It was as if an invisible iron hammer had smashed hard into his forehead.
Huai Shi's vision went black, and his ears rang. By the time he caught sight of that colossal figure, he had already gone numb with shock, utterly stunned.
The pressure born of divinity bore down relentlessly upon his will, nearly driving him to collapse in an instant.
But just before his Source Matter could completely split apart, the phantom of a silver mirror emerged behind his head. A thin layer of faint light shielded him from the suppression of the Mother of All Things, briefly restoring his clarity and allowing him to catch his breath.
Yet his mind remained utterly blank.
The earth trembled like a shaken blanket, while the stars in the Sky Dome fell like overripe wild fruit.
From the oncoming hurricane came a soul-piercing wail, echoing without end.
So this was... a Destruction Factor?
No matter how often he had walked along the edge of a blade, how many times he had courted death, how many indirect encounters he had had with Destruction Factors—when Gaia truly appeared before Huai Shi, that terrifying stature equal to the stars and that dreadful authority over the world still made him tremble.
It was not some derivative, nor a subordinate, much less some insignificant extension.
It was a true Destruction Factor.
The world itself... which had nurtured and sheltered the entire world for countless ages!
How should it even be described?
A nurturing mother? A protective father? A distant ancestor? Or perhaps the union of all meaning itself—the true, so-called world!
Grain Rain, raging winds, flash floods, earth, sky, and everything else gathered together, ultimately forming that solemn visage.
Any power that depended upon the Present Realm was nothing more than an illusion and emptiness before it.