Stone Ridge Mountain's core, the Fire Pit.
The dark-purple flames no longer leaped upward as they usually did, but moved like viscous liquid, coiling ring after ring around the naked man at the center. The air had been compressed to the limit, and every inch of the void gave off a glass-shattering "crack."
Chu Qing sat cross-legged at the very center of the Fire Pit, the gray core he had just stripped from the High-Dimensional Parasite's body suspended above the crown of his head. Under the scouring of the True One Aura, the core's edges kept crumbling, turning into countless flickering specks of gray code that sank into his pores.
"Urgh—!"
A suppressed growl spilled from Chu Qing's throat.
The skin all over his body instantly split open with dense, countless wounds, but what sprayed out was not red blood. It was dark-purple slurry mixed with shattered golden light. A rapid chain of Explosive Sounds came from his spine, as if someone inside him were swinging a heavy hammer, smashing each segment of bone apart by force, then forcibly piecing it back together.
That pain was no longer aimed at the flesh. It was as if hundreds of millions of tiny insects had burrowed into every thread of karma and were gnawing madly along his past and present toward the endpoint of his future.
Chu Qing clenched his teeth hard, the masseter muscles in his cheeks bulging high. His fingernails dug deep into the flesh of his knees, dragging out several purple bloodstreaks.
This isn't just fusion. This is peeling my entire being out of the Underlying Logic of this Chaos Sea.
In his sea of consciousness, the Profession Column flickered madly, the red warning text almost bursting the purple interface apart.
[Warning! Unknown high-dimensional logic intrusion detected!]
```[Detected that