481: Chapter 481 Giving Everything

The Lord of Burials' "gaze," condensed from grayish-white light and lacking eyes, slowly lifted from the boundless scorched earth.

This land was long unworthy of being called land.

It was the dregs of history chewed countless times, the ashes of civilizations ground into powder, the final, meaningless embers spread evenly across this fold of space-time after all existence had been devoured, digested, and decomposed.

The gaze crossed solidified time—time that resembled a specimen nailed to the wall of void, its traces of struggle already dried away.

It crossed frozen despair—despair that had long settled into the very scent of this world, thick enough to suffocate, so heavy that even a sigh could not rise.

Finally, that gaze formed of light, like a cold, invisible arrow, precisely and irresistibly pinned itself onto Chu Changsheng.

No, it was pinned onto his eyes.

That pair of deep purple pupils.

They were calm, not as if they were alive.

There was no reflection of stars, no ripples of destruction, and they could not even reflect the deathly silence of this Burial Land.

They only reflected one thing—a pure "rationality" that was almost cold, innate, and seemingly stripped from existence itself.

This was an abyss deeper than despair, a hardness harder than the void.

"Primordial."

The Lord of Burials' voice changed.

The heaviness of bearing the tombstones of entire epochs, the exhaustion and sorrow soaked in endless time, were stripped away layer by layer at this moment.

Replacing it was a more essential, more "fundamental" qualitative change.

Like an ice field covering billions of years, in a sigh unheard by anyone, a crack opened in its deepest part.

What surged out was not scalding magma.

It was an absolute-zero chill regarding "truth" itself, compressed to the extreme.

This was not a venting of emotion.

Emotion, in the face of what was about to be presented, was too cheap, too clamorous, too... inappropriate.

This was a kind of cold, bone-freezing relief that could only settle after touching the ultimate absurdity, where even pain, anger, and sorrow appeared pale and powerless.

A kind of absurd relief after realizing that the rules of the game itself were a trap.

"Do you know what the Void Clan... is?"

On the scorched earth, the wind was the only living thing, whimpering, swirling up particles that could no longer be distinguished as dust, ash, or the last sigh of civilization.

Chu Changsheng did not answer.

He did not nod, he did not shake his head, there was not even a flicker in his eyes.

He only, extremely slightly, narrowed those deep purple eyes.

This was a subtle change that could hardly be described as an "action," subtle to the point of being almost an illusion.

However, at the very moment of this "narrowing"—

"Crack."

A faint, crisp sound, as if glass were shattering, clearly bloomed in the absolutely dead space-time.

This was not the sound of matter; it was the sound of "solidification" itself being lightly "scraped" by something sharper.

It was as if an invisible, intangible, yet absolutely sharp sword had, within its sheath and within absolute stillness, extremely slowly rotated by an imperceptible angle.

Where the sword edge pointed, it locked onto the source of the killing intent—that which was, in the unseen, of the same root and origin as the despair permeating this place, yet in level and essence, completely different and far superior to it.

The Lord of Burials' voice, in this dead vacuum severed by the invisible sword, suddenly became very soft.

It was as soft as a string stretched for billions of years, having long lost all elasticity and about to snap completely, emitting—before it broke—the only and final tremor, using the last bit of resilience of its very existence.

"They..."

"Are kept in captivity."

Five words.

No thunderous force, no heaven-collapsing or earth-shattering power.

They did not even carry the impact that "sound" usually has.

They just fell calmly.

Like five "singularities," absolutely dense and absolutely dark, thrown from the deepest part of that "nothingness" before the birth of the Universe, they fell silently into this dead sea of consciousness named "Burial Land," which was already dead and could not even raise a ripple.

No splash, no sound.

Then—

The entire Burial Land "solidified."

It was not the solidification of space, nor the stagnation of time.

It was the solidification of "meaning."

It was the underlying "logic" that constituted this world and maintained this desperate reality, which, in the face of these five words, underwent an instantaneous, structural, avalanche-like—collapse.

Burial Son lay prone there, his body having long lost the strength to "struggle," and even his "posture" itself had become blurred.

His pupils, which had already shattered in endless despair, now seemed to have even the state of "shattering" lightly "erased" by a larger, more absolute power.

No light, no shadow.

Only two hollow voids remained, absorbing all color, all meaning, all "sense of existence"—"Nothingness."

His Divine Soul, the remnant that had silently roared on the verge of countless collapses, could not even stir the faintest ripple at this moment.

It was as if it had been thrown into the conceptual absolute zero, instantly frozen, and then perpetually falling toward an abyss deeper than the void, more thorough, where even "nothingness" itself lost its meaning—

"Kept... in captivity?"

"The Void Clan?"

"That terror itself which devoured time, gnawed on Laws, took the Myriad Heavens and Worlds as food, and reduced all 'being' to the ultimate 'nothingness'?"

"That... ultimate existence which had stood on the opposite side since the definitions of 'existence' and 'nothingness' were first established, could not be understood, could not be defeated, and whose very name was synonymous with 'End'?"

"A... pet?"

"A... pet, bound by chains by some... existence, confined by fences, released at specific moments like unleashing a hunting dog to complete some predetermined task?"

"Who?"

"Who could forge such chains? Who could define such fences?"

"Who had the qualifications to sit high above the dual opposition of 'existence' and 'nothingness,' like an extremely indifferent shepherd, overlooking the grassland named 'Epoch' composed of countless civilizations, races, loves, hates, life, and death, and then, simply because they felt the 'grass' had grown lush enough, nonchalantly untie the rope binding the dog of destruction?"

The Lord of Burials did not look at Burial Son's body, which had completely turned into an "empty shell."

All of its "gaze"—that grayish-white, eyeless "vision" condensed from pure light—was tightly, unmovingly wrapped around Chu Changsheng, attempting to squeeze out even the slightest ripple, crack, or scrap of emotion from those two pools of deep purple, ice-sealed ancient wells.

But what it saw, only beneath that ice layer, at the bottom of that ancient well, deep within that absolute calmness—

A point, condensing, lighting up, becoming incomparably clear, incomparably sharp... cold star.

This was not emotion, not surprise, not anger.

This was the prototype of "Sword Intent."

It was the sharp edge of "severing," the purest and coldest, born after absolute "knowledge," capable of cutting through all confusion and penetrating all falsehoods.

"Very funny, isn't it?"

The Lord of Burials' voice now recovered a strange steadiness.

But this steadiness was more hair-raising than any hysterical roar.

It was a kind of cold, iron-rusted, and blood-scented irony that remained after stripping away all pretenses and facing the ultimate absurdity.

This irony was no longer directed at any specific enemy, nor was it blaming fickle fate.

It pointed directly at the underlying "logic" that constituted this world, which everyone defaulted to, and relied upon to survive and resist.

Each word was like a red-hot branding iron seared onto the cognition of the Soul.

It did not burn the flesh, did not scorch matter, but only branded a charred, twisted, and indelible mark of "absurdity" onto the cornerstone that constituted "understanding" and "belief."

"We exhaust everything."

"Burning the Laws that define all things, sacrificing the Foundation that constructs the Dao, using brilliant civilizations as firewood, using endless sentient beings as trumpets, and using the existence of the entire epoch itself as the final stake..."

"What we oppose, what we fear, what we would stop at all costs, even if it means being shattered to pieces and suffering Soul Flying Away and Spirit Scattering..."

"Is merely a... watchdog kept by some existence in its home."

"A pet."

It repeated this word, the syllables carefully chewed in the invisible air, as if wanting to extract every drop of the potent poison contained within this word—a poison capable of turning all epics into jokes, all sacrifices into farces, and all heroic dirges into something ridiculous—and smear it onto this canvas of despair before it.

"They are hunting dogs, tools, in the hands of that existence which was already 'there' before everything began, before the concepts of 'being' and 'nothingness' were born, transcending all dual oppositions, which we can never understand, never describe, and cannot even outline in our consciousness..."