
The clinging darkness was like a layer of wet skin that could not be peeled away, smeared tightly across the black ship's keel.
Chu Qing stood atop the mast.
Barefoot.
His big toe dug into the seams of the Gods and Demons Spine, his fingertips turning a sickly white from the force.
The oppressive feeling born of absolute silence in the air seeped through his pores and into his bones, stirring the Purple True Blood within him into wave after wave of reverse flow.
Buzz—
In the depths of the void.
That mass of Black Paste, so dense it could not be dissolved, suddenly split open with a crack.
There were no eyelids, no lashes.
It simply flipped open out of thin air, revealing a colossal sphere that spanned half a starfield.
Its pupil was a ghastly white, its center covered in dense dark-red blood vessels like some ancient code.
In that instant, Chu Qing felt as though a heavy hammer had smashed brutally into his chest.
A sharp, sweet taste surged up his throat.
The sensation was strange. It was not pain, but the feeling that he had been stripped down to a naked white skeleton, with even the little secrets hidden in his marrow scraped away inch by inch by that eyeball.
[Warning: High-dimensional gaze detected.] [Divine soul wear: 0.5% per second...]
"Heh."
A cold laugh spilled from Chu Qing's throat.
(Action): Not only did he not close his eyes, he abruptly raised his head, his pupils contracting into black dots the size of needlepoints.
(Microexpression): His jawline suddenly tightened, and his teeth ground together with a creak.
Back in Stone Rock County, Zhao Wuji had looked down at him from the pavilion as though he were mere grass and dirt.
Later, in Nine