The End of Probing

"Just as expected of an angel by a god's side." He looked up, blue aura surging behind him like a cloak.

Speaking of Ultra Instinct, he smiled. "The gap between you and me is enormous."

A faint smile touched Vados's lips. Her staff lay horizontally before her, and her movements were as elegant as though she were painting.

"You're too modest. You've trained Ultra Instinct to this level with a mortal body—even I'm astonished. I've watched over Universe 6 for so long, yet I've never seen a mortal as... special as you."

"A mortal?" Chen Feng repeated, a hint of pride entering his laughter.

"Perhaps. But mortals can keep breaking through precisely because of that pride of 'overestimating themselves.'"

He drew a deep breath, and the blue aura around him suddenly contracted.

The radiance that had illuminated everything gradually dimmed, as if an entire sea of stars had been compressed into a single seed.

He had not grown weaker. This was ultimate concentration—all his energy had been packed into every inch of muscle and every bone.

His hair returned to black, and his eyes regained their deep darkness. He looked no different from an ordinary Saiyan, quietly floating beneath the starry sky without leaking the slightest trace of aura.

Vados's fingers tightened slightly around her staff.

For the first time, gravity showed in her pale violet eyes.

In her perception, Chen Feng's presence was rapidly vanishing—not because he was weakening, but as though he had poured an entire ocean into a clay jar, sealed it shut, and sunk it into the abyss.

That oppressive sensation of locking even destructive energy within flesh and blood instead made the surrounding space begin to tremble faintly.

"This is..." Vados murmured, unconsciously raising the tip of her staff slightly.

Chen Feng did not answer.

He merely slowly raised his right fist and drew it back to his waist.

That most basic fighting stance seemed to shift the gravity of the entire battlefield.

The void beneath his feet actually rippled like water, while floating meteor fragments in the distance silently turned to powder.

Vados's pupils suddenly contracted.

She could clearly sense it—within that seemingly ordinary human body lurked an immense power that made even her, an angel, tremble involuntarily.

That power was not flamboyantly unleashed. It was restrained to the extreme, like a cosmic singularity compressed at the end of time and space—calm on the surface, yet churning with undercurrents within, capable of erupting at any moment with violent energy that would overturn all understanding.

"You..." Rare uncertainty entered Vados's voice. Her violet eyes widened slightly, reflecting Chen Feng's calm figure.

"You voluntarily dispelled your Full-Power Super Saiyan Blue transformation?"

Chen Feng nodded, clasping his hands behind his back as he stood amid the drifting dust of shattered star rings.

There was not the slightest aura around him. His black hair hung down in the vacuum, making him look like a traveler strolling through the sea of stars.

"Full-Power Super Saiyan Blue is indeed the ultimate Saiyan form I can currently use." His voice was steady, each word landing like a meteor strike.

"But against you—"

He paused, and his gaze suddenly deepened, as if he were looking through Vados toward the deeper source of all laws.

"It's still far from enough."

Vados fell silent.

She had lived for hundreds of millions of years, seen countless galaxies born and destroyed, and fought alongside or against powerful beings from every universe. Yet she had never encountered someone like this—someone who, in the heat of battle, voluntarily shed a stronger form, returned to the most ordinary "normal state," and then calmly said, "It's still not enough."

This was not arrogance. It was an almost terrifying confidence and control.

"Then," Vados said, her eyelashes trembling slightly as she gripped her staff tightly, the crystal atop it glimmering with a wary light, "Lord Chen Feng, how do you intend to respond?"

A faint curve rose at the corner of Chen Feng's lips. The smile did not reach his eyes, yet it made the temperature of the surrounding space seem to plummet.

"Get a little more serious."

"Serious?" Vados frowned slightly, the pale violet holy glow around her rippling in response.

"That world-destroying clash just now... in your eyes, it still didn't count as being 'serious'?"

"Just now?" Chen Feng shook his head. The tips of his hair stirred, and a few grains of stardust were silently blown away.

"That was only... a warm-up where I got slightly serious."

The moment his words fell, a fundamental change took place.

There was no explosive rise in aura, no transformation. In fact, within Vados's perception, the energy readings around him fell rather than rose, becoming extraordinarily calm.

Yet its very "quality" changed completely.

Previously, Chen Feng had been like a divine sword that cleaved apart the river of stars, dazzling with brilliant light. Now, he was like a rough piece of primordial jade that had drawn in all its radiance and returned to simplicity.

Every edge, every trace of violence, every ripple of law had been perfectly compressed into the deepest part of that seemingly ordinary body, forming an absolute sense of existence that was suffocating.

The color drained from Vados's exquisite face.

At last, she understood—the fierce exchanges that had swept through the starfield and shaken the laws, the energy collisions powerful enough to destroy a universe, had truly been nothing more than "probing" to Chen Feng.

He had been probing her fighting style, probing the depths of her authority as an angel, and probing the limits of the Ultra Instinct technique she had mastered.

And now, the probing was over.

"Lord Chen Feng..." Vados's voice lost its former ethereal detachment and became incomparably grave, each word seeming to be forced out from between her teeth. "Just how much... have you still been hiding?"

Chen Feng did not answer.

He did not even assume an attacking stance. He merely slowly raised his right hand, spread his fingers, and lightly closed them toward Vados, dozens of kilometers away.

The gesture was gentle, like scooping up a handful of starlight.

But the instant his fingers curled shut—

"Woooong—!!!"

A "distortion" beyond the description of color or light descended abruptly upon the entire area around Vados, centered on his palm and ignoring the distance between them.

It was not an energy blast, but absolute dominion over "space" itself!

The cosmic void within a hundred li of Vados was like transparent gel gripped by an invisible giant hand, suddenly compressed inward, frozen, and crystallized.

Floating planetary debris, interstellar dust, and the faintly flowing cosmic radiation were all fixed in place and locked down, becoming a bizarre painting of absolute stillness.

Vados's pupils contracted sharply.

She felt an irresistible, terrifying pressure from the very structure of space itself crushing in from every direction. It did not act on her skin—it acted directly upon her very "existence"!

The holy shield aura that automatically surfaced around her gave a sharp crack beneath the spatial compression, instantly filling with spiderweb fractures.

She tried to invoke Ultra Instinct's divine intent to evade or disperse it, only to realize in shock that even the command to "dodge" was traveling incredibly slowly through this frozen space!

She was like an ancient insect trapped in cosmic amber; even shifting her gaze required immense effort.

That invisible hand was slowly tightening, intending to crush both her and this stretch of space into the most fundamental particles of spacetime.

"This is..." Vados's pupils shrank again. Her fingers tightened around her staff, and a flicker of incredulous shock flashed through her eyes.