Chapter 262 - 263: The Scramble
Outside the ancient ruin, the lower ranks waited.
Beginners, Initiates, Adepts, Advanced, and the remaining Experts who could not open the barrier themselves floated in a loose, tense cloud of auras. Dozens of them. Then more. The crowd kept swelling as new arrivals continued to appear at the edges of the void, drawn by the lingering energy signature. The last Master had entered some time ago. No new overwhelming presence had appeared since then. The torn gaps in the barrier still hung open like wounds that refused to close. Jagged edges of broken seal glowed faintly in the darkness, marking the places where Masters had simply ripped their way through.
The void around the ruin felt heavier than before. Thick with unspoken greed. Thick with calculation. Thick with the kind of silence that comes right before a storm breaks.
Everyone watched the gaps. Everyone measured the distance. Everyone calculated the odds.
A few more moments passed in relative silence. No one wanted to move first. Moving first meant drawing attention and becoming a target. But staying still meant letting someone else get ahead. The tension began to wound tighter and tighter, like a spring being compressed past its limit.
Then someone moved.
A single Advanced-tier man shot toward the nearest gap like a spear of pure force. He did not hesitate. He did not look around. He simply committed fully and launched himself forward with everything he had.
That was all it took.
The void exploded into chaos.
What followed was not a battle with clear sides. There were no teams. No alliances. No organized formations. It was a free-for-all of pure, unrestrained violence. Dozens of Multiversal beings who just greeted each other a few moments ago turned on each other in the same instant. Every single one of them wanted to be among the first through the barrier. They believed — all of them, without exception — that the earliest entrants would claim the deepest opportunities and the most valuable treasures. That the first to arrive inside would take everything worth taking before the rest could even set foot in the place.
At the same time, they thought that with a competitor removed or delayed was one less person who could snatch those treasures later. One less rival. One less threat. One less set of hands reaching for the same prize. The logic was simple. Brutal. And shared by almost everyone present.
So they killed each other. Or tried to.
Principles flared across the void in violent, overlapping waves. Light and darkness and force and law crashed together in a storm of competing authority. The quiet void space around the ruin became a meat grinder in the span of a single breath.
Spatial cultivators folded sections of the battlefield into crushing dimensional pockets. They compressed space itself into tight, inescapable boxes, trying to trap rivals inside collapsing geometry. One unfortunate Initiate was caught in three overlapping folds at once. He had been running toward a gap, focused only on the barrier ahead. He never saw the folds coming. His body compressed into a screaming point of light, smaller and smaller, before the folds tore him apart completely. There was a brief, horrible sound. Then nothing. Just scattered energy where a person had been.
Temporal specialists created short, vicious loops. They trapped enemies in repeating three-second windows, forcing them to relive the same incoming attack over and over until their defenses finally broke. One Adept screamed the same unfinished curse four times in a row. The same three words. The same rising pitch of terror. The same desperate raise of his shield. And on the fourth repetition, his protective barrier finally shattered. He died mid-scream for the fifth time.
Destruction and annihilation principles erased techniques mid-flight. Elegant strikes that should have erased sectors turned into harmless sparks and fizzled out. Entire combat styles were wiped from existence for a few critical moments, leaving their users defenseless and confused. One Advanced-tier woman launched a carefully structured attack sequence, only to watch every component dissolve into nothing before it reached her target. She stared at her empty hands for exactly one second. Then an annihilation bolt took her head off.
Binding chains of conceptual law snapped outward like whips. They locked limbs in place. They sealed cultivation bases shut. They froze thought itself, trapping minds in loops of paralysis while their bodies stood helpless. Several combatants found themselves unable to move, unable to think, unable to even form the intention to escape. They hung in the void like insects pinned to a board while attacks closed in.
Illusion principles painted false gaps in the barrier. False images of fleeing competitors. False openings that looked exactly like the real torn sections. Desperate cultivators charged toward what they thought was an entrance and ran straight into ambushes. Three Initiates slammed into an illusory gap and found themselves surrounded by four waiting attackers who had set the trap deliberately. The Initiates died within seconds.
Life-force cultivators drained residual energy from nearby clashes. Every explosion, every released technique, every burst of dying power — they pulled it in and used it to fuel their own recovery and attacks. They grew stronger as others weakened. They fed on the battlefield itself.
Some fought with pure physical power amplified by principles. Their fists and weapons carried the weight of collapsed sectors. Each punch cracked void space. Each swing sent shockwaves rippling outward. They did not bother with complex techniques. They simply hit things until those things stopped existing.
The scale of the destruction was catastrophic.
The void surrounding the ruin was torn to shreds. Space itself ripped open in long, bleeding wounds that leaked raw, chaotic energy. The wounds did not heal. They spread. They multiplied. Residual storms of mixed principles spun outward in every direction, colliding with each other and creating secondary detonations. Explosions birthed more explosions. Collapsing space triggered further collapses. The chain reaction fed itself.
To any distant observer, it would have felt like millions of sectors’ worth of universes were exploding at once. The light alone would have been blinding. The pressure alone would have flattened anything nearby. Shockwaves of clashing laws crashed into each other, erasing entire stretches of empty space and leaving behind only turbulent, wounded void. The local region became a boiling storm of color, force, and screaming authority. Red and black and gold and white all mixed together in a howling maelstrom.
The original quiet area around the ruin no longer existed. In its place was a battlefield that looked like the end of a minor multiversal war. The kind of destruction that usually only happened when entire civilizations clashed. And it was all over a doorway.
People died.
An Initiate was caught in overlapping spatial folds and crushed into a singularity of information particles and light. His scream lasted less than a second.
An Adept’s upper body was cleanly erased by an annihilation principle. One moment he was running. The next moment, everything above his waist simply stopped existing. His legs kept moving for two more steps before they realized there was nothing above them. They kicked once. Then went still. Then dissolved.
A Beginner was turned inside out by a conceptual inversion technique. His scream cut off abruptly as his form inverted into something that could no longer hold a soul. What was left behind looked like a shape that should not exist. Something with too many angles. Something that hurt to look at.
Bodies ruptured in bright flashes. Souls were scattered across the battlefield like torn paper caught in a storm. Cultivation bases shattered in final, brilliant bursts of released energy, painting the void with brief, beautiful light before fading into nothing.
Yet true permanent death among Multiversals was rare. Almost impossibly rare. Most of them carried multiple layers of insurance. They had prepared for this. They had always prepared for this.
Some had residual information backups stored in distant anchors or dimensions. The moment their body was destroyed, those anchors activated, immediately beginning the slow process of rebuilding their forms from stored data. Others possessed external life-bound artifacts that triggered the instant the original body failed. The artifacts hummed to life, slowly reconstructing flesh, energy, and soul from stored templates. A few relied on principle-based resurrection, reassembling themselves from principle fragments they had previously imprinted on the void itself. Delayed soul reassembly protocols activated. Pre-set revival points hidden in far-off locations pinged to life. Crude but effective body-regeneration techniques kicked in.
Many of the "dead" were already beginning to reform even as the fight raged on around their previous positions. Faint outlines of light gathered where bodies had been. Scattered soul fragments drifted back toward central points. Bones regrew. Energy recondensed. Eyes reopened.
Temporary death was painful. It was costly. It set back cultivation and burned resources. But for most of them, it was only a setback. Not an ending.
So they got back up. And they kept fighting.
The chaos only intensified as more combatants threw themselves into the fray. The ones who had been watching from the edges finally committed. The ones who had been waiting for the right moment decided this was it. The void became a grinding, screaming machine of violence.
In the middle of the storm, a few individuals carved their own paths with cold efficiency.
One Expert with an unusually refined movement principle slipped between clashing attacks like water flowing between stones. He never threw a single offensive technique. He never raised his hand to strike. He simply read the flow of the battle, adjusted his position by fractions, and moved through the gaps while everyone else tried to kill each other. A punch missed him by a hair. An annihilation bolt passed through the space he had occupied half a second ago. A spatial fold collapsed exactly where he would have been if he had not shifted left. He reached an open section of the barrier almost unnoticed and stepped through without hesitation. No one even saw him go.
Another cultivator used a rare phase-shifting principle. For short bursts, he became partially non-existent. Not invisible. Not hidden. Simply not fully there. Attacks that should have erased him passed through empty afterimages. Fists struck nothing. Chains grabbed air. He drifted through the worst of the combat like a ghost, ignoring the screams and explosions around him. His face was calm. His breathing was steady. He slipped into a gap while two stronger combatants were busy trying to annihilate each other three meters away. Neither of them noticed him.
A silent woman who specialized in misdirection created a dozen perfect afterimages of herself. Each one looked real. Each one moved differently. Each one ran toward a different gap. The battlefield tore the fakes apart one by one. Explosions consumed them. Chains grabbed them. Spatial folds crushed them. Each death looked convincing. Each scream sounded genuine. While her copies died in spectacular fashion, her real body walked calmly through a different gap entirely. Her expression never changed. She did not look back.
A massive six-armed beast of a man simply smashed everything in front of him. He did not dodge. He did not weave. He did not use clever techniques. He took dozens of hits. Attacks struck his body and he kept moving. He lost two arms at the shoulder in a single exchange. Blood and energy sprayed outward. He regenerated them mid-charge, new arms bursting from the stumps in sprays of raw power. He kept moving. He kept swinging. He bullied his way forward through pure durability and stubborn, relentless violence. Behind him, a thin scholar-type cultivator followed in the bloody path he cleared. The scholar made no effort to help or hinder anyone. He simply took advantage of the opening and walked through the barrier with the calm of someone who had planned for exactly this kind of chaos.
One after another, the successful ones crossed the torn barrier and stepped into the light teleportation door.
The moment they entered the ruin, the same massive suppression that had greeted Runar and the others slammed down on them without mercy. No warning or gradual buildup. Just an instant, crushing weight that locked everything down.
An Expert who had been so confident outside dropped to his knees. He gasped for breath that his new physical body suddenly needed. His eyes were wide. His hands trembled.
"What... what is this pressure?!"
His tens of principles he had mastered locked up as if iron clamps had closed around them. The multiverses he carried inside him went silent and distant, like stars seen through thick fog. His body of energy and information was forced into heavy physical matter that felt slow and fragile and wrong. Only the Principle of Runes still answered him with full Multiversal power. The contrast left him shaken. He sat on the ground for a long moment, just breathing, just trying to understand.
A Master’s disciple who had followed her group earlier stared at her hands in disbelief as the suppression settled over her.
"Everything is sealed... except runes? This is insane. What kind of place does this?"
Across different spawning points in the forest layer, the same realization spread like a cold wave. Shock. Rage. Cold calculation. Panic. Each new arrival experienced the crushing restriction. Each one felt the chains lock down. Each one discovered that only one path remained open. Some immediately tried to force other principles to respond and failed. They pushed and pulled and commanded, and nothing answered. Others tested their rune comprehension and felt the familiar Multiversal power flow only through that single channel. A few with sharper eyes already began examining the rune-constructed forest around them with greedy or desperate eyes, realizing that the trees themselves were textbooks.
One Advanced-tier man who had just reformed after temporary death stumbled through a gap and successfully entered the the ruin immediately fell to one knee when he spawned in a desert. His body was still knitting itself back together, still recovering from being killed. And then the suppression hit on top of that.
"My body... it’s physical again. Everything is locked. Only runes still work." He looked around at the glowing trees with wide, frightened eyes. "What kind of place is this?"
Nearby, a pair of Initiates who had entered together stared at each other in rising panic. Their faces were pale. Their hands were shaking.
"I barely know any runes," one whispered. "Maybe twenty basic structures. How are we supposed to fight like this?"
"We don’t," the other answered. His voice was tight but steady. He was already scanning his surroundings already looking at the symbols covering everything. "We learn. Fast. Or we die for real this time."
Outside, the battle continued without them.
More people forced their way toward the remaining gaps. More principles clashed in catastrophic displays. More temporary deaths occurred and began reversing in slow, painful reconstructions. The void around the ruin remained a shredded, howling storm of violence. Space bled from a hundred wounds. Laws screamed as they were twisted and broken. The sensation of millions of sectors’ worth of universes exploding at once did not fade. It only grew more chaotic as fresh combatants poured more power into the fight.
None of them knew the truth yet.
There were no conventional treasures waiting inside to be seized. No simple inheritance vaults filled with ready-made weapons or cultivation resources. No piles of artifacts or bottles of pills or stacks of technique scrolls. The real prize of the ruin was something far less straightforward. Far less tangible. And most of the desperate, bloody effort outside was already wasted motion. Energy spent on a race that did not matter in the way they thought it did.
The ruin did not care about their greed. It did not care about their temporary deaths. It did not care about their rank or their reputation or their power outside its walls. It only cared about the depth of their understanding once they stepped inside. That was the only currency. That was the only measure.
But they kept fighting anyway.
Because in the multiverse, the chance at greater power was almost always worth the risk of temporary death. Because no one wanted to be the one who stayed behind and wondered. Because the fear of missing out was stronger than the fear of dying.
And the first chamber of the ruin continued to receive new, newly weakened visitors. One after another. Scattering them across its rune-constructed forest to begin the real test under the same iron rules. Stripping them down. Leveling them. Forcing them to prove their worth in the only language the ruin accepted.
The scramble outside had become a war.
The competition inside had only just started.