Just shining it once had ruined a precious treasure and blinded a Self-Severing Realm elder?
The old Heavenly Human gazed down at the cold crystalline plain.
He knew perfectly well that the Heavenly God and the many True Gods they had sent out had absolutely died here.
And not even a scrap of them remained.
"Retreat."
The old Heavenly Human gave the order decisively, without the slightest hesitation.
"Return to the clan."
"Send word to every branch across the Three Thousand Dao Provinces. From this day onward, no one is to set so much as half a foot into the fringes of Sin Province."
"Designate this place the Heavenly Human Clan's foremost forbidden ground."
The Heavenly Human Clan's warship left as quickly as it had come.
Not daring to leave behind even a single threat, they slunk away, tearing through the void to flee.
Boundless Heaven.
In the far east lay a barren, deathly silent star domain.
The Changsheng Wang Family's migrating host was quietly encamped here.
Countless floating islands had been forcibly pieced together with formations, barely keeping the family's operations running.
Without immortal veins to sustain them, the Wang Family's disciples could only cultivate using pills and spirit stones they had previously stockpiled.
Wang Da stood outside a hastily constructed hall.
As he gazed at the desolate stars around him, his heart filled with pent-up frustration.
"To think that our mighty Immortal Family has been reduced to this place where birds won't even shit."
Wang Da punched the stone pillar beside him, snapping it with a crack.
Wang Changsheng slowly emerged from the hall.
He glanced at Wang Da.
"You should be content just to be alive."
Wang Da lowered his head, not daring to argue.
Just then, a clan elder responsible for monitoring events outside hurried over.
"Patriarch, there's movement at the Celestial God Academy."
Wang Changsheng's gaze sharpened.
"Speak."
The clan elder lowered his voice.
"The Celestial God Academy has publicly announced that it will hold a Secret Realm Grand Competition, an event held once every ten million years."
"But our agents inside the academy discovered that the competition is a smokescreen."
"Meng Tianzheng is splitting the academy's core disciples and precious texts into small groups and secretly relocating them to Boundless Heaven's borderlands."
After hearing this, Wang Changsheng's lips curled into a mocking sneer.
"That old fox Meng Tianzheng can't keep the lid on it any longer after all."
"That thing buried beneath his academy is even deadlier than the fingernail in our ancestral grounds."
"He's moving his disciples. He's preparing to abandon the Celestial God Academy."
Shock flashed through Wang Da's eyes at these words.
"Father, even the Celestial God Academy is going to flee?"
Wang Changsheng clasped his hands behind his back and gazed out at the stars.
"Flee?"
"It coils around the entire Nine Heavens and Ten Lands. Where could we possibly flee?"
"We've merely moved from beneath its toe into a gap between its fingers that it hasn't noticed."
"Pass down my order. Every member of the Wang Family is to enter secluded cultivation and remain there."
"Every eighteen hours, they must stop all cultivation and stabilize their physical bodies on the spot."
Sensing the increasingly distinct physical pulses between heaven and earth, Wang Changsheng's eyes filled with gloom.
"The heavens are about to change."
The Outer Realm Desert.
The Foreign Realm.
The Foreign Realm's army, once brimming with murderous fury, had long since retreated to their respective ancestral grounds.
The hundreds of millions of miles around the Heavenly Abyss had been designated an absolute forbidden zone for life.
An Lan, Yu Tuo, Wu Shang, the Scarlet King, and Kun Di.
The five Immortal Kings sat beneath the tallest World Tree in the Foreign Realm.
The World Tree here emitted a hazy green glow, barely resisting the regular frequency of physical deprivation from outside.
"Spatial curvature is still increasing."
Kun Di opened his eyes, a trace of exhaustion in his voice.
"Its mass is too great. The surrounding void is collapsing inward."
"Over the past few days, our Foreign Realm's territory has been forcibly compressed by one percent."
Wu Shang laid the Heavenly Halberd across his knees.
"The rate at which our magical power is draining has slowed, but that's no good sign."
"It's because our bodies are being forced to adapt to its frequency."
This was a subtle, gradual change.
The Immortal Kings discovered that the Immortal Dao Laws they took such pride in were being assimilated by that pure physical mass.
Their muscle density had become utterly terrifying, but the difficulty of unleashing divine abilities had increased more than tenfold.
An Lan looked at the now-healed web between his right thumb and forefinger.
"What exactly is it doing?"
"Why are the pulses so regular?"
While the five Immortal Kings puzzled over this in vain.
In the deepest reaches of the Chaos Void.
Gu Xian remained fast asleep.
The reconstruction of his bone marrow proceeded in an orderly manner.
Old bone marrow cells were pulverized, and new, higher-dimensional dark gold bone marrow was forming.
During this metabolic process.
A negligible trace of "impurity" was inevitably produced.
Compared to Gu Xian's immense body, these impurities amounted to less than one ten-millionth of a speck of dust.
They were like the tiniest drop of sweat secreted from a mortal's pores during sleep.
Or a wisp of stale breath.
Gu Xian's breathing remained steady.
Whoosh.
With this long exhalation.
That trace of "impurity," utterly invisible to the naked eye, was swept out of his enormous nasal cavity by the airflow.
The impurity entered the Chaos Void.
In the absolute-zero environment of chaos, this trace of impurity rapidly cooled, condensing into a drop of dark gold liquid.
To Gu Xian, it was a negligible drop of metabolic waste.
But to Perfect World.
It was a drop of higher-dimensional matter expelled after the reconstruction of the dark gold starry sky behemoth origin.
Carried by the currents of chaos, this drop of dark gold liquid drifted leisurely downward.
It passed through the shattered boundary wall.
And fell straight toward the center of the Foreign Realm's desert.
Beneath the World Tree.
The five Immortal Kings sensed the terrifying fluctuations from beyond their realm at the same time.
It felt as though a supernova containing the condensed mass of hundreds of millions of suns was hurtling down at them.
Kun Di sprang to his feet, his gaze piercing the void.
"Something's falling!"
An Lan and Wu Shang immediately brought out their weapons, ready for battle.
They raised their heads.
And saw a drop of water.
A dark gold drop of water radiating dazzling light.
It did not fall quickly.
But wherever it passed, space dissolved directly into nothingness, and even time was compressed until it ceased to flow.
"What is that?"
The Scarlet King's eyes filled with disbelief.
He tried to use the laws of time to trace the drop's origin, only for its mass to crush the river of time apart.
"Get away!"
Kun Di let out a shrill roar.
Not a shred of regal bearing remained in the five Immortal Kings.
Without even time to warn their respective clans, they burned their origins and transformed into five streaks of light, fleeing madly toward the Foreign Realm's edge.
The dark gold liquid slowly descended.
It pierced through the dark matter above the Foreign Realm.
It pierced through the atmosphere.
Finally, it landed lightly on the crown of the World Tree that supported the entire Foreign Realm.
Time seemed to stand still at that moment.
Time ground to a halt at that moment.
The dark gold liquid touched a leaf at the very top of the World Tree.
The World Tree.
The foundation of the Foreign Realm.
Every leaf bore real stars and contained complete world laws.
The divine tree erupted with boundless green light.
Hundreds of millions of immortal divine chains of order surged from its trunk, attempting to stop that drop of dark gold liquid.
Yet before absolute physical mass.
Laws became nothingness, and the dark gold liquid met not the slightest resistance.
It pierced through the green light.
It crushed the divine chains of order.
Crack!
The topmost leaf vaporized outright.
The several stars borne upon it were instantly torn apart by the liquid's gravitational field.
The liquid fell straight down along the World Tree's main trunk.
Not a single explosion could be heard.
There was only the sound of pure physical cutting.
From top to bottom, the indestructible trunk of the World Tree was pierced by this drop of liquid, leaving an utterly smooth hole clear through it.
The World Tree shuddered violently.
Its boundless vitality drained away madly.
Great swaths of its crown rapidly withered and yellowed, and fallen leaves rained to the ground.
Every leaf that touched the ground blasted out an enormous basin.
The Foreign Realm's sky collapsed in an instant.
The once-abundant immortal substance poured madly out through that clear hole.
Hundreds of millions of living beings prostrated themselves on the ground, trembling all over.
They sensed the depletion of the world's origin.
After piercing the World Tree, the drop of liquid struck the Foreign Realm's black earth without losing any of its momentum.
The earth remained intact.
With its unimaginable density, the liquid melted a bottomless, absolute abyss directly into the crust of this great world.
The five Immortal Kings who had fled to the Foreign Realm's edge stared blankly at it all.
Their hearts convulsed violently.
The World Tree had been pierced.
The laws of the entire Foreign Realm instantly became tattered and broken.
"What kind of artifact was that?" Blood streamed from the Scarlet King's eyes.
He had just forcibly used the laws of time to peer at it, and his eyes had been blinded outright.
Around that drop of liquid, the river of time had completely ceased to flow.
Kun Di trembled all over, his withered hands clutching his cane in a death grip.
He had just seen the whole thing clearly.
"That was absolutely no artifact."
Kun Di's voice carried profound fear and humiliation.
"That was a drop of water condensed from a breath of foul air that beast expelled in its sleep."
"To be precise, it was a drop of excreted waste fluid."
The edge of the Foreign Realm was deathly silent.
An Lan, Yu Tuo, Wu Shang.
These kings who looked down upon the ages felt their chests tighten, almost coughing up blood.
A single drop of excreted waste fluid!
It had destroyed the foundation of the Foreign Realm, the World Tree!
The world they treasured was nothing but a garbage dump in someone else's eyes!
"This is an outrage!" Wu Shang ground his steel-hard teeth to pieces.
But he did not draw his Heavenly Halberd.
Go seek revenge on that monster?
While it slept, a single drop of its waste fluid had punched through the World Tree.
If it woke, the entire Foreign Realm would be reduced to nothingness.
"Seal off that abyss." An Lan drew a deep breath, forcibly suppressing his humiliation.
"That drop of water carries a horrifying physical magnetic field."
"No one may approach within a hundred thousand li, or their bodies will collapse outright."
"Designate that region the Eternal Forbidden Zone."
The five Immortal Kings could only swallow this bitter fruit in silence and mark out a forbidden zone within their own territory.
The wastelands of Sin Province, the Glazed Crystal Plain.
Shi Hao stopped.
He sensed that no matter which direction he retreated in, those rhythmic physical pulses followed him.
The entire expanse of heaven and earth was being assimilated.
The air became unbearably heavy.
Every breath sent a tearing agony through his lungs.
Shi Hao sat cross-legged on a jutting crystal rock.
The dark gold dust around him rose and fell faster and faster.
The gravitational field grew ever more terrifying.
Dense beads of blood seeped from Shi Hao's skin.
With nowhere left to retreat, then adapt to it!
A frenzied light blazed from Shi Hao's eyes.
He completely abandoned mobilizing the runes and magical power within him.
He focused all his mental energy on every muscle and every bone in his body.
He felt the pulse frequency coming from the depths of the void.
Inhale.
His body tensed, resisting the immense gravity descending from above.
Gravity compressed his blood vessels.
Blood surged through them with the roar of rivers bursting their banks.
His Supreme Bone ceased evolving runes.
It began purely increasing its bone density.
Exhale.
His bones relaxed, yielding to the release of gravitational force as the pulse swept past.
Once, twice, ten times.
Throughout this process, Shi Hao's flesh was continually torn apart, then forcibly healed under the nourishment of his Supreme Blood.
His bones let out thunderous booms that shook the heavens.
With every boom, his physical strength surged another notch.
Taking the Self as the Seed!
In this forbidden zone of physics.
Shi Hao had actually endured the first wave of frequency assimilation through sheer force.
He slowly stood.
A tiny vacuum zone formed around his body.
The dark gold dust was repelled outright by the power radiating from his flesh.
"Such incredible strength."
Shi Hao clenched his fists.
He felt that, as he was now, he could blow apart that elderly Heavenly God from earlier with a single punch of pure physical strength.
Just as Shi Hao prepared to leave this crystal plain.
A dazzling ray of dark gold light suddenly shone from the enormous pit behind him.
Shi Hao turned his head.
The dark gold fragment at the bottom of the pit had changed.
After absorbing all the surrounding dust, its surface began to melt.
Its once-hard solid structure became a pool of dark gold liquid metal radiating terrifying heat.
An immense gravitational pull, powerful enough to warp space, emanated from the liquid metal.
The crystals on the ground began sliding toward the bottom of the pit.
Shi Hao immediately grew alert.
He drove power into his legs and leaped into the air, swiftly distancing himself from that expanding center of gravity.
The Celestial God Academy.
Evacuation efforts were proceeding urgently.
A grim atmosphere filled the academy.
The disciples formed orderly lines and quickly boarded the hovering warships.
Meng Tianzheng stood before the great hall, watching warship after warship laden with disciples vanish into the void.
Time was short.
The seal on that folded space underground could rupture at any moment.
Once it ruptured, the entire academy would turn to ash.
The second elder flew over in haste, his face anxious.
"Grand Elder, something has happened underground!"
"Has the seal cracked open?" Meng Tianzheng's heart tightened.
"It hasn't ruptured, but the temperature is rising sharply!"
The second elder wiped the sweat from his forehead.
"It's definitely not the heat of flames. It's all pure thermal radiation!"
"The formations on those floating islands near the underground area have all failed. They've already begun falling one after another!"
"That dark gold torso has begun giving off heat!"
Meng Tianzheng's figure flashed, and he arrived directly at the seal of the Immortal Family Ruins.
The moment he approached, a wave of heat powerful enough to melt immortal gold struck him in the face.
The surface of the golden seal formed from the Ten Evils Origin had actually begun glowing red.
Through the cracks in the seal.
Meng Tianzheng saw a horrifying sight.
That dark gold torso stretched across the folded space.
Its once-cold, deathly still scales were now glowing dark red.
That heat had nothing to do with the fire of the Great Dao or immortal dao fire.
It was entirely extreme physical heat generated by pure high-speed cellular friction and the reconstruction of flesh and blood.
The heat penetrated the spatial barrier.
The immortal pool within the ruins instantly boiled, then dried up completely.
In the Chaos Void.
Gu Xian slept soundly.
His bone marrow reconstruction had entered its most critical high-heat stage.
His body temperature began rising geometrically.
For Gu Xian's enormous body, this change in temperature was a completely normal physiological response.
But for the Perfect World.
It was equivalent to igniting hundreds of millions of supernovas around his body at once.
Beneath the Celestial God Academy.
Within just a few breaths, the intensity of the thermal radiation soared to an unimaginable level.
The surrounding rock strata were vitrified outright.
Crack!
The seal left behind by the Great Heavenly Horned Ant could no longer withstand the scorching heat.
It melted completely.
A devastating heat wave erupted thunderously from underground.
Meng Tianzheng's eyes widened, and he roared.
"Retreat!"
Before you continue