132: Chapter 132 A Punch in the Starry Sky

Inside the supermarket.

Three seconds after Jiang Feng vanished.

The shelves moved.

Not falling. Floating.

The nearest row of metal shelves rose silently from the floor; instant noodles, bottled water, and bottles of soy sauce and vinegar all shed their gravity, hovering and spinning in mid-air.

The bag of soy sauce in Liu Cuilan's hand floated upward.

She instinctively gripped the bag's handle, her feet no longer firmly touching the ground.

It wasn't just the supermarket.

Looking out through the glass door—pedestrians, cars, and street lamp posts had all left the ground.

The gravity of the entire Dongjiang City had been turned off by someone.

Then, the voice came.

It did not come from any specific direction. It did not pass through the ears. It poured directly into the deepest part of every living creature's brain.

Ancient. Hollow. Devoid of any human quality.

"The chess piece is overloaded. This star shall be refined anew."

Globally synchronized.

This sentence exploded simultaneously in the consciousness of seven billion people.

It did not belong to any language, yet everyone understood it—the syllables bypassed grammar and were forcibly carved into their cognition.

The voice did not stop.

"All spirits return to the furnace to form the Essence Pill. Since mortal ties are shackles—I shall personally sever them for him."

Two fluorescent tubes overhead exploded.

The shattered glass hung in the air, spinning like a slow-motion playback.

Amidst the weightlessness, an invisible divine might crushed down from the firmament.

It was not a law. It was not energy.

It was a suppression of pure "existential level."

High dimensions against low dimensions. Dimensional reduction strike. Literally.

The customers, cashiers, and security guards in the supermarket—all knelt down simultaneously.

Not voluntarily. Their knees bent on their own.

Their muscles did not obey their brains, their bones trembled, and their teeth chattered.

Liu Cuilan's knees hit a floating floor tile.

The soy sauce bag slipped from her hand, drifting slowly diagonally upward.

"Mom!"

Dragon Girl's voice exploded from the snack aisle.

The potato chips she was holding scattered, flying chaotically and tumbling in the weightless air—Lay's Original, Cucumber flavor, Extreme Spicy, they were everywhere.

Her pupils had slit into vertical pupils. Dark gold. The true form of the Ancient Ancestral Dragon.

Dragon Girl grabbed Liu Cuilan, her Ancestral Dragon blood and qi forcefully resisting that high-dimensional divine might.

Her arms were trembling. She bit her lip until it bled.

She was the new Heavenly Dao, the supreme authority above all things—yet even she struggled to withstand this pressure.

The ordinary people in the supermarket were on the verge of having their consciousness shattered.

Snap.

A hand caught the soy sauce bottle floating upward.

It was steady.

Five fingers gripped the bottle, not shaking in the slightest.

Dragon Girl looked up abruptly.

Jiang Feng was standing beside Liu Cuilan.

No light effects. No spatial ripples. He appeared out of thin air right where he was, as if he had never left at all.

"Xiaofeng..."

"It's fine."

Jiang Feng handed the soy sauce to Dragon Girl.

His tone was exactly the same as when he was helping his mother pick a brand in front of the shelves just moments ago.

Then he straightened up.

All the weightless items in the supermarket—the metal shelves, boxes of instant noodles, water bottles, ceiling fragments, Dragon Girl's flying potato chips—

In the same instant, they all returned to their places.

They didn't crash. They didn't break. They didn't make a single sound.

The instant noodles returned to the shelves, the bottled water stood where it originally was, and even the orientation of the labels was the same as before.

The high-dimensional divine might that had been crushing seven billion people—

Vanished.

It wasn't canceled out. It wasn't countered.

It was covered up by something greater.

466 Jian.

Jiang Feng didn't manipulate laws, nor did he activate divine abilities.

He just stood there and released a layer of his origin world essence.

A thin layer.

But the gap between this layer and that high-dimensional divine might—

Could not be calculated. The magnitude difference was too vast; mathematics had no meaning here.

The supermarket regained gravity.

Customers climbed up from the floor; some were crying, some were shaking, and some were sitting on the ground with blank stares.

Liu Cuilan was steadied by Dragon Girl.

She glanced at her son.

Jiang Feng's expression was calm, but Liu Cuilan was all too familiar with it—the last time she saw this look, he was in the third grade of elementary school, having watched her get four stitches after being bitten by the neighbor's dog, without making a sound the entire time.

The next day, that dog was gone.

"Mom, let's go home. We'll make the braised pork a bit later."

"...Okay."

Liu Cuilan gripped the bag tightly and walked out, supported by Dragon Girl.

After walking three steps.

She looked back.

Her son was already gone.

Outside Blue Star. One hundred thousand miles into the starry sky.

Xuanji's body hung in the void.

But that was no longer Xuanji.

Her limbs were pulled into a cross shape by chains of causality. Her spine was taut in a straight line. Her cyan-gold dharma robe was completely shattered.

Her body, covered in dense golden patterns, was exposed under the starlight; those patterns—shared the same origin and lineage as the ancient carvings deep within Blue Star's crust.

Her eyes were cyan.

Not her own color.

They were Venerable Xuan's.

Xuanji's consciousness was suppressed at the very bottom.

She could see her hands moving, could hear her mouth speaking—but none of those actions or sounds were commands she had issued.

It was like being locked inside her own body, separated by a layer of glass, watching someone else act while wearing her skin.

She could even feel the sensation of her tongue touching her teeth when her mouth opened and closed.

Crystal clear.

But she couldn't scream. She couldn't shout a single word.

Xuanji's hand raised up. She hadn't raised it.

Her palm was aimed at Blue Star.

A dark cyan beam of light shot out.

High-dimensional tribulation light.

Ignoring defenses. Ignoring laws. Ignoring causality.

Acting directly upon "existence" itself—erasing the target from this universe at a conceptual level.

A method at the level of a Chess Player.

The beam of light rushed toward the taixu barrier—

It didn't touch it.

It was blocked by a hand.

Jiang Feng hovered directly in front of Xuanji.

No one knew when he had arrived. There was no trajectory of movement, no spatial fluctuation. It was as if he had always been standing there.

The dark cyan tribulation light struck his open palm.

Light overflowed. One million miles of the starry sky were illuminated in a deathly white.

The lines on his palm didn't change in the slightest.

"Ignoring defenses?"

He said three words.

His tone was like reading the ingredient list of soy sauce in the supermarket.

Then he clenched his fist.

Retracted it to his waist.

No opening stance. No legal enhancement. No divine ability assistance.

Purely—a single punch.

466 Jian in total attributes.

2.4 billion times faith amplification.

The resulting number already exceeded the upper limit of all known calculation systems.

No reasoning. No laws. No high or low dimensions.

Just—physical output.

The fist landed on the layer of dimensional reduction barrier around Xuanji.

The world went silent.

Not the literary figure of speech "it was quiet for a moment."

It was the operation of the laws of the entire star region being frozen at a physical level for 0.3 seconds by the aftermath of this punch.

Then—

The barrier shattered.

Not cracking. Not collapsing.

Every high-dimensional particle constituting the barrier was, in the same instant, shaken into primal dust.

The chains of causality broke.

The golden shackles pulling Xuanji's limbs snapped at the root, shattering into fly ash.

The cyan in Xuanji's eyes—

Extinguished.

Supreme Void.

In front of the chessboard.

The teacup in Old Man Xuan's hand dropped.

He had been holding tea for billions of years.

His hand had never trembled.

It trembled at this moment.

The teacup shattered on the chessboard, tea splashing all over his hand.

He didn't look at the cup.

Because blood from his seven orifices had surged out first.

The corners of his eyes, ear canals, nostrils, corners of his mouth—golden blood flowed down quietly.

Neither fast nor slow.

Like melted wax.

The chessboard in front of him cracked open a seam right down the center.

The crack was not big.

But for this supreme artifact that carried the ancient chess game—it should not have any flaws.

Not even a trace.

"How is it possible?"

Old Man Xuan's voice changed.

The composure of having everything under control was punched through by that single blow.

What was revealed underneath was very simple—

Disbelief.

His will projection, via Xuanji's body, had descended in person.

With the dimensional level of a Chess Player, he had looked down from above, suppressing a low-dimensional variable born on Blue Star.

He was punched back.

Not by luck. Not by trickery. Not by some crooked path taking advantage of a loophole.

It was at the level of causality—

That numerical monster was higher than him.

Higher by more than one grade.

Old Man Xuan raised his hand, using the back of his hand to wipe the golden blood from the corner of his mouth.

The movement was very slow.

Opposite him, Old Man Ming stared at the cracked chessboard.

His pupils shrank to pinpoints.

It was quiet for a long while.

When he spoke, his voice was so cold it could scrape off a layer of frost:

"Did you lose?"

Old Man Xuan did not reply.

He stared at the spot of light on the chessboard representing Jiang Feng.

Its brightness—had risen again.

Xuanji fell from the void.

The backlash from the breaking of the chains of causality swallowed half her life. Her origin shrank rapidly, and the golden patterns on her body dimmed one by one.

Her aura fell to the bottom. It was worse than a lamp running out of oil.

Jiang Feng did not catch her.

His attention was elsewhere.

In the center of Xuanji's forehead—that pale golden mark, at the moment the chains of causality shattered, exposed something.

A line.

An extremely thin, cyan-golden line.

Extending from the depths of the mark, passing through dimensional barriers, passing through the Chaos Realm, passing through the boundaries of all known space—

Leading straight to the Supreme Void.

Leading straight to Venerable Xuan's true body.

An umbilical cord.

This was the umbilical cord Venerable Xuan had attached to Xuanji.

Nutrients were transported via it. Control was maintained via it.

Now, the channel had appeared unstable for a fraction of a second because the projection was shattered.

A fraction of a second.

It was enough.

Jiang Feng reached out his hand.

Two fingers pinched that umbilical cord.

In his mind, the system sound exploded.

[High-dimensional origin channel detected!]

[Ultimate Art · Pangu Plunder has locked onto target: Chess Player · Venerable Xuan (Origin Projection)]

[Execute plunder?]

"Plunder."

One word.

A tug with two fingers.

From that extremely thin channel—a mass of something was forcibly dragged out by him from the high-dimensional void.

Cyan-gold.

So thick it almost condensed into a solid.

hongmeng ancestral source.

Origin essence at the level of a Chess Player.

The entire mass of ancestral source rolled endlessly in Jiang Feng's palm. The overflowing aura caused the laws of the million-mile starry sky to lose order on the spot—the nearby asteroid belt disintegrated silently, and the orbits of three small planets were twisted into a knot.

[Ding! Congratulations Host, successfully plundered Chess Player · Venerable Xuan's hongmeng ancestral source x 1!]

[High-dimensional origin intrusion detected, 11th Turn Advancement Mission officially initiated!]

[Mission: Plunder Chess Player origin (1/3)]

Jiang Feng looked at the cyan-gold origin surging in his palm.

The corner of his mouth moved.

Not a smile.

It was confirmation.

From today on—

It is not them playing chess.

It is he, collecting the pieces.

Xuanji's body was still falling.

Her origin was exhausted, her aura like a wisp of thread. The connection between the mark and Venerable Xuan was forcibly severed, and the backlash had almost hollowed her out completely.

Jiang Feng looked down at her.

One glance.

No more.

He withdrew his gaze. He casually absorbed the hongmeng ancestral source in his palm into his body.

Toward Blue Star—

Liu Cuilan should be home.

The pork ribs hadn't been made yet.

The soy sauce should not have broken.