The dark gold section of tail that had been lying there quietly had not moved.
But infinitely high above it, a shadow hundreds or thousands of times larger than the tail was slowly descending from the deepest reaches of chaos.
That shadow blotted out the sky and sun.
It not only covered the entire Heavenly Abyss but extended all the way to the end of the Foreign Realm's desert, completely obscuring all starlight.
Heaven and earth sank into absolute darkness.
The five Immortal Kings tilted their heads back.
By the faint immortal light emanating from their bodies, they finally made out the outline of that shadow.
It was a scale.
An utterly ordinary scale belonging to the unknown beast's belly, which had just slowly drooped down from the deepest reaches of chaos.
And the edge of this scale hung directly above the heads of the five Immortal Kings.
Previously concealed by dense chaotic mist, its surface details were now fully exposed to the eyes of everyone from the Foreign Realm as the mist dispersed.
The monster had not moved.
It remained in a deep sleep, without even the slightest shift.
An Lan raised his head, staring intently at the dark gold scale overhead.
The edges of this scale extended beyond the limits of their sight.
Its immense bulk blocked all starlight.
Darkness shrouded the entire desert frontier.
Kun Di's face twitched several times.
When this most ancient Immortal King of the Foreign Realm spoke, his voice carried a tremor he struggled to suppress.
"This is merely a scale from its belly."
Yu Tuo turned to Kun Di.
"What led you to that conclusion?"
Kun Di raised a finger and pointed at the direction of the patterns on the scale overhead.
"Those patterns are very gentle, and there are minute traces of physical wear along the edges."
"Such marks result from rubbing against some flat substance over countless years."
Wu Shang tightened his grip on his heavenly war halberd.
Looking at the split webbing between his thumb and forefinger, he immediately pressed for an answer.
"What was it rubbing against?"
Kun Di fell silent for a long time.
He turned toward the Boundary Sea.
"The Boundary Sea."
The fierce wind outside the great hall swept yellow sand into the sky.
All five Immortal Kings fell silent.
It used the Boundary Sea as a bed.
Such immense dimensions lay entirely beyond the Immortal Kings' understanding of living forms.
The Scarlet King withdrew his manifestation of the Beast of Time and returned to human form.
"That physical shock wave during the day was a stress response triggered by those juniors touching it."
"It never woke. Its muscles' instinctive reaction alone bent An Lan's golden spear and forced the five of us back."
"If it truly wakes, our entire Foreign Realm won't even amount to a single mouthful."
An Lan withdrew the bent golden spear into his body.
This overbearing titan now made the most rational decision.
"The entire army is to retreat."
"Withdraw to the Foreign Realm's ancestral lands and activate every defensive formation."
"Until it leaves, no one is to approach within half a step of the Heavenly Abyss."
The Nine Heavens and Ten Lands, Borderland Imperial Pass.
Every defender atop the walls tightened their grip on their weapons.
They witnessed an utterly staggering sight.
The Foreign Realm's army of tens of millions was retreating.
The retreat was extremely swift.
The Foreign Realm's armored soldiers abandoned their battle standards and supplies, fleeing the Heavenly Abyss's boundary as fast as they could.
Several old Supreme Beings stood at the very front of the battlements.
They stared intently at the enormous dark gold tail lying deep within the Heavenly Abyss.
"The Foreign Realm has withdrawn."
One commander gasped for breath, his eyes filled with relief at surviving the calamity.
"That beast scared off the Immortal Kings!"
Another commander loudly agreed.
"It must be a divine guardian beast left behind by our forebears of the Immortal Ancient era!"
A white-haired old Supreme Being shook his head, rejecting this conjecture.
"You're reading too much into it."
"It has no intention whatsoever of sheltering us."
The old Supreme Being extended a withered finger toward the severed red chains of laws within the Heavenly Abyss.
"With its tail resting there, the Heavenly Abyss's laws simply snapped."
"If it truly intended to protect our world, it would have swept the Foreign Realm flat long ago."
"In its eyes, there is no difference between us and the cultivators of the Foreign Realm. We are all insignificant dust."
The old Supreme Being's words plunged the surrounding commanders into thought.
That was indeed the truth.
Before absolute physical domination, there was no distinction between friend and foe.
Just then, the teleportation formation behind the battlements blazed with dazzling light.
Meng Tianzheng strode out of the teleportation formation.
His face was pale, his aura in utter disarray.
The old Supreme Beings immediately went to meet him.
"Brother Meng, how is the Celestial God Academy?"
Meng Tianzheng looked at the enormous dark gold tail in the distance and let out a long sigh.
"Beneath the academy lies a section of dark gold torso."
All the old Supreme Beings atop the walls froze.
Meng Tianzheng continued.
"That section of torso runs through the academy's folded space."
"The Great Heavenly Horned Ant's remnant soul has completely dissipated in order to seal the spatial rift."
"The Little Skyhorned Ant tried to wrench off one of its barbs with brute strength, but every bone in his arms shattered, and he nearly died."
The old Supreme Beings sucked in cold breaths.
A Heavenly Horned Ant, embodying ultimate power, could not even budge a single one of its barbs.
This defied the most basic common knowledge of the cultivation world.
They looked at the tail in the Heavenly Abyss, then recalled the Celestial God Academy's geographical location.
"This..."
The old Supreme Being's voice began to shake.
"The Celestial God Academy is in Boundless Heaven."
"The Imperial Pass is in the borderlands."
"Countless star domains lie between them."
"Just how long is this monster's body?"
Meng Tianzheng walked to the edge of the wall and pressed both hands against bricks covered in sword and saber marks.
"The informant I planted near the Wang Family's ancestral lands sent word."
"The Changsheng Wang Family has abandoned its ancestral lands and is relocating its entire clan."
"A dark gold nail pierced the forbidden grounds in the mountains behind the Wang Family estate. Their clan-protecting formation shattered, and their immortal vein snapped."
An utter silence fell over the Imperial Pass's battlements.
Three locations, three entirely different body parts.
A vague outline of this creature's posture had already formed in everyone's minds.
It was coiled around the outside of the entire Nine Heavens and Ten Lands.
Its tail rested across the Heavenly Abyss.
Its torso passed through the Celestial God Academy.
Its nail pierced the Wang Family's ancestral lands.
It treated the Nine Heavens and Ten Lands as a sphere it could cling to at will.
The Immortal Domain.
Immortal King Ao Sheng's cultivation grounds.
Vast swathes of immortal vegetation withered.
The spiritual energy of heaven and earth was draining away in immense quantities toward the Chaos Void.
Ao Sheng sat cross-legged in empty space.
Dense immortal light surrounded him.
Pan King flew in from afar and landed at the edge of the cultivation grounds.
The two Immortal Kings exchanged a glance.
"Pan King, did you sense it?" Ao Sheng spoke first.
Pan King nodded.
"That physical vitality is unlike anything I have encountered in my life."
"I tried probing it with divine sense, but my divine sense collapsed the instant it touched it."
Ao Sheng rose and walked to the edge of the cultivation grounds, gazing into the depths of chaos.
"The commotion in the Foreign Realm has stopped."
"An Lan and Yu Tuo joined forces, together with Wu Shang, the Scarlet King, and Kun Di."
"Five Immortal Kings were driven back over a thousand li by a physical shock wave."
The corners of Pan King's eyes twitched several times.
"Was that a sign of the beast awakening?"
"The monster has remained asleep all along, without moving in the slightest," Ao Sheng replied.
Pan King was deeply puzzled.
"If it never moved, how could there be such an enormous shock wave?"
Ao Sheng pondered for a moment and reached an eminently logical conclusion.
"It was an instinctive physical stress response triggered by external contact."
"Some fool from the Foreign Realm attacked it with a weapon."
"Magical power and the Great Dao lost all effectiveness before absolute physical mass."
Pan King fell silent.
Without waking or moving, its muscles' instinctive reaction alone could drive back five Immortal Kings.
Before such an existence, what did an Immortal King amount to?
Even if the Immortal Kings joined forces, they could not inflict any substantive harm on it.
"Close the gates of the Immortal Domain," Ao Sheng ordered.
"Sever all contact with the Nine Heavens and Ten Lands and the Foreign Realm."
"Until it leaves, none of the Immortal Domain's kings may go out. Anyone who defies this order will be executed."
In the chaos beyond the world.
Gu Xian remained absolutely motionless.
The countdown continued ticking steadily.
He had absolutely no idea what was happening outside.
He was merely breathing according to his body's instincts.
Inhale.
Exhale.
This breathing followed an extremely stable rhythm.
Each full cycle took eighteen two-hour periods.
As time passed, this rhythmic breathing produced a high-frequency physical pulse.
Centered on Gu Xian's body, the pulse spread throughout the entire Perfect World.
The Nine Heavens and Ten Lands.
Atop the Imperial Pass's battlements.
Meng Tianzheng suddenly clutched his chest and spat out a mouthful of blood.
The Supreme Being laws within his body were disintegrating.
He was not the only one.
The old Supreme Beings around him dropped to the ground one after another, their faces deathly pale as the blood and qi within their bodies churned.
"What happened?" a commander cried out.
Meng Tianzheng raised his head with difficulty, sensing the changes taking place throughout heaven and earth.
The Great Dao rules of Perfect World were being forcibly overwritten by a higher-order, purer physical frequency.
The vibrational frequency of the spiritual energy between heaven and earth had changed.
The cultivation laws that cultivators depended on for survival were failing on a massive scale.
They tried to summon their magical power, only to discover that the moment it left their bodies, the new physical frequency in the air dispersed it.
Everyone realized a terrifying truth.
Heaven and earth were being forced to adapt to this monster's breathing rhythm.
The fundamental physical laws of the entire world were being forcibly rewritten by this slumbering behemoth!
Atop the walls of Imperial Pass.
Meng Tianzheng wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and braced himself against the edge of the wall, struggling to stand.
As a Supreme Being who stood at the pinnacle of the human path, he had not experienced such weakness for tens of thousands of years.
The vital energy and blood within him were still immense.
But the laws of heaven and earth he had painstakingly cultivated all his life, those divine chains of the Great Dao capable of destroying heaven and earth, were now like a pool of stagnant water.
He could not mobilize them at all.
Beside him, a commander refused to accept it. He drew the standard-issue saber at his waist and slashed fiercely into the air.
"Split!"
Under normal circumstances, this slash would have been enough to cleave stars and tear apart space.
The saber swung out.
A brilliant glimmer of runic light had only just appeared along the blade and had not even had time to leave it.
"Hum."
The invisible physical pulse that came once every thirty-six hours swept through the air.
The blade's radiance instantly dissipated.
There was no sound, no clash of energy.
Mottled patches rapidly spread across the surface of that divine saber, which had weathered countless battles. Then it turned into a handful of rust in the commander's hand and scattered on the wind.
The commander stared blankly at his empty hands. His legs buckled, and he collapsed to the ground.
"My magical power... is gone?"
Meng Tianzheng turned his head and looked at that section of dark gold tail, still utterly motionless in the depths of the Heavenly Abyss.
A profound sorrow showed in his eyes.
"It isn't that our magical power is gone."
"The fundamental rules of this world have been forcibly rewritten."
Meng Tianzheng extended his right hand.
Without using any magical power, he clenched his fist sharply in midair through physical strength alone.
"Crack!"
A crisp sonic boom rang out.
The air burst under pure physical force.
Meng Tianzheng lowered his hand, his voice dry.
"Its immense mass field, combined with that regular breathing frequency, has formed an entirely new set of physical rules."
"Under these rules, any spell that relies on the spiritual energy of heaven and earth or the Great Dao will be deconstructed in an instant."
"From now on, there will be no divine abilities or spells left in this world."
"Only the most primal flesh, the purest mass, and the most savage physical collisions will remain."
The old Supreme Beings around him looked ashen.
They had cultivated the Dao all their lives, seeking to comprehend heaven and earth.
In the end, someone else had merely slept beyond their world and taken a breath, and the Great Dao they depended on for survival had been completely erased.
Being crushed by such a reduction in dimensionality left them in greater despair than being killed outright.
Deep within the mist on the wastelands of Sin Province.
The Heavenly Human Clan pursuers were experiencing an unprecedented nightmare.
The elderly Heavenly God leading them had been hovering in midair, calculating the gaps between the dark gold motes around him.
Suddenly, he felt the divine flame within him shake violently before going out altogether.
His Heavenly God Laws instantly collapsed.
Without the support of his magical power, the elderly Heavenly God could no longer even fly. Like a kite with its string cut, he plummeted straight down from high above.
"Thud!"
The old man slammed heavily onto ground as hard as glass, leaving him battered and covered in dust.
"Elder!"
The several True God disciples around him turned pale with alarm and tried to use movement arts to help him up.
But they, too, discovered that the divine power within them had vanished without a trace.
Something even more terrifying happened.
Without the shelter of their protective divine light, the terrifying mass field around them acted directly on their flesh.
One disciple merely took a single step forward.
A dark gold mote beneath his foot bounced gently upward, resonating with that physical frequency.
The mote touched his knee.
"Crack!"
His thighbone shattered.
The disciple screamed, lost his balance, and toppled forward.
As he fell, he crashed straight into a dense patch of motes ahead.
"Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!"
A series of muffled sounds of flesh and blood being torn apart rang out.
Within a few breaths, that genius disciple at the True God level was battered into a puddle of bloody pulp by those seemingly insignificant motes.
Lying on the ground, the elderly Heavenly God watched the scene, his eyes almost bulging from their sockets.
He desperately tried to summon the reserves within him, only to discover that he could feel nothing except the pain in his flesh.
"My Dao fruits, my cultivation..."
The old man roared in despair.
Before this absolute physical crushing, he, a lofty Heavenly God, was now worse off than even a mortal.
Less than ten li from the Heavenly Human Clan pursuers.
Shi Hao pressed himself tightly against a boulder, gasping for breath.
He, too, had sensed the change in the rules of heaven and earth.
The runes within him were dull and lightless. Neither the Kun Peng Technique nor the Thunder Emperor Precious Technique could be used.
Yet an unprecedented brilliance flashed in Shi Hao's eyes.
"Magical power has failed, and the Great Dao is gone."
Shi Hao lowered his head to look at his hands, feeling the explosive strength contained in his muscles.
"But what I cultivate is Taking the Self as the Seed!"
"My flesh is my greatest asset!"
Before you continue