Ripples in the void suddenly burst open beneath their feet, and Qin Yu's voice resounded throughout the entire Spectral Ghost Cemetery:
"Run!"
Before the words were even finished, the Source-Extinguishing Divine Sword had already carved out a dazzling, Annihilation crack, cleaving open the surging Nine Soul Chains before it. Within the crack, the void seemed to be torn apart by an invisible hand, revealing a narrow and unstable spacetime rift.
Without the slightest hesitation, Wang Yuan used the pages of the Only Book Realm to transform into hundreds of light screens behind him, forcibly deflecting the three chains that were attacking him. However, each time the chains collided with the pages, large amounts of dark blue soul fire would burst forth, burning through the surrounding space into transparent voids.
The tomb guardian appeared above them as if teleported, its three asymmetrical eyes simultaneously flashing with an annihilating light—
That radiance had no warmth, no color, yet it made one feel as if the cause and effect of one's entire life was being erased.
Qin Yu suddenly reached out and grabbed Wang Yuan's shoulder. Azure Ring instantly unleashed countless Annihilation patterns between his brows, completely erasing the aura of the two of them.
"Walk--!"
The two transformed into two blurry streaks of light, disappearing directly into the void rift and vanishing without a trace in the next instant.
The moment the void closed, the nine soul chains lashed down heavily on the spot, cleaving a bottomless canyon into the surface of the entire Spectral Ghost Cemetery. The Netherworld energy poured down like a tsunami, as if to completely erase all traces of what had just happened.
Before the tomb, the guardian slowly withdrew his hands, his eyes gleaming as if tracing back through time, his deep voice echoing in the depths of the Netherworld:
"Can you escape... young man..."
The moment the void rift closed, Qin Yu and Wang Yuan were thrown into a completely different world.
The surrounding darkness seemed to be torn apart by a divine hand, and a waterfall of light, like a broken sky, poured down from the sky—it was not just light, but a time-space rhythm composed of countless brilliant colors, each color flickering and leaping eerily, as if recording the endless past and future in some undecipherable language.
Above that waterfall of light, a colossal celestial body floated, half-hidden behind a sea of clouds. Golden radiance burst forth from the gaps in the broken clouds, as if imprinting the entire spacetime under its splendor. The clouds churned, each cloud inlaid with a pattern of gold edges and shadows, as if woven from flowing stardust and the ashes of Annihilation.
Beneath their feet lay a range of shimmering, iridescent mountains. These mountains were not solid rock, but rather formed from billions of tiny particles of energy crystals, each refracting iridescent ripples that trembled gently with Qin Yu and Wang Yuan's footsteps. Rivers of light flowed through the valleys, their ripples resembling woven rainbow silk, reflecting the cascading light from the heavens and forming a unique, radiant passage between heaven and earth.
However, this scene is not purely beautiful.
Each ray of colored light was accompanied by an almost inaudible whisper, as if an unseen being was watching the intruder within the light. The air was as thick as liquid, and breathing felt like swallowing the weight of the entire starry sea; deep in the mountains below the waterfall of light, dark shadows would occasionally flash by between the lights, their outlines strange and their forms unclear, yet they exuded an aura that instinctively inspired fear.
Wang Yuan said in a low voice, "This place... doesn't seem to be any other realm."
Qin Yu's gaze darkened slightly. He had already realized that this world was not only a mixture of illusion and reality, but also the inner world of some kind of being—and they were being forcibly pulled into its heart.
The two had only taken a few steps when they heard a deep, resonant sound coming from the depths of the waterfall of light—a sound so profound it was impossible to detect with the ears. It was not a mere sound, but a vibration that resonated directly between their souls and marrow, as if an invisible hand was gently tapping at the core of their being.
Below the waterfall of light, the mountainside, where the crystalline sand that once flowed with dazzling energy, began to dim and fall away grain by grain, revealing a dark, light-devouring void skeleton beneath. Engraved on the skeleton were countless runes, which, in Qin Yu's view, did not belong to any known cosmic vocabulary. Each stroke seemed like a divine decree from the Chaos's First Birth, possessing the power to obliterate perception.
As the skeleton was revealed, an invisible pressure surged upwards, so intense that the river of colorful light beneath their feet instantly froze, as if time itself had been frozen. The waterfall of light slowly split open, revealing a giant claw covered in cracks and flowing chains of runes. The claw was not entirely solid, but rather composed of semi-solid and semi-illusory light and shadow. With each vibration of the runes, large swathes of space shattered like glass, turning into iridescent dust that dissipated into the void.
Wang Yuan's face turned deathly pale instantly, and he murmured in a low voice, "That... wasn't a creature's claw, it was—"
Before the words were finished, the giant claw suddenly grabbed at the ridge where the two were. In the silent tearing, the entire mountain was wiped away as if it had been erased, leaving not even a speck of dust behind, replaced by an absolute blank space, as if nothing had ever existed there.
Qin Yu's expression changed drastically. This was no longer within the realm of "strong," but rather an existence that could not be measured by realm at all. He suddenly grabbed Wang Yuan, and their figures instantly transformed into two streaks of light, rushing along the river of colorful light towards the distant end of the starry sky. However, the rainbow lines of the light waterfall seemed to have a life of their own, twisting and intertwining, trying to weave a sealing net in front of them, intercepting them in this strange domain.
For the first time, a genuine sense of gravity and pressure flashed in Qin Yu's eyes.
The iridescent rays of the light waterfall continued to cascade down, enveloping the entire world in a magnificent blend of dreamlike and oppressive grandeur. Suddenly, the starry sky above seemed to be torn apart by an invisible force, followed by a series of dull, low cracking sounds—the sound of the bones of spacetime breaking.
Cracks stretched wildly across the sky, crisscrossing like a spider web, each crack revealing a completely different light and shadow: some were skies burning with blue-gold starlight, some were battlefields covered in blood-red lightning, and some were just pitch-black voids, where even light dared not touch them.
Immediately afterwards, a tearing sound of space collapsing came from the depths of the rift—countless rainbow-colored streams of light fell from the rift, transforming into figures that heavily stomped onto this alien land.
Some wore Star Shattering Armor, carried Sky-Splitting Blades on their shoulders, and their feet were wreathed in crimson flames capable of splitting mountains and cleaving seas;
Some people were covered in white bone scales, with a soul furnace floating above their heads, the ghostly flames overflowing from the furnace mouth seemingly capable of burning away their destiny;
Others wore only blue robes, yet carried three ancient gray scrolls on their backs; the pages, half-open and half-closed, exuded a suffocating sense of oppression.
There were even strangely shaped alien races, their four wings shimmering with light, shaking the void, their pupils reflecting a thousand layers of space.
These people were all peerless experts who had traversed the realms of life and death. Their auras intertwined, causing the air to stagnate. Clearly, they had all been drawn here by an unknown force, following the rumors of the Spectral Ghost Cemetery.
However--
As they gazed upon this otherworldly realm formed by the cascading waterfall and colorful mountains, a fleeting, barely concealed solemnity and wariness crossed almost everyone's eyes. They all sensed that the oppressive aura enveloping the entire area did not emanate from any one of them, but from the very fabric of this world...
In that instant, the earth beneath the colorful waterfall and the rainbow mountain range was suddenly struck by a deep and dense series of "thump-thump-thump" sounds, as if thousands of drumbeats were simultaneously pounding the earth's core.
Cracks spread rapidly along the ground, like the veins of an invisible behemoth, tearing open one dark fissure after another. Then, from the depths of those cracks, strangely shaped little demons suddenly emerged—their bodies were as thin as withered branches, their skin was a translucent grayish-purple, their bones were clearly visible beneath their skin, and their eye sockets burned with the flames of Annihilation Origin, like two quiet yet all-consuming gray flames.
The moment these little devils appeared, the energy of heaven and earth changed drastically.
The Annihilation Source Realm · Initial Stage —Annihilation is the beginning, and Origin is stillness. Their existence means that they can directly touch the "origin format" of the world and rewrite the initial logic of all things with the essence of Annihilation. Even at the initial stage, their instincts are enough to cause the Fate Soul of an ordinary cultivator to collapse.
They move without making a sound, instead accompanied by a low-frequency "buzzing" sound, as if the background rules of the world are being erased little by little. Behind each little devil, there is a long, thin black shadow, which is not a shadow, but the trajectory of their plunder of "existence" - the stones, grass and trees and even the texture of the ground that they touch will instantly lose color and turn into nothingness.
In the blink of an eye, tens of thousands of little demons swarmed out from the ground, densely covering the entire area shrouded in colorful light. They did not roar or hiss, but simply raised their heads in unison, their eyes, burning with gray flames, locking onto every intruder in the area.
That kind of gaze made everyone feel as if they had been stripped of their initial "permission to exist," and that they might be annihilated into nothingness in the next moment.
The next instant, the air seemed to be suddenly crushed by an invisible hand—
Boom!
The first Annihilation Source Realm imp had transformed into a streak of gray-purple light, lunging directly at the nearest purple-robed cultivator. The cultivator reacted swiftly, immediately summoning a long halberd engulfed in golden runes, its tip flashing like lightning. However, before the halberd tip could pierce the imp's body, the golden light was instantly swallowed by the "Annihilation Origin Stillness Veil," as if it had been thrown into a bottomless abyss—the next moment, the halberd shattered into countless tiny specks of light, along with the cultivator's right arm, leaving only a remnant soul screaming in despair amidst excruciating pain.
Buzz--
Immediately afterwards, dozens of little devils leaped up at the same time, their gray flames drawing out a strange light curtain. It was the "Format Stripping Domain" unique to the Annihilation Source Realm, which forcibly rewrote the order of time and space in the area it covered. Some cultivators found their movements stretched into infinite slowness as soon as they raised their hands, while others even saw their heads severed half a breath before they could make a move.
On the other side, a high-level Soul Daoist roared and released his Fate Soul Domain. A hundred-foot-tall phantom of a Soul Beast appeared in the void, spewing out a thousand layers of lightning. The lightning fell, and the entire ground trembled violently, but the little devils only paused slightly before devouring the lightning with gray flames, turning it into dust of Annihilation. Moreover, the causal chain of the lightning was pulled in the opposite direction by them, and the Soul Daoist was instantly devoured by his own lightning strike, his blood mist spreading everywhere.
More people began to act in a panic, with various spells, domains, and weapon lights intertwining on this battlefield where rainbows and dark flames merged. However, whether it was raging fire, frost, sword energy, or spatial cutting, when it landed on these little devils at the Annihilation Source Realm · Initial Stage, it was like being thrown into a silent deep sea, instantly swallowed up and dissolved, without even a ripple.
In the air, the spacetime rift continued to expand, as if pouring out more and more deathly power, while on the ground, the dense tidal wave of imps surrounded all the treasure hunters, sealing off their escape route.
Amidst an overwhelming sense of oppression, the light mist of the gray flames began to condense into a massive phantom hand, slowly descending upon everyone—that was the "Origin Grasp" of Annihilation Origin. Once it closed, the entire area would be formatted into the beginning of nothingness.