Divine Punishment's Near Miss

Deep violet halos of destruction gathered along the edge of Beerus's palm, as though they could slice apart stars at any moment.

Qi Heng roared and fiercely poured all the power in his body into his arms. Silver-white aura condensed before him into a heavy shield of light.

"Boom—!"

The moment the hand strike collided with the light shield, purple-white radiance swallowed his vision whole.

Cracks instantly spread across the shield. Qi Heng's sleeves shattered into strips, and fine beads of blood seeped from beneath his skin.

The third headbutt—Beerus was simply unreasonable.

He suddenly lowered himself and charged forward, his forehead wrapped in extremely condensed purple energy as he crashed down like a meteor.

Qi Heng had no time to dodge. He could only grit his teeth and take it head-on.

"Thud—!"

The sound was not that of flesh colliding, but more like two planets crashing together.

Silver-white and purple energy currents erupted outward like a volcanic explosion.

Qi Heng's vision instantly turned white, and all that remained in his ears was the roar of his blood.

"Too slow!"

Beerus's voice came flooding in from every direction, echoing layer upon layer through the distorted void with cold mockery. "You move as fast as lightning, but your attack patterns are as obvious as a child's doodles! Your shoulders twitch, your waist turns, your gaze settles—every punch is practically telling me where you're about to strike!"

Before his words had even faded, he suddenly vanished completely from Qi Heng's senses.

It was not an afterimage, nor was it the ripple of spatial movement. It was true "erasure"—as if he had never been there at all.

Qi Heng's pupils shrank to pinpoints.

Above!

His battle instincts exploded through his marrow like an alarm bell, and his body nearly rolled aside before his mind could react.

But Beerus's speed had long surpassed the realm of "reaction." This was already the domain of a god, practically mocking time itself.

"God's Tail."

Beerus's voice descended from overhead, calm enough to make one's heart tremble.

His long tail transformed into a destructive steel whip covered in purple scale patterns, with viscous dark-purple energy surging through the gaps between its scales.

As the tail lashed down, the void was torn apart like silk.

Along the tail whip's path, the power of destruction solidified into a purple-black band of light, its edges lined with black fissures left by space being completely ripped apart.

From within came the faint, mournful cries of countless dying stars.

Qi Heng could only cross his arms above his head, compressing his silver-white aura into a sharply faceted diamond-shaped shield within a tenth of a second.

"Bang—!!!!!"

The impact was no longer sound, but force that struck directly at the soul.

Like the roar of a primordial beast of chaos, its soundwaves turned into purple ripples that spread into the depths of the universe, shattering floating stellar remains along the way.

The instant they collided, Qi Heng felt as if his arms had not been struck, but crushed head-on by a burning star.

Agonizing pain exploded from his ulna and radius like a flood, racing wildly along his nerves.

He clearly heard his arm bones let out a creaking groan—his bones were bending to their limit beneath the power of destruction.

The silver-white shield exploded into a skyful of light fragments. The purple tail whip did not stop, lashing viciously across his shoulder blade.

The next second, he became a meteor streaked with silver-white light and blood mist, plunging into the endless abyss of the void at a speed beyond perception.

He left behind a tragic trail of shattered energy and spatial fragments, like a wound carved across the curtain of the universe.

Qi Heng's body plummeted through the starry sky like a silver meteor abandoned by the universe.

Silver-white aura erupted around him, dragging out a trail that spanned tens of thousands of kilometers, twisting and dimming even the starlight.

The frigid cosmic winds were like billions of invisible blades, madly cutting through his protective aura with piercing shrieks that flooded his eardrums.

Distant starlight scattered across his sharply defined face like shattered diamonds, yet reflected not the slightest warmth.

Only within those silver pupils surged a mountain-like gravity and resolve.

Below his field of vision, that azure planet was rapidly expanding at an astonishing rate.

At first, it was merely a lone sapphire set against the darkness, tranquil and beautiful.

The next second, the blue of the oceans, the white of the clouds, the green and brown of the land—all those colors surged forth as details appeared in a frenzy.

Rivers winding like blood vessels, rolling mountain ranges, and the reflected light of the polar ice caps all became clear down to the finest detail.

Deeper still, on the side of the planet turned away from its star, countless city lights stubbornly flickered in the darkness, joining into vast stretches and becoming a warm sea of light—civilization's bonfires lit by billions of living beings through the silent night, faint yet brimming with vitality.

At that instant, Qi Heng's silver pupils suddenly contracted into pinpoints!

Cold calculation instantly crushed every emotion.

Speed, mass, remaining energy... countless figures exploded through his mind.

At his current falling speed, one that had broken through the limits of physics, he would not even need to strike the ground directly.

As long as he plunged into the atmosphere carrying those aftershocks capable of tearing apart stars, the resulting chain reaction would mean the end of this planet.

The atmosphere would be the first to ignite, stripped away layer by layer by ion storms like invisible giant hands.

Then the oceans would instantly boil and vaporize beneath the impact of trillions of tons of energy, becoming superstorms that swept across the entire globe.

The continental plates would crack and shift like eggshells, while magma from the planet's core erupted and devoured everything.

Those warm lights, those billions of pulsing lives, would become cosmic dust within a hundred-millionth of a second, unable even to let out a sigh before returning to eternal silence.

No pain, no struggle, not even the awareness that destruction had arrived—this was true nothingness.

"Damn it—!!!"

A low growl exploded from the depths of his soul.

Qi Heng nearly crushed his teeth. Every cell in his body burned amid its roar.

He forcibly twisted his body, an action that defied every law of mechanics, as though space itself had bent ninety degrees beneath his feet.

Boom!

Silver-white aura erupted with unprecedented intensity. It was no longer a trailing wake, but a tiny sun thrusting in reverse, trying to counter the falling momentum capable of piercing through stars in the most violent way possible.

The price struck back at once.

"Pfft—!"

He violently spat out a mouthful of blood mixed with silver motes of light, which condensed into a bleakly beautiful mist of blood in the vacuum.

The output of power beyond his limits made the energy circuits within his body spit sparks like an overloaded power grid.

Every muscle fiber let out a tearing wail, and every bone bore the horrifying pressure of being ground into powder.

The divine power of Super Saiyan Fifth Stage was forced to its absolute limit. Silver flames soared into the sky, dragging him inch by inch out of his fatal descent trajectory!

In the end, his body narrowly grazed past the thin outermost layer of that blue planet's atmosphere by the slightest margin.

Sizzle—!!!

The silver-white divine aura violently scraped against the atmosphere, bursting forth with sparks brighter than stars, like a god using a flaming giant pen to carve a soul-stirring scar across the planet's heavens.

Terrifying shockwaves spread wildly through the atmosphere, tearing a hole thousands of kilometers wide through the thick sea of clouds below. The turbulence they stirred became global super-hurricanes, raising colossal waves across the oceans and sandstorms on land that devoured everything.

But this had already reduced the destruction to its lowest possible level.

The planet continued to rotate slowly. The living beings upon it might only feel a sudden palpitation, encounter an abnormal storm, or notice the crust tremble slightly.