367: Chapter 368 The second useless seed is in hand; I'll scatter your ashes.

Ku Ye's body lay on the humus, his chest collapsed, his spine shattered, and his breathing so weak it had nearly stopped.

After his Soul was violently searched, his consciousness had completely dissipated, leaving only the most basic physiological functions to maintain a sliver of life.

But at that moment, Ku Ye's body underwent a change.

Dark green patterns began to surface on his skin. The patterns spread from his heart toward his limbs, like dead vines regrowing.

It wasn't Ku Ye doing this himself.

He no longer had the ability.

It was something deep within his Soul that automatically activated after his consciousness collapsed.

The evil god mark.

Lin Qi had seen this thing during the Soul search. Every High Priest's Soul core had a mark implanted by the Prophet. It usually remained dormant, but its function was to automatically start a sacrificial procedure when the High Priest was near death, converting the High Priest's residual Soul and Physical Body into Law energy to feed back into the faith channel.

To put it bluntly, it was a time bomb.

You work for me while you're alive, and you have to burn yourself as fuel when you die.

The Prophet was someone who had written the word "exploitation" into his very genes.

The dark green patterns spread rapidly across Ku Ye's body, and a thick scent of decay filled the air.

At the center where the patterns converged—the position of Ku Ye's heart—a high-frequency vibration of Law energy pulsed out.

This was the prelude to the activation of the sacrificial procedure.

Once completed, Ku Ye's Soul dregs and residual Law energy would be transmitted back to the Throat of Devouring Heaven through the mark. Although the faith channel itself had been formatted and severed, the mark had its own independent transmission circuit, equivalent to an encrypted satellite phone.

This meant the Prophet would receive the signal that "Ku Ye is dead" immediately and might even use the returned Soul dregs to reverse-track Lin Qi's general location.

No.

Lin Qi's Dao Source intervened when Ku Ye's sacrificial procedure was only thirty percent complete.

There were no complex maneuvers.

He crouched down, pressing his right hand against Ku Ye's chest. The Dao Source seeped into Ku Ye's entire body like ink soaking into rice paper.

Physical formatting.

Starting from the cellular level.

Using Ku Ye's heart as the starting point, the Dao Source rewrote the underlying material structure of his body layer by layer. Cell walls collapsed, protein chains snapped, and DNA sequences were wiped clean. The dark green Law patterns flickered out one by one in the areas the Dao Source passed over, like pixels being erased from a screen.

The transmission circuit of the evil god mark was completely severed when the formatting reached the Soul core.

The mark emitted one last short, high-pitched shriek and then fell silent.

The signal was never sent.

Lin Qi lifted his hand from Ku Ye's chest.

Ku Ye's body no longer existed.

"No longer existed" didn't mean it had vanished.

It was still in its original position, but it was no longer a body.

The formatted matter had lost all organic structure, turning into a pile of extremely fine grayish-white powder that slowly drifted away in the morning breeze.

It was like a clay sculpture left for ten thousand years that crumbled at the slightest touch of wind.

From Ku Ye's activation of ultimate decay to his turning into flying ash, the entire process took less than four minutes.

A hundred-year-old Law High Priest who had cultivated for over eighty years, along with the evil god mark deep in his Soul, had been wiped clean by a seventeen-year-old youth using the most primitive physical means.

No Soul escape.

No death curse.

No external signal.

It was as clean as if this person had never existed.

Lin Qi stood up and brushed the dust off his hands.

Then he looked down at where Ku Ye had dissipated.

In the center of the grayish-white powder, something remained.

A walnut-sized dark green crystal. Its surface luster had faded, and the originally flowing Law energy was frozen inside the crystal, like bubbles preserved in amber.

A law seed.

Just like the one left behind after Cang Yan's death in the mining area. Because the faith channel was interrupted and the High Priest's Soul had dissipated, the seed's connection to the Throat of Devouring Heaven was cut. The Law activity inside rapidly declined, and it was turning into a dead object.

Lin Qi bent over and picked it up.

It felt slightly cool to the touch, with no energy fluctuations.

He turned the seed over a few times and compared it with the one from Cang Yan in his pocket.

They were identical.

Standardized parts produced from the same template.

That made two.

The core material needed for the Fake Seed Fishing Plan was the underlying framework structure of a discarded law seed.

One could serve as a template, and two could be used for cross-verification, ensuring the forged fake seed reached perfect fidelity in its energy fluctuations.

Lin Qi put both seeds away and straightened up.

He looked around at his surroundings.

The Rotten Wood Forest was undergoing visible changes.

The central ancient tree was completely dead. The moment Ku Ye drained its last sliver of vitality, this old tree, which had existed for who knows how many years, fulfilled its mission. Now, the fungal plaques on the trunk were spreading rapidly, and grayish-black corrosion crawled from the top of the trunk down to the roots. A gust of wind blew, and the thickest side branch of the ancient tree snapped, hitting the ground and kicking up a cloud of dust.

But the changes didn't stop there.

In the area that had lost its Law support, the "half-dead" balance of the Rotten Wood Forest, originally maintained by the Law of Decay, was broken.

Those withered trees didn't survive through a normal ecosystem; they relied on the parasitic energy cycle provided by Ku Ye's Law roots.

Now, the roots were all severed. The Law had dissipated.

Without the supply of parasitic energy, these withered trees, which should have been long dead, began to truly perish.

Standing there, Lin Qi heard a series of fine snapping sounds.

Spreading outward from the center.

One tree, two trees, ten, a hundred.

The dead trees were falling.

Not in one direction, but in all directions. Starting from the central ancient tree, they toppled like dominoes, advancing outward circle by circle.

Each falling tree kicked up a cloud of ash-like dust. The dust merged into a gray "wall" that rolled toward the distant tree line.

The fifty-kilometer expanse of the Rotten Wood Forest began an irreversible ecological collapse within minutes of losing its core Law.

Lin Qi stood at the starting point of this collapse for a few seconds.

Morning light filtered through the remains of the fallen trees, landing on the grayish-white powdered ground.

Quiet.

The whole world had gone quiet.

Lin Qi withdrew his gaze and looked at his feet.

Three hundred meters underground, that thing that pulsed twice a minute was still there.

The frequency had risen to three times a minute.

A woman with an Extreme Yin Physique who had been buried alive for twenty-three years.

A Container that had already been nurtured to ninety-one percent.

Lin Qi did not go down.

It wasn't that he didn't want to deal with it.

It was that he currently didn't have enough information. What was the essence of the Container? What would happen after it was nurtured to one hundred percent? Would forcibly destroying the Container trigger some kind of chain reaction? Until these questions had answers, a rash encounter would only increase the risk.

Besides, he had more pressing matters.

Abyssal Fang was looking for people in Tianhai City.

There were millions of ordinary people in Tianhai City with no ability to protect themselves.

Lin Qi shouldered his entrenching tool, turned around, and found the hole he had dug when he arrived.

He jumped down.

The moment he fell underground, his Dao Source re-wrapped his body, the Silence Bubble activated, and the geological medium beneath his feet automatically softened into a traversable passage.

The return trip.

Two thousand kilometers.

He needed to rush back to Tianhai City in the shortest time possible.

Before jumping down, Lin Qi took one last look at the surface.

The collapse of the Rotten Wood Forest was still continuing. The range of fallen trees had reached the edge of the tree line as far as the eye could see. Gray dust clouds surged in the morning light like a silent sandstorm.

A hundred-year-old stronghold.

From infiltration to eradication, it had taken him less than two hours in total.

The hole on the surface closed automatically after Lin Qi passed through. Gravel and soil backfilled, leaving no trace.

It was as if nothing had ever happened.

Except the Rotten Wood Forest no longer existed.