The Invisible Pressure

Chapter 50: The Invisible Pressure

Morning mist draped like gauze, lightly veiling the small courtyard at the foothills of Buzhou Mountain.

Chen An carried a clay pot toward the vegetable patch, his bare feet leaving shallow prints on the damp soil. Well water poured from the spout, scattering fine droplets across the tender green leaves.

He hummed a few snatches of opera tunes picked up from the teahouse, the melody twisted and wandering far from its original form. His steps were light, the hem of his clothes catching the breeze, wholly immersed in that carefree contentment—utterly unaware that a thousand yards above, a crimson Demonic Cloud churned like boiling blood, silently staining half the sky.

Nine Infant coiled within the clouds, nine heads and eighteen bloodshot eyes locked onto the courtyard below.

The searing pain of yesterday's Dao backlash still burned in his demonic veins, but Kunpeng's secret order coiled around his heart like a venomous serpent—"Observe his form up close." Suppressing his fear, his demonic body transformed into a crimson streak and dove downward!

Strangely enough, despite Nine Infant's ferocious might, when he was barely a hundred paces from the courtyard—within arm's reach—the anomaly struck!

It was as if an invisible wall of diamond and iron had materialized out of thin air, slamming into him, preventing even a single inch of progress!

The surging, overwhelming demonic power that had roiled moments ago froze solid, as if plunged into an abyss of polar ice; his blood vessels churned and reversed uncontrollably, the agony twisting his nine heads into contorted howls that shook the land; and deep within his Primordial Spirit, it felt as if a gaze that had existed since the dawn of chaos had locked onto him, an boundless terror sweeping over him, driving even this ancient beast to the brink of soul-shattering despair!

Half a step! Just half a step more!

A desperate, suicidal ruthlessness surged from Nine Infant's heart. Gathering every shred of remaining will, he recklessly forced his Primordial Spirit onward, charging at the invisible barrier in a hopeless assault—

But what answered him was a crisp, teeth-grinding "crack" from the depths of his soul! He clearly "saw" his Primordial Spirit's surface instantly covered in spiderweb-like fissures, as if it would shatter completely in the next moment.

The ensuing pain far exceeded the limits of his endurance, as if his entire divine soul were being ground to dust inch by inch. All nine heads reared back, unleashing a roar mingled with agony and despair, and nine streams of thick black blood sprayed from their throats like spilled ink, turning into a rain of blood in the air.

Inside the courtyard, Chen An rubbed his lower back, tilted his head to look at the sky, and muttered about the most ordinary weather. Yet, as his pure gaze swept across the clouds, an invisible destruction had already crossed space and descended.

"Boom!"

In Nine Infant's perception, this was not thunder—it was the sound of his entire world's foundation cracking!

His divine soul, like a fragile piece of pottery hurled against a cliff, was swept by the residual force of that gaze. Before he could even form a thought of resistance, it was already riddled with cracks. This was not a battle; it was the instinctive annihilation of an ant before the heavens.

No! That was not a mortal's eye! That was divine punishment!

When that gaze fell upon me, I felt my soul seized like a sheet of paper, about to be ripped from my body! The Dao foundation I had cultivated for ten thousand years shattered inch by inch before it, like broken glass.

The ancient glory passed down through my bloodline now yielded only the most desperate scream from the source!

All resistance and ferocity vanished in that instant, as ultimate fear and pain finally exceeded the limits of endurance.

With a short, piercing wail, one of Nine Infant's dragon heads—condensing vast demonic power—could not withstand this crushing pressure from the very essence of existence. It exploded with a dull boom, black blood and brain matter splattering everywhere.

He dared not linger. All nine heads howled in unison as he transformed into a crimson rainbow, fleeing through the sky! As the Demonic Cloud scattered, a single drop of filthy blood fell into the withered grass outside the courtyard, hissing and sizzling.

Chen An scratched his head, withdrawing his gaze. "Must've been my imagination..." He bent down to continue watering, the clay pot clinking against the edge of the vegetable patch with a crisp "ding-dong."

A hundred miles away, in a rocky cave, Nine Infant curled up in the shadows. His remaining eight heads hung limp and listless, the shattered dragon head a bloody mess. Trembling, he spat out the last mouthful of black blood and rasped in a low growl:

"That gaze... was the judgment of chaos!"