364: Chapter 365 The Law of Decay? My coat isn't even torn.

The cracking ground did not produce a thunderous roar.

It was as if someone were turning the soil in a garden; clumps of earth were silently pushed aside, and gravel slid to both sides, revealing a hole less than a meter in diameter.

Then, a hand reached out from the hole.

The hand held an entrenching tool covered in repair marks.

Next came the shoulders, head, and body—a youth wearing an ordinary black casual jacket and carrying a backpack climbed out of the hole three meters in front of Ku Ye.

After climbing out, he even meticulously patted the dirt off his knees.

Ku Ye saw his face.

It was very young.

Ridiculously young.

If he hadn't sensed the terrifying energy density contained in those two shovel strikes just now, he would have thought this was a lost student who had wandered into the Rotten Wood Forest by mistake.

But it was this very young face, along with that ugly entrenching tool, that had sliced his hundred years of painstaking effort in half thirty seconds ago.

After Lin Qi stood firm, he first surveyed his surroundings.

The Rotten Wood Forest lived up to its name.

The surrounding trees were all in a half-dead state, their trunks grey-white and cracked, with withered yellow leaves hanging from the branches, shivering in the morning breeze. The ground was covered with a thick layer of humus, feeling as soft as rotting sponge when stepped upon.

A sweet, cloying scent of decay permeated the air.

The pillar of light from the faith channel was only seven or eight meters away, still flickering feebly, but its light had already dimmed by more than half.

The ancient tree was behind him. Its trunk, as thick as a small building, was covered in grey-black fungal plaques; half of the canopy was completely dead, while the other half still bore a few clusters of dark green leaves.

Then Lin Qi's gaze fell upon Ku Ye.

A withered, thin old man.

He was truly very old. The wrinkles on his skin were like the bark of a thousand-year-old tree, and brown age spots extended from his face all the way down his neck. His hair was entirely white and so sparse that the individual strands could be counted, but the light in his eyes was extremely sharp.

He wore an old grey-green robe and a pair of woven straw sandals on his feet.

Over a hundred years old, he looked as if he had crawled out of an Ancient Tomb.

The two of them locked eyes.

Ku Ye spoke first. His voice was hoarse, with the texture of rubbing bark.

"You are the one who killed Cang Yan."

Cang Yan. The name of the mining area's High Priest. Lin Qi didn't know the name, but he could guess who was being referred to.

"Mhm," Lin Qi replied briefly, propping himself up with the entrenching tool against the ground.

Ku Ye's gaze moved from Lin Qi's face to the entrenching tool, then back again.

"A weapon of the Frontier Army?"

"Dug it up in a ruin."

"Are you from the Federation?"

"I am my own person."

Ku Ye fell silent for a second.

Then he moved.

Without any warning, Ku Ye's withered hands suddenly thrust forward, and the Law of Decay exploded outward with him at the center.

Dark green mist covered all space within a thirty-meter radius of him in less than 0.3 seconds.

This was no ordinary decay.

This was the supreme Law condensed from Ku Ye's hundred years of cultivation, "Extreme Decay."

Wherever the mist reached, the humus layer weathered directly into fine powder; a withered tree the thickness of a forearm three meters away turned from grey-white to dark brown the moment it touched the mist, then turned to powder, and even the powder continued to decompose; dense cracks appeared on the surface of stones on the ground, as if accelerated by a thousand years of time.

The power of this strike was enough to cause any fourth-turn powerhouse to age to death within three seconds.

Once a biological body was enveloped, cells would die off at thousands of times their normal rate, muscles would atrophy, bones would become brittle, and organs would fail—a death more thorough than any poison.

The dark green mist swallowed Lin Qi.

Ku Ye stared at Lin Qi's position within the mist, his cloudy old eyes holding no joy of victory—only a cold sense of judgment.

Within his Law Domain, no living thing could survive for more than five seconds.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

The mist began to dissipate.

Lin Qi stood where he was.

The entrenching tool was still propped on the ground. The backpack was still on his back. That black casual jacket, which looked like it had been washed many times, was perfectly intact; not even a single loose thread had appeared at the collar.

He hadn't even changed his posture.

Ku Ye's hand froze in mid-air.

As the mist continued to dissipate, Lin Qi's full appearance was completely revealed—from the strands of his hair to the soles of his shoes, there was not a single trace of decay.

A faint, indistinct Chaos-colored sheen appeared on his skin, neither gold nor jade, shimmering slightly in the morning light.

Ancient Martial Gangqi.

An absolute isolation membrane formed by the Dao Source wrapping the body's surface.

The essence of Ku Ye's Law of Decay was to achieve destruction through accelerated degradation at the elemental and molecular levels—but the Protective Aura directly constructed a closed structure on Lin Qi's body surface that was independent of the external elemental System.

The target of the Law's effect simply could not come into contact with Lin Qi's body.

It was like spraying tear gas at someone wearing a spacesuit; the gas indeed hit them, but since they had their own oxygen circulation System, they couldn't inhale it at all.

Ku Ye's pupils constricted completely at this moment.

He had lived for over a hundred years. He had seen Law resistance, elemental immunity, and the high-dimensional power displayed by the Lord Prophet.

But he had never seen anyone who could stand right in the center of his Law Domain without even getting their clothes dirty.

This was no longer "resistance."

This was "ignoring."

It was as if the two of them were in different dimensions—his Law attack, for this youth, simply did not exist from the very beginning.

"Your Law..." For the first time, a genuine tremor appeared in Ku Ye's voice, "...belongs to which System?"

Lin Qi pulled the entrenching tool out of the ground and shouldered it.

"It doesn't belong to any System."

He took a step forward.

It was just an ordinary step, with no oppressive aura released, no explosion of Dao Source, not even an increase in speed.

But Ku Ye took half a step back.

An old High Priest who had lived for over a hundred years and was rooted in a region took half a step back in front of a seventeen-year-old youth.

Not because of fear.

But because his body was instinctively telling him that the person in front of him should not exist in his world.

"Your Law is useless against me," Lin Qi's tone was as flat as if he were stating a weather forecast. "Your perception net is already broken. Your faith channel still has—"

He tilted his head to look at the feebly flickering light pillar not far away.

"About ten minutes of power left."

Ku Ye's Adam's apple bobbed.

"So," Lin Qi lowered the entrenching tool from his shoulder, blade facing forward, holding it casually in his hand.

"Don't waste time, old man. Tell me what you know about the Container and the Prophet."

He paused for a moment.

"If you speak up readily, I'll let you go without pain."

Ku Ye's lips moved.

He looked at this incredibly young opponent, at that unremarkable entrenching tool, and at that casual jacket that was unscathed within the Extreme Decay Law.

Then he laughed.

A smile more unsightly than crying squeezed onto his withered face.

"Young man... you think that by cutting the tree I planted, you've won?"

He raised his hand and pointed at the ground beneath his feet.

"Look down; the thing I'm raising is about to wake up."

For the first time, Lin Qi's expression changed.

A very slight change; his brow twitched.

His Dao Source instantly spread beneath his feet.

Deep underground, at the end of the "diversion direction" he had sensed earlier, something was throbbing.

The frequency was not twelve times per minute.

It was once per minute.

Extremely slow, extremely heavy, like a heart awakening from a deep slumber.