Deep in the void, silence was torn apart by violence.
Chu Qing stood barefoot atop the surging Gray Fog. Behind him, thirty-three enormous halos slowly turned, each one containing a miniature projection of a world at its center.
There was the rainy night at the ruined temple in Stone Rock County, the bloody battle on the arena in the provincial city, and that tyrannical finger strike amidst ten thousand troops.
At this moment, the scenes from all thirty-three worlds lit up at once.
Buzz—
A deep resonance, so low it made souls tremble, exploded from the depths of Chu Qing's spine. He could hear hundreds of millions of living beings shouting, praying, and weeping in those worlds at once. Their voices converged into a scorching current that washed over the violet vortex at his heart.
Chu Qing spread his arms. The seventy-two arms behind him unfurled like a peacock displaying its tail, each palm clutching a thread of karmic aura from a different world.
(Physical response): He drew a deep breath, his lungs issuing a heavy sound like bellows being pulled. His chest rose, Dark Gold patterns pulsing wildly beneath his skin. The cramped unease that had once coiled around his heart—the unease of a lowly lackey—was swept clean by the True One Aura within him like dried scraps of skin blown away by the wind.
"A man should be like this."
All four of Chu Qing's faces pulled into cold, sharp arcs at once. Their overlapping voices shook the surrounding Gray Fog backward, carving out a ten-thousand-foot vacuum.
Above the void, the law net of All Heavens sensed the provocation.
The clouds turned crimson. Countless Dark Gold bolts of lightning wove into a gigantic net, bearing the will to erase every variable as it descended upon Chu Qing's head.