109: Title: Son of the Beginning

The cold mechanical voice sounded at the right time, like a divine oracle being proclaimed:

[First Trial: Time Torrent survival time: thirty breaths; Evaluation: Perfect!]

[Time Origin Law affinity: 5000%; Evaluation: Unprecedented!]

With a thought, Trace-less scanned his own panel:

[Time divine sense tree (Perfection)]

[Basic Combat Power: 300,000 Yu]

[Time Origin Law Mastery: 30% (+90,000 Yu)]

[Time Origin Law Affinity: 5000%]

Comprehensive Combat Power: 390,000 Yu!

Before he could recover from this surging power, the mechanical voice suddenly rose, carrying an unprecedented urgency and excitement:

"Warning! The tester's evaluation for the first trial has exceeded the historical threshold! The second trial's testing mode is forcibly changed—Free Challenge Mode activated!"

[Second Trial: Combat Power Test · Ultimate Trial]

[Opponents: Taichu Divine Continent · Spirit Refining Realm Historical General Ranking · Projections of the top 100,000 Prodigies!]

Shua—!

In the vast starry sky battlefield, a hundred thousand light cocoons as brilliant as stars appeared out of thin air! The cocoon shells shattered, and figures emitting an aura that suppressed eternity and cut across eras stepped out from the broken starlight!

A cold Sword Immortal carrying an ancient sword, his Sword Qi splitting the galaxy!

A peerless Divine Maiden treading barefoot on a phoenix, her divine flames incinerating the eight desolations!

A ten-thousand-zhang tall Primordial Giant, his golden blood vitality shaking the Universe!

...One hundred thousand figures of various forms, yet without exception, their bodies were entwined with a terrifying aura that made space wail and Laws retreat! They were all ultimate monsters who had truly ruled a Spirit Refining era throughout the endless eons of the Taichu Divine Continent!

[Rules: Survive amidst the siege of a hundred thousand Prodigies! Time is the score!]

One hundred thousand pairs of eyes containing supreme will locked onto the only living being in the field—Trace-less—at the same instant!

Rumble rumble rumble—!!!

Without any warning or probing, a world-ending tide erupted instantly! One hundred thousand attacks, like the first destructive light at the beginning of the Universe, wove into an ultimate net that covered the entire starry sky and annihilated all life! Sword light severed the chains of the galaxy! Punch shadows pulverized star worlds! An ice tide frozen the myriad realms! Divine fire incinerated the heavens! Countless high-level and low-level Laws, even interspersed with wisps of Origin power, turned into a torrent of destruction, completely submerging and tearing apart the space where Trace-less was located!

"Time Stasis!"

At the critical moment, Trace-less formed hand seals, and the Time divine sense tree in his Sea of Consciousness erupted with a silver glow that illuminated eternity! A silver halo of extreme purity swept out silently with him as the center!

Buzz—!

Wherever the halo passed, time froze!

A radius of a hundred miles turned into an absolute stasis Domain! That world-destroying tide of attacks, hundreds of millions of energy beams and Law torrents capable of pulverizing a Small World, were strangely frozen in the Void Realm less than a hundred zhang from Trace-less's body, as if the pause button had been pressed! The galaxy battlefield fell into a deathly silver-white silence!

However, only for half a breath!

Crack! Crack! Crack!

Like a mirror shattering! Over a thousand figures in the front ranks with the most terrifying auras erupted with Law power that shook time and space, violently tearing through the shackles of Time Stasis!

Clang—! A swordsman in green robes swung his sword, and dozens of complete high-level Laws transformed into a river of Sword Qi, traversing the Universe!

Screech—! A barefoot girl moved with lotus steps, the Six Paths of Reincarnation seals rotating beneath her feet, invoking the phantoms of the birth and death of the heavens!

Even more terrifying were the hundreds of phantoms entwined with the radiance of Origin Laws! Although most were only low-level Origins with less than 10% comprehension, in the Spirit Refining Realm, this was already a power that shocked the past and present and subverted perception! Hundreds of attacks containing the might of the Origin tore through the frozen time and space, piercing towards Trace-less like spears of judgment!

"Well come!" Trace-less shouted, his Battle Intent soaring to the skies! The silver roots of the Time divine sense tree plunged fiercely into the depths of the Void Realm, actually beginning to frantically extract the Origin power of the long river of time! His hand seals changed again, and a great power that reversed Karma and subverted the temporal order erupted:

"Time... Reversal!"

Buzz!

With Trace-less as the center, within a radius of ten thousand zhang, that world-destroying torrent of attacks was forcibly turned around by an invisible giant hand! Sword light rolled back! Punch shadows returned! Divine fire burned in reverse! The ice tide traced back! One hundred thousand destructive attacks poured out, under the absolute dominance of the power of time, actually turned their spearheads and blasted back towards their masters with an even more violent posture!

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

The starry sky battlefield was instantly completely swallowed by light and heat that exceeded the limits! The shockwaves generated by the collision of Laws, like hundreds of millions of stars exploding simultaneously, tore the space into dense black cracks like a spider web! The radiance of energy annihilation illuminated the eternal darkness!

In this world-destroying collision, those Prodigy phantoms ranked lower vanished into thin air like ice and snow under the blazing sun, before they could even scream! Only the peerless monsters ranked in the top hundred of history stood firm in the tide, relying on their Heaven-Defying foundations and instincts!

"Break!" The black-robed man ranked ninety-seventh, his fists entwined with pure Gold Origin, punched out, actually punching a hole through the backward-flowing long river of time!

"Extinguish!" The one-eyed giant ranked tenth roared to the sky, his single eye bursting with Light Origin that annihilated all things, turning all attacks reaching him into nothingness!

Most heart-palpitating was the masked woman ranked third; with a flick of her finger, the Origin power of space folded and twisted, forming a dimensional pocket that swallowed everything, silently transferring all attacks!

"What strong combat instincts!" Trace-less's pupils suddenly contracted. These projections could actually withstand Time Reversal!

Change of move! "Time... Acceleration!"

Trace-less's seals changed again! That silver halo covering ten thousand miles suddenly contracted and condensed, turning into three hundred and sixty Time Arrows as thin as hair but faster than the limit of thought, ignoring spatial barriers and piercing the strongest group of phantoms in an instant!

Buzz!

The movements of the phantoms hit suddenly accelerated ten thousand times, a hundred thousand times! Time flowed frantically upon them! The purple-haired youth ranked seventy-second, his body visibly aged and weathered under the ten-thousand-fold acceleration, turning into cosmic dust in the blink of an eye! The youth ranked fifty-fifth, his proud Earth Origin could not resist the erosion of time either, his majestic body crumbling inch by inch and dissipating into filling sand!

Except for those ten figures standing like boulders at the peak of history, all other phantoms were instantly turned into nothingness under this inconceivable temporal dimension tearing!

"Roar!" The phantom ranked tenth had his Life Origin boiling, tenaciously resisting the washing of time, but his aura was weakening frantically! After supporting for only three breaths, he finished a million-year life journey under the ten-thousand-fold acceleration, turning into a withered bone and drifting away with the wind!

Just then!

Chi—!

A Fate Origin spear entwined with a gray aura that seemed to dominate the destiny of all living beings was thrown without warning from the hands of the golden-armored youth ranked first! The spear tip ignored the turbulence of Time Acceleration, directly locking onto Trace-less's past, present, and future, and pierced towards his forehead with the will of inevitable fate!

At the same time! A cold light flashed in the eyes of the silver-haired woman ranked second, and the black long sword in her hand slashed out a Destruction Origin Sword Qi containing the Concept of the end of all things and the silence of the Universe! The Sword Qi arrived later but struck first, forming a fatal combined attack with the Fate Spear, sealing off all possibilities of evasion and resistance for Trace-less!

Puchi!

Blood appeared! Trace-less's right shoulder was pierced by the Fate Spear! Silver divine blood containing the curse of fate sprayed onto the cold starry sky!

"Heh..." Under the intense pain, instead of fear, a near-insane heat ignited in Trace-less's eyes! In his Sea of Consciousness, that Time divine sense tree crashed out, directly manifesting in the starry sky battlefield! The three Time Origin Dao Marks branded on the trunk simultaneously erupted with silver light that illuminated the heavens! At the top of the tree crown, the phantom of that ancient sundial began to rotate backward and frantically!

"Time... Zero!"

Buzz!!!

An indescribable, ultimate temporal power beyond understanding descended! In the entire vast starry sky battlefield, time... stopped flowing! Then, like a film being rewound, everything in the battlefield—the shattered space, the annihilated energy, and even the nine remaining peerless phantoms—began to flow backward against all logic! The destroyed phantoms reconsolidated, and their violent attack postures were reset, returning to the moment they first launched their attacks!

That was it!

Trace-less slammed his palms together! The sundial phantom vibrated violently, projecting three phantoms of the long river of time that traversed the endless starry sky as if connecting the past and present! The long river surged, instantly engulfing those nine phantoms ranked in the top ten who had just "reborn" and had no time to react into the violent and disorderly temporal turbulence! No matter how they struggled and roared, they could not escape this banishment originating from the Time Origin!

[Killed all historical top 100,000 Spirit Refining Realm Prodigy projections!]

[Evaluation: Unique throughout the ages!]

[Potential calculation complete: Time Origin Law Mastery 30%! Red Dao Foundation (Supreme)! Tenth-order Divine Thought (Unseen since ancient times)! Eternal Evolution Body (Not activated)!]

[Total Score: 10 million!]

The cold prompt voice carried a hint of undisguisable shock.

Boom-crack—!!!

The moment the score was settled, the primal divine stele that had stood for eternity outside actually emitted an overburdened wail! On the surface of the stele, all the flowing starlight points suddenly went out! Under the horrified gazes of countless Cultivators—

Chi-la!

A Chaos Qi Pillar of an indescribable color, as if containing all the mysteries of Chaos at the birth of the Universe, tore through the thirty-three heavens and crashed down, ignoring all obstructions! The Qi pillar precisely penetrated the primal divine stele, completely enveloping Trace-less in the testing space!

A voice, unprecedentedly solemn and grand like the Heavenly Dao's decree, resounded throughout all places on the Taichu Continent that possessed a divine stele:

[Detected a Supreme Time Origin compatible one!]

[Conferring the supreme title of "Son of the Primordial (Time)"!]

[Bestowing: time origin dao seed * 1!]

A seed of light only the size of a thumb, translucent, with a miniature version of the surging long river of time floating inside, slowly drifted down from the Chaos Qi Pillar and fell into Trace-less's palm. The moment his fingertips touched it, the light seed had already traversed time and space, directly merging into his Sea of Consciousness!

Buzz!

In the Sea of Consciousness, the Time divine sense tree swayed frantically! All the silver-white roots, like dragons that had been thirsty for hundreds of millions of years, greedily and recklessly plunged into that time origin dao seed! Visibly, the fourth, fifth... more mysterious and complex Time Origin Dao Marks containing an immortal aura were rapidly generated and branded on the main trunk of the tree! The aura of the divine tree began another terrifying leap!

When that Chaos Qi Pillar traversing heaven and earth slowly dissipated... when Trace-less's figure reappeared calmly before the primal divine stele... the entire Tianmen City fell into a deathly, suffocating silence! Hundreds of millions of Cultivators, as if under a freezing spell, even forgot to breathe.

"Boom—!!!"

The silence was shattered! On the surface of the primal divine stele, hundreds of millions of Chaos golden lights that pierced the firmament exploded! All the starlight points on the stele flowed and reorganized frantically, finally condensing a line of Chaos Divine Script that traversed the sky and illuminated eternity at the very top of the list symbolizing the limit of the Spirit Refining Realm:

[Taichu Divine Continent · Spirit Refining Realm Historical General Ranking]

[First Place: Time Without Trace (Son of the Primordial)]

"Son of the Primordial?! The Heavenly Dao bestowed the surname 'Time'!!"

"The surname Time! He was given the surname of time by the Heavenly Dao! This is receiving the supreme recognition of the Time Origin!"

"Impossible! This is absolutely impossible! 'Son of the Primordial' is a supreme title that stands above a Dao Lord in legends!"

"Dao Lord? The last Destruction Dao Lord who obtained the title of 'Son of the Primordial' was an existence that suppressed the heavens ten eras ago!!"

"Spirit Refining Realm, Son of the Primordial, Heavenly Dao bestowed surname, my Dao Heart is going to collapse!"

On the square, it was as if a Destruction Divine Thunder had been thrown! Countless Cultivators' faces were as white as paper, their bodies trembling violently! Thud! Thud! Thud! Like a wave of harvested wheat, large patches of Cultivators uncontrollably knelt on the ground, prostrating themselves before the name on the divine stele! Those Feather Transformation Realm and Dharma Domain Realm powerhouses who had previously looked down on Trace-less were now even more pale, their eyes filled only with boundless fear and awe, as if they were seeing a god walking among men!

"He... he... he... he... he is really only in the Spirit Refining Realm?!" That Feather Transformation Realm brute who had carried a bronze battle-axe and mocked him was now chattering his teeth. Recalling his previous ignorant arrogant words, boundless fear seized his heart, his back was instantly soaked with a waterfall of cold sweat, and cracks appeared in his Dao Heart!

Clatter!

The recording Jade Slip in the red-robed old man's hand fell to the ground and shattered into pieces. He stared fixedly at that calm figure under the divine stele, his lips trembling, using all his strength to squeeze out a few words: "The Time-Space Divine Temple... has produced another monster among monsters!"

Trace-less's expression was calm and rippleless, as if that achievement that shocked the past and present had nothing to do with him. His Tenth-order Divine Thought was like an invisible heavenly net, silently covering a radius of ten thousand miles. In an instant, within ten thousand miles, every Cultivator's heartbeat frequency, blood flow speed, every bit of stagnation in the operation of their True Essence, every fluctuation of their Divine Soul, and even how their muscles would contract, how their True Essence would run, and what thoughts their Divine Soul would generate in the next three breaths, were all reflected clearly in his perception that touched the essence of time, like looking at the lines on his palm.

Awe, fear, worship, jealousy, fanaticism... countless complex emotions surged toward him like a substantial wave.

"Is this the feeling of being feared by all living beings?" Trace-less whispered in his heart, but in the depths of his clear eyes, not a single ripple of pride was raised, only a natural calmness, like looking down on the changes of the galaxy, eternal and unchanging.