In the distance.
Clad in a blood-red robe, the High Priest stood suspended in the air like an ancient blood-fiend deity. Yet there was not the slightest surprise in his scarlet eyes.
Only a cold look of detached certainty.
The curve at the corner of his lips seemed to sharpen slightly.
In the deepest depths of those eyes, darker than the abyss and redder than a sea of blood, two glints of icy light—finer and sharper than needlepoints—flashed and vanished!
"Good!"
A soundless word brimming with immense power exploded in the deepest abyss of his heart:
"This Priest fears nothing—except that you...
truly feel nothing at all!"
So long as you still have something you seek, so long as you are still weighing your options—
so long as your heart still harbors a shred of luck, then you will—inevitably fall into my net!"
In an instant!
The High Priest's blood-red divine eyes, seemingly capable of piercing the Nine Netherworlds and seeing through all heavens and myriad realms, opened and closed slightly!
Two rays of bloody gaze, faint to the point of near invisibility yet containing terrifying penetrating power, silently swept outward from him like an invisible laser matrix!
In an instant, wherever his gaze reached...
the structure of space, the flow of energy, even the faintest ripples of laws—all were laid bare before his eyes!
Locked on!
It took only—not even half a breath!
Suddenly.
The sweep of that blood-red gaze abruptly stopped!
It focused with astonishing precision upon a seemingly empty, utterly unremarkable node in space—
the very spot where Cheng Buzheng's paper effigy substitute stood!
A dreadful force began to surge, about to follow the intent of that locking gaze and pour forth, completely imprisoning that patch of space and grinding it into the most basic motes of