309: Blue Star!

As far as his eyes could see, Lin Yuan's heart suddenly sank into a bottomless abyss!

Blue Star was still torn into the realms of Yin and Yang. The hemisphere facing the sun was bathed in a false tranquility, with azure oceans and verdant continents clearly outlined under the golden sunlight. However, the other half... that hemisphere once swallowed by the Burial God Abyss, which, despite having its core pollution removed, had a spatial structure on the brink of total collapse—it was a shocking sight!

Planetary scars! Spatial rifts as massive as the gaping maws of an abyss, like the claw marks of an evil god, crisscrossed the land, piercing through continents and tearing apart oceans! Tectonic plates twisted, overturned, and shattered in silent wails! Once prosperous cities had become blurred silhouettes of broken walls and ruins, tightly shrouded by billowing clouds of filthy dust carrying the breath of death. The entire hemisphere was as deathly silent as an ancient burial ground! Only the energy turbulence caused by the collapse of the spatial structure flickered and annihilated silently at the edges of the rifts, like the final spasms of a dying behemoth!

But this sight was far from the most fatal shock!

Lin Yuan's Divine Thought, like an invisible flood of world-ending destruction, carrying the vast perception of a Myriad Dao Realm Dao Lord capable of covering the stars, instantly swept across Blue Star—that "surviving" hemisphere bathed in false sunlight!

Empty!

A deathly, absolute emptiness!

The mother planet that was once full of vitality and carried nearly ten billion living beings now felt as weak as a candle in the wind in his Divine Thought! The vast land, the immense oceans, the city clusters as dense as ant nests... this should have been a place where the breath of life intertwined like a boiling sea of stars, but now it was as if an invisible, bone-chilling hand had wiped away the vast majority of existence!

Skyscrapers had turned into a silent forest of steel tombstones, their glass curtain walls reflecting cold, heatless sunlight. On the streets, abandoned vehicles piled up into continuous mounds, rust being their only mourner. In the parks, empty swings swayed hollowly in the deathly wind, and faded toys lay scattered on the ground, freezing a moment of childhood innocence that had come to a sudden halt. Supermarket shelves were overturned, and goods rotted under thick layers of dust. The cities had long since died; the neon lights that never slept were completely extinguished, with only a few scattered emergency lights struggling to survive in the shadows of massive buildings, casting brief, lonely, ghost-fire-like spots of light.

The fields were desolate, with withered crops on charred earth pointing toward the gloomy sky. The ports were deathly silent; giant ships were like stranded steel coffins, their cables snapped, drifting with the waves on the silent sea toward nothingness.

The entire planet was a civilization graveyard, instantly abandoned and magnified billions of times!

"One billion... no, even fewer..." Lin Yuan's heart felt as if it were frozen and crushed by ten-thousand-year-old profound ice! His Divine Thought precisely captured those life signals, weak as candles in the wind and scattered sporadically across the ruins: elderly people huddled in the corners of cold shelters, gasping for breath as they waited for death; young children crying hoarsely among the broken walls with no one to respond; the sick and injured lying on simple beds, their eyes hollow as they waited for a rescue that would never come... These ordinary people, who could not Cultivate or were too weak to cause spatial ripples, were like dust heartlessly swept away, abandoned upon the ashes of civilization! The number... had plummeted to a heart-wrenching less than one billion!

"What happened?! Where did the Martial Artists go?" A bone-chilling cold instantly froze Lin Yuan's spine! The Burial God Abyss's consumption was indeed terrifying, but given the speed of its spread and the situation he had timely suppressed, it was absolutely impossible for such a tragic extinction of Martial Artists to occur in just a few days! This was more like... a cold, efficient, large-scale cleansing evacuation! They had taken all the elites and power, leaving behind only these "burdens"... the abandoned people!

At that moment, Lin Yuan's Divine Thought suddenly focused! He captured faint but familiar energy fluctuations—Martial Artist spiritual energy—on the giant holographic projection bases that had long since stopped working in the centers of several super-city ruins that were once the most densely populated! Moreover, it was the energy of Martial Artists with considerable strength! One of the auras was vast and majestic, yet carried a decisiveness that led the era and a... bone-deep sorrow! Lin Yuan instantly recognized it—Blue Star's strongest expert, Ji Fengyun!

"Where are the Martial Artists? Where is Blue Star's Martial Artist force?!" Lin Zhengnan's voice carried shock and disbelief. Before he "fell asleep," although Blue Star's martial path wasn't top-tier, there were still dozens of Spirit Refining Realm experts and a huge base of Martial Artists to support it. How could it have withered to this extent?!

Lin Yuan's eyes were like quenched cold blades, and his Divine Thought pierced into the Void Realm like a probe, frantically tracing the remaining fragments of information. In the atmosphere, traces of a special, large-scale spatial jump fluctuation were vaguely visible; in the ruins of major cities worldwide, the remains of those broken giant projection devices stood like silent monuments of accusation.

The truth, pieced together by his Divine Thought, arrived with bloody sorrow!

Just as the Burial God Abyss accelerated its consumption of the Kuiper Belt and despair swept across Blue Star like a plague, a golden pillar of light that tore through the firmament rose from deep within the Kunlun Mountains—reaching toward the heavens! At the core of the light pillar, a figure stood as towering as an ancient deity; it was none other than Ji Fengyun, the recognized pillar of Blue Star!

His face was as solemn as if cast from ten-thousand-year-old profound iron, and his eyes no longer held their former disdain, leaving only heart-burning anxiety and a kind of... desperation to perish together! After leading the Martial Artists deep into the black mist and paying a heavy price, he had actually used some secret method to communicate with Blue Star's most mysterious existence—the projection of the heaven-reaching pagoda!

Every remaining screen across the globe, whether internet or broadcast, was forcibly cut into at the same moment. The figure of Ji Fengyun, who had once brought infinite hope to humanity, appeared before every screen. However, his voice at this moment was as heavy as a funeral bell and choked with blood:

"Fellow citizens of Blue Star... I am... Ji Fengyun..." His voice trembled so much he could barely form a sentence, and the tears he struggled to hold back in his eyes stung the heart of every survivor. "The Burial God Abyss... we... are powerless... Its consumption speed is far beyond our most desperate imagination... All of Blue Star's defenses... including myself... are vulnerable before it..."

The background of the screen was the towering and ancient body of the Kunlun heaven-reaching pagoda's projection. The dim, clear light emitted by the pagoda's body seemed so cold and distant at this moment.

"The spirit of the heaven-reaching pagoda... has responded! This pagoda's projection... can provide... the final refuge for Martial Artists to temporarily leave this realm... But..." Ji Fengyun's voice suddenly became incredibly difficult, each word sounding as if it were being gouged out from the depths of his Soul, carrying the pain of tearing flesh and an indescribable guilt, "It... can only carry lives that have awakened Mental Energy! Ordinary citizens... cannot enter!"

Before the screens, billions of pairs of desperate eyes instantly froze! Cries, curses, and heart-wrenching pleas... the invisible waves of sound seemed to penetrate the screens, turning into overwhelming resentment and despair that crashed heavily upon Ji Fengyun!

He slammed his eyes shut, and two lines of scalding tears finally burst forth. When he opened them again, his eyes were as red as blood, with only the decisiveness to cut through eternity burning fiercely! "I... Ji Fengyun... have failed the people of the world! Ten thousand deaths cannot atone for this crime!" He almost roared these words, his voice hoarse. "But! To preserve the final sparks of Blue Star's civilization! For the future... for that revenge and hope so faint it's almost invisible... I... have to... make this... heart-wrenching decision that will leave eternal regret!"

He raised his head to the sky and let out a final, most tragic roar like a dying behemoth. His voice was like a blood-weeping war drum, tearing apart Blue Star's last shred of peace:

"All Blue Star Martial Artists who have awakened Mental Energy—hear my command!"

"Give up all pointless resistance!"

"Immediately—assemble toward the Cangqiong Academy in the Kunlun Mountains!"

"Using your Mental Energy as proof—sense the heaven-reaching pagoda's projection!"

"The Pagoda Spirit—will guide you... to leave!"

"This is—a military order!"

"This is—the Blue Star civilization's..."

"Final... sparks!!"

As his voice faded, the screen—suddenly went pitch black!