And that speck of light did not vanish.
After passing through the crystal orb, it continued flying along its original trajectory.
Straight into Tianwu's chest.
Tianwu's body swayed.
Just once.
His ten-thousand-meter-tall frame staggered almost imperceptibly. Then he steadied himself.
After the speck of light entered Tianwu's body... it did not explode immediately.
It was inside him.
Resting quietly inside him.
Tianwu lowered the five heads he could still move. He did not look at the pinhole-sized entry point in his chest.
That opening was too small to find on a body ten thousand meters tall.
But he knew that thing was inside him.
He knew what it was.
A singularity of the Way of Space. Once detonated, it would completely erase the space at its location. This was not destruction on a material level—the space itself would cease to exist.
Tianwu stopped looking at his body.
He raised his heads.
His slit pupils, their bloody color mostly faded to a pale blue-green... fixed on Chen Hao, who hovered in the air.
"You cannot protect the Nine Provinces for long."
Tianwu spoke.
His voice was level. There was no anger. No murderous intent. It was a statement.
"When you perish..."
That spot on his chest began to glow. Pinhole-sized light seeped out from within Tianwu's body. One ray. Two. Ten.
"...that will be the moment the Nine Provinces fall."
Light burst from every wound, every pore, every crack in Tianwu's body.
The singularity detonated.
Tianwu's ten-thousand-meter-tall body was torn apart from within. It was not an explosion... it was erasure.
Flesh, bones, Dao patterns, blood... everything that made up his body, upon touching the expanding wave of spatial erasure, did not shatter or evaporate. It went from existing to not existing.
Silence.
There was not even the sound of an