Little Skyhorned Ant's eyes burned red. Ignoring his broken arms, he roared and tried to throw himself forward.
Meng Tianzheng reacted swiftly and clamped a hand onto his shoulder.
Supreme pressure surged, pinning him in place.
Boom!
A dazzling blaze of light erupted at the spatial fissure.
The Great Heavenly Horned Ant's remnant soul exploded completely, turning into countless golden runes that merged into the surrounding spatial barriers.
The shattered folded space finally barely healed as the Ten Evils Origin filled its gaps.
One of the Immortal Ancient Ten Evils vanished like smoke, without leaving even another word behind.
Little Skyhorned Ant knelt on the ground, his teeth grinding audibly as two trails of bloody tears streamed from his eyes.
Meng Tianzheng stood beside him, his expression stern.
As he watched the space close again, he understood that the Great Heavenly Horned Ant's sacrifice could buy only a moment's peace.
As long as that monster lay below, the Celestial God Academy could become a land of death at any moment.
At the same time.
At the Sin Province Border, in the Three Thousand Dao Provinces.
Fierce winds carrying the stench of blood ravaged the wasteland.
A thin figure hurtled through space, trailing a long string of afterimages.
It was Shi Hao.
He was in a wretched state. His blue-green robes had long since been stained red with blood, and a wound deep enough to expose bone marked his chest.
An eerie sheen shimmered over the wound, preventing his flesh from healing.
"Those old dogs of the Heavenly Human Clan really won't stop until they've wiped me out!"
Shi Hao clenched his teeth and drove the Kun Peng Technique to its limit.
Several hundred li behind him, several incomparably powerful auras pursued relentlessly.
They were the pursuers sent by the Heavenly Human Clan.
To seize the fortune he carried, the Heavenly Human Clan had utterly torn away all pretense, dispatching several True Gods and even experts from the Heavenly God Realm to lead them.
The gulf between their cultivation realms was like a chasm across the heavens.
Had Shi Hao not exhausted his trump cards, relied on his keen instinct for the terrain, and later made use of that mysterious creature, he would have been captured long ago.
"Little bastard, let's see how long you can keep running!"
An angry shout rang out behind him.
The pressure of the Heavenly God Realm swept over everything, instantly reducing the surrounding mountains, rivers, trees, and grasses to dust.
Shi Hao felt his back grow heavy, as though he bore an ancient divine mountain. His speed immediately dropped a fraction.
At that critical moment.
Shi Hao fiercely bit the tip of his tongue and spat out a mouthful of blood essence.
He changed direction and plunged straight into a bank of mist in the deepest reaches of Sin Province.
It was an ancient stretch of No-Man's Land.
Poisonous miasma shrouded it year-round, and rumors even claimed that Heavenly Gods had perished within.
But he had no other choice now.
The moment he entered the mist, Shi Hao sensed something strange.
The air around him became extraordinarily heavy.
The spiritual energy of heaven and earth seemed frozen here, becoming exceedingly difficult to circulate.
More terrifying still, a faint pressure came from ahead that made even his soul tremble.
This sensation was a thousand, ten thousand times more terrifying than those Heavenly Human Clan experts behind him.
It was as though an ancient primordial beast crouched deep within the mist.
Behind him.
The Heavenly Human Clan's pursuers also stopped at the edge of the mist.
The Heavenly God elder leading them knitted his brows tightly. As he gazed at the churning fog before him, a trace of apprehension flashed in his eyes.
"Elder, that boy ran inside. Do we pursue him?" a True God asked respectfully.
The Heavenly God elder snorted coldly.
"A mere deathtrap thinks it can stop the Heavenly Human Clan?"
"Alive, I want to see him. Dead, I want his corpse. Follow me in!"
The group marched into the mist in force.
Yet the deeper they went, the uglier the Heavenly God elder's expression became.
He discovered that his divine sense was severely suppressed here.
His divine sense, which could originally cover a radius of a hundred thousand li, now could not even clearly discern the scene ten li away.
Stranger still, fine dark gold dust had appeared in the surrounding space at some unknown point.
The dust hung in midair, giving off a faint glow.
A Heavenly Human Clan disciple curiously reached out, wanting to touch the dust.
"Don't touch it!" the Heavenly God elder shouted.
But it was already too late. The disciple's finger had just touched a grain of dark gold dust.
In an instant, that insignificant speck of dust erupted with terrifying mass, heavy as ten thousand jun.
Crack!
The disciple's arm snapped instantly, broken bone piercing his flesh and protruding into the air.
But that was only the beginning.
The dust fell straight into his body through his wound.
A pure physical force that swept through everything like rotten wood erupted inside him.
"Aah!"
With a piercing scream.
The True God disciple's entire body was crushed into a cloud of bloody mist by that force.
Not a scrap of flesh or bone remained.
Every Heavenly Human Clan expert sucked in a cold breath, raising protective divine light and desperately retreating.
A speck of dust had killed a True God in an instant?
The Heavenly God elder stared fixedly ahead, his voice trembling.
"What kind of damned place is this..."
Beyond the Nine Heavens and Ten Lands.
In the boundless Chaos Void.
Gu Xian's enormous body remained quietly coiled.
Washed by currents of chaos, his dark gold scales gleamed with an eternal, unchanging luster.
[Fusion degree: Perfect] [Sleeping Task countdown: Nine days and sixteen hours]
Within his sea of consciousness, the countdown ticked steadily.
Gu Xian slept especially soundly.
He had no idea that the tiny flakes of dead skin rubbed off his scales when he had unconsciously turned over earlier.
Had now drifted through spatial fissures into every corner of the Three Thousand Dao Provinces.
Some flakes had become chains of divine mountains, crushing the leylines beneath them.
Other specks of dust hovered within No-Man's Land, turning it into a deathtrap that made even Heavenly Gods pale at its mention.
His breathing continued in a steady rhythm.
With every breath.
The surrounding currents of chaos surged into violent tides.
Space continuously twisted and reformed beneath that rhythm.
That pure bodily strength, which transcended the restrictions of laws, was slowly but surely reshaping this realm in an irreversible course.
However vast Perfect World might be.
Before such a colossal creature that spanned dimensions, it ultimately seemed unbearably fragile.
At the Celestial God Academy.
Meng Tianzheng stared at the space the Great Heavenly Horned Ant had sealed with his life.
His fists were clenched deathly tight.
As a Supreme, he could clearly sense that the seal would not hold for long.
The rhythm of breathing behind the seal was constantly eroding the runes left by the Ten Evils Origin.
One month at the shortest, half a year at the longest.
That section of dark gold torso, with its accompanying terrifying mass field, would burst this folded space apart completely.
When that happened, the entire Celestial God Academy, and even half of Boundless Heaven, would be razed to the ground.
How should he respond?
Mobilize the entire academy's strength to attack that section of torso?
The moment that thought surfaced, Meng Tianzheng extinguished it.
Absolutely impossible.
Even the laws of heaven and earth could do nothing against something of that scale. Human attacks would only trigger an even more terrifying backlash.
Meng Tianzheng drew a deep breath and turned to Little Skyhorned Ant beside him, whose arms were both completely ruined.
"I will draw upon the academy's reserves to rebuild your arms."
"But this place has already become dangerous."
Meng Tianzheng raised his head, his gaze deep as he looked into the depths of the heavens.
He had to begin preparations to find a way out for the Celestial God Academy.
If that forbidden beast spanning star domains truly awakened, the entire Nine Heavens and Ten Lands would inevitably face an unprecedented reshuffling!
Meanwhile, elsewhere.
At the edge of the mist, the Heavenly Human Clan experts halted.
The True God disciple's gruesome death had instantly chilled everyone's blood.
The Heavenly God elder stood at the front, his expression grim.
He stopped those behind him who were preparing to retreat.
As a Heavenly God, he had lived through countless battles and killings. He would never shrink back.
Forming a hand seal with one hand, the elder summoned a battered purple-gold shield.
This was a precious treasure of the Heavenly Human Clan. It had once blocked a full-strength strike from a Self-Severing Realm expert and was incomparably sturdy.
With a flick of his finger, the Purple-Gold Shield became a streak of light and shot straight toward a grain of dark gold dust suspended in midair.
The two made contact.
Crack.
A crisp shattering sound rang out.
The Purple-Gold Shield could not withstand it at all. The point at its center that touched the dust instantly caved inward.
Then the entire shield disintegrated into fragments that filled the air, losing all spirituality and scattering across the ground.
The cultivators sucked in cold breaths.
The Heavenly God elder's eyes twitched violently.
What terrifying mass!
He looked up and scanned his surroundings. Within this mist, there were at least thousands upon thousands of similar grains of dark gold dust.
Touching a single grain would leave even a Heavenly God dead on the spot, nursing bitter regret.
"Elder, Shi Hao is certain to die after fleeing in here. Let's withdraw," the Heavenly God protector beside him suggested quietly.
"Foolish."
The Heavenly God elder swept a cold gaze over the speaker.
"Shi Hao carries great fortune. How could he seek death so easily?"
"If he dared charge inside, he must have sensed a path to survival."
The elder gazed into the depths of the mist, divine light blazing from his eyes as he tried to see through to the source of the dust.
He discovered a detail that sent chills through the heart.
All the dark gold dust was rising and falling slightly to an extraordinarily slow rhythm.
One inhalation, one exhalation.
Utterly regular.
The poisonous miasma of a deathtrap could never possess such power.
This was a Supreme Divine Object Fallen from Beyond the Heavens!
The elder made an immediate decision, ordering everyone to spread out and form the Heavenly Human Clan's Sky-Observing Formation.
He sought not to kill an enemy, but only to calculate the intervals and trajectories of the dust's movements.
Several Formation Grandmasters immediately sat cross-legged, using their own blood essence as a guide to deduce the gate of life.
Intricate runes shot skyward, weaving into a massive star map in midair as they tried to capture the rhythm of the dark gold dust.
Deep within the mist.
Shi Hao leaned against a withered ancient tree, gasping for breath.
He had forcibly suppressed the wound in his chest with runes.
Dense grains of dark gold dust floated over the path ahead.
Every speck of dust pressed against space until it warped, producing tiny spatial rifts.
The Supreme Bone in Shi Hao's chest burned hot.
The bone was frantically sounding a warning.
A dead end ahead.
Pursuers behind.
Shi Hao wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and calmly surveyed his surroundings.
He discovered the pattern in the dust's rise and fall.
Eighteen breaths.
Shi Hao counted silently.
Every eighteen breaths, the dust floated three inches upward, then slowly sank.
There was an extremely brief pause in between.
He picked up a withered branch from the ground, waited for the right moment, and hurled it forward.
The branch passed through the gap between two specks of dust and landed safely.
There was a way through.
Shi Hao's gaze was resolute. He reined in his entire aura, like a Ferocious Beast on the prowl.
Following the intervals in the dust's rise and fall, he felt his way deeper, step by step.
The farther he went, the more dramatically the terrain changed.
The once-soft soil had long since vanished, replaced by hard crystals formed under extreme gravitational pressure.
A vast, unfathomably deep pit appeared in the ground ahead.
The rocks along the pit's rim had turned glasslike, gleaming with a cold, eerie luster.
Shi Hao lay prone at the edge and looked down.
At the bottom lay a fist-sized dark gold fragment.
Every speck of dust floating nearby had flaked off this fragment.
This small fragment alone had suppressed the leylines for ten thousand li around, completely congealing the spiritual energy of heaven and earth.
Looking at the fragment, Shi Hao recalled the divine mountain spanning a hundred thousand li that Liu Shen had taken him to see.
The material was exactly the same.
A tiny flake that had fallen from that being's body had created a forbidden zone.
Shi Hao was utterly stunned.
Knowing full well that he could not linger here, he was about to skirt the enormous pit and continue onward.
The dark gold fragment at the bottom of the pit suddenly let out a hum.
The rhythm of the dust's rise and fall fell into disarray.
Celestial God Academy, the Immortal Family Ruins.
Meng Tianzheng stood before the seal with his hands behind his back.
The golden runes formed from the Ten Evils Origin circulated slowly in space, barely plugging the spatial rift.
Tiny dark gold spots had already appeared along the edges of the golden light.
Assimilation was underway.
The physical mass of that forbidden being was crushing the laws of the Immortal Ancient Era, bit by bit.
Beside him, an academy disciple knelt on one knee, his forehead covered in cold sweat, not daring even to breathe heavily.
The Little Skyhorned Ant lay on a jade bed not far away. Meng Tianzheng had reattached his arms with supreme medicines, but he remained in a deep coma.
"Grand Elder, how long can the seal hold?" the academy disciple ventured to ask.
Meng Tianzheng's tone was calm.
"Three months."
"In three months, the folded space will collapse, and the oppressive might of that torso itself will descend in full."
The academy disciple's face turned deathly pale.
A sense of helplessness welled up in his heart.
Meng Tianzheng turned and strode toward the exit of the ruins.
"Summon the elders to deliberate in the main hall."
A short while later.
Dozens of core elders gathered in Celestial God Academy's main hall.
All of them sensed the grim, murderous air about the Grand Elder.
"What happened beneath the academy?" the Second Elder asked gravely, worry in his eyes.
Meng Tianzheng swept his gaze across them and laid out the entire situation deep within the ruins.
A prolonged silence fell over the hall.
A falling pin could have been heard.
A section of torso had crushed the Ten Evils Great Array and would destroy the academy in three months.
This exceeded everyone's comprehension.
"Could we combine our strength and form a peerless killing array to shatter it?" the hot-tempered Fourth Elder proposed at once.
Without comment, Meng Tianzheng waved a curtain of light into being.
An image of the dark gold torso appeared within it.
"The Great Heavenly Horned Ant's remnant soul tried to break off the edge of a single barb on it and nearly perished, his Dao extinguished."
Meng Tianzheng stated the facts.
The Fourth Elder staggered back two steps, unable to utter another word.
Even a Heavenly Horned Ant, the embodiment of ultimate power, had met such an end. If they acted, their only fate would be to have their bodies smashed and their bones ground to dust.
"Grand Elder, since we cannot overcome it by force, could we use a supreme spatial artifact to uproot the entire academy and escape into endless space?" the Third Elder proposed, stroking his beard with a long sigh.
"No." Meng Tianzheng shook his head.
"Physical mass of that magnitude has completely locked down the academy's leylines. If we forcibly uproot it, the academy will disintegrate instantly."
They exchanged looks, each seeing the despair in the others' eyes.
"Unseal the academy's reserves."
Meng Tianzheng issued his final orders.
"Disperse all core disciples and resources into small groups and secretly transfer them to the borders of Boundless Heaven."
"Publicly announce that the academy will hold its once-in-ten-million-years Secret Realm Grand Competition to conceal our movements."
"Remember, move slowly. We must not alert the Foreign Realm or the other powers of the Nine Heavens and Ten Lands."
The elders acknowledged the orders in unison and swiftly withdrew to make arrangements.
Meng Tianzheng stood alone outside the empty hall.
He raised his head and gazed into the depths of the heavens.
A mass retreat was only a last resort.
If a being of such immense bulk truly turned over, fleeing anywhere would be futile.
He had to transfer that torso out of Boundless Heaven the instant the folded space collapsed.
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