Deep in the void, the chaos that had once been utterly still suddenly rippled violently.
The ancient white bone lotus that had stretched across the ages was now trembling slightly.
Vast Void Dao Ancestor sat cross-legged atop the lotus. The greed and fervor in his single eye turned in an instant to utter coldness.
He felt it.
The new cultivation technique, which had been circulating docilely within him, suddenly became a gigantic suction cup.
A tremendous force of suction, enough to make even him shudder, was following the patterns of the rune and frantically draining his source power.
This wasn't normal expenditure.
It was plunder.
"Whelp, how dare you!"
Vast Void Dao Ancestor gave a cold snort, his voice shattering the chaotic currents of the void for thousands of miles around.
He didn't panic.
As the old ancestor who toyed with reality and illusion, he had been prepared for this move all along.
Before swallowing the rune, he had already constructed a virtual sea of qi outside his source core, named "Mirror Flower Water Moon."
Although the rune was inside him, it was actually parasitic within that virtual sea of qi.
It was cut off from all real cause and effect.
"I knew you weren't up to any good, junior."
"You planted a trap in this rune, hoping to bite back at me?"
A mocking smile curled Vast Void Dao Ancestor's lips.
His withered hands slammed together, and a bleak white ray of annihilation shot from his single eye.
"Perish."
He uttered a low shout.
The virtual sea of qi inside him collapsed in an instant.
The gray rune that had been frantically devouring his power, along with the virtual space, was completely ground into nothingness in that moment.
All connections were severed.
The bothersome suction vanished with them.
Vast Void Dao Ancestor released his hands and lightly flicked nonexistent dust from his sleeve.
"Child's play."
"Did you really think I'd spent hundreds of thousands of years doing nothing?"
"Trying to ambush me? You're still wet behind the ears."
He laughed smugly, his laughter echoing through the empty void, full of a superior being's contempt for an ant.
Not only had he neutralized the danger, he had even reverse-engineered Li Yan's method of attack, making him all the more confident in his earlier judgment.
However.
Just as his laughter reached its loudest,
it seemed to be abruptly seized by an invisible hand and cut off.
Vast Void Dao Ancestor suddenly lowered his head, staring fixedly at the location of his source.
His face turned deathly pale at a visible speed.
Deep within his true source core, which should have been utterly pure,
a point of gray light suddenly flared.
The light rapidly spread, transforming into a familiar rune with a twisted beauty.
It was the very rune he had just "snuffed out" with his own hands.
It hadn't invaded from outside or passed through any meridians.
It was as if it had always grown there, appearing out of thin air.
And this time, it had sunk its roots even deeper.
The suction returned, more violent and ravenous than before.
"How can this be..."
Vast Void Dao Ancestor's voice trembled slightly.
He had clearly annihilated the virtual sea of qi completely.
The causal link was severed, the substance erased.
How could this thing come back?
A chill unlike anything he had ever felt crawled up his spine and over his scalp.
He didn't dare delay. His fingers blurred as he formed hand seals, casting one ancient, intricate restriction after another.
"Threefold Void Realm, seal it off!"
First, sever space.
He laid tens of thousands of layers of spatial folds around his source core, making it impossible for any substance to cross them.
Second, sever time.
He completely froze the passage of time in the core region, trying to halt the rune's growth.
Third, sever perception.
He wielded the highest mysteries of the Yao Jue Dao Patterns to forcibly alter reality, defining the rune as "nonexistent."
By the time he finished, Vast Void Dao Ancestor was drenched in sweat.
Even an Ancient God would be heavily burdened by instantly mobilizing such vast power of the laws.
He nervously peered into his source.
Under those three layers of absolute isolation, the gray rune finally dimmed, then slowly vanished.
The feeling of his power being drained also came to a stop.
Whew.
Vast Void Dao Ancestor let out a long breath.
"That was close..."
"What kind of monstrous thing is this? It's unbelievably hard to deal with."
He wiped the cold sweat from his brow, still shaken.
Fortunately, his methods were peerless. In the end, he had managed to suppress it.
But before he could finish exhaling,
his pupils suddenly shrank to pinpoints.
Right in the center of his source core, protected by layer upon layer of defenses and even frozen in time,
the gray rune
lit up again.
This time, it didn't sneak in quietly.
Instead, it took root and sprouted directly within his source power, shining with a dazzling, mocking radiance.
It even split into a second rune, then a third.
The spatial folds, frozen time, and altered perception were all completely useless against it.
It ignored every rule.
It was right there.
So real it was despairing.
"No... This can't be!"
Vast Void Dao Ancestor let out a terrified scream.
He had never encountered anything like this.
He was like a man frantically washing his hands. He could scrub the skin right off, only to find the stain still embedded in the flesh.
He couldn't shake it off, no matter what.
Like a patch of ringworm stuck to his soul.
The more he scratched, the bloodier it got, and the more vigorously it grew.
The suction erupted again.
This time, it wasn't just his power.
Even Vast Void Dao Ancestor's source essence, and the Ancient God status he prided himself on, were being ravenously devoured by the rune.
His power was flowing through that invisible conduit, pouring endlessly into the Canglan Realm.
"Stop! Stop right now!"
Vast Void Dao Ancestor frantically gathered divine power and struck at the rune.
But each time he attacked, each time he tried to erase it,
the rune grew stronger and more firmly rooted after being reborn.
The harder he resisted, the deeper he sank.
Beneath Zhongzhou, at the core of the formation.
Li Yan watched the torrent of white divine power pouring in above him, several times thicker than before.
He nodded in satisfaction.
"He's panicking."
"He's starting to fight back."
Li Yan changed his hand seal and guided the torrent toward the divine arm that was about to take shape.
Vast Void Dao Ancestor would never understand, even in death.
He had lost because he trusted his own laws too much.
The core of the Yao Jue Dao Patterns was "turning the false into the true, and the true into the false."
The core of Li Yan's Side Effect Law was "reversing cause and effect."
When the two were combined, they formed an unsolvable logical loop.
The rune was half true and half false.
When Vast Void Dao Ancestor deemed it a "real" threat and tried to erase it, the Side Effect Law activated and reversed it into something "false," allowing it to evade destruction.
When Vast Void Dao Ancestor tried to use altered perception to define it as "false," the Yao Jue Dao Patterns activated and turned it "true," manifesting it directly within his source.
Turning the false into the true.
No matter what he did, no matter how he defined it,
the rune would use his own power to be reborn wherever he least wanted it.
Every time he erased it, he was actually charging the rune.
He was using his own laws to feed Li Yan's trap.
"Thanks for the feast."
Li Yan chuckled softly.
Vast source power poured into the furnace.
The divine arm suspended in the air finally completed its last transformation.
All deathly energy, baleful energy, and impurities were completely washed away by the Ancient God source power.
A suffocating aura seeped from beneath the skin, where blue-gray intertwined with dark red.
The divine arm's fingers twitched slightly.
That tiny movement alone
instantly spread spiderweb-like cracks across the sturdy underground walls.
Even space itself let out an overwhelmed wail, unable to bear the weight.
The Divine Artifact was complete.
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