The Shattered Law

This was not the vigilance one felt when facing a powerful enemy, nor was it the fear of standing at death's edge—Champa would never admit that he could be afraid. He had merely fallen into a deeper kind of confusion.

It was as though some eternal law of the universe had silently crumbled into dust before his eyes.

He simply could not understand the person before him.

A mortal. A Saiyan. What gave him the right to stand so calmly in this cosmic void, where even gods had to tread carefully?

What gave him the right to casually disperse energy capable of destroying a galaxy without Champa even noticing?

And what gave him the right to look at him with such calm, almost indifferent eyes? Deep within that gaze, there was even a trace of... pity, so faint it was nearly gone.

"You..." Champa's voice caught in his throat, low and hoarse, each word like a volcano on the verge of erupting. "You think this... is enough to scare me?"

Chen Feng tilted his head slightly, several strands of black hair drifting softly through the silent void.

A faint smile rested at the corner of his lips, like a weak shadow cast by distant mountains.

"I wasn't trying to scare you, Lord Champa." His voice entered Champa's mind directly, as though distance meant nothing to him. "I merely stated the facts."

"Facts?" Champa sneered, the sound like ice scraping across metal—grating and furious.

The purple divine power around him suddenly boiled over. Its aura burst into countless crackling bolts of lightning, instantly vaporizing the nearby meteor fragments.

"Then take a good look at what a real 'fact' is!"

His final word became a thunderous roar.

Champa suddenly clenched his fist, purple veins of condensed divine power bulging across his arm—not blood vessels.

His slightly bloated waist tightened, his chest swelled, and an energy even more vast, pure, and destructive than before erupted from within him like a star core that had slept for billions of years suddenly awakening!

Rumble—!!!

An indescribable boom resounded from the depths of the universe—a tremor on the level of energy itself.

The purple aura no longer merely enveloped him. It completely ignited the space Champa occupied.

Those flames did not burn matter. They burned space itself.

The curtain of the universe was brutally twisted and folded. Light bent and tangled like water drawn into a vortex, while even the flow of time became viscous and strange.

Nearby, an asteroid was swept into the edge of the aura. Before it could even make a sound, it began collapsing at the molecular level, turning into a cloud of faintly glowing dust that was soon completely erased by the radiation from the energy core, returning to nothingness.

Champa's body underwent a terrifying change within the light.

His frame did not grow larger. Instead, it became leaner and more powerful, every muscle like purple alloy, sharply defined and brimming with explosive strength.

Dark-black markings emerged across his skin, spreading and intertwining into ancient, bizarre patterns. They seemed to record the truth of destruction from the dawn of the universe, with dim crimson light seeping through their gaps.

He raised his head slightly. His fangs grew longer and sharper, glinting coldly; his nails became hooked claws, and with a casual swipe, he carved five fleeting spatial rifts beside him.

Most unnerving of all were his eyes—his sclera had been dyed deep purple, while his pupils contracted into two points of blazing white flame, burning with mad battle intent. Wherever he looked seemed ready to ignite.

"This is the true form of a God of Destruction!" Champa's voice had changed, layered with multiple echoes as though ten thousand bolts of thunder were roaring together, battering everything on a spiritual level. "It has been tens of thousands of years... tens of thousands of years since any living being was worthy of making me use this power! Saiyan, remember this honor with your destruction!"

Chen Feng quietly watched Champa complete his transformation, the interest in his eyes growing stronger.

To his senses, Champa's aura shot upward like a rocket, breaking through one threshold after another—fivefold, sevenfold, tenfold... and still rising in a violent rhythm. It churned the energy fields across several light-years, making even the distant aging red giant flicker erratically.

"Not bad indeed." Chen Feng finally spoke, as though offering an appraisal. "Much more... presentable than before."

"Presentable? Hahahaha!" Champa bared his bone-white fangs, his laughter filled with the exhilaration of destruction. "You will pay for your arrogance!"

The instant he finished speaking, his figure vanished.

This was not an afterimage produced by speed, but a true spatial jump performed through divine power.

There was no sonic boom, no trace of movement, not even the ripples that should have accompanied travel through space. He simply erased his own "existence" from where he stood, then "defined" his appearance anew somewhere else.

In less than one-thousandth of a second, Champa appeared directly in front of Chen Feng, only an arm's length away!

His already-charged right fist shot forward. Destruction energy condensed around its edge, deep purple-black like a miniature black hole that devoured all nearby light and heat.

Along the path of his fist, space shattered segment by segment like glass, tearing open vicious black cracks. Chaotic currents surged out from within with piercing shrieks, enough to tear stellar matter into its most fundamental particles.

The force of the punch arrived first—not a movement of air, but a solidified intent of destruction as sharp as a divine weapon. It swept past Chen Feng's ear and silently cleaved a distant band of stardust behind him in two, leaving a cross-section as smooth as a mirror.

Chen Feng did not dodge, nor did he make any obvious defensive motion.

At the very instant the fist was about to touch the tip of his nose, he merely raised his right hand. His movement was unhurried, his five fingers naturally spread, palm facing forward as he met the strike capable of shattering stars.

Thud—!!!

It was not an explosion, but an utterly muffled roar, like two neutron stars colliding.

Centered on the point where fist and palm met, a translucent spherical shockwave mingling purple and pale gold suddenly expanded at faster-than-light speed!

Everything tangible and intangible in its path was annihilated.

Three to five nearby asteroids, each dozens of kilometers across, had no time to resist before instantly turning into the finest cosmic dust, only to be thoroughly cleansed away by the energy moments later, vanishing without a trace.

Farther away, the edge of the shockwave grazed a dwarf planet roughly four hundred kilometers in diameter. As though sliced by an invisible colossal blade, one-third of its mass vanished instantly, exposing a churning ocean of molten lava within. The bare core erupted with plasma flames in the vacuum like a gigantic torch suddenly set ablaze.

The ferocious grin on Champa's face froze, and his blazing white pupils shrank sharply to pinpoints.

He had held nothing back in that punch. He had concentrated all the peak Destruction power of his battle form into his fist.

Over the long ages, no being—whether Gods of Destruction from other universes or monsters from ancient legends—had ever been able to take such a punch from him while standing still so casually, without even having the edge of their clothes stirred.

But Chen Feng caught it.

With only one raised hand, his five fingers firmly closed around Champa's devastating fist.

The expected sound of shattering bones and exploding energy never came. Instead, a tough, unwavering solidity came from the other man's palm, as if he were gripping not a hand, but the spine of the entire universe.

"How... is that possible..." Champa muttered, an almost imperceptible tremor in his voice—the instinctive shudder of a worldview utterly overturned.

The hand Chen Feng held around his fist began to slowly tighten.

It was not an explosive burst of force, but a steady, irresistible pressure, as though the gravity of the entire universe had condensed between those five fingers.

The God of Destruction power gathered around Champa's fist was forcibly compressed by those fingers, letting out an overwhelmed creak—the wail of an energy structure being twisted out of shape.

The bones in his fist—divine bones tempered countless times by divine power, nearly comparable to material from a stellar core—also began to give off faint yet distinct cracking sounds. Agonizing pain shot up his arm like electricity.