Chapter 209 - The Pierced Seam and the Ancient Intent
The effect was immediate.
Ashen-Blood Miasma bent away from him as a vast Yin presence unfolded from the place where his aura had seemed almost nonexistent only moments earlier.
Black frost crept across the shattered stones beneath his feet, spreading through the cracks while the surrounding air grew noticeably heavier.
The cultivation revealed beneath that pressure was still only at the Golden Core Fourth Stage.
Yet nothing about the aura itself felt ordinary.
It carried the depth of the infinite Dantian.
It carried the accumulated transformation of his body, the strange balance of black ice and golden Yang, and the weight that the Void Ring had hidden from the world since his tribulation.
The lower Returnees were the first to suffer.
Several collapsed to one knee. One tried to move and stumbled as though an invisible mountain had suddenly settled across its shoulders.
Those already weakened fell completely.
The Nascent Soul-level Returnees remained standing, but their movements hesitated.
The Void-Shattering Returnees did not buckle like the weaker ones, but the sudden weight of Su Bai’s aura still caught them off guard.
Their movements faltered for the briefest instant.
With his aura no longer hidden, its presence spread across the ruined battlefield until everything within its reach seemed to fall under an invisible weight.
For Su Bai, the world suddenly felt slower.
The Void-Shattering Returnees had not actually lost speed, yet their movements no longer slipped past his perception so easily.
Every shift within the reach of his aura became clearer, enough for his spiritual sense to keep hold of movements that had previously blurred together.
One of the Void-Shattering Returnees stared at Su Bai in disbelief.
"A Domain?"
The question came out almost instinctively.
Another immediately frowned. "Impossible. He’s only at Golden Core."
Yet neither of them could completely dismiss the resemblance.
Su Bai had no time to care what they thought.
The spatial seam beneath the enlarged needle had become clearer within his perception, and he seized that fleeting opportunity without hesitation.
He pushed.
The enlarged needle trembled against the seam while the tiny illusory needle inside his sea of consciousness shuddered violently under the strain.
The Returnees were already recovering.
Su Bai gritted his teeth and forced the needle forward.
Finally, something finally gave way.
Its tip slipped into the seam.
Barely a fraction had entered, yet the sensation was unmistakable.
He had pierced space.
But then, a faint cracking sound echoed through his sea of consciousness.
Crk.
A hairline crack appeared along the tiny illusory needle of his Flaw-Piercing Intent Seed.
Pain struck his spirit. The backlash should have shaken his soul and injured his spiritual foundation.
Instead, his Reversal Body reacted.
The harmful spiritual backlash twisted.
The pain remained for only an instant before changing into a strange coolness that spread through his spiritual sea. The violent force that should have damaged his spirit instead washed through it like an extremely unpleasant form of nourishment.
Su Bai noticed.
He had no time to understand what had happened.
The hairline crack remained on the Intent Seed, and almost immediately, Qi began pouring toward it from his infinite Dantian and nine Gateway Qi Reservoirs.
The amount startled even Su Bai.
The damaged Intent Seed seemed determined to mend itself regardless of the cost, drawing upon his reserves with an appetite that made his eyelid twitch.
Before he could properly react, an unfortunately familiar emptiness opened in his stomach.
Grrr—
Su Bai nearly lost concentration.
Of all the possible moments...
Su Bai swallowed.
’Apparently, repairing Intent was expensive.’
That information would have been useful five breaths earlier.
At that moment, the Void-Shattering Returnee reached Su Bai just as he pulled the enlarged needle free.
The battlefield trembled.
Every Void-Shattering Returnee stopped at once. Their attention snapped toward the space behind him.
The pierced seam contracted sharply before swelling outward. A thin black line appeared where the needle had entered and began spreading sideways.
The ancient Space-Reaping wound trembled.
For countless years, the sword Intent within that wound had performed one simple act.
It kept the original cut apart.
The surrounding spatial layers had adjusted around that ancient violence. They bent around it, endured it, and stabilized themselves while the lingering Intent continued forcing the two sides of the wound away from each other.
Su Bai had not attacked the ancient Intent itself.
He had done something worse.
He had damaged one of the seams helping the surrounding space endure it.
The balance broke.
The pressure held within the ancient wound found the weakened path almost immediately.
The Space-Reaping Intent reacted.
The thin scar widened as part of that lingering force spilled into the seam Su Bai had just pierced, and the black line running through it began to branch.
One fracture became two. Two became dozens.
The Void-Shattering Returnees reacted instantly.
"Stabilize it!"
Two of them abandoned Su Bai entirely.
Spatial force surged from their bodies as they tried to reinforce the outer boundary of the rupture.
A third moved toward the ancient scar, then immediately stopped before crossing its killing range.
They knew exactly what was happening.
That was why they were afraid.
Su Bai did not stay to admire his work.
His Nether Thread Network tightened.
One of the lower Returnees had collapsed farther from the spatial wound when Su Bai released his aura. A needle had already pierced its side earlier, leaving a Nether Thread attached.
Su Bai pulled.
The Returnee lurched toward him.
At the same time, Su Bai activated Frictionless Phantom Step and used the tension in the thread to redirect his own momentum toward the Returnee’s position.
Both moved.
The difference was that Su Bai had almost no resistance against the ground.
He glided.
The lower Returnee was dragged several steps toward the rupture while Su Bai shot past the midpoint, using it as an unwilling moving anchor.
The Returnee realized what had happened.
Its expression became furious.
Su Bai passed it.
"Thank you."
The Returnee roared.
Su Bai did not think gratitude had been accepted.
Behind him, space bloomed.
There was no explosion. The rupture opened like a black flower whose petals were made from broken distance.
The ground nearest to it did not immediately rush inward. Instead, it began to distort.
A broken stone stretched impossibly long and thin before disappearing into the tear, while half of a collapsed pillar bent toward the rupture without ever truly sliding across the ground.
Only after that did the pull begin.
It was not wind.
Space itself was collapsing toward the opened wound, dragging everything nearby toward the place where distance had stopped behaving properly.
Stone tore free from the earth, Ashen-Blood Miasma twisted into spirals, and the lower Returnees began screaming as their bodies were dragged backward.
The Void-Shattering Returnees managed to hold their ground. Their hands moved rapidly as they tried to stabilize the surrounding space.
Spatial anchors appeared around the rupture. Each one forced the surrounding layers into temporary alignment.
Within moments, three separate distortions had been pinned.
The expanding tear slowed.
Su Bai looked back while fleeing.
For one terrible second, he thought they might actually contain it. But the ancient Space-Reaping Intent moved again.
The old sword Intent had never cared about stabilization.
Its entire existence carried the will left behind by that ancient strike: to cut space apart and keep the wound from ever closing.
The Void-Shattering Returnees were forcing nearby space closed.
The ancient Intent was forcing it apart.
The two forces met.
The nearest Void-Shattering Returnee’s face changed.
"Release the anchor!"
It tried to resist, but the rupture had already gone too far.
The spatial anchor it had created became part of the unstable seam.
The Space-Reaping Intent followed the connection.
A thin distortion appeared across the Returnee’s right arm.
The arm vanished from the elbow down.
The Returnee immediately severed its own spatial anchor and retreated.
That decision saved its life.
The second was not as fortunate.
It had anchored two sides of the rupture simultaneously, trying to prevent the tear from spreading toward the others.
When the ancient Intent surged through the weakened seam, both anchors collapsed inward.
For an instant, the Returnee was caught between two spatial layers that no longer agreed on where its body belonged.
Its expression changed as its torso shifted half a step to the left while its legs remained where they were.
The Void-Shattering Returnee tried to escape through raw movement, but the ruptured space folded again before it could break free. Its upper body disappeared first, while the rest was dragged into the expanding black tear and swallowed by the spatial turbulence.
Even its Soul-Bloom failed to emerge properly.
A black-red light flickered into existence for less than a breath before several conflicting spatial layers passed through it and tore the bloom apart.
Su Bai saw all of this from a rapidly increasing distance.
His scalp tingled.
That had been a Void-Shattering Returnee.
He had wanted space angry. He had succeeded somewhat more thoroughly than expected.
Su Bai could not help glancing back at the ancient scar.
He seriously wondered what kind of person could leave something like that behind.
The remaining Void-Shattering Returnees no longer looked at him.
They could not.
One continued stabilizing the rupture.
Another dragged two lower Returnees away before using their bodies and miasma to reinforce a collapsing spatial anchor.
The wounded Void-Shattering Returnee pressed its remaining hand against a widening distortion and forcibly compressed it.
They were not panicking blindly. They were fighting a disaster.
Su Bai respected that.
He also intended to take full advantage of it.
Su Bai was already beyond the worst of the pull.
Frictionless Phantom Step carried him across the fractured ground while the Macro-Taiji circulation continued repairing his chest.
His ribs still hurt.
The Intent Seed inside his sea of consciousness carried a visible hairline crack. Qi continued pouring toward it. And the hunger inside Su Bai was becoming unreasonable.
His stomach growled again.
Su Bai pressed one hand against his damaged chest while moving faster.
"This had better heal quickly."
Behind him, another spatial crack tore through a ruined wall.
The entire structure disappeared.
Su Bai reconsidered.
"Actually, take your time."
He did not want the Intent Seed demanding another practical lesson today.