407: Chapter 407 A truly one-of-a-kind senior brother! Ahh ...

Chu Zhanxiao's icy cold question was like the first frost bead formed on the extreme northern ice plains, falling into a cold pool that had been undisturbed for ten thousand years—

On a battlefield so silent that one could hear dust settling on blood, it sent out a ripple so faint it was almost imperceptible.

Before this ripple could even reach the hem of his dark battle robe—

"Yes! Absolutely! Third Senior Brother, you are simply my reborn parents, my peerless hero, my life-saving straw, the one and only best Senior Brother in all the heavens and earth, aaaaah!!!"

A hoarse yet explosive cry, laden with blood, mud, sweat, and the madness of surviving a catastrophe, erupted thunderously!

Luo Xiaojiu "sprang" up from the ground.

This wasn't standing up, nor was it leaping; it was a burst that defied all logic, ignited by the survival instinct and immense grievance of a nearly dead body.

In that instant, her limp, mud-like limbs were filled with unreasonable brute force. Her tattered robes tore through the air with a wailing sound, and she transformed into a blood-stained, out-of-control little cannonball, dragging an afterimage as she slammed straight into Chu Zhanxiao's chest.

—Slamming straight into that "Extinction Thunder Domain" which should have annihilated everything.

Chu Zhanxiao's brows furrowed almost imperceptibly.

Instinct had already taken over.

The three feet around him were the absolute forbidden zone naturally covered by the "Extinction Thunder Domain."

Without needing a thought, billions of silver arcs of lightning, as fine as hair, had long since woven into a net, with the Dao rhythm forming naturally, annihilating dust and suppressing evil spirits.

Never mind a body of flesh and blood; even a wisp of foreign True Qi intruding would be reduced to nothingness in a thousandth of a heartbeat.

The thought of dodging rose like a flash of lightning, and his body had already slightly turned—

But it was in this split second, where life-and-death instinct controlled everything—

"Bang!!!" Solidly. Without any obstruction.

Luo Xiaojiu slammed entirely into his arms.

Within the dull sound of the impact, there was the faint creaking of bones unable to bear the weight, and the thick, inseparable scent of blood.

The sound was dull and real, like a blow ordained by fate, unavoidable and inescapable.

This impact was just the beginning.

The next instant, those arms—stained with black-red blood scabs, mud, and even charred marks—like vines reaching out from a desperate abyss, or like the final madness before drowning, clamped tightly around Chu Zhanxiao's lean and solid waist with lightning speed!

Tight. So tight that her knuckles turned white, so tight that her arms trembled, so tight that it felt as if she wanted to fuse herself into his armor, never to be separated again.

Immediately after, that fuzzy, messy head, covered in blood and dust, unceremoniously buried itself heavily into the front of Chu Zhanxiao's pristine dark battle robe—

Where dark golden Dragon patterns faintly flowed under the lightning, noble and inviolable—and then, she rubbed against it forcefully and chaotically.

The dark golden Dragon patterns were instantly smeared with large, filthy, warm traces.

"Wooo wooo wooo... Third Senior Brother, you finally came... Waaaa—!!!"

The incoherent sobbing erupted into wailing, mixed with the ecstasy of survival, boundless grievance, and incoherent reliance. Hot tears mixed with blood quickly soaked the cold brocade.

There was not a shred of restraint or concealment in the crying; it was a complete breakdown, a total surrender of herself:

"The three of them fought the two and a half of us... No, that's one and a half! The Nine-Headed Golden Lion is almost bald from the beating, wooo wooo wooo... I was so scared, I was really so scared... I thought I was really going to die this time, that I'd never see Revered Master again, never see the peach trees in the back mountain, never see the osmanthus cake I hid..."

She was sobbing so hard her whole body was convulsing, smearing snot, tears, and blood all over him, yet her arms clamped even tighter, as if letting go would mean falling back into that abyss of death.

Inside that small body, it was as if an entire lake, burst open by fear, was now overflowing, pouring everything onto this chest that should have been cold and heartless:

"Senior Brother, you are so amazing... So amazing, so amazing! A hundred times, a thousand times, ten thousand times more amazing than what Revered Master secretly told me! That lightning... wooo... it was so cool... it blasted them all away... Senior Brother, you are the electricity, you are the light, you are the only myth..."

—Chu Zhanxiao: "..."

His face, carved from ten thousand years of ice and ancient thunder, showed a clear crack for the first time.

It was not anger. Nor was it disgust. It was a pure... blankness, exceeding all his cultivation knowledge and life experience.

Extreme bewilderment froze his eyes, which were usually as sharp as lightning and insightful of all things.

He stood stiffly in place, as if locked by a top-tier immobilization spell.

His long arms still maintained the original slightly raised posture of preparing to summon lightning or brush away dust, but now they hung in mid-air, fingertips slightly curled, with nowhere to rest.

Nowhere to rest. These four words had never appeared in the life dictionary of the Extinction Thunder Venerable.

He had experienced the mountains of corpses and seas of blood in three thousand worlds, faced the siege and slaughter of various Heavenly Gods and demons, and once, in a dead-end situation, backhanded a summons for the Nine Heavens thunder to wipe out the enemy along with half a Star Domain.

He had never been "without a place to rest." —At this moment, he had nowhere to rest.

The thunder Dao rhythm and invisible Dragon majesty that naturally flowed around him, causing the spiritual power of heaven and earth to tremble and bow, now revealed a hint of rare "helplessness."

They surged instinctively, wanting to violently repel, completely purify, and cast away the hot, soft, dirty, and noisy "foreign object" in his arms, yet they were firmly constrained by his powerful, almost terrifying control of Divine Thought. They could only flicker with a faint "crackle" on his skin, forming a thin, trembling purple electrical membrane, futilely attempting to isolate the filth and... body heat that kept invading.

Body heat. She was so hot. So hot that she was like a ball of fire, a fire that had crawled back from the edge of death, burning with all its vitality.

He lowered his head. In his field of vision was that dirty head, burrowing against his chest, rubbing his magnificent battle robe into a mess.

Bits of grass and blood clots were stuck in her hair, trembling with each sob.

From that angle, he could even see a hideous wound on the back of her neck, the flesh and skin rolled back, the blood half-dried—that was the evidence of what kind of tragic battle she had just experienced.

Hot tears, mixed with the scent of sweat and blood, penetrated the fabric, scorching his cold skin.

A close embrace. No gap. Against the rules. Disregarding the boundaries between men and women. It could be called... a rebellious offense.

Chu Zhanxiao's core of thought, capable of deducing the flow of the galaxy and controlling extinction and rebirth, fell into a brief and complete system crash.

—On the other side, Li Jiuyou's face had shifted from the paleness of blood loss to a deathly gray, as if witnessing the heavens and earth inverted and the Law collapsing.

The twitching of his mouth was so wide it looked like he was suffering from epilepsy; every twitch tugged at the wound on his chest, making his vision go black with pain, yet it could not compare to one ten-thousandth of the raging waves in his heart.

His eyes were almost popping out of their sockets, nailed firmly to Luo Xiaojiu's "audacious" and "suicidal" back, as if he were not looking at his familiar Junior Sister, but at a stupid deer happily running toward the center of magma, intending to take a bath.

Was she crazy?! This was Third Senior Brother! The peerless god of slaughter who could kill an alien Prodigy with one palm! How dared she?! How dared she—

He suddenly, using all his remaining strength, jabbed his elbow hard to the side—what he touched was hard, trembling, and equally stiff lion fur.

The remaining ten eyes of the Nine-Headed Golden Lion (five heads remaining), each one wide as a golden bowl filled with terror, focused in unison on Li Jiuyou's face.

The information in their eyes was complex and surging, almost turning into tangible sound waves: "What are you doing?! Stop her quickly! This is a peerless god of slaughter! A peerless fierce person who kills alien Heavenly Gods like cutting grass! She will die! We will also be blasted into charcoal along with her! Go quickly!!!"

Li Jiuyou glared back, his vision blurred by blood loss, desperately trying to convey his collapsing scream: "How am I supposed to go?! You go! Your skin is thick and flesh is tough! You can take a beating! Maybe calling him Senior will let you keep your whole corpse!"

The Golden Lion's five heads shook violently at the same time, the movement so large it almost caused its only remaining good leg to lose balance. Ten eyes were filled with immense terror and an ironclad refusal:

"I'm not going! Absolutely not! Didn't you see how tightly she's hugging him? It's like she's welded on! Go over and pull her off now? Are you complaining that we didn't die thoroughly enough just now and want to add a soul-and-body annihilation? If you want to go, you go! You're her Senior Brother!"

The two brothers-in-misfortune (and lion) who had dragged each other out of the mountain of corpses and sea of blood were now engaged in an intense, silent war of shunting responsibility with their eyes, while their bodies remained honestly nailed to the spot, like two stone statues stained with blood, scared stiff and not daring to move a single step.

They even subconsciously held their breath, as if afraid to disturb the "bizarre" scene in the center and invite a catastrophe.

—The scene solidified into an absurd silence. The killing intent had not dissipated. The chasm remained.

The scorched earth emitted lingering smoke, and the air was filled with the pungent smell of ozone and the sweet stench of flesh and blood.

The remains of the alien race, blasted into charcoal, were scattered all around, telling the story of that earth-shattering blow just now.

And in the center of these embers of death and battle, such a scene was playing out:

A girl covered in blood, her small face dirty, like a young beast that had found its only shelter after being terrified, was clinging tightly to a man whose breath was cold and whose posture was as upright as a solitary peak, crying without any image, her complaints and flattery flying together.

On the scorched earth behind her were the drag marks she had left while fighting bloody battles; under her tattered robes on her chest was the last bit of temperature belonging to "being alive" that she had protected with her life.

And not far away were the two bystanders, their expressions completely broken, their eyes darting around, but not daring to step forward.

A breath that was subtle to the extreme, mixed with the lingering smell of blood, permeated the air.

This was not just "social death," but a huge bewilderment and panic brought about by the complete subversion of the known world, the dignity of the strong, and normal interpersonal boundaries...

—Time seemed to have passed for a long time, and yet it seemed only a moment had passed.

Chu Zhanxiao seemed to have finally struggled out of that swamp of blankness and regained a trace of the consciousness belonging to the "Extinction Thunder Venerable."

He lifted his left hand, the one not wrapped in destructive thunder arcs, extremely slowly, as if moving a ten-thousand-ton mountain.

The movement was so stiff it felt like his joints had rusted, or as if he were learning how to use this body for the first time. Then—

This hand hovered three inches above Luo Xiaojiu's dirty hair.

It stopped. Arcs of lightning flickered uncertainly at his fingertips, like the embodiment of the war between heaven and man in his heart.

Push her away? Or... The whole scene held its breath.

Li Jiuyou's pupils shook, and the Nine-Headed Golden Lion's ten eyeballs almost jumped out of their sockets.

Then, they saw—this hand, slowly, extremely unnaturally, as if betraying all of its Revered Master's combat instincts and social taboos—landed on top of Luo Xiaojiu's head.

No thunder. No blasting away.